Pirates! According to the current spate of Disney epics, this word is supposed to be shouted with a kind of reverent bewilderment, or if you prefer, a bemused, facetious spite. In kind, Curse of the Black Spot continues this new Doctor Who season’s dip into a more American flavor of action-adventure television. It was X-Files in the Big Sky West last time, with a little Apollo Moon landing spice, and now we’re running laps around the poop deck with a few mangy curs.

Our curs our still British, who’ve stolen shiny treasure from somewhere colonial and feel bad about abandoning their wives and sons, of course, but there’s plenty of parrots and yo-ho-humor. It’s definitely still Doctor Who, the classic sort where a spooky bit of nonsense gobbles up all the bit players one every four minutes or so. There are already detractors, I’m sure, of an episode that feels claustrophobic compared to the sprawling, epic feel of the season opener, but lack of scope isn’t really the trouble, rather a kind of frenetic spinning in place is what keeps this plot from properly getting off the page.

I’m here to say “low-budget” and “rubbish”, the epithets most often thrown at smaller-scale episodes, really do mischaracterize how the mark’s missed here. One-offs in Doctor Who are all increasingly feeling like little interstitials between openers, closers, two-parters and guest-star-written-game-changers. With only thirteen episodes a season, if we aren’t shoving the Daleks back into the Time-War, undoing the paradox that eats all of existence or regenerating the Doctor, then we’re just waiting around for the season’s secret notes to play out.

I like a self-contained Doctor Who episode. I don’t need all of the series-long mystery story, in fact, I prefer the best of the one-offs like Moffat’s Girl in the Fireplace and Blink, which are perfectly good at being what they are: good stories. In this case, the Doctor lands on a becalmed pirate ship beset by a strange curse and gets accused of being a stowaway before ensuing himself in the wackiness. It could be the plot of a classic episode, and I don’t think its any the worse for that.

The episode plays the first beats of the premise too long, but it has a solid concept with a good finish. The babble behind the plot twist felt a little tired, but that was done with good humor. The real trouble with Curse of the Black Spot is that it was too fast and too slow – its too-many clever little one-liners, its self-impressed imagery, all without really establishing a strong story or mounting an adventure that’s more than the set-up for the next joke – or the next flash-bang. Part of the running gag of the episode is that the Doctor comes up with more wrong theories than fill an episode of House, and that leaves our heroes pretty much running in circles, rather than digging into some good high-seas hijinks.

I don’t like giving plots away, so I won’t – but I will say that by the ending there is a good story here, its just that we don’t really use it. It’s as if the writer didn’t really like the premise, and rushed those bits through the Doctor’s mouth so we could spend more time on the spooky music and, of course, make room for the season mysteries: Amy’s sliding window makes a prominent, anachronistic shot across the bow, Amy and Rory have to debate whether they should spill their big secret and the Doctor spends the episode’s sting staring at Amy’s will-she-won’t-she sonogram.

I like Matt Smith’s Doctor making jokes about hats. I like Karen Gillan’s Amy and her charmingly ignorant, cutlass-waggling braggadocio. I don’t exactly like the turn in this episode or the explanation for it – I feel like Doctor Who has gone to both wells in the modern series – but the real criticism of this episode is simply that it doesn’t take the story elements and craft a ripping good yarn. Take that! Ha-Har!

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