In seeking the second segment of the Key to Time, the TARDIS heads for an icy world but lands on a populated planet that shouldn't be there.In seeking the second segment of the Key to Time, the TARDIS heads for an icy world but lands on a populated planet that shouldn't be there.In seeking the second segment of the Key to Time, the TARDIS heads for an icy world but lands on a populated planet that shouldn't be there.
John Leeson
- K9
- (voice)
John Cannon
- Technican
- (uncredited)
Tony Hayes
- Mentiad
- (uncredited)
Derek Hunt
- Citizen
- (uncredited)
Ray Knight
- Mentiad
- (uncredited)
James Muir
- Technician
- (uncredited)
Brychan Powell
- Mentiad
- (uncredited)
- Director
- Writers
- Douglas Adams
- Sydney Newman(uncredited)
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaJust prior to shooting the 16th season, Tom Baker was mauled by a dog and was left with a large tear in his lip (his first thought, he claimed, was, "Now I'll be stuck with smiling parts for the rest of my career."). The wound was covered up with make-up while it was healed, but is still very noticeable throughout the season. A scene showing the Doctor banging his lip on the TARDIS console was added to "The Pirate Planet" to account for the disfigurement.
- GoofsSome handwritten notes can be seen after the Doctor rips a page out of the manual. Mary Tamm (playing Romana) hides the page from the camera after a few seconds.
- Quotes
K9: Suggest you allow Mistress to make contact.
The Doctor: Nonsense! Making contact with an alien race is an immensely skilled operation. It calls for tact and exper... What would SHE know about it?
Romana: [in background making contact] Hello. Excuse me...
K9: She is prettier than you, Master.
The Doctor: [nonplussed] Is she?
- ConnectionsFeatured in Being a Girl (2013)
Featured review
Charting a Promising Course Toward Planetary Plunder
In the late 1970s, Douglas Adams was a busy man at the BBC. For BBC Radio, he developed his first incarnation of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," whose multiple episodes, which began airing in 1978, spawned a "five-part trilogy" of novels, a 1981 BBC Television miniseries, and a godawful 2005 feature film. (Adams had done preliminary work on the project before his 2001 death.) By 1979, Adams had also become the script editor for season 17 of "Doctor Who," although it was Adams's pilot "Hitchhiker's" script, which he had submitted to the production team the year before, that led to his commission to write "The Pirate Planet."
Not surprisingly, a lot of "Hitchhiker's" is reflected in this four-part story, the second installment of the season 16 story arc "The Key to Time," which finds the Time Lord the Doctor and his companion, fellow Time Lord Romana, traipsing across the universe to round up the Key's six segments before dark forces beat them to it.
Adams was not only keeping very busy, he was an unprolific writer with disdain for schedules (he once remarked that he loved the whooshing sound of deadlines as they went by), which is likely why "The Pirate Planet" is his only "Doctor Who" writing credit during the series' run. (With producer Graham Williams, Adams co-scripted "The City of Death" under the pseudonym "David Agnew" while Adams also wrote "Shada," which never aired during the series' run although a version later became available on home media.)
Commanding the planet Xanak from his cliff-hugging "Bridge," the Captain (Bruce Purchase) announces to his delighted subjects another "new golden age of prosperity" that will shower them "in wealth beyond the dreams of avarice" even if the mysterious mechanism by which that occurs hits a rough patch, felt also by the Doctor and Romana as they try to land the TARDIS "capsule" (as Romana terms it) on what they think is the planet Calufrax, location of the second segment to the Key to Time. But instead of the cold, uninhabited planet the Doctor is expecting, it is a pleasant, populated, suspiciously enriched world, albeit policed by the Captain's armed guards and seemingly terrorized by psychic ghouls called the Mentiads.
One denizen adversely affected by the "omens" proclaiming this latest golden age is Pralix (David Sibley), whose physical and psychological distress troubles his grandfather Balaton (Ralph Michael) and sister Mula (Primi Townsend) along with Mula's boyfriend Kimus (David Warwick), critical of the Captain's regime. While the Doctor, accompanied by his robot dog K-9, encounters them, Romana is arrested by one of the Captain's guards for having a prohibited item, a telescope, and asking a prohibited question: why?
In just her second "Doctor Who" story, Mary Tamm displays smooth confidence and saucy charm as her spirited interactions with Tom Baker begin to crackle. As the blustering Captain, Purchase seems over the top, but there are indications of deeper dimensions in the character while Andrew Robertson, playing the Captain's harried lieutenant Mr. Fibuli, becomes a likeable, sympathetic audience surrogate simply from his deft pirouetting around the glowering Purchase and his stream of deliberately overblown oaths. Part One of "The Pirate Planet" charts a promising course toward planetary plunder.
Not surprisingly, a lot of "Hitchhiker's" is reflected in this four-part story, the second installment of the season 16 story arc "The Key to Time," which finds the Time Lord the Doctor and his companion, fellow Time Lord Romana, traipsing across the universe to round up the Key's six segments before dark forces beat them to it.
Adams was not only keeping very busy, he was an unprolific writer with disdain for schedules (he once remarked that he loved the whooshing sound of deadlines as they went by), which is likely why "The Pirate Planet" is his only "Doctor Who" writing credit during the series' run. (With producer Graham Williams, Adams co-scripted "The City of Death" under the pseudonym "David Agnew" while Adams also wrote "Shada," which never aired during the series' run although a version later became available on home media.)
Commanding the planet Xanak from his cliff-hugging "Bridge," the Captain (Bruce Purchase) announces to his delighted subjects another "new golden age of prosperity" that will shower them "in wealth beyond the dreams of avarice" even if the mysterious mechanism by which that occurs hits a rough patch, felt also by the Doctor and Romana as they try to land the TARDIS "capsule" (as Romana terms it) on what they think is the planet Calufrax, location of the second segment to the Key to Time. But instead of the cold, uninhabited planet the Doctor is expecting, it is a pleasant, populated, suspiciously enriched world, albeit policed by the Captain's armed guards and seemingly terrorized by psychic ghouls called the Mentiads.
One denizen adversely affected by the "omens" proclaiming this latest golden age is Pralix (David Sibley), whose physical and psychological distress troubles his grandfather Balaton (Ralph Michael) and sister Mula (Primi Townsend) along with Mula's boyfriend Kimus (David Warwick), critical of the Captain's regime. While the Doctor, accompanied by his robot dog K-9, encounters them, Romana is arrested by one of the Captain's guards for having a prohibited item, a telescope, and asking a prohibited question: why?
In just her second "Doctor Who" story, Mary Tamm displays smooth confidence and saucy charm as her spirited interactions with Tom Baker begin to crackle. As the blustering Captain, Purchase seems over the top, but there are indications of deeper dimensions in the character while Andrew Robertson, playing the Captain's harried lieutenant Mr. Fibuli, becomes a likeable, sympathetic audience surrogate simply from his deft pirouetting around the glowering Purchase and his stream of deliberately overblown oaths. Part One of "The Pirate Planet" charts a promising course toward planetary plunder.
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- darryl-tahirali
- Mar 17, 2022
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