New Who 6.3: The Curse of the Black Spot

I saw this late, as I was staying with my sister while it was broadcast, which meant that I'd already read a lot of negative reviews before I got the chance to view it for myself. Perhaps inevitably, then, by the time I saw it, I found myself inclined to give it a more sympathetic viewing than I might otherwise have done.

It's certainly not what you would call a great episode. The story is enjoyable so far as it goes, but it doesn't stand up to particularly close scrutiny. And the dialogue was serviceable, but not exactly outstanding - and featured rather far too much goofy Brit-out-of-water on the part of the Doctor. But not every episode every week can drive the plot forward in huge and tantalising ways, or stretch the parameters of the Whoniverse. And this one was certainly better than some filler episodes we have known - Fear Her, for example.

Meanwhile, I felt that it waved away a lot of its own failings by so cheerfully acknowledging its own light-weightedness. Right from the Doctor's first line ("Yo ho ho! - or does nobody actually say that"?), our attention is drawn to the mis-match between the real pirates of history and the fictional traditions about them. And although nobody on the ship does say 'Yo ho ho!', it is made pretty obvious that we are to imagine ourselves amongst fictional pirates, rather than their real counterparts. They can do the laugh (as the Doctor notes), they've got the treasure, and they're suffering from an entirely literary trope.

Once we've grasped all that, anything goes, really. We might, for example, pedantically ask why Amy takes the time to get changed into a pirate costume before going to save the Doctor, when he is already in mortal peril before she gets thrown below deck. The answer here is blatantly that it makes her swashbuckling rescue attempt look much cooler, and more in keeping with our expectations of fearless girls on the high seas (drawn especially from Keira Knightley in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies). Indeed, at this point, setting Amy up to look as awesomely fierce and dashing as possible also works rather nicely in terms of bringing out the next stage in the plot. We think the pirates are so scared of her because she is just Amy being awesome, and are sitting there thinking "Hah! There's a modern woman for you! Stick that in your 17th-century pipes!", when our expectations are suddenly undermined as we come to understand the true consequences of even the tiniest of scratches for them. None of that would have worked so well without the pirate costume - so pedants be damned.

Elsewhere, parrot_knight provides some very helpful notes about the historical figure of Henry Avery, whose surname historians now seem to have agreed to spell as 'Every'. As parrot_knight points out, this disdain for the new historical consensus is yet another signal that this episode is not really trying to be strictly historical, but instead focusing on the cheerfully fictional. And of course the preference for the spelling 'Avery' in this particular case allows the idea that we might be dealing with the same (deceased) character who lies behind much of the action in The Smugglers to be preserved.

So to finish off, just for a giggle, I combed the Wikipedia pages for The Smugglers, The Curse of the Black Spot and the historical Henry Every, to see whether it is possible to reconcile them. It's a slight stretch, but I think it can be ( done as follows )

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