DOCTOR WHO:  THE PIRATE PLANET

commentary by Judy Harris

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#25:  THE PIRATE PLANET (4 Parts)	
ORIGINALLY AIRED:  9/30/78 to 10/21/78
WRITTEN BY:  Douglas Adams	
DIRECTED BY:  Pennant Roberts
PRODUCER:  Graham Williams	
SCRIPT EDITOR:  Anthony Read

Douglas Adams is the author of the popular THE HITCH HIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY series of comedy-science fiction radio plays, records, TV shows and books. He later joined DOCTOR WHO as a script editor. THE PIRATE PLANET demonstrates Adams' ability to think up absurd words and his delight in bantering dialogue, which helped progress the Doctor's relationship with Romana. From this point on they get along much better, with Romana largely ignoring the Doctor's sarcasm.

Some minor quibbles about this story include small similarities with the previous one. Both feature a nameless character called the Captain and both peripherally involve an "ultimate" mineral. In THE RIBOS OPERATION, it was Jethrik, "the rarest element in the universe;" in THE PIRATE PLANET, it's oolian, "one of the most precious stones in the galaxy." The ending of THE PIRATE PLANET is very abrupt as well, as though there was more plot than could fit into the allotted time. In fact, quite a bit goes on in this story; there are many twists and complicated explanations, right up to the last minute, so there isn't even time to actually show the Doctor getting the second segment to the Key to Time, let alone transforming it.

The story opens with a miniature landscape of a city which we will eventually learn is on the planet Zanak. The miniature is very nice and appears to be houses carved out of stone, which don't really match up to the full sized sets. There's also a miniature of the Bridge, set in the side of a mountain. Although it looks like a model, it is very detailed and well done.

On the Bridge, the Captain shouts for Mr. Fibuli. The Captain is a cyborg; half of his head and face and all of one arm are mechanical. As befits a pirate, on his shoulder perches a parrot, but this one is mechanical. The Captain calls it his one true friend. This is Polyphase Avatron, which is sort of the parrot equivalent of K9, except it doesn't talk. Bruce Purchase as the Captain makes up for this, in an over-the-top performance where he seldom speaks quietly and has to spout oaths such as "Moons of Madness!"

Mr. Fibuli is a tiny, slender, uniformed functionary, obviously petrified of the Captain. In his voice and fastidious manner, he fits the mental picture I have of the actor who provides K9's voice and, until John Leeson turned up as a human character in THE POWER OF KROLL, I always pictured him as Andrew Robertson, who is excellent in the role.

Fibuli has good news. Deposits of the minerals vulium, galium and setinite 455 have been mined, processed and stored. Still, the Captain is disappointed, he wanted vaselium and madrinite 15. Fibuli has located a new source and the Captain is anxious to go after it.

The Captain uses a loud speaker to declare to the citizens a new age of prosperity for all. He exhorts everyone to watch for the omens in the sky, when the mines will once again be full.

In a cave outside the city, a circle of hooded figures perform a ceremony to contact a new recruit they've identified.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor puts the first segment of the Key to Time in an old boot and puts the boot in an old refrigerator, which is full of odds and ends.

In the control room, Romana is reading the TARDIS' technical manual, a large, thick, heavy bound volume. "The type 40 capsule wasn't on the main syllabus," she explains, "Veteran and vintage vehicles was an optional extra."

The Doctor puts the tracer in the console and discovers the next destination is Calufrax. "How paralyzingly dull, boring and tedious," he fumes, suggesting Romana watch while he sets the coordinates. She points out he doesn't engage the synchronic feedback circuit, which--according to the manual--is essential. The Doctor tells her it's a complete waste of time. "Have you any idea how long I've been operating this TARDIS?" he asks. She has--523 years. "Is it really that long? My how time flies," the Doctor remarks, surprised.

Romana asks about the multiloop stabilizer. She reads from the manual: "On any capsule it will be found impossible to effect a smooth materialization without first activating the multiloop stabilizer." "Absolute rubbish," the Doctor exclaims, tearing the page out. He promises Romana a really smooth materialization. The TARDIS starts to shake and shimmer until the Doctor turns off the materialization control and bumps his nose on the control panel.

