Mark Watches ‘Doctor Who’: S06E03 – The Curse of the Black Spot

In the third episode of the sixth series of Doctor Who, the TARDIS is marooned on a pirate ship. HOW HAS NU-WHO NOT DONE PIRATES YET? The episode is largely an entertaining and humorous chunk of filler until WHAT IS THAT LAST THIRD. What?!?!?! If you’re intrigued, then it’s time for Mark to watch Doctor Who.

Ok, confession to start off: When I watched the small preview for “The Curse of the Black Spot” at the end of “Day of the Moon,” all my brain could think was YAWN WHO CARES THE DOCTOR IS GOING TO DIE. After coming off of one hell of a series opener, how on earth do you transition to an episode about a pirate ship?

Question: This is how you do it.

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t have loved to seen a fully serialized Doctor Who, a thirteen-part story if you will. But enough of what I watch and read is that way, so it’s nice to have a story that, UNTIL THE END, is largely disposable to the mythology. I add that qualification at the end to make sure it’s clear that this episode itself is not disposable as a whole, but it’s not something a person will probably need at the end of series six. Dramas like this need down time in a way, and the tone of “The Curse of the Black Spot” mixes fairly well between intrigue, tension, and plain goofiness.

Really, I just wanted to see the three of these characters SMILE. After that double-parter, I just needed some joy for a second.

Right from the start, with the Doctor’s ill-used “Yo ho ho!” as our time traveling heroes burst out of the belly of the ship, I could tell that the tone of this episode would be a lot lighter than what we’d just experienced. The story itself is familiar: a beautiful siren is taking pirates about the ship to their graves with her, marking them with the black spot in their palm to signify that they will be taken next. Proving yet again that it’s all in the details, it’s the smaller changes to this story that make it work; it’s those small changes to the myth that also keep the Doctor on his toes.

We’ve seen the Doctor out of his element before (“The Lodger” for instance) (Could Craig Owens please come back?) (I know his story is done, but he’s so awesome and I just want to see more of him.), but Steve Thompson’s story is more about the Doctor being wrong over and over again. The mistakes he makes along the way inevitably get the passengers aboard the ship zapped into nothingness by the siren and, along with the visual cue of the spots, help to give this episode a running tension. (Plus, not being able to have reflections around? Must every inanimate object be used for terror on this show?)

The story itself only really becomes fascinating to me at the very end, aside from my desire to figure out what the siren is. Again, this is perfectly fine for me, as it was nice to sort of “turn off” while watching the episode. If anything, “The Curse of the Black Spot” was a bunch of tiny moments of joy tied together for half an hour. These moments included:

• Amy finding the swords down below the deck, donning an outfit (because seriously, what else would you do?), and then becoming a badass swashbuckler in sixty seconds.
• “Look, “I want to say multi-dimensional engineering, but since you had a problem with sensors, I won’t go there. Look, I’m the Doctor. This is Amy. Rory. We’re sailors! Same as you. Rawr! Except for the gun thing. And the beardiness.
• Amy’s insistence that she did not kill one of the pirates just because she cut him. Do you know where my brain went immediately during this scene? “It’s just a flesh wound!”
• The Doctor’s slight obsession with pirate laughter. It’s true, though. Only pirates laugh like that!
• Watching Arthur Davrill’s brilliant turn of acting when he was stricken with the black spot and immediately turned into a boisterous, brag-happy Rory. “Cuddle me, shipmate!”
• The Doctor met Freud. God, I really do love the tiny, minuscule details like this.
• “Well thank God we’re not in the middle of the ocean.” Because sarcastic Amy is a beautiful Amy.
• The introduction of Toby, and his subsequent “disappearance.” I almost said “death,” but we now know that’s not the case. The thing that this episode does well, albeit a bit sparsely, is introduce the son, set him up to be heartbroken, do that, and then KILL HIM IN FRONT OF HIS FATHER. I mean, we do get the very basic elements to that story and nothing terribly in-depth, but I liked it. It was something to add a bit more emotion to Captain Avery’s efforts to save his ship and himself. And I haven’t commented about him yet, so allow me to do so now: I LOVE HUGH BONNEVILLE. I feel like he’s been in EVERYTHING EVER, so I loved that he finally appeared on Doctor Who.
• I noticed that the dynamic changed here just a bit. We’re used to Rory being so worried about Amy’s feelings towards another person, and for this episode, it’s Amy who’s the one who’s a bit freaked out by Rory. Granted, he’s under the spell of the Siren, so it’s not quite the same, but a great deal of this episode is about the strength of the Pond relationship. (That’s right. It’s Rory Pond. DEAL WITH IT.) (No, seriously, not only is this canon, but I saw a few fuckheads on Tumblr trying to whine about how this is unrealistic and ridiculous and HEY SHUT YOUR FACE. For once, a woman gets to keep her last name in a marriage on television. YOU HAVE EVERY OTHER HETEROSEXUAL MARRIAGE EVER ON TV FOR YOU TO DROOL ABOUT. Now, just bring back Canton Delaware III and his hot boyfriend and queer up this show now, please.
• Bringing Captain Avery aboard the TARDIS: Unexpected and pleasant, especially for the way Steve Thompson parallels the two “captains” and their ships.
• Rory, please write a pirate phrase book.

