An Hour of Who a Day: 05/23/15

May 23: "The Curse of the Black Spot" Prequel / "The Curse of the Black Spot"

The prequel for this episode is suitably tense, as Captain Avery writes of the nameless enemy that's been picking off his crew, one by one. In fact, it might be better than anything in the episode proper...

To be fair, for much of "The Curse of the Black Spot" we get a competent episode, as we're confronted with pirates (Captain Henry Avery, in fact, last mentioned in The Smugglers²²⁸), a strange Siren stealing away crewmen, and a ship lying motionless in doldrums. It also creates an effective atmosphere of dread, as the remaining crewmen are slowly picked off one by one by the Siren -- meaning that their allies are growing fewer and fewer and that every person left becomes that much more important.²²⁹ So there's a sense of murkiness and claustrophobia that pervades the entire episode. (Which is why it's odd that Steven Moffat moved this episode up from the second half of the series during its filming because he felt the first half was too dark -- apparently he thought this would be a lot more swashbuckling than it actually ended up being.)

But it's an effective atmosphere, and the Doctor's realization that he's gotten wrong the way the Siren appears is rather nice, even if it leads to all sorts of logical problems (so breathing on a medallion is enough to stop the Siren using it, but opening a barrel of water in the middle of a storm isn't). The only issue is that it's not particularly exciting. Having them all terrified of the smallest wounds is clever, but it doesn't make for the most thrilling drama, and the sense of terror this creates isn't quite enough to paper over the problem. You never get the feeling that these pirates will betray each other at the drop of a hat (despite the effort to convey this when Mulligan steals the keys and darts out of the magazine), which is really what this story needs: internal tensions as well as external threats.

None of this is necessarily a dealbreaker, but the story hits a major problem when they transport to the spaceship (and how is it that they weren't hooked up to hospital beds like every other person brought aboard?), and that's the problem of the Siren. In the best Doctor Who stories, the Doctor should be one step ahead of the audience, or at least coming to significant realizations at the same time, but here we have to wait a painfully long time until the Doctor realizes that this is a hospital ship and that the Siren is trying to help, not harm. This became pretty clear the moment they stepped into the sickbay and saw that everyone was still alive, but the script insists on having the Doctor believe the Siren is malicious for quite a while, and it makes for tedious viewing that the story never quite recovers from. It doesn't help that there's a lingering feeling of "so what?" at the end of this -- although that might be more down to the direction than the script itself, as Steve Thompson does try to underline the threat of the Siren reaching the mainland. But it's a bit too abstract for us the audience to really latch on to.

So there are two problems central to "The Curse of the Black Spot". The first is that it can't decide if it wants to be a swashbuckling adventure with all the pirate clichés present and correct or a claustrophobic horror movie where trapped survivors are picked off one by one, and so it tries to have it both ways -- but the result is that it doesn't fully succeed at either. The second problem is that the resolution goes on way too long and doesn't feel particularly satisfying when we learn what's really going on. Bless them, they did try, but "The Curse of the Black Spot" falls rather short of the standard we've come to expect.

²²⁸ This is actually a coincidence, as writer Steve Thompson simply picked an historical pirate who disappeared without being captured, rather than trying to make an explicit connection. Nevertheless, as the pirates in The Smugglers are obsessed with finding Avery's treasure, it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume they're talking about the same person as here.
²²⁹ Er, except for the Boatswain, who, somewhat infamously, suddenly disappears from the narrative after we see him barricade the magazine, with no explanation whatsoever. Because this is Moffat's Doctor Who, where we've already seen last series that "goofs" are just clever bits of foreshadowing, people wondered what the significance of the Boatswain's sudden disappearance was. But alas, it's just a continuity error, the result of his "death" scene being cut in editing. And besides, you can see him as one of Avery's crew in their final scene.