This bump into the control panel was probably written to account for the state of Tom Baker's lip, which looks far worse here than it does in THE RIBOS OPERATION.

On the Bridge, a similar problem has occurred. All their equipment is jammed. The Captain shows Fibuli some readings which indicate for 10 seconds the entire fabric of the space time continuum was ripped apart; the whole infrastructure of quantum physics was in retreat.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor angrily tells Romana he's perfectly capable of admitting when he's wrong, "only this time I wasn't. There was definitely something out there jamming our materialization field."

Romana asks if she may try, by the book. The Doctor steps aside to let her, and crouches near K9. Holding his ears and shutting his eyes, he says: "Look out, K9, hold on." The TARDIS smoothly materializes. "Good," the Doctor admits, "that was very, very good." K9 echoes this opinion. "I think she's going to be all right, very all right," the Doctor confides to K9 and he agrees.

The Doctor tells Romana Calufrax is a cold, wet, icy planet with no life of any sort, but the scanner shows a pleasant, attractive city. The Doctor tells Romana this is not Calufrax: "You've probably missed it by a couple of million light years." K9 starts to spin in a circle.

In the cave, the hooded figures also rotate in a circle, chanting "life force dying." In the city, Pralix tosses and turns as if in a fever, watched over by his grandfather Balaton and his sister Mula. Kimus arrives as Pralix starts to shout "life force dying."

The Doctor checks the coordinates; they're at the right place and the right time but on the wrong planet; this isn't Calufrax. The Doctor doesn't know where they are but this planet wasn't here when he tried to land.

The Doctor, K9 and Romana exit the TARDIS. Still stubbornly expecting the icy coldness of Calufrax, the Doctor is bundled up and has to fan himself to keep cool. The tracer signal is coming from everywhere. "Never trust gimmicky gadgets," the Doctor says (again).

The Doctor tries to talk to some passing people--"Would you take me to your leader?"--but they ignore him. "You're not doing very well, K9," the Doctor says. K9 suggests allowing Romana to try. "Nonsense," the Doctor huffs, "making contact with an alien race is an immensely skilled and delicate operation. It calls for tact and experience. What would she know about it?" "She is prettier than you," K9 points out. "Is she?," the Doctor asks, "What's that got to do with it?"

While the Doctor and K9 have been debating, Romana has engaged a passing citizen in conversation and learns the Captain has announced a new golden age of prosperity. The citizen speaks of the omens--the skies shook with light. He gives Romana some diamonds and a ruby. She offers him some jelly babies in return. The Doctor takes one and the citizen takes several, then leaves, saying, "Watch out for the Mentiads."

The Doctor snatches back the jelly babies from Romana, who got them from his pocket. "Good looks are no substitute for a sound character," he lectures her.

The Doctor thinks the jewels are genuine and K9 concurs. There are more lying nearby in the street, including diamonds and Andromedan blood stones. "Don't they have street sweepers here?" the Doctor wonders.

Romana finds oolian, which the Doctor says is "one of the most precious stones in the galaxy; only occurs naturally in 2 places--Colactum and Bandraginus 5," which rings a bell in the Doctor's memory but he can't pinpoint it. "I wonder where Calufrax got to?" the Doctor muses.

Balaton tells Kimus how bad things were under old Queen Xanxia, and tells Mula she must protect her brother from the Mentiads.

In the cave, the hooded figures set out to "harvest" Pralix and promise "vengeance for the crimes of Zanak."

The Doctor persists in trying to get someone to talk to him: "Excuse me," he says, to a fleeing figure, "Have you seen Calufrax, it's a sort of planet about 14,000 kilometers across, oblate spheroid?" After being ignored several times, the Doctor simply shouts, "Has anybody seen a planet called Calufrax?" Then more quietly, he says: "Funny, nobody's seen it."

The Doctor hears someone shouting "The life force is dead," so leaves Romana and K9 to investigate. He rings the bell at Balaton's house and walks in. "Excuse me," he says, "Are you sure this planet is meant to be here?"

A guard approaches Romana as she spots the Bridge in the side of a mountain. He snatches away her telescope, telling her it's a forbidden object and arresting her. She distracts him while she tells K9 to fetch the Doctor.

