"No bug-eyed monsters!" I am grateful and no not just because Facebook has recently undergone the spam email plague that I though would have passed by 2005 and hence suggests that I should (mini rant over), but because this command, these mere three words has dramatically augmented my life.
This instruction by Sydney Newman ordered that "Doctor Who" move from sludgy cesspit of 50's pulp sci-fi into what we genre nerds refer to as "The Golden Age". But how, you ask, has this changed my life? Whilst this rule was quickly transgressed with the introduction of the Daleks, the tone set here was for the writers to write sophisticated and mature stories; essentially minus femme fatales, strong male heros and minority inspired villains; and this is why the Space Pirates exists and yes, despite the fact I've attempted to drag it through a lot of mud and faeces (I'll leave it up to you to figure out what faeces I'm referring to) I am truly grateful it exists.
In this, the last episode we see a far more engaging side of the story in which real characterisation shines through and the characters such as Clancey, Madeleine and our beloved Doctor begin being people and not rigid, bumbling, expositionals that have been set up so far (mind the neologism). Watching (well mostly listening) Madeleine performing a functional role other than the previously discussed standard 'I will do anything for X, but I won't do that' morality crisis changes the dynamic and evokes some genuine emotion from both the other characters and the responder. Yes Milo remained a bumbling idiot but the man performs under pressure, he is capable of shifting the tone of the story into action and forces the Doctor back his continually innovative, deus ex machina-y self, having to fix a spaceship, and defuse a nuclear war head all in under an hour (yeah I'm pretty sure that's more than the sum total of the previous 5 episodes) . I seriously believed the writers didn't want to write this or felt that a shorter format may have been better with such and adventurous tale.
Now back to being grateful. The dialogue we see here is of the calibre that make a decent Doctor Who episode, the suspense is held well in the music and the characterisations are comparitive to other more modern narratives of the same thread such as the previously mentioned "Firefly". For I feel this episode may have been the inspiration, well the base inspiration came from some absolute tripe pulp sci-fi but this story told in this much more mature format is, as far as I can find, the earliest big example of a space western. The Space Pirates sets the tropes of the subgenre, it has taken trash and made it gold, so I can now go and read "Neuromancer" whilst watching the Serenity blast across one screen and a Zurg rush occur across the other all because of the critical foundations set by this story, in part inspired by those three words.
Some of the greatest (and my favourite) exemplars of science fictions are at least in part space westerns, the genre as it is today and my love for it (including Doctor Who) would not have congealed in this way had it not been for the development of this particular subgenre, which is why this story annoyed me so much at the beginning, but as it progressed and it's strengths appeared I could see the importance of this story. It's kind of funny how Doctor Who inspired me to watch Doctor Who, how very fitting.
Unfortunately all this must be disregarded for I was wrong, I was terribly, terribly wrong...
...For Clancy is a far better analogue to Jar Jar Binks.
With love and it's been great, Mitch.
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