Story 216 - The Curse of the Black Spot

In which the TARDIS materialises in the hold of a becalmed sailing ship. On being discovered by the crew, the Doctor and his companions find that they are on the Fancy, the ship of the notorious pirate Captain Henry Avery. Accused of being stowaways, which they cannot afford to feed or water, Avery orders the Doctor to walk the plank. Amy has been locked below decks, but finds a cutlass and manages to break free. She attempts to rescue the Doctor and Rory and in the scuffle she inflicts a slight wound on the hand of one of the pirates. She is surprised at the reaction of the crew, who act as though she had killed him. Rory has also suffered a slight injury in the fight, and he notices a large black spot has appeared on his palm. The wounded crewman has one of these as well. Avery orders everyone back from the injured men. A strange melody is heard and suddenly a female figure leaps from the sea onto the ship. She appears to be a beautiful young woman, glowing with an unearthly light. Rory finds himself drawn towards her, as is the injured crewman. Rory is pulled away but the crewman reaches out to touch her and vanishes as he does so, apparently disintegrated.

Avery informs the Doctor that they have been attacked by the creature, which they assume to be a mythical Siren, ever since the ship was becalmed. She only comes to claim those who have been injured. Everyone goes below decks where they believe they will be safe, but when another crewman is hurt, the Siren appears from out of a water barrel. The Doctor deduces that she can emerge from any body of water, no matter how small. Avery discovers that he really does have a stowaway on board his ship, as they hear coughing coming from one of the storage barrels. Within is his son, Toby.
The boy is upset to learn that his father is not the honourable navy captain who he thought he was, but is instead a pirate. Avery and the Doctor are more concerned that the boy has a black spot on the palm of his hand. His cough is a sign of a serious illness, typhoid fever, and the Doctor realises that the Siren will attack the sick as well as the injured. Avery insists that the Doctor show him his ship - the TARDIS - to see if they can escape in that. The pirate picks up the basic principles of its functioning rather quickly. Something is wrong with the TARDIS, however, and they are forced to exit before it dematerialises on its own. Something nearby has affected it.

The Doctor had thought that the Siren was getting to the crew through water, but he is shocked to discover that he was mistaken when she appears from a polished object. She can travel through any reflective surface. He orders all windows smashed, and Avery must throw his prized treasure horde, stolen from the Mughal of India, overboard. The captain cannot dispose of it all, and secretly holds onto a golden crown. Amy spots once again a woman wearing an eye-patch looking at her through a hatch in the hull, which vanishes when she investigates. A storm hits the ship and everyone goes on deck. The crown falls from Avery's coat, and the Siren appears on deck. She takes Toby. Rory then falls overboard and they are unable to rescue him, but they see the Siren dive in after him. The Doctor suspects that the people taken aren't dead, but have been removed to some other place. He, Amy and Avery elect to cut their hands so that they too will be taken. They find themselves inside a spaceship, which has been sitting on the deck all the time but invisible to them as it exists in another dimension. It was this which caused the TARDIS to behave the way it did. It is here on the spaceship. The alien crew are found to have died long ago from some unknown virus. All the crew, plus Rory and Toby, are in a sickbay. The Siren is really an AI nurse, programmed to heal anyone sick or injured without really understanding human physiology. The black spot is actually a skin sample. She is initially defensive when they try to tamper with the patients, but Amy convinces her to hand over to her the care of her husband. Toby will die if he leaves this place, so Avery elects to stay on the spaceship with his crew to fly the stars instead of sailing the seas. Rory is removed from the sickbay and starts to drown, but Amy gives him CPR and he recovers.
As she takes him off to bed, the Doctor continues to puzzle over the yes / no scans for Amy's pregnancy...

