After the density and dread of the opening two-parter, Series 6 does what this show always does and parks a standalone in the middle of the road. “The Curse of the Black Spot” is pirates, and a monster, and a twist, and it is, I’m sorry to say, the weakest episode the Eleventh Doctor has been handed. It isn’t offensive and it isn’t annoying. It’s just thin, and it keeps tripping over its own plot on the way to a genuinely good idea it doesn’t leave itself time to use.
The TARDIS lands on a seventeenth-century pirate ship, stuck in a dead flat sea, with a crew being picked off one at a time and a captain who has lost any real authority over them. The setting is genuinely promising. Hugh Bonneville is good value as Captain Henry Avery, not a swaggering pirate king but a tired, compromised man who went to sea for money and has ended up somewhere much worse, and the ship is well realised, all creaking timber and lantern light and no wind at all, with a real claustrophobia to a vessel that physically cannot leave. The rule is a good one too. Anyone who is injured, even trivially, a splinter, a nicked finger, develops a black spot on the palm, and then the Siren comes for them. It’s the sort of simple, testable threat this show does well, and the first act gets decent mileage out of watching hardened men become terrified of paper cuts. Amy, meanwhile, finds a chest, puts on the coat and the boots, picks up a cutlass and starts fencing, and Karen Gillan is clearly having the time of her life. It’s a fun couple of minutes and it tells you exactly what the episode thinks it is. The trouble is that a romp needs to keep its footing, and this one doesn’t.
The rules keep moving
The Siren herself appears in reflections, in water, in a blade, in a mirror, and sings, and anyone marked walks willingly into her arms and is vaporised in green light. Lily Cole is used well as a visual, silent and luminous and expressionless, more unsettling than beautiful. The reflection rule produces the episode’s one genuinely good sequence, in which the crew frantically smash, cover or throw overboard every reflective surface on the ship, only to be undone by the shine on a puddle. That’s a proper Doctor Who beat, a monster with a loophole and a room full of people trying to think their way out of it faster than it can find one.
The trouble is that the rules keep bending. Reflections matter, then they don’t. Water matters, then it doesn’t. The Doctor advances a confident theory, is wrong, advances another, is wrong again, which could be a nice bit of humility and instead plays as a script that hasn’t decided what’s happening. By the third reversal the tension has leaked out of the thing entirely, because the audience has quietly learned that whatever’s established this minute probably won’t hold for the next one. Suspense needs rules that stay put. You cannot be frightened of a threat that keeps renegotiating its own terms.
Rory is injured, marked, and eventually drowns, and Amy performs CPR on him for a long, agonising stretch while the Doctor counts and tells her when to stop. The scene is well played, both Gillan and Darvill are very good in it, and the moment where Amy simply refuses to accept the timing and keeps going is genuinely affecting. Rory even gets to talk her through it beforehand, calm and practical, a nurse explaining his own resuscitation to the person who’ll have to do it, which is the most Rory thing imaginable and easily his best material here. But it is also the third time this season and change that Rory Williams has died or been erased, and the returns are diminishing badly. He crumbled to dust in Amy’s Choice, which meant something because it forced Amy into the choice that defined her, and he was erased from history entirely a few episodes later. Now he drowns and is revived within four minutes, and the show has started treating his mortality as a recurring set piece rather than a stake. If a character dies every third week the deaths stop landing, and the episode doesn’t seem to notice it’s spending something it will badly want back later.
The twist arrives too late
The best thing in the script is the one it has least time for. Avery’s son Toby has stowed away aboard his father’s ship, having been told by his mother that Henry was a naval officer rather than a pirate, and he is also, it turns out, dying of typhoid. So the man who chose gold over his family is confronted with a child who came looking for a version of him that never existed, and who is now sick because of the choice. That’s a real story, it has weight, it rhymes with the Siren’s function, and it gives Bonneville something to play beyond weary competence. It gets roughly one scene, because the episode keeps cutting away from the thing it should be about in order to service another reversal about whether reflections count, and by the time it comes back there’s no room left to land it.
The reveal is the episode’s best idea and it arrives far too late to save it. The Siren isn’t a monster, she’s an automated medical hologram from an alien ship occupying the same physical space in a parallel dimension, and she’s been scanning the crew, identifying anyone injured or sick, and transporting them into stasis for treatment. The black spot is a tissue sample. The vaporisation is a beam-out. Nobody has been killed at all, and the entire missing crew are lying in a sickbay in another dimension, perfectly safe and rather bored. Her own crew died of a virus that human beings shrug off, and she has been left running her programme with nobody to run it on, for centuries. That’s a lovely inversion and very much in this show’s tradition of monsters that turn out to be doing their jobs badly rather than doing evil, and it retroactively improves the horror, because the thing dragging screaming men out of the world was the whole time a nurse with no off switch and no judgement about consent.
The problem is purely one of shape. It lands with about eight minutes left, so there’s no room to sit with it, and the resolution, Avery and his surviving crew simply taking possession of the alien vessel and flying off as space pirates with Toby kept alive in the sickbay, is so abrupt it plays like a summary of an ending rather than an ending. Somewhere in here is a much better episode where the reveal happens at the midpoint and the back half is about a father who has to stay aboard a ship he doesn’t understand to keep his son breathing. That episode would have been rather good.
The arc keeps ticking underneath the shipwreck plot regardless: Amy’s scan flickers between pregnant and not pregnant, and the woman with the eyepatch opens her hatch in the wall again, exactly as she did in Day of the Moon. Whatever is being done to Amy is still being done, whether this particular hour has time for it or not.
Rating: 2.5/5. Nicely mounted and pleasant enough to sit through, but muddled in its construction, tonally weightless, and it squanders both its best idea and its best character by hiding them at the back. The weakest of the Matt Smith run so far. A ship that can’t sail, a woman in the water, and a monster who turned out to be a nurse. Also, that eyepatch again. I’m starting to think Amy is the season.