Fibuli tells the Captain the Mentiads are marching; they've located another rogue telepath. The Captain sends out his guards to kill the new telepath before the Mentiads reach him. The guards shoot at the Mentiads but to no effect, except one of the guards is wounded.

The Doctor examines Pralix and finds he's in a state of shock. Mula says her brother has had these spells the last two or three times the Captain announced a new golden age.

The Captain spots K9 on his viewscope and tells his guards to follow him. K9 shows up at Balaton's and tries to tell the Doctor about Romana. The guards arrive, and K9 stuns them. The hooded figures arrive. "Hello," the Doctor says, "are you by any chance the Mentiads? When he gets no answer, he adds, with a nervous laugh, "Well, it's just that you look like Mentiads to me." The Mentiads direct their gaze at the Doctor, emitting a ray, which knocks him unconscious.

On the Bridge the Captain berates his guards for not destroying the telepath. "When someone fails me," he rants, "someone dies." Polyphase Avatron takes off from the Captain's shoulder and kills a guard.

The Doctor wakes with a headache. K9 says he was hit by a "gestalt generated psychokinetic blast" on a wavelength of 338.79 micropars.

The Mentiads have Pralix, but the Doctor promises to get him back. K9 can trace them by their psychospoor--psychokinetic energy of that level leaves considerable disturbance in the ether.

The Doctor notices Romana is missing and K9 tells him she's been arrested. "It just means two rescue attempts, that's all. Romana has the tracer, you see," the Doctor tells the uncomprehending Kimus and Mula. They think she's been taken to the Bridge and tell the Doctor no one ever comes back from there.

The guards take Romana to an air car, which resembles a speed boat. She tells one she had a craft like this once, a present for her seventieth birthday.

In Balaton's house, the Doctor decides to flip a coin: "Heads we go after Romana first; tails we go after Pralix first." It comes up heads; The Doctor reveals the coin has two heads. He feels Romana is in greater danger than Pralix.

Mula storms out to find her brother, so the Doctor sends K9 with her. "Off you go," he says.

Kimus points out the Bridge to the Doctor, who decides to borrow an air car to get there. To lure the sleeping guard away from it, the Doctor bites into a bag of jelly babies as if he were pulling the pin on a hand grenade and lobs it onto the air car. The guard follows the trail of candy (Licorice Allsorts this time), while the Doctor and Kimus climb in the car and take off. "Bye, bye," the Doctor calls, waving.

Mr. Fibuli has bad news for the Captain. The macromat field integrator has burned out. It's one of the four components they can't replace themselves. There are 3 alternatives: (1) try to find another, which is impossible; (2) find the rare mineral PJX18 to replace it; or (3) Zanak could settle where it is. At any rate, they can make only one more jump and that would be extremely risky.

In the air car, Kimus tells the Doctor the mines are automated; when the minerals run out, the Captain announces a new Golden Age of Prosperity and the mines fill up again. The Doctor calls this an "economic miracle." Kimus also tells him little points of light in the sky change. He thinks the Doctor is very good at maneuvering the air car and asks if he does it for a living. "I save planets mostly," the Doctor says, "but this time I think I've arrived far, far too late."

On the Bridge, Romana tells the Captain she's a Time Lord, who can travel in time and space, but he doesn't believe her. He sics Polyphase Avatron on her, but his Nurse tells him the excitement of more than one execution in a day is bad for his blood pressure.

The Doctor lands the air car. Kimus finds a locked door and thinks it will be impossible to open it. "Impossible!," the Doctor scoffs, "that means it will take 73 seconds! and we can ill afford it." He uses the sonic screwdriver and a bent hair pin. "The more sophisticated the technology," he tells Kimus, "the more vulnerable it is to primitive attack. People often overlook the obvious." The door opens and they enter.

On the Bridge, Mr. Fibuli shows Romana an obviously burned out piece of equipment. She identifies it as an old macromat field integrator, which must be part of a massive dematerialization circuit.

