The Pirate Loop (with illustrations)

Martha tries her hand at seducing badgers.
Tennant fancies himself Pertwee and fights with nasty badgers!

Jocelyn the Badger Pirate with pink lipstick
The Doctor Dances (again)
The Doctor and ice cream?! I'm there
The Doctor (strangely looking like Oscar Wilde) with Mrs. Wingsworth
Mouthless Men!

The subtleties in reviewing The Pirate Loop are that, because I sort of know the author, I knew about it for quite awhile before it came out and was eagerly anticipating it—as everything I’ve read of his I’ve pretty much liked. The other factor is that I’m just an eensy bit envious of him, and the meaner side of my critical nature is inclined to be nitpicky. However, I can say without bias I did quite enjoy the book. Simon is after all the first person who pointed out to me that the new Doctor novels are more like the Target novelizations (when I’d rather meanly told him I found them dumbed-down for twelve-year-olds). A fun way to pass the time.

It’s interesting to me to look at this book in light of “Voyage of the Damned,” also set on an ostensible pleasure cruise ship with a clear delineation between passengers and crew. It also has a familiar vibe since it has space pirates with nostalgic trimmings, a fact the author seems to catch: The fortieth century had quite a vogue for old-school piracy in space, recalled the Doctor. You know me: I’ll take pirates any day. I even learned something I didn’t know about pirate earrings: The single loop is an old tradition. If Archie here gets himself killed, his comrades can claim his earring as payment for seeing he gets a decent funeral. The starship on the cover just seems so “Enlightenment,” I still would have preferred the scary badger pirate illustration.

There’s a wonderful opening line: Six thousand robots danced through the streets of Milky-Pink City. Within the first few pages, the Doctor is alienating Martha (he forgot they were both in Denmark together) and being very Seventh Doctorish (pulling yo-yos out of his pockets). The end of the first chapter, however, is a pure Simon-ism: The sentence died in her throat as the man in the leather apron stepped out into the light. He was tall and muscular, his eyes alive with fear and excitement. And he didn’t have a mouth.

More Simon-isms (God, I sound like a stalker now): the time loop itself is initiated by an experimental drive in the starship Brilliant and causes what are at first some wonderful fake-outs: a tentacled creature named Mrs. Wingsworth dissolves into pink light, a helpful robot named Gabriel (apparently kidnapped from Heroes) is exploded, and then Martha herself appears to die. This recalls, of course, They Keep Killing Andrews from The Time Travellers. To be honest, at first I found this really annoying. By the time there were some “real” deaths, I was appalled at the carnage and felt like ranting about the Holmes-ness of it all. When the end is a relatively happy one, I have to admit I was too contented to think about reset buttons.

I have read that people have been annoyed that a) badger pirates exist; b) they speak in Hampshire accents. Since the only equivalent I could come up with in my American brain is Bill Oddie as the camp pirate captain in Doctor Who and the Pirates, I was content to let them talk that way. Similarly, I think criticism has been garnered by the childishness of the badgers. When I stopped and thought about it, however, they reminded me of the few yobs I’ve had the misfortune of meeting (mostly in bus stations in Swansea). The juvenile attitudes toward everything, especially boredom and causing pain and suffering, seem to coincide. Give those yobs guns that spurt out pink light and they would probably use them with the indifference of Dash, Archie, and Jocelyn. I appreciated that the badgers were grown in labs (that they actually occurred in nature would have taxed our belief!), and their plight reminded me of The Last Dodo.

Mrs. Wingsworth, a tentacled Balumin, speaks as though she should be in an Oscar Wilde play. I admit I found her pretty tiresome at first. By the end, however, she acquired some depth: ‘I don’t expect they’ll be very interested, dear. They [my family] never were in me.’ And then I thought, oh dear, he’s pulled another Mrs. Moore with us. Oh, ye of little faith. It’s difficult not to warm to the badgers, too, especially their love of food (perhaps they’re Hobbits in disguise), despite their errant ways. Though Martha takes a shine to the human crewmember Thomas, all the humans seemed pretty flat and bland. (Though for some reason, try as I might, for Captain Georgina I couldn’t get out of my head the image of Beryl Reid as the captain in “Earthshock.”)

I’m rather impressed at the way the author captures Martha. There are good insights into her character. In the Rose and Martha books I’ve read, without fail it’s been Jacqueline Rayner who gets the crush thing right, and men like Stephen Cole and Justin Richards who just don’t quite. So I’m surprised to pronounce Simon Guerrier successful at capturing Martha’s feelings for the good ol’ Doc. The Doctor gazed at her, deep brown eyes open wide. Martha felt the smile on her own face falter, her insides turning over. She had come to accept that the Doctor didn’t share her feelings for him, but sometimes the way he looked at her . . . The way Martha deals with the badgers, and feels compassion for nearly every character at various points, makes you want to give her a high-five. Nevertheless, it’s interesting, these differing visions of Martha: I always thought she was a coffee person, and here the Doctor even knows her milk and sugar tea preferences.

Speaking of tea . . . As Archie might say, Cor. The mouthless men offer tea to make people feel better, the Doctor asks for it in lieu of liquor, the Doctor constructs a fantastic Teasmade, and I’m reminded a bit of the last few lines in “The Awakening”: ‘Is tea good?’ Archibald asked him. ‘Oh,’ said the Doctor darkly. ‘It’s not for everybody. It can be quite dangerous.’ ‘I’ll ‘ave a cuppa tea.’

I’m also rather surprised at the amount of description we get of the Doctor physically: his skinny fingers, his height, his prominent cheekbones, his dark eyes, his messy hair, his furry sideburns (it begins to smack of a certain fan fic writer . . . ahem). I enjoy it, though, it fleshes out the story even more. One thing I noticed about the beginning of the book was long passages of exposition and analogy (which I seem to recall in Time Travellers too) giving the Doctor the opportunity for long-windedness or over-abundant silliness (it was a criticism I had of The Resurrection Casket as well). I think the Tenth Doctor is a bit harder to write in prose than on screen, as he bounces all over the place and is physical and comic, like Tom Baker I guess. However, the Doctor gets to duel with a badger pirate queen. How Pertwee, I thought. How indescribably cool. Jocelyn the badger notes during the duel that Martha fancies the Doctor . . . well, what an apt scene to make that observation anyway.

I’m usually very critical of endings, but I thought this one just made me smile. First of all, there’s the Doctor fixing milkshakes in a giant party consisting of Balumins, robots, badgers, and humans. Then there’s the moral dilemma of a lifetime of ease and boredom, or going back out into the hostile universe. Very Doctor-ish. But this: The Doctor took Martha’s left hand in his, put his right hand on her waist. Realizing what he meant to do, she put her hand to his shoulder, so close to him she could feel the buttons of his suit against her chest, so close she could feel his hearts beating. I love that.


My Martha fics: Doctor Who the Musical season 3

Over and Under
1969 Diaries is done but not on ff.net yet