The Curse of the Black Spot

At the end of the previous episode, the Doctor suggested an adventure for a break. So naturally, we find ourselves dealing with pirates.

Doctor Who was originally conceived and for many years was produced as a show for children. As a result it has picked up a lot of storytelling techniques that are not considered adult: its basic serial form; its reliance on plot driving character as often as character drives plot; an attitude that the creators can occasionally slide one past the audience and be accepted if the jokes are funny enough; and, most importantly, a work crew that does this show because they grew up loving it and do it as much for themselves as the audience.

Doctor Who, in short, has become fan fiction, full of glosses and details that arise because some child or adolescent has focused on it to the exclusion of things that most people consider important; and when parents or teachers ask "Don't you have something better to do?" loudly reply "No." They're the sort of people who write sequels to loved books or focus on obscure characters or impose their own manias on the series; and like that other hotbed of fan fiction, Star Trek, if Bill Shatner tells them to get a life, they will blink and answer "This is my life." Leading this band of madmen currently is producer Steven Moffat. He loves children literature and the remnants of 19th Century literature that has evolved into modern children's fiction. He translates Victorian literature into the 21st century in JEKYLL and SHERLOCK. He has written the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's TINTIN, due out next year, and which I am eagerly await. He fills the episodes he writes personally with jokes and gags and silliness and terror and that's what he demands of his fellow writers and directors, and if occasionally logic seems to go out the window, the audience is too dizzy to notice.

That, in large part, is what this episode is about: pirates and children stowing away, straight out of TREASURE ISLAND and mermaids and the Doctor and his companions turning up for a lark, straight out of James Barrie's Peter Pan. That's the symbolic thrust of yet another Steven's script: Steven Thompson, who has already written a script for Moffat's other TV series, SHERLOCK. His thrust, though, is not the pure adventure and childish wish-fulfillment of Barrie. Instead, he focuses on the adults, on the father who has grown up to be a pirate, seeking gold and adventure, and giving up the treasure that is his wife, now dead, and his son. It's a melancholy subtext, and it can zip right past the viewer. Quite right, for the purpose of symbolic fiction is to suggest those issues which we cannot bear to speak aloud.

Look in the mirror of symbolism and you see another world that looks disturbingly like ours. Accept it and you can shave in it, but it's not really you. And if you're not paying attention, you can cut yourself badly.

Thompson's script is a bit too complicated to fit into a single episode of Doctor Who and as a result it lacks the time for the jokes and pratfalls that amuse me. It also does not significantly -- or, perhaps the word I want is 'obviously' -- advance the complicated plot arc that that Steven Moffat the writer used the first two episodes to set up. However, Moffat the producer knows that a break is a good idea, both to give us a rest and to make us, childlike, anxious to get on with it. What better break than an adventure with pirates that winds up with them sailing towards the first star on the right?