 This story is the first ever contribution to the show by Douglas Adams who is better known as the author of the world-renowned series The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy and it was while working on this story that he sold his radio play for The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy to the BBC, resulting in him working on both projects at the same time.
This was actually Douglas Adams’ second submission to Doctor Who, his first being "The Krikketmen" which would live on as the third The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy book, "Life, The Universe and Evertything".
"The Pirate Planet" is the second of six linked stories that comprise the whole of Season Sixteen, known collectively as The Key to Time.
The story was a combination of two concepts, one involving a Time Lord trapped inside a giant aggression-absorbing machine, the other a drug parable about a company that slows down time for people who fear death. The original draft though turned out to be extremely complex and so had to be heavily simplified by Script Editor, Anthony Read.
David Warwick, who played Kimus, later played the police commissioner in the Tenth Doctor 2006 story "Army of Ghosts/Doomsday".
The scenes in the engine room were filmed at the Berkeley Nuclear Power Station. It has been rumoured that this made many of the cast and crew rather nervous.
The Doctor’s accident with the console early in the story, when the TARDIS makes a bumpy landing on Zanak, was staged to explain Tom Baker’s real-life lip injury, which occurred while the preceding story "The Ribos Operation" was being recorded.
Zanak is the ‘pirate planet’. Planets that The Captain has in his collection include: Bandraginus V, Calufrax, Collactin, Granados and Qualactin.
Bantraginus V is likely a reference to Santraginus V, the home for one of the key ingredients in Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Calufrax Minor is one of the planets stolen by Davros and the Daleks in the 2008 Tenth Doctor story "The Stolen Earth/Journey's End".
This story is renowned for featuring some of Douglas Adams style of humour as well as many other elements that also appear in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
At one point, The Doctor is heard telling Kimus, ‘Don't panic’, which is the tagline for Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The Doctor’s attempt to strike up a conversation with the guards escorting him and Romana in the second episode is reminiscent of Ford Prefect’s attempt to talk a Vogon guard out of throwing Ford and Arthur Dent out of an airlock in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And The Doctor’s line - ‘Standing around all day looking tough must be very wearing on the nerves’ - was later used in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series.
The Queen of Zanak is revealed to have been frozen in time at the cusp of death.... as is the Emperor of the Galaxy in the novel and second radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (although the references to the Emperor are throwaway lines and not plot-points as they are in "The Pirate Planet").
The Doctor shouts ‘I’ll never be cruel to an electron in a particle accelerator again’. while being pulled along the linear induction corridor into the mountain - reminiscent of Arthur Dent’s statement, ’I’ll never be cruel to a gin and tonic again’, the first time he goes into hyperspace in the radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
It is revealed that The Doctor does not use the synchronic feedback circuit or the multi-loop stabiliser when landing the TARDIS (both of which are, according to Romana, essential for a smooth materialisation).
Interestingly Romana pilots the TARDIS at the start of this story (and during times later on in this show) by the book, and the TARDIS makes the usual materialisation noise, which happens every time she pilots it. However, in the 2010 Eleventh Doctor story "The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone", when River Song pilots the TARDIS to follow the Byzantium, the TARDIS does not make the noise, saying that it is due to The Doctor leaving the breaks on, yet other TARDISes (i.e. The Master’s, or The Rani’s) piloted by experienced and trained pilots still make this noise, contradicting what River Song said.
This story appears to begin the day after the conclusion of "The Ribos Operation". The Doctor is seen about to put away the newly acquired first segment, and talking to K9 about the success of the earlier mission. He then proceeds to say ‘good morning’ to Romana, suggesting at least an evening has passed, but not much more.
In the first episode, The Doctor is heard directly referring to Romana as having ‘good looks’, one of the few times in the original run of the show that The Doctor made such a remark regarding one of his companions. Ironically, Douglas Adams’ later story, "City of Death" in 1979, included the line ‘You’re a good looking woman, probably’ another rare reference to the physical appearance of his companions.
The Doctor is heard once again telling Romana not to trust ‘gimmicky gadgets’. (see "The Ribos Operation").
Romana and The Doctor are seen looking inside the TARDIS Instruction Manual, where The Doctor tears a page out. The Eleventh Doctor later states, in "Amy's Choice", he had thrown the Manual into a supernova because he ‘disagreed with it’.
Romana is heard stating The Doctor has been travelling in the TARDIS for 523 years. If this is correct and his age is 759 (as he stated in "The Ribos Operation"), then this would have made The Doctor about 236 when he first ‘borrowed’ the TARDIS and left Gallifrey.
Romana in this story is wearing pink and white despite in early production it was said she should always wear white as she did in "The Ribos Operation" and "The Armageddon Factor".
At one point, Romana is seen shooting an enemy soldier dead. Although her predecessor, Leela, often used deadly force, this was one of the only on-screen occasions in which Romana did so. Romana’s reaction to doing so leaves it unclear as to whether this is the first time she had killed someone.
Whilst unconscious on The Bridge, The Doctor is heard to mumble ‘no more Janis Thorns’, the admonishment he used several times on former companion Leela, particularly in her debut story "The Face of Evil".
Featured in this story are a linear induction corridor, a macro-mac field integrator, an amblicyclic photon bridge, a magnifactoid eccentricolometer, a counter jamming frequency projector and a warp oscilloscope.
The Doctor is heard claiming to have met Isaac Newton, and says he dropped the apple that made him discover gravity. Isaac Newton is said to have told The Doctor to get out of his tree, and The Doctor later explains gravity to him.
BBC Head of Serials Graeme McDonald complained that the story was too camp, directly in contradiction to the lighter tone the BBC demanded of the production team this year.
This story was repeated on BBC One in July/August 1979.
The Pirate Captain appears in the regeneration montage in "Logopolis".
This is one of four of the televised Doctor Who stories that were never novelised by Target Books as they were unable to come to an agreement with Douglas Adams that would have allowed him or another writer to adapt the script. An unsanctioned fan novelisation was written in 1990, by David Bishop, and titled "Doctor Who and the Pirate Planet". It was first published by a fan group in New Zealand and then re-released later by TSV Books with a cover by Alistair Hughes. It was later republished as an online eBook. An official version of this story, written by James Goss, was finally published, by BBC Books, in January 2017.
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The Firsts:
The first Doctor Who story to be written by Douglas Adams.
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(Position = 77 out of 159)
(Position = 109 out of 200)
