Having spun an audacious yarn up to and including a hollow planet that literally swallows other planets across the first three parts of "The Pirate Planet," Douglas Adams might not have fallen off a cliff in Part Four but, having written himself into a corner with his cheeky cleverness, he must resort to a great deal of hand-waving before finally tossing a spanner into the works in this less-than-scintillating close to a gleefully outsized, wryly outrageous shaggy dog.
Our story so far: In their search for the second segment to the Key to Time, the Time Lords the Doctor and Romana journey to the planet Calufrax, only to find it somehow subsumed by the planet Xanak, ruled by the tyrannical Captain (Bruce Purchase), a blustering, half-man, half-cyborg pirate caricature plundering other worlds for more than their material wealth. The Doctor uncovers that purpose when he discovers the wizened Queen Xanxia (Vi Delmar), suspended in her last moments of life, whose incipient new incarnation, the fetching young nurse (Rosalind Lloyd) tending to the Captain, needs ever-more energy from those plundered worlds to complete her transition--with Earth next to be devoured.
Subtle hints that the transitional Xanxia had been controlling the Captain all along become explicit as the Doctor and Kimus (David Warwick), sent to infiltrate the Bridge, the Captain's mountain redoubt, escape his death sentence with the help of K-9, the Doctor's robot dog, as Romana, Mula (Primi Townsend), and the Mentiads now led by Pralix (David Sibley) storm the Bridge to help stop the Captain and Xanxia from their next jump.
What should be a battle royale, or at least a nail-biting race against time, instead fizzles as the Mentiads, stymied by the Captain's psychic blocking device, stand motionless like the "zombies" the nurse derides them as while K-9 runs out of juice. So does Adams's script, which resorts to hammer-headed--make that spanner-headed--nonsense at its resolution (despite a sly swipe at alleged psychic Uri Geller, at the time famous for supposedly being able to bend a spoon using just his mind), although that pales in comparison to the timey-wimey bafflegab, delivered by Tom Baker with literal hand-waving, the Doctor spews forth to explain how he'll set the worlds to rights.
Location filming at various hillscapes throughout the serial helps to offset the pervasive sound stages and model-work special effects, typical "Doctor Who" fare, while Mary Tamm, so impressive in Part One, recedes into Baker's shadow by the conclusion, although the ever-delightful interjections by John Leeson, voicing K-9, are welcome compensation.
Despite his florid, deliberate overacting, Purchase imbues the cartoonish Captain with dimension split between wistful pathos and veiled passive-aggressiveness toward Xanxia as Andrew Robertson, playing his subordinate foil, the harried Mr. Fibuli, quietly commands every scene he's in with his arch, self-aware toadying. However, Lloyd, Sibley, Townsend, and Warwick collectively project only colorlessness with the appetizing consistency of cold, lumpy oatmeal, which isn't true of this flawed but fascinating seriocomical farce.
Overall rating for "The Pirate Planet," all four parts: 8/10.
Our story so far: In their search for the second segment to the Key to Time, the Time Lords the Doctor and Romana journey to the planet Calufrax, only to find it somehow subsumed by the planet Xanak, ruled by the tyrannical Captain (Bruce Purchase), a blustering, half-man, half-cyborg pirate caricature plundering other worlds for more than their material wealth. The Doctor uncovers that purpose when he discovers the wizened Queen Xanxia (Vi Delmar), suspended in her last moments of life, whose incipient new incarnation, the fetching young nurse (Rosalind Lloyd) tending to the Captain, needs ever-more energy from those plundered worlds to complete her transition--with Earth next to be devoured.
Subtle hints that the transitional Xanxia had been controlling the Captain all along become explicit as the Doctor and Kimus (David Warwick), sent to infiltrate the Bridge, the Captain's mountain redoubt, escape his death sentence with the help of K-9, the Doctor's robot dog, as Romana, Mula (Primi Townsend), and the Mentiads now led by Pralix (David Sibley) storm the Bridge to help stop the Captain and Xanxia from their next jump.
What should be a battle royale, or at least a nail-biting race against time, instead fizzles as the Mentiads, stymied by the Captain's psychic blocking device, stand motionless like the "zombies" the nurse derides them as while K-9 runs out of juice. So does Adams's script, which resorts to hammer-headed--make that spanner-headed--nonsense at its resolution (despite a sly swipe at alleged psychic Uri Geller, at the time famous for supposedly being able to bend a spoon using just his mind), although that pales in comparison to the timey-wimey bafflegab, delivered by Tom Baker with literal hand-waving, the Doctor spews forth to explain how he'll set the worlds to rights.
Location filming at various hillscapes throughout the serial helps to offset the pervasive sound stages and model-work special effects, typical "Doctor Who" fare, while Mary Tamm, so impressive in Part One, recedes into Baker's shadow by the conclusion, although the ever-delightful interjections by John Leeson, voicing K-9, are welcome compensation.
Despite his florid, deliberate overacting, Purchase imbues the cartoonish Captain with dimension split between wistful pathos and veiled passive-aggressiveness toward Xanxia as Andrew Robertson, playing his subordinate foil, the harried Mr. Fibuli, quietly commands every scene he's in with his arch, self-aware toadying. However, Lloyd, Sibley, Townsend, and Warwick collectively project only colorlessness with the appetizing consistency of cold, lumpy oatmeal, which isn't true of this flawed but fascinating seriocomical farce.
Overall rating for "The Pirate Planet," all four parts: 8/10.