The Mentiads take the Doctor, Romana and Kimus to a reunion with K9 and Mula, where they set about trying to defeat the Captain's plans.The Mentiads take the Doctor, Romana and Kimus to a reunion with K9 and Mula, where they set about trying to defeat the Captain's plans.The Mentiads take the Doctor, Romana and Kimus to a reunion with K9 and Mula, where they set about trying to defeat the Captain's plans.
John Leeson
- K9
- (voice)
John Cannon
- Technician
- (uncredited)
Vi Delmar
- Old Queen Xanxia
- (uncredited)
Tony Hayes
- Mentiad
- (uncredited)
Ray Knight
- Mentiad
- (uncredited)
Brychan Powell
- Mentiad
- (uncredited)
Clive Rogers
- Mentiad
- (uncredited)
Derek Suthern
- Mentiad
- (uncredited)
- Director
- Writers
- Douglas Adams
- Sydney Newman(uncredited)
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaWhen the captain is talking to Mr. Fibuli about the ship he built, he uses one of Douglas Adams' (the series writer) favorite phrases, "...technology so advanced you would not be able to distinguish it from magic!"
- GoofsAncient Queen Xanxia is kept in existence within a pocket of slowed time, stretching her final few seconds of life into years. At such a slowed speed, we should not be able to see her breathing or blinking or nodding her head to one side, but we do.
- Quotes
Doctor Who: What do you want? You don't want to take over the universe, do you? No. You wouldn't know what to do with it, beyond shout at it.
- ConnectionsFeatured in The History of Power Rangers: Power Rangers Ninja Storm (2011)
Featured review
In Which All Is Revealed. Well, Almost.
Part Three of "The Pirate Planet" is an exposition explosion that challenges writer Douglas Adams and director Pennant Roberts to convey the various strands while disguising what will be a dialog data dump. Fine performances, particularly by Tom Baker, and Adams's dry wit help to camouflage that, especially with the heaviest lift: explaining what's up with the Mentiads.
After shielding the Doctor, Romana, and Kimus (David Warwick) from the Captain's (Bruce Purchase) guards in the mineshaft with their psychic abilities, the Mentiads, now led by Pralix (David Sibley), return to base with the three in tow to rendezvous with Pralix's sister Mula (Primi Townsend) and the Doctor's robot dog K-9. Then Romana, Kimus, and even Mula help the Doctor break it all down.
Xanak is indeed a hollow planet, a pirate planet that materializes around other planets, such as Calufrax, on which the Doctor and Romana expected to find the second segment to the Key to Time, and plunders them for their mineral wealth--millions, even billions, of inhabitants of all levels of sentience be damned. Apart from the material riches it yields that herald each new "golden age of prosperity," the planetary digestion process also releases enormous blasts of psychic energy that awaken those, such as Pralix, who have psychic abilities and alert those who are already awoken to help form an even more powerful gestalt, one that could challenge the Captain and his own formidable powers.
Ah, but the Captain and his trusty right-hand man Mr. Fibuli (Andrew Robertson) are busy synthesizing compounds from the elements found on Calufrax, their latest plunder, to use in a blocking device to defeat the Mentiads' psychic abilities. However, to fully repair their transmat system that transports them through space, they will need to plunder another world rich in "PJX1-8" (we know it as quartz), and have found one, located in the backwater of the Milky Way galaxy in a star system named Sol, the planet Terra (AKA Earth).
So, what exactly does Douglas Adams have against Earth, anyway? Those familiar with "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" will recall that Adams's magnum opus opens with Earth's destruction by a Vogon constructor fleet led by a fatuous, irritable martinet not entirely unlike the Captain. Adams, a talented but lazy writer already occupied with launching and sustaining his initial radio version of "Hitchhiker's," (ahem) pirated from it to populate this "Doctor Who" story.
But at least Adams developed "The Pirate Planet" even further, because is the Captain sucking the marrow from other worlds simply for material gain? No, as the Doctor discovers when he and Kimus are captured by the Captain's guards. Beneath his bionic blowhardiness, the Captain is actually a gifted hyper-engineer who has, in a feat of brilliant astro-gravitational engineering, managed to compress the masses of his plundered planets into a display gallery that does credit to Jon Pusey's inventive production design.
But is this simply the vain, arrogant Captain's trophy case? No, as the Doctor and Kimus discover when they accidentally stumble upon Xanak's original terrible tyrant, Queen Xanxia, creepily preserved in her last moments of life as--but let's not fall off the plank now, shall we?
After shielding the Doctor, Romana, and Kimus (David Warwick) from the Captain's (Bruce Purchase) guards in the mineshaft with their psychic abilities, the Mentiads, now led by Pralix (David Sibley), return to base with the three in tow to rendezvous with Pralix's sister Mula (Primi Townsend) and the Doctor's robot dog K-9. Then Romana, Kimus, and even Mula help the Doctor break it all down.
Xanak is indeed a hollow planet, a pirate planet that materializes around other planets, such as Calufrax, on which the Doctor and Romana expected to find the second segment to the Key to Time, and plunders them for their mineral wealth--millions, even billions, of inhabitants of all levels of sentience be damned. Apart from the material riches it yields that herald each new "golden age of prosperity," the planetary digestion process also releases enormous blasts of psychic energy that awaken those, such as Pralix, who have psychic abilities and alert those who are already awoken to help form an even more powerful gestalt, one that could challenge the Captain and his own formidable powers.
Ah, but the Captain and his trusty right-hand man Mr. Fibuli (Andrew Robertson) are busy synthesizing compounds from the elements found on Calufrax, their latest plunder, to use in a blocking device to defeat the Mentiads' psychic abilities. However, to fully repair their transmat system that transports them through space, they will need to plunder another world rich in "PJX1-8" (we know it as quartz), and have found one, located in the backwater of the Milky Way galaxy in a star system named Sol, the planet Terra (AKA Earth).
So, what exactly does Douglas Adams have against Earth, anyway? Those familiar with "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" will recall that Adams's magnum opus opens with Earth's destruction by a Vogon constructor fleet led by a fatuous, irritable martinet not entirely unlike the Captain. Adams, a talented but lazy writer already occupied with launching and sustaining his initial radio version of "Hitchhiker's," (ahem) pirated from it to populate this "Doctor Who" story.
But at least Adams developed "The Pirate Planet" even further, because is the Captain sucking the marrow from other worlds simply for material gain? No, as the Doctor discovers when he and Kimus are captured by the Captain's guards. Beneath his bionic blowhardiness, the Captain is actually a gifted hyper-engineer who has, in a feat of brilliant astro-gravitational engineering, managed to compress the masses of his plundered planets into a display gallery that does credit to Jon Pusey's inventive production design.
But is this simply the vain, arrogant Captain's trophy case? No, as the Doctor and Kimus discover when they accidentally stumble upon Xanak's original terrible tyrant, Queen Xanxia, creepily preserved in her last moments of life as--but let's not fall off the plank now, shall we?
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- darryl-tahirali
- Mar 18, 2022
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