Written by the late great Douglas Adams, this is another great adventure of the 4th Doctor by my favorite writer. Can you really beat that? Of course not. And you get an entire planet that is a Pirate ship. Time to get your Doctor Who on!

REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS…

The Doctor (Tom Baker) returns with Romana (Mary Tamm) on the search for the second piece of the key of Time, but they arrive on a planet that while in the right space and time, does not seem to be the right planet Calufrax, but is in fact the planet Zanak. It is a planet filled with riches way beyond it’s means, but ruled under the tight fight fist of The Captain (Bruce Purchase) a space pirate, whose only friend is a killer robotic bird, and half of his body is roboticised. The people are not allowed to think, but given wealth beyond their wildest dreams, but are scared to death of a group of psychics called the Mentiad’s led by Bryachan Powell. People are possessed by the minds of the Mentiads, and The Captain has his guards murder them before they are taken. With the help of the Doctor and K9 (John Leeson) Pralix (David Sibley) is not killed and is taken by the Mentiads who are in fact natives to Zanak and a gestalt entity of psychics.

Of course the Captain ends up confronting the captain and realizes that the entire planet of Zanak is hollow and has materialized over Calufrax and is mining it for it’s material wealth, as it has done with countless other planets including many habited planets, so Zanak is a pirate planet. The Doctor makes friends with the Mentiads to try and defeat the Captain, but realizes the Captain is nothing but a puppet controlled by his nurse who is a projection of the dyeing Queen Xanxia (Rosalind Lloyd) who is using the power of the planets that she uses the wealth from, then compresses the planet to create power and holds them in stasis to try to come back to life. The Doctor manages to destroy the space folding engines and reverses the energy of the fields to put a planet back into the void of Zanak, and send off Calufrax into time so they can pick it up in the Tardis since it is the second key to time.

Bad ass, totally fun and enjoyable. The one thing I have to say is damn that herpes Tom Baker has looks painful on his lip! Youch!!!