Just watched the latest Doctor Who – The Curse of the Black Spot. Very much in the monster of the week / concept based science fiction mixed up with pirates. In theory it had all the elements to be a really good episode. Unfortunately somewhere along the way something got lost. I don’t think the problem was that comparing it to Pirates of the Caribbean. The becalmed pirate ship set up let them get away with a story that was in a nice, self-contained location. Maybe they were so busy ticking pirate story boxes they lost the spirit of the pirate story? I expected the pirates themselves to be both bad and scary in their own right but they’d be reduced to paper cut fearing, backboneless jellies who didn’t really come across as having been very naughty let alone worthy of the hangman’s rope.
The twist of the siren turning out to be a spaceship’s automated medical system trying to save the humans was a nice idea.
There were a couple of nods to The Day of the Moon and The Impossible Astronaut. They felt a little bit heavy-handed in the way they were included as though someone felt we had to be reminded there is an ongoing plot this series in case we might forget.
So personally I felt The Curse of the Black Spot wasn’t a bad Doctor Who but it wasn’t a great one either.
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