This is essentially what my brain did: I made bullet points of all these funny lines or fascinating scenes and realized afterwards that a largely mysterious plot was what was holding it all together. There weren’t too many (if any at all) overarching themes about hope or loss or scary mythological villains to harp on. (There was one thing, but I’ll get to that at the end.)

So when the Doctor announced that he believed he could reason with the intelligent being that caused all of this, I figured that this is exactly how the episode would end: He’d give some big speech to the Siren. The Siren would relent and give up Rory or some deus ex machina would save them all and they’d part ways.

Here’s why I like Doctor Who so much, and why this episode got saved from being entirely forgettable, aside from some cute lines and scenes: This shit is fucking weird. At no point was I thinking, “Oh shit, this is an episode about parallel worlds colliding in the same point in space!” Not once. When Amy, Captain Avery, and the Doctor woke up aboard what they thought was the same ship as before, I was now more confused than ever. For me, it was just so AWESOME when they realized they were aboard another spaceship. (A small part of me suddenly thought WHAT IF THIS WAS ANOTHER ONE OF THE SILENCE’S SHIPS but then I had to calm down again.)

That’s the real beauty of this show, of the world that they’re allowed to build time and time again. Something like this might have problems with its own internal logic, but not once do we, as the viewer, think that THIS IS AN OUTRAGE AND NOT POSSIBLE. The Doctor is just going to go to weird places and find weird things and weird creatures. It had never even occurred to me that the Siren could have been acting entirely out of a desire to care for the people she was taking.

It’s one of those things where we just get a hint of another world and a whole set of characters, complete with their alien boogies, that we may never revisit again. We only get enough for the story to make sense, and then the shows moves on. We’ll probably never find out what those original creatures were or what sort of technology created that “doctor.” That’s perfectly fine, because we get a poetic story about a father accepting the fate he’s been dealt and staying with his son to take care of him. (Plus, his entire crew is returned to him! That’s pretty cool, too!)

In the case of Rory, who was drowning when the Siren saved him, yet another being finds their life in the hands of Amelia Pond. (Does the Doctor not know CPR? Also, do writers not know that CPR isn’t really used in the way it was used here?) Again, as I said earlier, parts of “The Curse of the Black Spot” acted as a way to show us just how much Rory and Amy Pond love each other. As they take the risk, with Rory’s trust completely in Amy, the Doctor and Amy bring Rory back to the TARDIS and she tries to save his life.

Steve Thompson, HOW DARE YOU MAKE THIS SCENE LAST SO LONG. Did anyone else think they were going to actually kill Rory again in some way? For maybe three or four seconds, I started freaking out because the scene of him not breathing went on WAY TOO LONG. WAY WAY WAY TOO LONG. And then the Doctor got that look on his face, that awfully sad face he gets when he’s given up, which is like NEVER, and I nearly started tearing up.

BUT JK JK JK HE’S ALIVE! Ugh, I would not have forgiven this show had they killed him TWICE in just a year. PLEASE DON’T, THANK YOU.

So, while the whole “pregnant/not pregnant” think is certainly intriguing, we really do need to talk about one thing:

WHO THE FUCK IS THAT WOMAN WITH THE EYE PATCH AND WHY DID SHE APPEAR IN THIS EPISODE AND TELL AMY THAT SHE WAS DOING JUST FINE.

What?!?!?!?!!?! I don’t understand it AT ALL. AT ALL. Is she monitoring Amy? What the fuck for? Before, she said that she believed Amy was dreaming. Ok….is Amy actually asleep somewhere else? I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS.

(Just a reminder: No spoilers are allowed on this site. If you decide you want to talk about theories of your own, please start your comment off with THEORIES ABOUND so you can warn those who do not wish to read theories. Thanks!)