The Curse of the Black Spot was written by Steve Thompson, and was first broadcast on 7th May 2011.
Despite the rather lacklustre reception to this story (it came 227th out of 241 in the DWM 50th Anniversary poll), Thompson was invited back for the next two seasons, and was also brought on board to write for the first three series of Sherlock.
The story is a prequel of sorts to 1966 's The Smugglers, which featured pirates searching for Henry Avery's buried treasure some time after his death. Here we see that he did not die, but instead left to go travelling through space, and the treasure which Captain Pike unearthed must be some earlier plunder, as the Mughal of India's horde is thrown overboard. This story is dated to 1699, which helps to date the Hartnell story to the early years of the 18th Century.
The Curse of the Black Spot gets its name from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, where giving someone a piece of paper with a black spot on it marked the recipient for death.
The story was originally supposed to air in the second half of the season, as it had been decided to split Series 6 into Spring and Autumn halves with a summer break, as audiences dropped considerably in the finer weather. Mark Gatiss' Night Terrors was originally going to be in the first half, in the fourth episode slot. It got moved to the Autumn and Thompson's script was brought forward, then swapped with The Doctor's Wife.
These changes meant that the production was rather rushed to be completed on time.

One of the reasons people disliked this story so much was its resolution. The mystery turned out to be some Artificial Intelligence going about things because it didn't understand and didn't know any better. Unfortunately this had been used before in the show - most notably by Moffat himself with the nanogenes in The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances. Things weren't helped by there being another story in the second half of Series 6 which had the exact same premise - medical AI's harming unintentionally - which was done very much better.
Fans also expected some full-on pirate genre material, as with the popular Pirates of the Caribbean films, and didn't get any of this save a few of the trappings briefly at the start - such as the walking of the plank. The Pirate Planet had covered a lot more pirate territory, in more amusing fashion.
One other source of complaint was yet another "death" for Rory. He had so many false deaths by this time that audiences couldn't invest emotionally in the final scenes.
Arthur Darvill fans at least got to see Rory with his shirt off. (In an odd bit of synchronicity, The Smugglers is the only other story where the male companion is seen topless, when Ben changes his clothes at the inn).
From a story arc point of view, we have another appearance by the mysterious "Eye-patch Lady" - played by Frances Barber - and the Doctor's on-going puzzlement at Amy's pregnancy scan.

The principal guest artist is Hugh Bonneville playing Henry Avery. He was already internationally known for Downton Abbey. He grew a beard for the part especially.
Portraying the Siren is Lily Cole. She started out as a child actor but then moved into modelling, before returning to acting in 2009. She is perhaps better known these days for her humanitarian and environmental charity work.
Toby is played by Oscar Lloyd, who had just come off a lengthy stint on ITV soap Emmerdale.
Two main crewmen who are featured include the unnamed Boatswain who is played by Lee Ross. He had previously appeared in the TV series Jericho, also written by Steve Thompson, and children's drama series Press Gang, on which Steven Moffat had worked. Mulligan, meanwhile, is played by Michael Begley, who recently returned to the series as obsessive cafe owner "All Ears" Alan in Fugitive of the Judoon.

Overall, a disappointing story, which had promised so much. The first half isn't all that bad, but it is definitely let down by the second.
Things you might like to know:

• The working title was "Siren".
• Sirens are creatures from Greek mythology. They ensnare sailors by enchanting them with their music, which lures them onto the rocks where the Sirens would then eat them. There were three types - ones ruled by Zeus, ones by Poseidon, and ones ruled by Hades. They are sometimes portrayed as looking like mermaids, with a woman's head and torso and the tail of a fish, or like Harpies, with bodies of birds. It's claimed that the mermaid myth grew out of the Siren one. They feature in the stories of both Jason and the Argonauts and the Odyssey.
• The ship on which the story was filmed was docked at all times in Cornwall (where The Smugglers was also filmed). A smoke machine was used to simulate fog to keep the background obscured.
• The first draft was set on land in Cornwall, as Thompson wasn't sure the BBC would be able to get the use of a proper sailing ship.
• Thompson was unfamiliar with the Hartnell story, not realising Avery had been mentioned in it. He simply took the character out of one of his son's books.
• One of the series' most notorious continuity glitches occurs when the Boatswain simply vanishes mid-story - turning up later with the other injured crew on the spaceship. His capture by the Siren was lost in the edit.
• A couple of elements from the Key to Time season reappear. We've already mentioned The Pirate Planet, which also saw the Doctor forced to walk the plank. Then we have the spaceship in The Stones of Blood, which occupies another dimension invisible to ours.