What are the Wild Waves Saying?
The Curse of the Black Spot
After the sound and fury that greeted The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon, I suppose I should be grateful that I’m reviewing a straightforward standalone story like The Curse of the Black Spot. But old-fashioned traditional Doctor Who like this defies analysis almost as much as the new-fangled, mid-arc, jam tomorrow episodes favoured by Steven Moffat. In every season there’s at least one lightweight potboiler that’s passed over in silence never to be mentioned (or watched) again aside from when drunkenly playing the “list the episodes in reverse order” game. The most recent example was The Vampires of Venice, although that now looks like a timeless classic when compared to The Curse of the Black Spot.
I suppose the best description of the story is that dreaded and overused word “romp” but I think that’s unfair to genuine romps. This was more of a yomp than a romp. I quite enjoyed the opening minute but then came the gradual realization that the cast really were just going to run around the ship for the whole episode and a terrible torpor set in. At one point I heard a salty sea dog say “Eight days we’ve been stranded here – becalmed” and I found myself nodding in real sympathy.
As ever with Doctor Who there were some nice moments, and some of the Doctor’s dialogue in particular was right on the button. “I have my good days and my bad days” should become the motto for the whole series, and “Ignore all my previous theories up to this point” sounded remarkably like several internet forum discussions that took place after Day of the Moon. But generally I was startled by how much this episode reminded me of Season Seventeen with all the good and bad that entails. Like much of that season, The Curse of the Black Spot had a thin script and consequently the onus was on the generally fantastic Matt Smith to dominate proceedings and help us to forget that there was little drama unfolding onscreen. Unfortunately, as in some of Tom Baker’s more wayward performances, I felt that Smith overdid it at times in this episode, and whereas his eccentricity seemed so natural in Series Five, here he veered towards a forced “wackiness” which is less appealing.
This air of pantomime wasn’t dispelled by some of the other actors, and I had a momentary feeling that, as in the bad old days, some of the performers weren’t exactly taking the proceedings seriously. Lee Ross is a fine actor who was brilliant years ago in Moffat’s Press Gang and has subsequently earned many plaudits through his work with Mike Leigh. Here, he sounded like a man trained at the Brian Croucher School of Dramatic Arts. Hugh Bonneville gave good beard, and is a dependable actor, but there were moments (particularly in the scene where the Doctor smashes the mirrors) where he hardly seemed to be in character at all, not that Avery was much of a character in the first place.
I was also surprised by some very Season Seventeen production errors that had crept in. Maybe there was something wrong with my preview disc, but Lee Ross’s character, after being scratched by Toby, seemed to disappear without any explanation, before suddenly reappearing on the spaceship at the climax. The implication was that he’d been taken by the Siren at some point, and possibly this was in a missing scene, but it felt very disjointed.
The Siren herself was a bit of a damp squib. Boom boom. It was to be expected that Lily Cole wouldn’t have much difficulty gliding silently along while being gawped at by blokes as that’s her day job, but once you’ve seen one Jolly Roger vaporised you’ve seen them all. By the third time she appeared, I was already downloading Enya tracks from iTunes and putting in an online order at Marks and Spencers so if nothing else the character was a triumph for subliminal advertising.
Unfortunately, the Siren wasn’t the only character in the story with a green complexion as Avery’s ailing son Toby also put in an appearance. I’ve been violently repulsed by sickly children in fiction ever since Little Nell and Paul Dombey blighted my first year at University, but in this case I was willing to let it go as dramatically it made sense for Avery’s relationship with Toby to be at the core of the story, and result in his eventual redemption.
When the action switched to the alien spaceship things definitely started to look up for The Curse of the Black Spot (especially the great moment when the Doctor wiped alien bogeys onto Amy), which made it all the more perplexing when the climax shifted the emphasis to yet another life-threatening incident for Rory. I like Rory, but there’s a limit to how many times I can care about his imminent death when I’ve seen it all before. That was bad enough, but the whole sequence where he was (eventually) disconnected from life support and then resuscitated felt padded, hysterical and inevitably undramatic.
But I can’t rule out the possibility that Frances Barber, a sort of three-dimensional Chad, has something to do with all this. Maybe Amy’s in a coma and Frances is manipulating her dreams so that one week she’s in a confusing but fascinating story about the moon landings, only the next week to appear in a cheesy and undemanding pantomime about pirates where she can buckle her swash and save her husband. I’m not sure.
What I do know is that there are always going to be some Doctor Who episodes that are a bit rubbish, and The Curse of the Black Spot is one of them. But I bet the kids loved it, just as I loved The Horns of Nimon, so job done and let’s move on to the next one.
