Hello everyone, the Historian here with the wrapup for our penultimate story. Which was…charitably…not among the best of the Project. I’m still unsure whether it was the worst, but I think it’s fair to say it probably ranks near the bottom for the Project team.
PRODUCTION NOTES: As I’ve mentioned before, this was an interesting time for the show, with Peter Bryant and Derek Sherwin trading off the producer’s chair and Sherwin and Terrence Dicks doing revolving script editor duties. (And, confusingly, a man called Trevor Ray joined the team as Dicks’ assistant at this point.) That ends here; The Space Pirates was Bryant’s last official credit as a producer for Doctor Who.
This script, written rather hurridly as a replacement for the somewhat infamous “Prison in Space” (check out the adaptation of that unproduced script from Big Finish if you want to know why I call it “infamous”), was by Robert Holmes, fresh from writing The Krotons earlier in the series. He offered Terrence Dicks one storyline which was rejected, then offered the idea for a space western. Dicks loved the idea and commissioned it. There was some worry that the Doctor and companions weren’t as involved in the story as they perhaps should be, but the storyline was accepted. I find it both amusing and unsurprising that Holmes himself has said his original plan had been for the story to run four episodes, not six.
There were further travails during filming, but the full details can be found at A Brief History of Time (Travel).
PROJECT NOTES: Wow. Where to begin? To say the least, the Project team did not take to this story. In general, we liked some of the ideas in it–specifically the idea of an old Western miner in space. We liked Milo Clancy a lot, with the caveat that the soundtrack made him often unintelligible. We liked the models, for the most part.
And here’s the thing that I’ve said before: I think we all (well, except for Ketina, maybe) would have enjoyed the story more if we could have seen more of it. Clearly the model work is indicative of interesting visual work, and there’s no question that lots of action that can’t be really be conveyed properly through a recon was all over this story.
To be fair, though, the story itself has a few significant flaws, the largest of which (in my attempts-to-be-humble opinion) is that the Doctor and his friends are almost entirely unimportant to the story–until the very end. Not that there isn’t some decent plotting here–the misdirection of how culpable Madeliene might be is did surprise us a bit. But, for the most part, it veers towards the “boring” axis. (And the somewhat ridiculous “hide her father right under her nose” thing…the less said about that, the better.
But…but…but here’s the thing. Here’s the thing that baffles me. Robert Holmes went from writing The Krotons, an uneven and kind of silly storyline with a few decent ideas, to The Space Pirates, a dull storyline with some ok characterization for one guest role and a couple of decent ideas…to Spearhead From Space. All in the course of about a year and a half. What happened? How did the leap in quality, in fun, happen? Was it entirely due to Terrence Dicks having more influence? Was it (as he would definitely say himself) entirely due to Derek Sherwin’s handling of the commisson and oversight? I have no idea, but I do know that from that point on, Holmes had very few stories that even approached being clunkers…and his script editing tenure is considered one of the best in the entire run of Doctor Who. Anyone else have any thoughts or opinions on this? Seriously, I’d love to hear them.
And here’s the BBC episode guide and our episode discussions:
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Coming tomorrow, a new story! The last story of the Project! I just can’t believe it, can you? Until then, I remain
THE HISTORIAN
