Rate and Discuss: The Pirate Planet

[SiHart]

Pirate captain, Polyphase Avatron, Mentiads, Nurse, Mr Fibuli and the mystery of what happened to the planet Calufrax... could it all be buried inside Zanak, the pirate planet?

What do you think of the second story of the Key to Time series?

[Terry Leptil]

Well, it's been some time since I last saw it, but The Pirate Planet is a good, funny story written by Douglas Adams.

7/10

[Rob McCow]

I've always thought it was rather marvelous. The Mentiads aren't a particularly memorable bunch, but the Pirate Captain is such a huge, larger-than-life and in the end, slightly tragic character that it makes up for everything.

More thoughts later...

[Andrew Curnow]

As a kid I remember being fascinated by the cliffhanger to part 3... and mystified by the 'explanation' in part 4. It's a corkingly good, really enjoyable story... probably let down by a very rushed, highly-technobabbly last episode. But such fun, even down to that last triumphant punch in the air!

[Stuart Wallis]

Despite being a Douglas Adams story, The Pirate Planet feels a tad below-par.
The Captain is overblown, and while people like him because of that, I've found him to be irritating, like a half-baked charicature of Brian Blessed, the expert in the field. Neither he nor the Mentiads are the threat they should be, the latter because we largely only see them marching about the countryside, and we only have word-of-mouth accounts of their powers and so-called villainy. Plotwise, the ideas are big and powerful, but there's something about the way the story's told that doesn't quite grab me. The humour is primitive Adams at this point, and doesn't really work.

A disappointment.

4/10

[SiHart]

This was the first of the Key to Time stories I ever got to see, and at the time it was something of a mystery to me. I knew the others really well from the Target books, but this one, of course, was never novelised.

I like the way the story reveals happen, as we unpeel the mystery layer by layer, until its revealed that the Nurse is behind it all, and the Captain is just the sideshow, despite being a dangerous and clever man. I also like that Tom gives this one some gravity- it's a very good performance from him and he's obviously enjoying this all immensely. The scene with the Captain where he loses it is very good, as is the "buried inside Zanak, the pirate planet and having he goodness sucked out of it." Super stuff.

Yeah, another favourite from a season that's a bit of a favourite all round.