Doctor Who Review: Curse of The Black Spot

So the opening episodes created a huge mystery which you wanted to know the answers to straight away. How could a standalone episode work at this point, well by being fantastic. Unfortunately Curse of the Black Spot, isn’t. It’s not the worst Doctor Who episode ever.  But I was not a fan. I’ll assume anyone reading this has seen the episode and just skip the plot summary straight to my problems with this episode. It’s dull. It has lots of good ideas. Pirates, good, but they weren’t interesting enough to be well rounded characters and they weren’t over the top enough to be plain fun. The main pirate, wasn’t bad, but I was put off him from that one scene in the Tardis where he says that the controls are like parts of his ship, it could’ve been funny, but it wasn’t and just didn’t sit right. I couldn’t tell you what was wrong with the scene, maybe it was his lack of wonder as the amazing machine. The Doctor has met some of the smartest men ever and they can hardly handle the inside being bigger than the outside and this pirate wanders in and immediately understands everything.

The scenes of the pirate ship were alright but they seemed to be leading up a big shock. And it turned out the killer spirit was actually a holographic nurse who was just trying to help everyone. Which just seemed like an enormous anticlimax, reminding me of last year’s The Beast Below. In that everyone on a ship is hiding a huge secret and it turned out that the ship had no engines and was instead being moved by a giant space whale. Both these stories had me interested to hear what the twist was, only to make it completely uninteresting. Also, due to the fact the mermaid was a nurse there is no tension at the end, so they have to make fake tension by making the nurse unable to heal people so Amy has to resuscitate a drowning Rory herself. Which she fails at. He comes back to life once she’s given up. Oh, yes, she gave up, and the only reason Rory asked her to do it, instead of the Doctor, who name is the Doctor and has been around for 900 years so he’s obviously going to be better at CPR than Amy, is that she wouldn’t give up. But she did. Urgh. This story annoyed me.

And of course, the pirates going off into space in the ship. It’s so obviously just there to get people to say “Hey, remember that bit where it’s like pirates in space? That was so cool!” Well it wasn’t. It was clearly meant to be, but it failed.

So, it was a dull episode with plenty of parts which didn’t make sense or just annoyed me. Not the worst story ever, but definitely my least favourite Matt Smith episode by far. Hopefully next week’s will be back on form.

1/5