purplecat | Curse of the Black Spot

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I felt this episode had two large flaws which combined fairly fatally.

1. Firstly we had some very lacklustre direction. This was a swash buckler with, outside the first five minutes, very little swash or buckle. That's not entirely the director's fault since there wasn't actually a great deal of swash and buckle in the script, but what there was wasn't really capitalised on. It also looked like there were some fairly tight budgetry constraints making the story look very studio-bound (while failing to captilise on this for a claustrophic ghost story) and these may also have contributed to the lack of exciting action. However there were places where there was little excuse, for instance, the way miscellaneous pirates tended to amble slowly in the direction of the mermaid (while Amy was quite easily restraining Rory) had us shouting "someone stop him!" at the screen. Which observation leads into...

2. Plot hole city. I get laughed at when I say "but why?" too often when watching a show. For all I often pick at Who's plots it's actually normally good enough to keep me out of "but why?" mode, but almost every revelation in this story had me going "but why?" - "but why didn't she come out of glass sooner?", "but why can't the TARDIS move?", "but why must she keep people with cut fingers on life support?", "is it really a good idea to set a bunch of blood-thirsty pirates loose with a space ship?"

Sigh. Pacier direction would, I think, have covered up a lot of the plot holes and a tighter script would have made more of the claustrophic studio-bound setting. Combined, I'm afraid I thought this episode was both dull and stupid.

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purplecat

January 2026

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