The Space Pirates - Episode 5

Right, I have decided to have a more positive attitude to these final two episodes. I’m going to force myself to get more involved in the story. Something I forgot to mention in yesterdays review is that it was Frazer Hines’ 100^th episode as Jamie. It’s a shame then that episode four was so poor. Hopefully his 101^st episode will be better. For the others, this is Troughtons 105^th episode and Wendy Padbury is celebrating 37 episodes and is currently one episode behind Maureen O’Brien (38) and two behind Deborah Watling (39). As a team, the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are the third longest partnership in Doctor Who. They are just two behind the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria (40) and 14 episodes behind the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan (51).

The first thing that I noticed again about this episode is the opera singer (I’m guessing she’s an opera singer!), her voice pierces the early stages of this episode. There’s a line about a room being like an Edwardian study. The thought of a room like this on a spaceship is a lovely one. The problem at the moment is that because I haven’t really been paying attention to the story, I am slightly confused as to where the story is and more importantly where it’s going. There is a lot of people sounding quite worried and things seem to be getting out of hand but I have come to the party late and so feel like I should have bought a present and haven’t. It does feel like that for the regulars which shouldn’t be the case especially when they are suppose to be the main selling point of the story.

Whilst being totally confused with what’s going on and all the new characters that seem to have introduced is noticing that the regulars seem rather flat. They are there but don’t seem to be given much to do and that’s a weird thing to happen. It’s one thing when one of the regulars is given a light workload but when all three seem to suffers the same fate then it really affects the story. It even seems to affect the relationship between the characters. After being rather rude to Zoe in episode two, the Doctor accuses Jamie of not appreciating the things that he does for him.

As far as my enjoyment goes for this story, there was a definite improvement from the last episode. Episode 4 got a poor 4.8 whereas episode five got 5.2 so at least its going up but it’s the third episode in a row that has ended in the 6’s. The story rating (including all five episodes) continues to decline currently standing at 6.88 and only ‘The Highlanders’ has a worst rating during Troughtons’ time. I do think that the final episode of the story might end it on a high note. Fingers crossed. I do feel like I’ve been more enthusiastic about this episode but not much. One reason to be optimistic is that it’s the last time that I will have to listen to an episode as opposed to watching it.