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In the final scenes of The War Machines, Ben and Polly slip inside the TARDIS as it fades away from London—and the real world—once again. But those final scenes also marked the end of the show’s tumultuous third season, defined by an anxious winter of discontent that threatened to tear Doctor Who apart and a subsequent, desperate bid for stability.

And we enter the fourth season, starting with The Smugglers. Another missing serial.

Like three previous stories—Marco Polo, The Crusade and The Savages—it at least survives in the form of telesnaps, so things aren’t quite as dire as they were during the static-y winter of late 1965 and early 1966. Also, much like The Crusade and The Savages, The Smugglers was featured as a photonovel on the BBC website in the early 2000s: its surviving telesnaps accompanied by prose, giving a rough approximation of what the serial might have been like. And yet we’re still limited in how well we can discuss this story. We only have a glimpse into the visual aspects of The Smugglers—how the camera interacted with physical performances and physical spaces. This nagging sense that we only have momentary glimpses into the visual qualities of these serials is one that will continue to plague the fourth season much as it did the third before it. We find ourselves entering an incomplete season of incomplete serials—a trail of orphaned episodes.

Except this time, it’s far worse.

This is more than just a gap, a crackling frenzy of static as a long-lost signal attempts to speak to us from the final months of 1966. These are the episodes that continue to cement the new regime of Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis—a tantalising period where the long transition that Doctor Who has been trapped in ever since Verity Lambert left might finally, belatedly, end. This is the period where they begin to implement a vision for Doctor Who which we could only previously glimpse in the final serials of the third season.

It’s also the end of William Hartnell as the Doctor. At long last, we’ve reached the end—and it’s just out of grasp.

When it comes to The Smugglers, that presents something of an issue. After all, it’s the start of Ben and Polly’s adventures in the TARDIS. Perhaps Hartnell’s time as the Doctor is soon about to end, but both Ben and Polly are going to continue their adventures well after he’s gone. If I was to use these final posts on the First Doctor to tie up any outstanding themes and ideas, attempt some kind of neat bookending perhaps, it’s difficult to do so with Ben and Polly. They’re a thread that must remain loose, spiralling into an absent future beyond the confines of this project.

Any engagement with Ben and Polly at this point is going to end up feeling rather limited. So, with that out of the way, let’s get straight into The Smugglers and begin what is (for now) a brief engagement with the fourth season of Doctor Who.

In terms of both narrative and production it follows on immediately from the end of The War Machines by Ian Stuart Black, which itself followed on from The Savages also by Ian Stuart Black. Something that appeared to link the two serials was an attempt to determine the first principles of Doctor Who, and from there attempt to not just re-engage with those principles but use them to help rebuild the programme after a creatively anxious season. As I’ve already written about at length The Savages sought to realign Doctor Who with a revolutionary ethos, rooted in the imagery of both The Tribe of Gum and The Dead Planet—and this pilfering of images from the show’s still-recent past was something that The War Machines did too, invoking The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

But that was Ian Stuart Black. The Smugglers is an historical written by Brian Hayles, featuring smugglers and pirates in seventeenth-century Cornwall. Hayles, of course, was the original writer of The Celestial Toymaker, but that serial was so redrafted and rewritten that it’s uncertain how much of Hayles is actually left in it. We don’t really have much of an idea of “Brian Hayles” as a writer to go off at this point. Instead, I want to carry on with this line of thought that I’ve lingered on with Black in the past two posts—that Doctor Who is returning to its first principles.

If The Smugglers is continuing a thematic return to the very beginning, then the opening scenes do seem to offer some support for this reading. After all, Hayles opens on the Doctor furious upon discovering that Ben and Polly have “follow[ed him] into the TARDIS,” before gradually revealing to the two confused Londoners that the police box that they have wandered into is actually a “vessel for travelling through time and space.”

How many scenes like this have we had before? A scene where the narrative slows down, lingers in this fundamentally basic initiation of new characters into the idea of travelling through time? Off the top of my head, we’ve only had this scene play out twice before—in “An Unearthly Child” and most recently in The Time Meddler. Of course, having a scene like this in “An Unearthly Child” makes sense: it’s the first episode, introducing not just the core characters but the audience itself to the basic premise of Doctor Who. It’s that it also features in The Time Meddler that this scene becomes interesting.

