The Pirate Planet

The next segment of the Key to Time is apparantly on the planet Calufrax, somewhere the Doctor knows to be a cold wet and unpleasant place. Imagine his surprise though when he and Romana emerge from the TARDIS and find instead a temperate climate, and a bright world full of happy people and lots of mineral wealth. Ruling over this land of plenty is the Captain, a yelling blustering bully of a tyrant who every so often announces that they are about to enter a new age of prosperity, and presto the mines are full of jewels once more. It seems that the Captain's planet, Zanak, is actually hollow and leaps across space and materializes around other worlds, smothering them and mining them dry. The mineral weath goes to the people, and the Captain keeps the compressed remains of the mined planets as a souvenir. But how does the ageing Queen Zanxia come into this? And what of the Mentiads, whose psychic powers increase exponentially with the death of every planet?

The Pirate Planet is a bit of an off-the-wall adventure with extreme characters and a casual disregard for the laws of physics as they apply to relocating entire planets, but when you consider that Douglas Adams wrote the script, all is forgiven. Or indeed praised. Tom Baker's Doctor always flourishes when the script is about having fun, so he does an exceptional job this time, despite that dog bite on his face. Romana's naivety is still very much alive and well, staying calm and aloof when she is arrested by the Captain's guards, and not realizing that she is actually in any danger. And I do like the Captain; a loud scurvy swabs kinda pirate who was disfigured when he crashed on Zanak and was rebuilt with mechanical prosthetics to serve Zanxia in her mad quest for immortality. He's even got a robot parrot named Avatron that kills at his command. Until K9 shoots it out of the air that is. The Pirate Planet is one of those few tales where K9 is actually allowed out of the TARDIS as it lands rather than be left behind until he's called for to come and save people.

The Mentiads are an off semi-zombie army; they're not exactly intimidating from a distance in their bright yellow robes, unless, of course, you think they're Hare Krishnas coming to ask you for money. Clever, though; a psychic gestalt made stronger by absorbing the energy released by in the dying throes of a planet. Misunderstood by the people, they live outside the city (again here's another planet with one city on it, and nothing else) and only come in when they detect another of their number about to emerge. The Captain fears and hates them, doing his best to wipe out new Mentiads before they can join the gestalt and be protected.

And what can we say about poor Mr Fibuli? That's a hell of a name actually. He's the closest thing to a friend that the Captain has aside from his flying buzzard-droid. The buzzard deserved to die, though; it was a horrible CSO effect. Serves it right for picking a fight with K9.

Oh yeah and they find the second segment of the Key to Time. Almost forgot that bit.

NEXT EPISODE : THE STONES OF BLOOD