Warning: This post contains spoilers for Season 6, Episode 3 of Doctor Who, The Curse of the Black Spot. If you haven't seen that episode, I don't expect this will make all that much sense to you. You should watch it first, or at least read the Television Without Pity recap. You have been warned!
By request, I'm backtracking to talk a little bit about the third episode of the sixth season of New Who, The Curse of the Black Spot. So here's what I thought about it:
It was okay. Kind of bad, even.
Want more? Well, alright. If you insist.
The biggest problem with The Curse of the Black Spot comes from its positioning in the series. This episode was originally scheduled to be shown ninth in the series, not third. That explains the fairly redundant flashback where Amy and Rory are concerned about the Doctor's death. It shouldn't be there, because the scenes they cover happened only an episode or two ago. They do make sense, though, if we're talking about an episode on the other side of the summer break, where this episode was originally scheduled. So that's a problem.
(It also means that the Doctor's death and the bit with the cyborg-eyepatch lady aren't getting wrapped up at the halfway point. I wouldn't have expected them to be, that's season finale stuff, but this serves as confirmation.)
More damning, though, is the episode's weak performance compared to what came before it and, since I'm writing this a few days after The Doctor's Wife, the brilliant episode that follows it. The Impossible Astrounaut and Day of the Moon establish a new feel for the series. There are grander vistas, a cinematic style, action and adventure, dense plotting, mysteries that matter, and a sense that, as River warned at the end of The Big Bang, "that's when everything changes."
The Curse of the Black Spot didn't get the memo. It's this season's "new historical." Back in the early days of Doctor Who, they used to have "historical episodes" where the Doctor and his crew get inserted into actual historical events. Episodes like The Aztecs, The Gunfighters, The Massacre, and so on were all in there to make the show more educational as well as entertaining. Eventually they died out as the entertainment became much more important, and lucrative, than the education.
Every season since the show restarted in 2005, though, there's been one new historical where the Doctor and his friends end up back in time and interact with a famous historical figure. There was Charles Dickens in The Unquiet Dead, Madame Pompadour in The Girl in the Fireplace, Shakespeare in The Shakespeare Code, Agatha Christie in The Unicorn and the Wasp, and Vincent van Gogh in Vincent and the Doctor. And now we have Henry Avery, the notorious real life pirate who actually did steal a Grand Mughal treasure ship and then disappear under mysterious circumstances.
And you know what? Done right, that's perfectly fine. Not every episode has to be a game changing event episode. Even Babylon 5 only had two or three 'Wham' episodes every season. You need the slower stuff to make the big news actually feel important. So I expect that we'll get a few standard monster-of-the-week episodes as we go along. It's a tried and true formula for Who, and it works.
But you may have noticed that there's a caveat in there. "Done right." So does the Curse deliver?
Not really. Oh, there were a few decent scenes in there. Amy looked cute dressed up as a pirate, though Karen Gillan looks cute dressed up in almost anything. Rory "dying" again has officially become a recurring gag. The Doctor had a few funny lines. That was about it for the good stuff, though.
(Speaking of Rory and the Grim Reaper, it really is getting kind of ridiculous. By moving Curse between Moon and Doctor's Wife, you get a situation where Rory dies or has been thought dead in three straight episodes, and has been dead or been thought dead no less than five times over two seasons. Play the Dead Rory Game and try to find them all!)
On the negative side of the ledger was the fact that there was very little mystery in the episode. I figured out that the Siren was some kind of healing program almost from the very beginning. It was a gimmick that they did much better in The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances. The Doctor was acting like an idiot for much of the episode, and that last bit with the CPR was especially stupid. Quick! Your life is on the line! Who do you trust to do the CPR to save your life? Your wife, who needs to have the procedure explained to her by you, or THE DOCTOR, a guy who's been saving lives for hundreds of years?
If you picked your wife, you're an idiot and deserve to drown in an air filled room.
There was also a pretty obvious editing error. We get the scene where you have the two pirates with Amy, Rory, and the kid in the armory. The kid scratches one and the other takes off, gets hurt, and the Siren takes him. Fine. Except that one who got scratched isn't there the next time we cut to the armory? Where'd he go? Since we see him in the cabin of the space ship at the end, presumably the Siren takes him too, but that would have been nice to show. Or mention. At all.
Speaking of pirates, these guys are unrepentant murderers and thieves. And the Doctor just gave them a space ship. What do you think is going to happen next? Anyone else remember The Pirate Planet?
Oh, and that whole "one ship is pretty much like another" line is bullshit. The TARDIS has nothing in common with a sailing ship outside of the broadest "they are both vehicles" sense. That's like my saying that because I can drive a car I'm qualified to pilot the space shuttle. I call bullshit.
You know, the more I write about this episode, the less I like it. I think I'm going to bring this to a close while I still have any affection for it at all.
To summarize, then, there are episodes of Doctor Who, as with any other series, that are just there. They don't advance the greater plot, they don't have great writing or a great performance in them to make you want to re-watch it, and they aren't particularly memorable once you've finished watching it. The Curse of the Black Spot is one of those. You don't need to watch it, but there are worse ways to spend an hour.
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