Kimus finds a passage and starts to run down it, but he gets nowhere. The Doctor pulls him out of it and tells him to stand guard outside. At first the Doctor thinks the passage is a linear induction corridor, but after he rides it, he realizes it works by neutralizing inertia. To start it he presses a button in the wall and, without walking, shoots down the passage, waving goodbye to Kimus. "I'll never be cruel to an electron in a particle accelerator again," he promises as he zooms along. Coming to a gentle stop at the end, he takes a lift up.

Romana thinks the burned out component can be repaired, but it's a job for the Doctor. As the Captain orders out his guards to look for him, the Doctor crawls under an opening door and introduces himself in a verbose spate of patter. The guards seize him. "Such hospitality," the Doctor says mildly, "I'm underwhelmed."

Romana brings over the macromat field integrator and says the ambicyclic photon bridge is broken as well. The Doctor and Romana are led off to the engine room to check things out.

Watched by the Captain and Mr. Fibuli, the Doctor pretends to take measurements: "Gravitic anomalizing input reading 9.5." He tells Romana he had his suspicious about the mountain being a spaceship. "I just put 1.795372 and 2.204628 together," he says. Romana wants to know what that means. "Four!," the Doctor booms out, pretending it's another reading.

He tells Romana they are in "very, very, very, great danger." Romana thinks the Captain is just a terrible old bully, full of bluster. "Romana, we've stumbled on one of the most heinous crimes ever committed in this galaxy," the Doctor assures her.

He tells the Captain his "magnifactoid eccentricolometer is definitely on the blink." The Doctor wants to return to his ship to prepare some special equipment. The Captain wants to hold Romana hostage, but the Doctor lies, saying there's a special lock fitted to the TARDIS door requiring the physical presence of both of them to open. The Captain orders the guards to escort them to their ship. They exit the side of the mountain and Kimus shoots the guards. They escape in the air car and set off to investigate the mines.

The Doctor, Kimus and Romana enter a slow-moving lift and start down into a deep shaft. The Captain is monitoring the shaft and sends his guards to obliterate them.

They exit the lift 3 miles beneath the surface of Zanak; it's cold, wet and icy. These scenes were shot in caves in Brecon Beacons National Park. The Doctor tells Romana the entire planet is hollow. "The reason the stars in your sky change is because they don't," the Doctor explains to Kimus, "Your entire planet jumps through space." The engines in the mountain are "huge enough to dematerialize an entire hollow planet, flip it halfway across the galaxy and rematerialize it 'round its chosen prey"--other planets--"like a huge fist. It's one huge mining machine; it mines planets. It extracts all the valuable minerals and leaves the rubble behind."

The cold, icy, wet ground they're standing on is Calufrax. The oolian stone the Doctor picked up in the street is from Bandraginus 5. "About a hundred years ago it disappeared without a trace--a planet of a thousand million souls--Captain fodder," the Doctor says. Kimus vows to avenge Bandraginus 5.

The guards arrive, so the Doctor, Kimus and Romana flee, running straight into the Mentiads. They create a forcefield, preventing the guards' weapons from harming them. The Doctor, Kimus and Romana go off with the Mentiads to their cave, where they reteam with K9 and Mula. The Doctor realizes the Mentiads are a telepathic gestalt--"many minds combined together telepathically to form a single entity," K9 explains.

"Zanak is just a shell of a planet"--a complete hollow "but very rarely empty," the Doctor tells the Mentiads. "There are vast transmat engines hidden underneath the Captain's mountain." At almost the same moment Zanak vanishes, "it rematerializes in another part of the galaxy around another, slightly smaller planet." Zanak then "smothers it, crushes it and mines all the mineral wealth out of it." The Doctor says the lights in the sky, which the citizens call omens, "mean the death of another planet."

On the Bridge, the Captain decides to wipe out the Mentiads now they have a leader and a purpose. Fibuli says Calufrax is rich in vulium and madrinite 15. The vibrations of the refined crystals can be harnessed to produce interference patterns which will neutralize the Mentiads' mental power. If they put all the automated mining and processing equipment on full power, the entire planet of Calufrax could be reduced within hours.

Pralix tells the Doctor Zanak was a happy, prosperous planet until the reign of Queen Xanxia, who had evil powers and lived for hundreds of years. "That's not necessarily evil," the Doctor interrupts defensively, "I've known hundreds of people who've lived for hundreds of years."

