"Ignore everything I've said up till now."
Take one part Horror of Fang Rock and add one part "The Empty Child," one half-part The Stones of Blood and one part Pirates of the Carribean and you pretty much have the recipe for this episode.
...I really don't know what else needs to be said, but anyway, here goes.
Ever since The Time Meddler, Doctor Who has had this habit of getting science fiction in my historical dramas. Or perhaps historical dramas in my science fiction, I'm not sure which. Anyways, there's a pirate ship, and anyone on it who gets sick or injured gets the black spot on their hand, and then a siren comes up and vaporizes them. The Doctor et al appear, and after a brief sword-fight, Rory gets injured. The Siren shows up to claim him, but the crew manages to hide on various different parts of the ship. The TARDIS gets stolen and one by one, the crew are killed. When the captain's son gets vaporized, you just know that you're not getting the whole story.
Here's the problem with this episode. The audience knows that no kid is ever going to die on Doctor Who (aside from Adric, and not counting what happens in Rory's dream. And also not counting the Astronaut/Time Lord, which doesn't count anyway). So when Toby gets zapped, we know the Siren's "good," but the Doctor simply asks his companions to take a leap of faith. This is the sort of antic we could expect from anyone from Indiana Jones to Captain Jack Sparrow, but the Doctor has (generally) actually had a good reason for doing what he does, and for him to take the "what the hell" approach seems a bit off.
(Okay, he and Amy did it in "Amy's Choice," but that was prompted by her. It's generally true that while the Doctor may throw himself willy-nilly into dangerous situations, he's never before - to the best of my knowledge - shaken hands with death quite like this.)
Anyway, there is another ship occupying the same space as the pirate ship (this is where Stones of Blood comes in), and it's got a sickbay with a mind of its own (this is where "The Empty Child" comes in). The Siren is actually an emergency medical hologram... but alas, it does not refer to itself as "the Doctor." The black spot is what gets left over when the Siren takes a tissue sample, which a) is a staggeringly inane explanation for the black spot, and b) leaves open the gaping plot hole of why the Siren needs to take a tissue sample in the first place. If the ship has the technology to take a tissue sample of the afflicted crewman so the Siren knows who to take, why doesn't the ship just take all the tissue samples, i.e, the entire person?
Anyway, Rory dies (again), and comes back (again), and the captain and his crew and his son go gallivanting off in the spaceship. Everybody lives.
The bottom line is, it's another "Medical Tech Run Amok Disguised As A Horror Story" episode. Parts of it were very well done, especially all the pirate ship stuff on a BBC budget. Nevertheless, it seems like the author was trying too hard to cram both the Siren and the black spot into the episode and, as I pointed out above, it suffers for that.
5 out of 10.
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