After all, what do these three stories have in common? It’s not just that they all feature new companions entering the TARDIS and embarking on their first voyage through time and space—there have been other serials which do just that. None of them, however, have that single scene where the narrative slows down to linger in the basic reiteration of how the TARDIS works.

What I think they all have in common is that they’re about laying the groundwork for the future. It’s obvious in the case of “An Unearthly Child”—the first episode of any programme is going to be introducing the very ideas and characters that will form its foundations. But that’s also the purpose of The Time Meddler too, isn’t it? In a narrative sense, Doctor Who had just returned Ian and Barbara to a materially real world at the end of The Chase—and, thematically, took Verity Lambert’s aesthetic vision to such a point of overwhelming excess that it had nowhere further to go. The Time Meddler was about laying the groundwork for what could come next, after its final lingering connections to the real world had been let go and an entire aesthetic period lay complete. Similarly, The Smugglers is about establishing where the show is about to go now that it has just returned to the real world in The War Machines and begun opening up a brand-new aesthetic period.

At each of these major turning points, Doctor Who finds itself retracing its footsteps and reiterating its most essential principle: the TARDIS is a “vessel for travelling through time and space.” So let’s retrace our own footsteps for a moment and return to one of the first ideas I proposed in this project—that the TARDIS, that very “vessel for travelling through time and space,” can be understood as the “novum.” Coined by Darko Suvin, the “novum” is an “absolutely new” machine “whose presence compels us to imagine a different way of conceiving our world.”

But what kind of “different way of conceiving our world” are we being asked to “imagine”? The answer to that has long been in flux as the dominant creative voices of the show have shifted. They’re still in the process of shifting. If we want to pursue this question, we need to look at what other things The Smugglers is attempting to do. Maybe then we can uncover what “different way of conceiving our world” Lloyd and Davis are asking us to imagine.

Let’s circle back then to the fact that The Smugglers is another historical serial. It’s a subgenre that I’ve discussed at great length throughout the Hartnell era, and which I’ve regularly read through the framing of Thomas Nashe. As Nashe frames it in Pierce Penilesse, historical theatre is a tool “wherein our forefather’s valiant acts… are revived, and they themselves raised from the grave of oblivion… [their] bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least… who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.” There’s a sense that theatre—and historical theatre specifically—is an act of necromancy, raising the historical dead “from the grave of oblivion.”

It’s been my default approach to engaging with the historical since The Aztecs, where Barbara performed the role of the dead priest Yetexa—and believed to be Yetaxa themselves “raised from the grave of oblivion.” However, reading most historical serials through this lens reveals something limiting about the genre: that they all circle back to merely finding new ways of engaging with performance and this idea of using theatre as a necromantic medium.

In using Nashe as our lens through which we read the historical, however, we must reckon with the inherent conservatism to Nashe’s understanding of the genre. After all, it’s not just a genre that revives the “valiant acts” of “our forefathers.” For Nashe, this necromancy serves an ideological purpose: so that “our forefathers” might “plead their aged honours… [a] reproof to these degenerate effeminate days of ours.”

Very reject modernity, embrace tradition. Very great man of history.

Of course, that’s not to say this is how Doctor Who has approached history. Rather, it’s leaned more into the idea of theatre as being a means to resurrect the past: using costuming and props as means by which the characters can summon or enter into historical narratives. And yet, the genre has consistently featured great men of history “raised from the grave of oblivion… [their] bones new embalmed.” From Marco Polo to Robespierre, Richard the Lionheart to Wyatt Earp, the genre has relied upon the portrayal of recognisable great men of the past.

The Smugglers, then, feels in part like a new approach—a “different way of conceiving” history. We have no great men who find themselves “raised from the grave of oblivion” through the necromantic power of theatre. The only historical figure mentioned by name in the entire serial is “Avery the pirate,” but as the churchwarden Joe Longfoot says in “Episode One” “he’s been buried these long years past.” His only presence in the story is as the person whose cursed treasure the various pirates and smugglers in this coastal Cornish town are desperately after. He might haunt its proceedings, but Avery is very dead.

There is no necromantic performer raising Avery from that grave. Instead we get a story about pirates and a smuggling ring—not exactly the sort of “valiant acts” that Nashe would have envisaged.

