The Pirate Planet is the 99th serial and it was first broadcast in 4 weekly parts from September 30 to October 21 1978. It's the 2nd serial of the Key to Time story arc that runs through the whole 16th season. It was written by Douglas Adams and directed by Pennant Roberts. Tom Baker is still the Doctor, Mary Tamm is Romana and John Leeson is the voice of K-9.
The Doctor and Romana are traveling in the Tardis to the planet Calufrax which has the second of the Keys of Time. There are 6 of them, one in each serial of the season. They arrive and the Doc has a bit of an accident with the Tardis. He bumps his face into the console. This was to cover up a bite Tom had gotten from a crew member's trick dog. On command it would jump up and pull things out of his owner's mouth. It didn't work so well for Tom and he got a nice bite. This happened during the filming of the last episode of the previous serial and Tom talks about the incident on the commentary on that disc. I finally got around to it before I passed the disc back to the library. On Calufrax they find the planet to be different than the Doc remembered. It turns out that the people in charge have a planet which they materialize over another planet to extact the wealth. The Earth is next. Well, we all know that isn't going to stand with the Doctor. He finds that there's a bit of a resistance to the people in charge.
That's the Captain and his nurse on the left and the robed guys are the Mentiads who have some mental powers. They're against the Captain and his gang of soldiers. The Captain has a secret master but we don't find out who it is until later in the program. There's the usual running about and getting caught. Of course they figure out where the key is and stop the Captain from getting his hands on the Earth.
Romana is standing in a flying car that's been made out of a boat hull. Not sure if I think it was a successful conversion but there you go. It was an ok story, better than the last one anyway. There were some laughs. The Captain on the DW serial reminded me of the Captain of the Vorgon ship in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. Adams was working on THGTTG at the same time he was working on Doctor Who.
The extras have two commentaries, the 1st with Pennant Roberts and Bruce Purchase and the 2nd with Tom Baker, Mary Tamm and Anthony Read. The 1st commentary was more about the making of the show than the 2nd and I found it more interesting. There is a nice making of featurette with a lot of people talking about Douglas Adams, a useless featurette called Weird Science, a photo gallery, Radio Times listings, a batch of film inserts, outtakes and a couple of deleted scenes.
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