When I first watched The Curse of the Black Spot I remember being underwhelmed.  It was broadcast after the epic two parter opener to Series 6 and felt, as a consequence, a little flimsy.  I anticipated that, watched in isolation, free of the rather heavy arc elements of Series 6, it might stand up a little better.  To some extent, I was right.I love Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl – a clear influence on this story right down to the eventual title (it’s working title was apparently Siren which is fairly non-descript and not the punchy, attention grabbing style that Steven Moffat has confessed to preferring).  I even like the two sequels – Dead Man’s Chest and World’s End (although I admit they are far too long).  I haven’t seen On Stranger Tides yet but I haven’t heard great things!

But I do like pirates and all the trappings Moffat talks about in the accompanying Confidential.  Coming up in my marathon are quite a few pirates – we have The Smugglers up next and later in the 18^th century the rather wonderful Doctor Who and the Pirates.  But The Curse of the Black Spot is probably the closest we get to anything resembling the clichéd view of pirates (although I may revise that opinion once I’ve experienced the other piratey stories).

So why do I only feel partly inclined to like this story?

The pirates are good – Hugh Bonneville as Captain Avery is great (I love his stuff in the TARDIS) and Lee Ross as the Boatswain walks a fine line between believable and ‘ooooaaarrrr’.  The rest of the crew a fairly generic but get dispatched so quickly you don’t really have time to worry about their characterisation – they’re just ‘red shirts’ really (oh my – I think that’s my first Star Trek reference so far in my marathon – bad Who fan, bad Who fan).The pirate ship is gorgeous and the night shoot lends the whole caper a good, spooky atmosphere.

The central plot of two ships existing side by side with the Siren being a medical interface from the alien ship is a fun one and the Siren herself is suitably spooky (although I don’t particularly like the ‘angry’ effect they create for her – they do something to Lily Cole’s eyes that just looks wrong somehow.  I think it would have been far more effective to just have her turn red and let the ‘emotion’ come through Cole’s acting).

I like the stuff with Toby.  I know some fans have issues with Steven Moffat including so many children as central characters in his stories, but I like it.  I don’t think any of the child actors so far have been poor and have held their own admirably against much more experienced actors.  I think having children central to a show which has a core audience of children makes eminent sense.  They’re not the focus obviously – most children watching want to see the Doctor having adventures – but they need to be there, next to the Doctor sharing those adventures with him from time to time.  (I’m also a bit biased in this story because my son is called Tobias – and yes, we did partly name him after a certain Mr Vaughn…)

I think the problem is the pacing.  It is an issue I find I am realising I am having with quite a lot of the new series, ever since its return in 2005.  The 45 minute format is one which just seems to constantly restrict authors and what happens is that story’s often feel rushed.  It is highlighted more so when episodes are allowed that little bit of extra time – The Eleventh Hour or Asylum of the Daleks, or even the Christmas Specials.  None of those have ever struck me as having a problem with their pacing.  And it’s not all the 45 minute episodes either.  But The Curse of the Black Spot is one of those which seems to suffer from being squeezed into this time limit.  It’s all the more evident in this episode because of one specific incident – the missing Boatswain.

Towards the end of the story, the Boatswain – a fairly major character up to that point – just disappears without a word.  None of the other characters refer to him and eventually he is just ‘there’ in the final scenes of the pirates aboard the alien spaceship.  Apparently there was a sequence, edited out because of time constraints, where the Boatswain was clapped in irons and, on escaping, is taken by the Siren.  The Brilliant Book 2012 comments on his disappearance and says that his absence simply allows us to assume he’s been taken.  But we shouldn’t have to just assume.  That is sloppy storytelling.  If Avery or the Doctor had said – where’s the Boatswain, or we had a brief scene of him and a blue light – much as we have for the other remaining pirate, Mulligan, then yes, as an audience, we can put two and two together and continue with the plot.  But when a character simply drops off the page it just seems sloppy.

The other problem I think is the desire the production team had to include every pirate cliché in the story meaning there was possibly a tad too much to fit in – although goodness knows what it would have been like if we’d had the early draft featuring an army of militia as well as the pirates and the TARDIS crew.

