Day 128: The Smugglers Episode 2

This story features pirates, an interesting historical concept to visit in the series. This is mainly because pirates are both incredibly interesting and characters who are beloved for their swashbuckling action, but they also never quite seem to work in fiction. There's excitement, yes, but it sometimes fails to materialise. This can be said for this episode especially, which is mainly dialogue scenes with the occasional escape from prison. It doesn't help that this story is currently missing from the BBC archives, as it enhances the problem here, as we constantly fail to see any action occurring on the screen. This is mostly due to delayed gratification, where we have things being set up for a pay off at the end. This could work in some fields, such as film or literature, where it is possible to consume the media within a single sitting, however it is substantially more difficult to continually wait for a piratical action scene over the course of four weeks, the transmission length of this story. Doctor Who needs to change, because the way in which these historical stories are now being written is not all that exciting, and audiences are moving away.