MR 043: Doctor Who and the Pirates or The Lass That Lost a Sailor

Once again Jacqueline Rayner knocks it out of the park. It makes sense that she'd do so well with Evelyn because she wrote the first story and originated the character. She understands Evelyn more than most and it really shows here. Besides Jubilee, this is Evelyn's best story since the very first one. What a long way Evelyn has come too. She has nine stories in the first fifty main range. NINE! That's wild. Early Big Finish knew they had a good thing going with her. She was probably popular and with good reason.

This story feels like it's emulating Robert Shearman, in a good way. It's being hilarious and witty while at the same time being about something much more dark and painful. But there's hope in the end too, like the best of Robert Shearman's work.

There's a general framing device to this story. Evelyn, and then later the Doctor as well, are telling this story to one of Evelyn's students, Sally. Sally absolutely does not want to hear the story. She at first gets bowled over by Evelyn and then the Doctor who completely ignore her and then she tries to get them to leave and tell them that she doesn't care about their story. To which they completely ignore her and continue.

The framing device works to tell the broader story, but it also works to inject comedy into the story. Evelyn and the Doctor fudge some of the details or have the characters say things differently. The Doctor has the pirate captain call him well dressed and well spoken. While Evelyn tries to liven things up and deliberate steers the narrative to ignore the existence of a person who is too painful for her to acknowledge.

And it's with this narrative device that the story later turns into a musical where Colin sings not one, not two, not three, but FOUR different songs. Evelyn even gets to sing a song herself. This being a musical is brilliant. As the Doctor says, nothing even goes wrong in musicals. To which Sally helplfully points out a bunch of musicals where people die.

The actual story here is that long ago a pirate crew was infiltrated by a British spy. When the pirate captain found out about the spy, he hid his treasure on land and then had everyone in the crew marooned or killed to avoid the spy. But got got anyway by the last member of the crew, who was presumably the spy. That spy had a child who is now on the ship that the Doctor and Evelyn are on. He has a compass with a map. It feels very Disney Pirates of the Caribbean which came out in the same year as this one. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!

The pirate captain boards the ship and goes about torching it but the captain, Evelyn and son, Jem, survive while the Doctor basically just hangs out on the pirate ship and hears the backstory. And then gets into a song contest with the pirates. It all ends in finding the treasure and the pirates marooned while the sailors on the ship that was captured sail back on the pirate ship.

None of that really matters, though. The pirate romp story is just set dressing to the real story here. In the process of interogating Jem for the treasure map, the pirate captain kills him. Evelyn blames herself for mentioning the islands that they're looking for and it deeply affects her. It's wild because usually in Doctor Who we just see death as a matter of course. It's a Doctor Who story, of course people die that the Doctor can't save. But here we actually stop to examine it and what it means to the people involved. The Doctor shrugs it off, of course. He says sorry but it doesn't really affect him the way it affects Evelyn. This sort of thing is why being a companion changes you as a person permanently. You get desensitized to death, your own or other people's.

Evelyn relates her trauma in maybe causing a death to the trauma of her student, Sally. The reason why Sally doesn't want them there is becasue she accidentally killed her lover in a car accident where she was driving. She was trying to drive fast to get to where she was going and didn't see them before hitting them. And this is the night where she left a suicide note for Evelyn and went to kill herself.

In a rare turn of events for the Doctor, he actually lets Evelyn go back in time and save Sally from killing herself. Normally in a situation like this he'd say something like "we're a part of events now, we can't go back" to avoid creating a paradox. They see the suicide note, go back in time to stop it, and so she doesn't leave a note and so they don't go back in time to stop it. But that kind of time travel explanation would defeat the entire point of the story, and ruin it, so we're ignoring it. It makes for a very good ending. That's the reason why Evelyn refused to leave and bowled her over to tell her pirate story. She won't leave Sally alone because she knows what Sally will do and she needs someone to sit with her and show that she cares. The night is darkest just before the dawn. And in the end Sally makes it to that next dawn.

That framing story is ultimately what makes this story so strong and so impactful. The pirate romp is delightful and fun, but at the center of it is an evil/mad pirate kind who will stop at nothing to get his treasure, killing everyone along the way. It's an over the top cliche, but it relates to the much more real story of someone dying in a car accident, something that is all too common. It gives Sally some really strong, emotional songs in the middle of the silly ones as well.

You'd think something like this would be mood dissonance, but it works quite well. Rayner weaves the comedy in with the tragedy so expertly, as if she's been writing stories like this all her life. She knows when to play up the tragedy or when to play up the comedy for full effect. It works particularly well when Evelyn is trying to ignore her trauma and bury it by covering it up with comedy. Evelyn uses comedy as a coping mechanism while the Doctor helps her heal. Indeed the Doctor says that he brought her back and did this for Evelyn. He's desensitized to death, but not Evelyn. Not yet. After all the death she's seen in the previous seven stories with her before this one, THIS is the death that impacts her the most. A young man who just wanted to sail the seas.