Episode #99 : The Pirate Planet

"What is it you're really up to, eh? What do you want? You don't want to take over the universe do you? No. You wouldn't know what to do with it beyond shout at it."

Episode 99:   The Pirate Planet.
Companions: 4th Doctor, K9 and Romana.
Air Date:       Four episodes. 30th September to 21st October 1978.

The tracer detects the second segment on the planet Calufrax. The TARDIS makes a bumpy landing, and the Doctor and Romana soon discover that they are not on Calufrax at all. They are in fact on Zanak, a planet that has been hollowed out and fitted with engines so that it can transmat through space and materialise around others - such as Calufrax - to plunder their mineral wealth, leaving them as shrunken husks held by gravitational forces in a 'trophy room'.

The Pirate Planet was written by Douglas Adams, author of The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, and is by that understandably full of humour and more than a few tweaked references to that book. Coupled with a very different take on the space pirates genre you have a rather enjoyable if odd adventure.

The main villain of the piece throughout is the Captain, a former space pirate now cyborg, complete with robot death parrot, who uses his transporting planet to crush, mine and collect other worlds rich in minerals and energy. He is loud, bombastic and is played excellently by Bruce Purchase in a role that may well have suited Brian Blessed. As a villain he is somewhat two dimensional but the humour put across means that you don't really notice.

The Doctor seems back on form in this story but it is Romana who steals the spot light. Almost from the start she has ignored all the rules that the Doctor gave her in the last story and it guides her from being the new companion to a character in her own right. At one point she is even forced to shoot and kill a guard followed by a look that suggests she had to weigh on her mind if only for a moment.

If there is a negative to this story it is the weak ending which like so many stories never quite ties up properly. The Doctor and Romana walk away leaving everyone to just get on with it. That is part of the character to be fair and we know he doesn't like to stay for the clean up, but in this case it feels like it needed just something tacked on to give some closure.