The Curse of the Black Spot: Pirates, a Dead Calm and a Siren

After the density and dread of the opening two-parter, series six 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’s, 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. I wanted to like it more than I did, because a pirate ship is about as Saturday teatime as Doctor Who gets.

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’s lost any real hold over them. The setting’s 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 looks great, all creaking timber and lantern light and no wind at all, with a real claustrophobia to a boat that physically can’t leave. The rule’s a good one too. Anyone who gets hurt, even trivially, a splinter, a nicked finger, gets 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 go pale over paper cuts.

Amy, meanwhile, finds a chest, puts on the coat and the boots and the hat, picks up a cutlass and starts fencing, and Karen Gillan is clearly having the time of her life. She’s more convincing with a sword than most of the actual pirates, which isn’t saying much when the whole crew is scared stiff of getting a scratch. It’s a fun couple of minutes and it tells you exactly what the episode thinks it is, a romp with a bit of a scare in it. The trouble is that a romp needs to keep its footing, and this one doesn’t, which is where I started losing patience with it.

The rules keep moving

The Siren herself turns up in reflections, in water, in a blade, in a mirror, and sings, and anyone marked walks willingly into her arms and vanishes in green light. Lily Cole is used well as a visual, silent and glowing and blank-faced, more unsettling than beautiful. The reflection rule gives the episode its one genuinely good sequence, where the crew frantically smash, cover or chuck overboard every shiny 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 a way in.

But the rules keep bending. Reflections matter, then they don’t. Water matters, then it doesn’t. The Doctor puts forward a confident theory, is wrong, puts forward another, is wrong again, which could have been a nice bit of humility and instead plays like a script that hasn’t decided what’s going on. First it’s the water, so everyone keeps away from the sea, then it’s anything that shines, Avery’s treasure included. By the third reversal the tension had leaked out of it for me entirely, because I’d quietly learned that whatever got established this minute probably wouldn’t hold for the next one. Suspense needs rules that stay put. You can’t be scared of a threat that keeps renegotiating its own terms, and I wasn’t the only one who came away thinking it wasn’t all that spooky or all that funny either.

Rory drowns, again

Rory gets hurt, gets marked, and eventually drowns, and Amy does CPR on him for a long, horrible stretch. The scene’s well played, both Gillan and Darvill are very good in it, and the moment where Amy just refuses to accept that it’s over 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. I’ll give the episode that one.

But it’s also the third time in a season and a bit that Rory Williams has died or been wiped out, and the returns are shrinking fast. 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 back within a few minutes, and the show’s started treating his death as a recurring bit rather than a stake. If a character dies every third week the deaths stop landing, and I don’t think the episode notices it’s spending something it’ll badly want back later. I like Rory a lot, and that’s exactly why it bugs me. Every time they kill him and bring him back it costs a bit of the next time, and there’s going to be a next time, I’d put money on it.

The twist arrives too late

The best thing in the script is the one it has least time for. Henry Avery was a real pirate, one of the most wanted men of the 1690s, who took an enormous haul of treasure and then simply disappeared, and the episode quietly offers itself as the answer to where he went. I like that sort of thing a lot, the show slotting itself into a gap in real history. Avery’s son Toby has stowed away on his father’s ship, having been brought up thinking Henry was a naval officer rather than a pirate, and he’s also, it turns out, dying of typhoid. So the man who chose gold over his family is faced with a child who came looking for a version of him that never existed. That’s a real story, it has weight, it rhymes with what the Siren is doing, and it gives Bonneville something to play beyond weary competence. It gets about one scene, because the episode keeps cutting away from the thing it should be about to fit in another reversal about whether reflections count, and by the time it comes back there’s no room left to land it.

What the Siren is really doing

The twist 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 sitting in the same spot in a parallel dimension, and she’s been scanning the crew, picking out anyone hurt or sick, and pulling them into stasis for treatment. The black spot is a tissue sample. The green flash is a beam-out. Nobody’s been killed at all, and the whole missing crew are lying in a sickbay in another dimension, perfectly safe and rather bored. Her own crew died of a bug humans shrug off, and she’s been left running her programme with nobody to run it on. It’s lovely, and very much in the tradition of the nanogenes in The Doctor Dances, medical machinery doing its job badly rather than doing evil, and it makes the earlier scares better looking back, because the thing dragging screaming men out of the world was a nurse with no off switch and no idea about consent.

The problem is purely one of shape. It lands with about eight minutes left, so there’s no time to sit with it, and the ending, Avery and his surviving crew taking over the alien ship and flying off as space pirates with Toby kept alive in the sickbay, is so abrupt it plays like a summary of an ending. Somewhere in here is a much better episode where the twist comes at the halfway mark 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 regardless, and the woman with the eyepatch turns up again, exactly as she did in Day of the Moon. Whatever’s being done to Amy is still being done, whether this particular hour has time for it or not.

Rating: 2.5/5. Pleasant enough to sit through, but I’m starting to think Amy is the season.