Queen Xanxia staged galactic wars to demonstrate her powers, ruining Zanak. The Captain arrived in a spaceship crash and took charge. The Doctor explains about the terrible mental agony the Mentiads feel: "You were absorbing what you would call the life force from the plundered planets." Romana elaborates: "Every atom of matter in the universe has a certain amount of energy locked inside it. Now, with something the size of a planet, there's an enormous quantity, so every time Zanak crushes a planet, it releases all that energy." Some of it is on psychic wavelengths, so every time it happens, "there's a fantastic blast of psychic energy--enough to smash open the neural pathways of anyone with telepathic abilities."

This is very similar to the "great disturbance in the Force" Obi-Wan Kenobi feels in STAR WARS when the planet of Alderaan is destroyed by the Death Star.

On the Bridge, the Captain brags he used to be one of the greatest hyperengineers of his time. The components around him were salvaged from his ship, The Vantarialis, the greatest raiding cruiser ever built--built by him with technology so advanced you couldn't tell it from magic.

Back in the city, the Doctor tries his jelly baby gag to steal an air car again, observing, "Well, they say you can fool some of the people all of the time." It's Licorice Allsorts again. "I really must stop doing this," the Doctor says, climbing into the air car, "It's like shooting fish in a barrel." But the controls have been boobytrapped and the guard captures the Doctor and Kimus.

Fibuli gives the Captain this good news and also tells him he's located a potential source of PJX18 on a heavily populated planet in Sol--the planet Terra. "It will be pleasant to destroy it," the Captain says.

K9 steals an air car and sets off to rescue the Doctor, who--with Kimus--is hanging by his wrists while the Captain gloats over them. "No more Janis thorns," the Doctor shouts groggily. He wakes up and says, "I've been tied to pillars by better men than you, Captain." He wants to know what kind of pirate the Captain is "hidden away in your mountain retreat, eating other people's perfectly good planets--where's the derring do in that?"

When the Captain threatens him, the Doctor says, "You can't kill me while I'm helpless" because "you're a warrior, and it's against the warriors' code. You should have thought of that before you tied me up."

The Captain orders the Doctor's release and shows him his trophy room, which has a 1978 white Earth telephone on the wall. In display cases are the entire remains of the worlds he's destroyed, including Bandraginus and Granados - the crushed remains of the planets, now about the size of footballs. Millions upon millions of tons of compressed rock held suspended by forces beyond the limits of the imagination--forces generated and harnessed by the Captain. The Doctor says it's impossible--"That amount of matter in so small a space would undergo instant gravitational collapse and form a black hole," dragging Zanak into a gravitational whirlpool. The Captain tells him this doesn't happen because "the whole system is so perfectly aligned by the most exquisite exercise in gravitational geometry that every system is balanced out within itself." With each new planet the Captain acquires, the forces are realigned, but the system of billions of tons of supercompressed matter remains. "It's the most brilliant piece of astrogravitational engineering I've ever seen. The concept is simply staggering," the Doctor says, "Pointless, but staggering." The Captain refuses to tell him its purpose.

Back on the Bridge, the Doctor frees Kimus from the pillar he's tied to. The Captain has a psychic interference transmitter he's about to use against the Mentiads. The Doctor tells him to make the machine work, he needs vulium and madrinite 15, which occur only on Calufrax. "My biorhythms must be at an all time low," the Doctor says to himself.

Just as the Captain tells his mechanical parrot to kill Kimus, K9 arrives and lures Avatron away. During this diversion, the Doctor escapes with Kimus, using his sonic screwdriver to enter a room beyond the Captain's trophy room. It in is an incredibly old woman--Queen Xanxia, suspended in the last few seconds of her life. The Doctor prevents Kimus from touching her and disturbing the time dams she's attached to. These slow down the flow of time and the space between, given enough energy. The energy of entire planets is needed to fuel the dams.

K9 enters with the deactivated Avatron in his mouth and the Doctor calls him a hero. The Doctor sends Kimus and K9 down in the service lift to the engine room to sabotage the engines. "Off you go," he says.

