Trivia / Doctor Who S16 E2 "The Pirate Planet"

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• Acting for Two: Tom Baker briefly plays the Doctor and his projection.
• Creator Backlash: Douglas Adams didn't like the casting of Bruce Purchase as the Captain. He envisaged a grotesque, and felt that Purchase played it far too jokey.
• Creator's Favourite Episode: Mary Tamm named this as her favourite story.
• No Adaptations Allowed: One of just four Doctor Who stories from the show's original run not to receive a novelisation by Target Books, as the success of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meant Douglas Adams was priced out of Target's range but he was unwilling to let anyone else novelise them. BBC Books published a novelisation based on Adams' original outline in 2017, following on from their previous novelisations of Shada and City of Death.
• Similarly Named Works: There was another sci-fi four-parter entitled The Pirate Planet serialized in The '30s in these four Astounding issues. The two stories are completely unrelated.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Douglas Adams' original outline involved a planet which was being mined by the Time Lords, who use a giant aggression-sapping machine (disguised as a statue) to pacify the natives. One Time Lord, Malchios, becomes both stuck in the slow-time field, in the midst of his last regeneration and trapped in the statue. Over centuries, he absorbed all the aggression, inducing him to turn against his people. He causes the mining devices to hollow out the planet and now plans to make it dematerialise and reform around Gallifrey. The story had to be changed, mostly because Graham Williams was concerned about how many recent stories had centred around the Time Lords.
  • Adams had also conceived of a drug addiction allegory, about a company which preys on people who fear death by offering machines which can slow time for them — but at an exorbitant price. The company goes bankrupt, however, leaving one old lady in need of a source of fantastic energy.
  • Adams thought about subverting expectations for the story. He wanted the Doctor to find the piece of the Key as a mundane object within the first episode, then go off on an unrelated adventure without telling Romana.
  • Originally, Adams planned for the Nurse to in fact be the Master's daughter, then amended his plan for the Nurse to simply be a female incarnation of the Master. Ultimately, Graham Williams' desire to reduce the presence of Time Lords in the show meant that she instead became the ancient Queen Xanxia. The idea of a female Master would eventually be resurrected for the Twelfth Doctor era 36 years later.
  • Mula's line "I get the feeling the Doctor isn't fully in control" was originally supposed to be spoken by Romana but Mary Tamm was having problems saying "control". Pennant Roberts initially complained that she was saying it in her natural Yorkshire accent and then that she was using too much of a posh voice so she ultimately suggested that Primi Townsend say the line instead.
• Working Title: The Pirates and The Perfect Planet.
• Written-In Infirmity: The Doctor's accident where he falls and bangs his face on the console of the TARDIS was staged to explain Tom Baker's real-life cut lip. In real life, it was because of a dog bite from a Jack Russell terrier owned by actor Paul Seed during the making of the last story "The Ribos Operation", where Seed had played the Graff.

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