But, there are lots of fun things in this episode, so let’s focus on those.  This story is a romp and that’s what I love about it.  Amy’s swashbuckling, the Doctor walking the plank, Rory’s seduction by the Siren (I love the ‘brilliant’ bit he does early in the episode).  I like the fact that the Doctor keeps getting the situation wrong and has to revise his advice to the others.  Having the Doctor slightly on the back foot is always a bit refreshing (Midnight did it too, but showed us the far more chilling side to a situation like that).

The end of the story with the drowning and resuscitation of Rory is a good ending, although apparently it was originally going to be Amy in the drink but was swopped because Amy was ‘nearly dying’ too many times that Series.  How ironic that they swopped it to Rory who, far more than Amy, is now linked to the running joke that he always dies in Doctor Who – so much so it was even a gag in their final story, The Angels Take Manhattan.

Historically we have, of course, Captain Henry Avery – a real pirate who did indeed disappear in around 1696.  The tradition of Doctor Who giving its own conclusion to history’s mysteries is something I enjoy immensely and I do quite like the idea of true ‘space pirates’ gallivanting around the galaxy and getting up to all sorts of piratey mischief.  I know briefly see Avery and Toby in A Good Man Goes to War, but it would be fun to revisit the whole crew properly at some point in the future.

The Brilliant Book of 2012 give a little summary of Captain Avery’s real life travels in the years running up to his disappearance and for all the cliché present in the episode itself, its pleasing to have this factual undertone to the story.

The mystery of his missing treasure is also a link to The Smugglers which sees pirates and smugglers hunting for the lost treasure of Captain Avery.  Unintentional on Stephen Thompson, the writer’s, part, the fact that this story serves as a prequel to The Smugglers is wonderful and why I love the fact that Doctor Who has such a rich and interwoven universe to play in.

Ultimately, The Curse of the Black Spot is a fun romp through Pirate Land with the odd interesting character spot thrown in (Avery’s greed and abandonment of his family for example) and it stands as one of those middle of the road stories which entertain but don’t expect too much of the audience.

i quote the doctor's "Yo ho ho!" w/ the same intonation and everything near-daily instead of saying hello to my friends

I enjoyed it. It was fun. It obviously wasn't on a par with the opening episodes but this was supposed to be a break from that and it succeeded. It was a very old school episode and I've been wanting to see a Doctor Who story involving pirates for a while. Rory being killed is becoming a bit of a running joke though.

I feel like this episode has a terrible reputation but it's just mediocre more than terrible.  The ship doesn't look half bad as a set, although the ghost thing is pretty goofy looking.  Our characters also feel a little more annoying here than the usual sort of endearing tone the Moffat era could take.  Like the whole Rory dying thing already felt way played out and just silly at this point.  It's where the story started to lose me because it feels like we are just going by the Eleventh Doctor formula with episodes like this, not offering anything unique even though it's a pirate story - that should be a certain brand of fun I just found missing here.  In comparison, I feel like the show made a better use of the Western trope in Series 7 compared to here.  The Curse of the Black Spot's story isn't remarkable but it is a very easy one to sit through.  Not my favourite but not unbearably bad, either.

Its been quite some time since we've had a clunker of this magnitude. It whips by quite well in the beginning, when the scope is just "pirates!" But as the alien menace and the son are revealed, things start to click out of place and logical inconsistencies appear. Gallifrey Base must have feasted on these back in 2011.

There's so many well worn ideas that don't usually mix together fighting for space. You have a recycled nanogene plot (the menace in fact is curing not killing), trying to fit alongside the legend of sirens calling sailors onto the shore, except she's not on the shore, she's using reflections as portals.

Without nitpicking, the most inconsistent element must be the danger of reflections. They have tonnes of barrels of water, but its too dangerous to put the pirate's treasure into the barrels to secure them?

When the pirates get the black spot they are always dispensed with immediately, but Rory manages to receive this without being taken out of action for some time, why is not effort put into holding the other victims back? What does the siren do in instances when people are too ill to approach her?

When Toby was hiding in the hold for three months, sick with a black spot, did he not open a barrel of water once to take a drink?

Once the show has shifted to the spaceship setting (which marvelously I had absolutely no recollection of) the questions persist. Why is the siren able to stabilise but not cure basic illnesses that have, in the future, long been cured?

Then you have Rory almost dying. Hilarious at this point in his story. You can't pull that trick again. They Keep Killing Rory.