The Doctor picks up a piece of equipment which resembles a large box camera and returns to the Bridge to give himself up. When asked about his colleagues, the Doctor points his thumb downward, which the Captain interprets as meaning they're dead, when it merely means they're below in the engine room. The Doctor hands over the remains of Polyphase Avatron, saying, "I'm sorry about that, but it was becoming an infernal nuisance." For the death of the robot parrot, the Doctor is condemned to death. The Captain raises a shutter in the side of the mountain. The Doctor is marched up to it and forced to walk a plank. At the end is a thousand foot drop. The Captain shoots at the Doctor's feet and the Doctor falls off.

Mr. Fibuli, the Nurse and the Captain laugh; when they trail off, the Doctor's laughter can be heard. He walks onto the Bridge carrying the boxlike device he picked up earlier. He presses a button and a duplicate Doctor appears. It was a projection that walked the plank. The Doctor threatens to switch off the image of another "apparently real" person. He tries and the Nurse flickers but returns. She gloats her new body has almost attained fully corporeal form.

The Mentiads, Mula and Romana have climbed the mountain and reached the doorway. Scenes of them trekking along were shot at Nantyglo and Blaenavon in Wales. The Mentiads direct their mind energy against the door and open it. The guards attack and the Mentiads cause a rockslide to fall on them. Fibuli activates the psychic interference transmitter, causing the Mentiads' power to leave. One is shot by a guard before Romana grabs up a gun and shoots him.

The Doctor says to the Nurse, who is a younger incarnation of Xanxia, "Your new body is based on a cell projection system, I think," which is still unstable. He tells her it won't work: "I'm an old hand at regenerations; it can't be done that way. Those time dams back there--they just won't work." When Xanxia says she intends to live forever, the Doctor says, "I've never heard such bafflegab in all my lives." She slaps his face.

The Doctor tells her her body will never become fully corporeal because her calculations are based on a false premise. "The energy needs of the time dams increase exponentially--there just isn't enough energy in the universe to keep them going forever. In the end you'll die."

Xanxia turns the Captain off from a box strapped to her waist, and he slumps over like a puppet with his strings cut. "Ah, so that's how you control him!" the Doctor says. She reactivates him to deal with the Mentiads.

Zanak gets ready to jump to the planet with PJX18, which is quartz. The Doctor is horrified to discover their destination is Earth and tries to talk the Captain out of it, opening the door to the bridge while no one is looking. It takes 10 minutes to set the coordinates, so that's all the time he has to save Earth. He escapes and meets up with Romana, Mula and the Mentiads. Kimus runs in to say the engine room is barricaded with inches thick steel and K9's batteries are exhausted from trying to burn down the door.

The Doctor, Romana and the Mentiads set off for the engine room. The Doctor asks if K9 can set up a counterinterference in the psychic plane, wavelength 337.98 micropars. K9 is unable because he's out of juice. "That's all right, K9, you're still my best friend," the Doctor says, promoting K9 from the second best he was in UNDERWORLD and THE INVASION OF TIME.

Fortunately, there's a power cable behind the Doctor. He plugs K9 in after Romana opens his inspection hatch. K9 diverts the current into his frequency projectors, enabling the Mentiads to function again, but they are not strong enough to open the door.

The Doctor and Romana head back to the TARDIS, planning to try to materialize on Earth simultaneously with Zanak to prevent the planet from materializing. The Doctor tells Pralix to concentrate on his mind, which contains the image of a bent fork.

The Captain's guards chase the Doctor and Romana--who cover the backs of their heads with their hands to avoid the gunfire--through the inertia neutralizing corridor. When they exit, the Doctor says, "You know, I think the conservation of momentum is a very important law in physics, don't you? I don't think anyone should tamper with it, do you?" He removes a component from the control unit and the pursuing guards smash into the wall instead of gliding to a stop. "Newton's revenge," the Doctor smiles.

Fibuli tells the Captain something is counterjamming the psychic interference transmitter. On the air car ride to the TARDIS, Romana asks who Newton is. "Old Isaac?," Doctor reminisces, "Friend of mine on Earth. Discovered gravity. When I say he discovered gravity--I had to give him a bit of a prod." The Doctor climbed up a tree and dropped an apple on his head. "He told me to clear off out of his tree. I explained it to him afterwards at dinner."

