DW: The Pirate Loop

Next up is The Pirate Loop by Simon Guerrier. Wee, fun! Pirates! How original! Never had pirates in Doctor Who before!


And it is a lot of fun! People die, but it doesn’t matter! Let us all have a lot of joyous fun solving the mysterious puzzle of Starship Brilliant! There is indeed an interesting puzzle here as the Starship is caught up in some weird time craziness and the Doctor and Martha land right in the middle of it. Plot-wise, it is captivating, although the reader is ahead of the Doctor and Martha, which rather undercuts the drama Simon is trying to build.

Then again, Simon changes tack with the tone of the book entirely in the latter part of the book, making what has been enjoyable romp into something deadly serious, although he then tries again to change tack once more. It’s disconcerting, and ruined the atmosphere he had built up. And the ending was a bit weird as well.

Character-wise, the Doctor and Martha are solidly in charge of their scenes, as they should be. The rest of the cast are fairly non-noticeable with the exception of Mrs Wingsworth (who I never could picture properly) and the badger-faced pirates. Oh your gods, how many times did Simon write “badger faced pirates”? Too many times. These are obviously a creation that caught Simon’s fancy and by hell’s high water, he was going to make sure we knew about them. Tried too hard, and doesn’t really pull them off (like we need another “race based on some earth species” (although we do have a better reason for why they exist, unlike almost every other earth animal based species)).

Basically, the majority of the book was quite good, but there’s trouble with the ending.


Order: same place as Wishing Well. And it shows that we should read these in order as there is a reference to Wishing Well in this book.

[END]