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Though it pains me to give in to the conventional notion that adding pirates to anything makes it more awesome, a view that has a particularly vocal contingent on the Internet, I have to admit that the introduction of not just pirates but a whole heap of pirate lore to Doctor Who this week made it a great deal more sprightly and fun than the two-part opener, which I have warmed to over time but which still didn't engage me half as much as this one did.

The episode opens with a group of sailors, led by Hugh Bonneville and his GREAT BIG BUSHY BEARD, discovering that one of their own has a black spot on the palm of his hand. They then put him out on the deck where he promptly disappears, with no sign of a struggle to indicate that he has been taken. It's at this point that they open the hold to discover The Doctor, Rory and Amy, who they take for stowaways, thanks to The Doctor's inability to come up with a convincing lie to explain how his blue box was actually a ship. To be fair to him, an 18th-century boat floating out in the middle of the sea is probably the one instance in which no amount of psychic paper is going to be of any help.

Just as Matt Smith is about to take a long walk off a short plank, Amy gets hold of a sword, a hat and a long coat and starts buckling some swashes. I liked the return of kick-ass Amy Pond after the first two episodes, which largely confined her to being a supporting player/damsel in distress, which is fine, since The Doctor needs someone to save every week and the companion will always handily fill that role, but part of the reason why I and others fell for Amy last year was seeing her hold her own as a character in her own right. Karen Gillan got to do some fine work this week, both in terms of swinging through the air on ropes, cutting motherfuckers up, and getting to e-MOTE when trying to save Rory from drowning.

On top of saving The Doctor, Amy's actions reveal the monster-of-the-week; a Siren, played by Lily Cole's Massive Forehead, who marks anyone who has been injured with a tell-tale black spot, sings at them, then makes them disintegrate as soon as she touches them. Pretty much as soon as the first sailor got turned into black smoke, I suspected that the Siren was more than she appeared to be, especially given the previously used idea of The Stone Angels being able to "kill" by moving people into different eras in time. Once Bonneville's son got smoked, I was pretty certain that there was going to be some "The Siren is actually teleporting people" twist, and I was proved right, which is a shame, really. On the one hand, I liked the switcheroo halfway through in which The Doctor and Amy used the Siren as a means to save Rory, but on the other I sort of wanted the show to go down a darker route and actually kill off the little boy. Not because I’m a psycho or anything, but because a lack of death on the show tends to lower the stakes for future episodes. Knowing that people can die makes the episodes more exciting, so if The Doctor saves everyone all the time it can deflate things, dramatically speaking.

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