In the TARDIS, the Doctor says, "This is the most dangerous maneuver the TARDIS has ever attempted. Don't take it personally, old girl, just try and survive." Romana reads the coordinates to the Doctor: 58044684884. The Doctor, taking no chances, engages the multiloop stabilizer and the synchronic feedback. Romana mans the warp oscilloscope and the gravity dilation meter, which will both peak when Zanak goes into demat and remat mode.

Zanak jumps. Fibuli tells the Captain of a slight disturbance in the warp oscilloscope during dematerialization. At rematerialization, both Zanak and the TARDIS shake and shimmer. "It will go on getting worse till one of us explodes or the Mentiads raise that door," the Doctor says. He opens a communications channel in his mind to Pralix. Although it's the only protection they have, the Doctor asks Romana to switch off the TARDIS forcefield to boost the signal to Pralix.

The Mentiads still are too weak to open the engine room door. The Doctor tells Pralix to project his mind beyond the door. In mental images, he shows them a spanner and leads them past a "microvectoid particle analyzer" and "omnimodular thermacrom" to the "megaphoton discharge link." With their mental powers, the Mentiads hurl the spanner, which sets off a series off explosions throughout the engine room and the Bridge.

The Doctor and Romana are hurled to the floor. "You can never relax for a moment in this job," the Doctor says. "We've done it," Romana tells him. "Yes, the question is, will we ever be able to do anything else again?" the Doctor replies.

The TARDIS materializes in the time dam room. "Any interference in the time dam field will trigger off an explosion that would blast us off the planet," the Doctor says.

On the Bridge, the Captain mourns the death of Mr. Fibuli, saying "He was a good man," and vowing to avenge his death.

The Doctor shows Romana the Captain's trophy room, where "all the forces cancel each other perfectly." Romana realizes all the Captain's bluster was an act to lull Xanxia into a false sense of security. "Let that be a lesson to you, my girl," the Doctor lectures, "Never take anything at its face value." The only way the Captain could destroy Xanxia without blowing the whole mountain and himself to atoms would be to get inside the perimeter of the time dams without disturbing them, requiring astronomic energy sources. When he had enough energy, all he had to do is alter the balance slightly and create a standing vortex in the middle of the time field, so time starts up again at the normal speed and the Queen dies.

The Doctor says it wouldn't have worked anyway, because Calufrax is not a normal planet. "It's an artificially metricized structure consisting of a substance with a variable atomic weight," he says. The entire planet of Calufrax is the second segment of the Key to Time.

On the Bridge, Xanxia kills the Captain. Just as she's about to shoot the Doctor, Kimus enters and shoots her; she disappears. The Doctor sends everyone to the foot of the mountain because the Bridge is unstable.

He rewires the Captain's control panel and returns laughing to the TARDIS, saying, "I've switched the Captain's circuits around to create a hyperspacial forceshield around the shrunken planet" and "put his dematerialization control in the remote mode" so it can be operated from the TARDIS.

The Doctor explains to Romana what he'll do: "First I dematerialize the TARDIS. Then I make Zanak dematerialize for a millisecond or two. Then I invert the gravity field at a hyperspacial forceshield and drop the shrunken planets" into the hollow center of Zanak. "They expand in an instant to fill the hollow space and bang!," the Doctor concludes, "Naturally Calufrax is flung off into the space-time vortex, and we pick it up later in the TARDIS."

As for the Bridge and the time dams, the Doctor will blow them up: "It's a bit crude but immensely satisfying," he admits. Leela would have been proud of him.

On Zanak the Doctor wires the Bridge with explosives and carries the detonator to the foot of the mountain. "I think this is a good place in the universe to settle down," he tells Kimus and Mula, "You've got reasonable sun, good neighbors and some quite convenient stars for when you get 'round to ordinary space travel. I think you're going to be all right here."

He asks the Mentiads, "What I want to know is am I going to blow up that Bridge or are you?" The Mentiads do it mentally. The Bridge explodes. "That was very satisfying," the Doctor says, "Come on, Romana, we've got a job to do," and they walk off.

Bruce Purchase, who plays the Captain, also appeared in the British science fiction series THE TRIPODS, which has aired in America on PBS.