Pocket Full of Argonite

We have no limes!

The Space Pirates is another missing story. A six-parter and the penultimate TV story of Troughton's era on the show, only the second episode survives and the missing ones haven't been animated. Ergo I returned to my Target library for this one. It wasn't novelized until 1990, a few years after writer Robert Holmes had died, so Terrance Dicks had the honor of writing it up.

In order that interplanetary commerce remain free flowing and unhindered (or some such thing), beacons are placed in the blackness of space to help spaceship pilots navigate the space lanes. Or something like that. These beacons are made from a rare and precious mineral called argonite. They are also prefab and consist of 8 ready-made sections that are held together magnetically.

A group of space pirates, led by the lowdown, dirty, and mean Caven is going around and blowing up these beacons into their consituent sections and sending them back to their base to be processed and sold for a tidy profit. The Space Corp seeks to stop them. V-41, one of their flagships, patrols the space lanes and is commanded by General Nikolai Hermack.

Hermack learns that Beacon Alpha One had sent a distress call that suddenly stopped. Being a veteran of the Corps, his gut tells him that the beacon was a victim of piracy. So he stations small crews on some of the beacons in a bid to catch them in flagrante delicto.

The TARDIS lands on Beacon Alpha Four unbeknownst to the handful of Space Corp security officers stationed there. Caven and his men, including his right-hand one, Dervish (great name), enter the beacon and make short work of the Space Corp guys except for one named Lt. Sorba. They spare the Doctor, Zoe, and Jamie but seal them in a section of it. When the pirates blow the beacon into its parts, our heroes are left tumbling through space in one of them.

Fortunately, they are rescued by one Milo Clancey - what's with that name? - an old duffer (I think he's a sexagenarian) who still cruises around in a vintage ship from the days of his youth called the LIZ-79. The section of the beacon with the TARDIS continues on with the pirates.

I pictured Clancey as a combination of Monty Python's Mr. Neutron and Dastari from The Two Doctors with slicked back grey hair, though his personality was more like Zaphod Beeblebrox in that he was a bit full of himself but not evil.

Hermack suspects Clancey is behind all of the argonite piracy and pursues the LIZ-79 with the TARDIS crew still aboard. The veteran pilot decides to hide where the Space Corp would never think to look for him - a planet called Ta.

We learn that the pirates are in league with the CEO of the Issigri Mining Corporation, Madeleine Issigri, which is headquartered on Ta. Madeleine's father, Dom, was friends with Clancey but he has gone missing, presumed dead at the hands of his old pal by many.

Madeleine tells Caven to take a running jump when she discovers that her father is still alive, imprisoned in his old office. The pirate captain doesn't take this well and wires an atomic something or other to blow and take Ta with it. Now that it one ginormous chain reaction! Of course the Doctor saves the day by disarming the bomb mechanism. And Hermack is finally able to send Caven and company the missile he's been waiting to give them right up the jacksie.

The book is only 132 pages yet this was a six-parter. Did Dicks leave a lot out? Perhaps I am just miscalculating things.

While on Ta, Jamie shows some derring do and kills a few pirates allowing everyone else to flee. And he twists his ankle at one point but it mysteriously gets a lot better a bit too quickly. Zoe's math skills are put to good use when she calculates that the pieces of a broken beacon were on a trajectory for Ta. Beyond that, I don't recall her doing any other computing and, instead, she was relegated to running and pointing things out for the reader, in the main.

The Doctor here is basically what you'd expect. A little bumbling, some flashes of genius, handy with a sonic screwdriver. And he seems to really be able to hoof it when he needs to.

Clancey is like a space cowboy who seemed to be straight out of a comic book and I am looking forward to watching the lone extant episode to hear if he has an English accent or American. He'll say "laddie" and then turn around and utter "Tarnation, someone’s shooting at us!" Do Englishmen actually say "tarnation" or just Yosemite Sam?

Caven is a true scoundrel and a suitable pirate captain. Like any boss, he expects the impossible of his underlings and for them to accomplish it in record time. He's always threatening poor Dervish if he doesn't do something quicker than any human being has done before and, when Dervish protests, Caven threatens even more violence that's inherent in the system. Near the end, he moves to destroy Ta even if it means he dies too. If not for the Doctor, he'd have sent everyone to their doom.

I wonder what the pirates' outfits look like as I'm unsure if the guy on the cover is a pirate or an agent of the Space Corps. With that snarl, I assume he's a pirate but you never know with these things. It'd be cool if they had hi-tech peg legs or electric parrots or something fun and piratey.

All in all, I found The Space Pirates to be pretty bad. Granted, it's a fun little premise and the scene where our heroes find themselves trapped in a section of a beacon while the TARDIS is floating away in another was really neat. But there's so little dialogue of interest. Clancey chews the scenery well but, while Caven could do some fine mustache twirling, he mainly issues bland threats. The Space Corp folks, especially Hermack, sound so incredibly earnest that they come off almost as parody. It's as if the dialogue was ripped right from an English officer corp training film.

