What a beautiful story. My expectations were over the moon and they were still blown out of the water (water like like pirates on the sea guys). Probably also my bias for sea settings and ultra cliché horribly inaccurate portrayals of pirates. While listening I played some games where i just walked around in a pirate-island setting, so I was locked in to be fully immersed in this one ya know what i mean.

But then, and I’ve gotta be fair here, even if I enjoyed the stupid pirates a lot, as other reviewers have pointed out, the plot is terribly simplistic and the pacing all over the place, but like, I think it kinda works for me thematically? It’s a bit just scene after scene, skipping over stuff, it actually feels like a recount of an adventure instead of a standard DW adventure. All the messy desperateness to get to plot points they want, to needless extending of a scene, feels like a very specific stylistic writing choice, especially because we know that Rayner can write meticulously paced stories. I mean we’ve all heard The Marian Conspiracy.

This writing style doesn’t work for a normal story, but for this special case where the adventure isn’t the actual story, it works. It does make you think if the story really needs to be this long, and you know what? Maybe it doesn’t. It could’ve possibly been way tighter as a one hour story, but you know what again? I like it better this way. From purely a script perspective, there is a lot of unnecessary pirate blabbering, but overall, I think it helps with setting the tone, the vibes as they say. Not the vibes of the sea (yarr-arr) but those of Evelyn and Six and Sally. The filler-y nature of the pirate story allows the real story to become a bit of a slow burn. It’s always when nothing is said that the most is said (that works both ways) and I think this story shows this very well. When Evelyn awkwardly tries to avoid Sally’s questions and starts going on a long talk about irrelevant details, it’s saying so much by having her say nothing (meanwhile she’s saying lots of things that don’t really say anything. Both ways i said!). Like yeah it’s weird to have the primary part of your story be a worse story that really just plays a supporting role to your main narrative, but that’s also why I love it so much. It’s so Doctor Who, like nothing else can be.

The idea of this seems unappealing. Not like something that’ll get you lots of sells. It goes so overboard (ha ha get it) in its attempt to have such a realistic feel that it sacrifices its marketable surface. Hollywood executives would say it’s counterintuitive to the whole point of creation. But you know. You and I know what the real point is.

Be weird, be diverse, be allowed to do something else. This story out of universe is the successtory of a story that wasn’t afraid to not conform to conventionalities. A realization for me about what people mean when they talk about early Big Finish being willing to experiment.

I do understand that this isn’t a story for everyone, and I do see how one could even find it off putting, but for me it really works. And then some, because. Well.

And then, euh, my guilty pleasure that I have avoided talking about… I genuinely really enjoy the silly pirate story as well. IT’S MY THING OKAY I LOVE THIS SHIT. I already told you how i was ‘locked in’ and stuff, i was READY for this nonsense and I would have probably loved this regardless of if it was actually good or not. Yeah, I have a type. Just saying if you’re a campy story sailing the seven seas I won’t mind if you gave me your number.

I don’t think I really need to explain what i like about the story about grief and depression and suicide. That’s pretty obviously stellar, and i feel there are people who could more eloquently put its beauty into words than me. So instead I’ll just give my hot take, or maybe not hot take idk, opinion that this is a way more elegant story about suicide than The Chimes of Midnight. Not that that isn’t a 10/10 story, but that’s also for different reasons, and this is a 10/10 plus a little red heart. Essentially Pirates and Chimes have the same core message, but I think Pirates does a way better job at flowing that message throughout the themes of its story, and is less heavy-handed in the delivery.

Damn i went through all that and didn’t even mention the songs. Yeah, part three might just be the single most entertaining episode of Doctor Who in any media. That is recency bias. When you read this I most possibly don’t think that anymore lol. But I have always loved song parodies from a young age, with Dutch comedy duo ‘Van Der Laan en Woe’ being very heavily responsible for this, (why not, i had to add some personal experience about my life to this review) and this falls perfectly into that. What do people say about this sorta thing usually? Oh right. “Great stuff.”

I’ve now started thinking about writing a song parody into this review but I feel like that would be very much overkill and also it’ll be terrible so that’s gotta wait for the next musical episode. Yeah I’ll end it there that’s a good review ending methinks.