Dave Stone is an author known for massive flights of fancy in his books and being an author who some find brilliantly inventive and others find self-indulgently over the top. I have enjoyed some of Stone's books and others have been very middle of the road. This is a book which I actively hated for around 75% of its page count.

I rarely hate Doctor Who stories. If this was any other book, I'd have probably given up five chapters in. But, I can't leave a Doctor Who story unfinished and certainly not one I know is part of an arc which leads up to the finale of the Virgin Bernice Summerfield book range.

The story, what there is of it, sees an unnamed agent who has been employed to find Bernice after the events on Dellah seen in the previous book Where Angels Fear. The trail has only a sparse number of clues and instead of teasing the reader with clues as to what has happened to Bernice, Stone prefers to send the agent on a variety of pointless and unengaging sidequests which I think Stone thinks are amusing and packed with great original characters. They're not. They're just frustrating.

This is ostensibly a Bernice Summerfield book and she doesn't appear until page 200 or so out of 245. Jason Kane appears a few pages before her. It is too little, too late. This isn't an interesting world. The agent isn't an interesting character. The fact that they hardly know who Benny is doesn't help. It makes the entire novel hugely aimless. Where Angels Fear ended on the devastation of Dellah and this story is just chooses to put that firmly into the background and waste time wandering around other planets meeting characters the reader isn't given any reason to care about.

It's telling that the only part I enjoyed was from when Jason turned up, and then obviously the final, eleventh hour, appearance of Bernice. In two or three chapters we suddenly get about half a book's worth of plot squeezed in before the book has to finish. It's finally fun and engaging but all my goodwill towards the book had dissipated long before.

I don't like stories which deliberately obfuscate details. There is no reason for not telling the reader who we are following for 245 pages. They are our point of view character. No name, barely any description. It's just hugely frustrating and then at the end Dave Stone chooses to stick two fingers up to the reader by literally ending with the agent telling us we will never get to find out who they really are. Again, not funny or clever.

It worries me hugely that Stone returns in Return to the Fractured Planet and also that I know the next novel, Dead Romance, is also Benny-less (although at least I know Chris Cwej features in it). I'm hoping I can get through these last few Virgin Benny books with more enjoyment than this novel but the future doesn't look too bright.

The Daleks are back, again, and just as useless as before.  This time they have constructed a human detector and use it only to be fooled by a cat and the Doctor, Ian and Barbara hiding under a manhole cover.  The Daleks of the Chad Valley Universe are not the all-conquering evil lumps of hate in bonded polycarbide armour we know from the TV series - or even their dedicated spin off comic strip.  Very disappointing.

A short tale which provides some remarkably accurate background to how the TARDIS works, many years before the Doctor explained it to Leela in The Robots of Death.  There's also a lovely image of the ship's interior.  A rather lovely pause in the rollercoaster of adventures presented by Chad Valley.

A story which suggests the Daleks are very easily defeated.  It also seems a bit rich that the Doctor and Ian should be designing a weapon to defeat the Daleks after the pepperpots saved them in their last encounter.  It seems a bit mean-spirited.  The Daleks running away is a rather ignominious end to this story.

The Doctor fixes a bit of faulty wiring in the Watermen's spaceship and the head off home on their 5 million light year journey!  A spiritual sequel to The Edge of Destruction but a good example of how not all aliens were deemed as monstrous in the early days of the show.

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.

A strong start which sees Barbara decide to venture out of the TARDIS first soon descends into a cautionary tale for women about not getting above their station, when she is attacked by a gigantic spider.  It's a little disheartening to see Barbara's good character being sullied by the sexist ending.

This is a story that is hugely reminiscent of the TV Comic tale Shark Bait.  There are odd patches of invisible water which allow sea creatures to seemingly swim in mid-air.  Barbara nearly gets eaten by a giant fish but it is apparently too stupid not to swim outside of it's natural habitat whereupon it dies.  It would be like a fish on Earth just deciding to swim out on to land for no apparent reason.

Strange insects attack the Doctor, Ian and Barbara on the planet of the Daleks. The Daleks save them and let them leave - but with a strict warning never to return.  An interesting take on pest control.

The Doctor, Ian and Barbara find themselves miniaturised and pursued by a bird in scenes which clearly influenced Pixar's A Bug's Life.  The scene of the hiding under a giant button is a marvel.