When people talk to one another, it feels like it's mostly threats and barking orders with some technobabble thrown in for good measure. Caven is too vile to engage in some badinage with Dervish whereas an older Holmes would have made them a fine double act. The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe are usually too busy running and evading to do anything fun. Plus, I feel that our heroes got precious little time on the page. You've got the Space Corp, the pirates, Madeleine Issigri, Clancey - a lot of characters to deal with besides the TARDIS crew. I wonder if it was the same on the screen.

The story, at least as Dicks told it, was just rather clinical and lacked warmth. Clancey was a funny character but he stands alone here.

OK, I am off to check out what Tony Whitt and friends have to say about this book on the Doctor Who Target Book Club Podcast.

Where is E-Kobalt when you need him?

Apparently this is Robert Holmes' first Doctor Who story and all I can say is that he got better. Well, I suppose that the guy who gave us "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" and "The Caves of Androzani" had to start somewhere.

As the TARDIS lands on some planet, the people there, the Gonds, prepare to anoint two of their best and brightest as "Companions of the Krotons". This involves donning fancy robes before your peers and walking through a door fixed in a crystalline archway.

Having read Alien Bodies and heard various takes on how that novel did wonders for the Krotons, one of the most lackluster races in Doctor Who until that point, I was keen to learn how they had originally been portrayed.

I am unsure if Krotons are these big, bulky robotic creatures with a skirting at the bottom to allow for actors' legs to have some freedom of movement or if they are crystalline creatures inside these robot shells in the same way Daleks are these tentacled creatures inside of tank-like shells with plungers and eye stalks. For heads, they've got these crystal-like thingies which spin uncontrollably when their machine cum spaceship, the Dynotrope, runs low on energy. Instead of arms with something approaching hands with opposable thumbs that would be dexterous and useful, they are endowed with big vacuum hose arms with claws on them just like the robot from Lost in Space. Quite cheesy. But they do have these loud, booming voices which are quite intimidating.

The Krotons have conned the Gonds into periodically offering the smartest among them which are usually the folks who have spent the most time in the Hall of Learning, a room with these computers that are big and bulky like the Krotons themselves. There prospective companions do CBTs. Having stepped through the door wearing a robe, these people sit in uncomfortable looking chairs and undergo a psychedelic process that reminded me of The Ipcress File. Here it drains them of their mental energy which is consumed by the Dynotrope. The remaining husks, i.e. - the bodies, walk outside and get a gas sprayed at them which reduces the flesh into tiny particles which get dispersed by the wind.

There is a faction of Gonds that seeks to rebel against the Krotons and the others who bow down before these crystalline masters. The Doctor is naturally sympathetic to the anti-Kroton cause but he charts his own rebellion which involves helping a local chemist named Beta whip up a big batch of sulfuric acid which is used on the Dynotrope to save the day.

This story is quite hackneyed with the Gonds being completely forgettable and the Krotons looking unfinished. You don't see that skirting often as the director seems to have tried to keep it out of frame but you do see it a couple times and it just left me wondering, WTF? The lead Gond, a guy named Selris, can't talk without speaking rather forcefully and loudly. Someone should have told the actor he's not onstage and doesn't have to project. He wears this thing that looks like a breast plate with shoulder dealios that bend up to look like spikes and I just couldn't help think he looked a bit like Rodak from The Space Giants. In one scene he's at somebody's home with the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe who have saved a companion from being gassed. Selris stands there with his arms at his sides and his hands balled up in fists. All he needed was a kerchief on his head and he'd have looked just like Mr. Gumby. I chuckled every time I saw him onscreen after that.

"My brain hurts!"

Zoe wears one of the miniest mini-skirts in the history of the show and looks very fine doing so. It's too bad she's reduced to yelling out the obvious ("Look! There's a door!") and for the Doctor's help or for him to be careful or whatever. Well, there is one scene where she sits down in the Hall of Learning and is all proud of herself for having solved a puzzle quickly. Mostly, though, she stands behind the men screaming this or that.

The rebel Gonds act rashly and have to have their zeal tempered and plans rearranged by the Doctor. Was Holmes doing his Edmund Burke imitation here?

Lastly, I'll note that this story sees the TV debut of the Hostile Action Displacement System. (It got mentioned in the short story "The Avant Guardian", however.) A Kroton covers the TARDIS with that nasty desolver gas and, when the stuff has dissipated, the beloved ship is gone. But we see that it simply avoided the danger by zipping over to a different part of the quarry.

Watching this story really brought home just what a stroke of genius Lawrence Miles' portrayal of the Krotons in Alien Bodies was. In that story, they are slow but steady Dalek killers while here they're just home appliances with Stentorian voices.