By Roy Mathur, on 2021-09-22, at 23:23:57--23:59:18, for Captain Roy's Rocket Radio Show, Listen
The State of the Rewatch The Ribos Operation coverage coincided with Talk Like a Pirate Day---yes, I was unbearably faux piratey becasue this is an annoyingly space piratey themed podcast---and today we a revisiting and entire planet of space pirates! Argh, matey!Fourth Doctor: Tom Baker
Companion(s): Romana: Mary Tamm, K9: John Leeson
Director: Pennant Roberts
Writer: Douglas Adams
Producer: Graham Williams
Location: Berkeley Power Station, Gloucestershire, Coity Mountain, Gellifelen Railway Tunnels, Monmouthshire Golf Course, Big Pit, Bwlch y Garn, and National Showcaves Centre for Wales in Gwent in May 1978, Shepperton Studios and BBC Television Centre (Studio TC6) in June 1978.
Broadcast: Story 099/serial 2 of season 16, 4 x 25 minute episodes, 30 September--21 October 1978, following The Ribos Operation covered in pod 404.
No.
Using the tracer device, the Doctor and Romana track the next piece of The Key to Time to a supposedly desolate planet called Calufrax.
Instead they find a rich and comfortable world, though a dictatorship ruled largely by the mysterious captain, nut occasionally menaced by psionic cultists called the Mentiads.
The Doctor is later captured by the captain's men and discovers the planet, Zanak, is hollow world that predates on other planets by materialising around them. Their next target is Earth.
The captain is not even in charge, but the puppet of the planet Zanak's ruler, the aging and evil Queen Xanxia. When his ship crashed, the Queen saved his life with many cybernetic implants. She is using him, and the remnants of this ship, to strip planets bare and use their resources to permanently transfer her personality from an aging husk to the young nurse's body she has created.
The Doctor discovers a room full of the planets predated upon, not entirely destroyed, but compressed, including Calufrax, the planet that they were originally aiming for. The whole planet is the piece of the Key they are looking for, hence the previously confused readings from the Key tracer.
Unbeknownst to the queen, the mad but brilliant captain intends on sabotaging the stasis field suspending her original body from death and killing her, but the plan goes awry and she kills him instead.
The Doctor They use the TARDIS to once again disrupt Zanak's materialisation around Earth while the Mentiads sabotage the engines.
The Doctor, Romana, and the rebels storm the captain's bridge and kill the queen.
The Doctor fixes the hollow world by expanding most of the compressed worlds into the centre of Zanak, creating a pleasant planet for the freed natives. Calufrax, he sends off into space to pick up afterwards.
We continue the MacGuffin hunt in this second mission to retrieve another part of the Key of Time.
The look of the city seems reminiscent to me of the Castrovalva (story 116/serial 1 of season 19, 1982).
There is the usual joke of the Doctor not completely understanding the TARDIS and being a bad driver.
The concept of a planet spaceship eating others planet is very similar to the concept of cities consuming cities from Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series.
The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos (New Who, 2018), also has a shrunken planet; the Earth.
Speaking as a slightly demented captain myself, I would say the pirate captain of the pirate planet reached at least 9 on the maniac scale. Well done, that man!
On the subject of the Captain, wasn't the cybernetically re-built man similar in look to Saw Gerrera from Rogue One (2016)?
The captain's shoulder mounted deadly parrot/hawk drone reminds me of Michael Rooker's Yondu Udonta and his psionically controlled arrow from Guardians of the Galaxy.
The captain's main henchman Mr Fibuli's (Andrew Robertson) uniform, slightly resembles that of a Star Wars imperial officer.
There's a great scene in which the Doctor disables an inertial neutralising high-speed walkway, sending their pursuers smashing into a wall. The Doctor says, "Newton's revenge" and , of course, goes on to explain how he helped Sir Isaac Newton discover gravity. Ah... science and comedy.
K-9 says, "Danger, master, danger!" like Will Robinson's Robot in Lost in Space. He also says, regarding the reason for Romana's better people skills, "She's prettier than you, master."
I also enjoyed the robot vs robot battle between K-9 and the captain's parrot/hawk/drone. I thought it especially funny when he presents the Doctor with the dead droid, like a dog fetching a murdered pigeon.
There's a lot of blowing stuff up and pyrotechnic FX, it's all very James Bond, the way the Doctor defeats his enemies in this story.
Douglas Adams, author of HHGTTG wrote this, along with City of Death (partially), and Shada (incomplete, but salvaged, dialogue added, and animated, then released in 2017).
He reserved novelisation tie-in rights, but then sat of them until he had, "run out of things to do".
James Goss eventually wrote the tie-in in 2017.