However, this isn’t to say that The Smugglers entirely drops the themes of performance which have been so essential to the historical genre in the past. “Episode Two” sees Ben and Polly wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of the aforementioned Joe Longfoot and, as you do when you’re wrongfully imprisoned in a television series, they try to stage an escape. And stage is an appropriate word here—Polly notes that “they were terribly superstitious” in the seventeenth century and the pair quite literally stage an elaborate performance to take advantage of their guard’s superstitions and fears. They devise a scene where they are the “apprentices” of the Doctor—a “warlock” and a “wizard” who has “took over” Polly. This sets up a series of performances, as actors play characters in turn playing roles. Anneke Wills, for instance, plays Polly: but Polly as a character is also playing the role of someone possessed. Michael Craze is also playing Ben, but Ben is also playing a role of his own: the Doctor’s apprentice, rhetorically exaggerating the fears of their guard:

BEN: The old Doctor’s a wizard, no less, Tom, and us two’s his apprentices.
TOM: You got the power?
BEN: We have, Tom, from our master. Now, you see the gibbet? You see the fellow what’s swinging here?
TOM: That’s a doll. Just a straw doll.
BEN: Ah, sure mate. But it’s more than that ‘cos it’s got a soul. Someone else’s soul!
TOM: No.
BEN: It’s our master, Tom. He’s captured the soul of someone he holds responsible for us being here, and he’s gonna do him in!
TOM: Well, it ain’t me. I ain’t but lookin after ye.
BEN: But there’s one hair from your head inside that doll, Tom.
TOM: No!

Doctor Who, The Smugglers, “Episode Two,” (Brian Hayles)

There’s definitely an attempt to engage with and prioritise acts of performance in The Smugglers, so it’s still engaging with this Nashean understanding of historical theatre right? But it’s not, as in the case of previous historicals, using costuming or props as a means for characters to slip into or summon the events of history. Rather, their performance here seems to be a way of engaging with and manipulating the past—using their own wits to regain some level of control over the narrative.

It actually evokes how Doc Holliday’s character functioned in The Gunfighters. There his use of performance seemed to be a way for Holliday to retain narrative control—survive, even, in a hostile world. More than just that, however, there was also a sense that Holliday fundamentally took pleasure in performance for its own sake. We don’t quite get the same thing here from Ben or Polly. In The Smugglers, you perform or you die. You don’t just do it for the fun of it.

This is a distinct change from how performance function as recently as The Gunfighters. Remember, that serial was fundamentally built upon irony and performance, and within this explicitly performative space the historical found itself overwhelmed and subsumed within a song: “The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon.” Rather than costuming and props being tools to seemingly resurrect the past, they lie revealed as mere tools of performance. The historical has all been a self-mythicised ballad we sing to ourselves. One vision for the historical—explicitly rooted in performance—has already reached its endpoint.

For the first time since The Aztecs, then, we find ourselves faced with a major question for the genre: where does it go after The Gunfighters? And we find it tied to the separate, but related, question of what new “way of conceiving the world” Lloyd and Davis are asking us to imagine. At least based on this scene—which does show Ben and Polly using their wits to outsmart others—it seems as if we’re being asked to view the past as somehow limited.

And this actually goes beyond just this scene. Take, for instance, Ben’s line in “Episode One” upon entering a small inn that he’s “seen a few shady customers in [his] time, but this crowd beats the lot.” Ben, of course, comes from 1966—his perception of the world is, implicitly, reflective of both the writer and the assumed audience.

This depiction of Cornwall, a den of smugglers and pirates, treats it as something unsavoury—something criminal.

It’s certainly true that Cornwall has a long history of smuggling: “many Cornish merchants were engaged in illegal activity, while the native population at all levels was particularly reluctant to the payment of customs and other duties.” During the 17^th century smuggling primarily took the form of port fraud, with customs officials “turn[ing] a blind eye to the import of dutiable goods, or… underweigh[ing] them.” What illegal landings there were during this period seemed to be efforts to smuggle “spirits, wine and tea from France,” most often due to war or ongoing trade rivalries between England and France. Some regions of Cornwall, however (such as the Isles of Scilly) were “totally reliant on the smuggling trade” because “legal business,” such as fishing, were purely seasonal. For some Cornish communities, smuggling was the local economy.

At first glance, then, the “different way of conceiving the world” that we’re being invited to imagine is the inverse of Nashe’s ideological vision for historical theatre. Rather than a genre where “our forefathers” will “plead their aged honours” as a “reproof” to modern society, our “forefathers” are revealed petty criminals. Instead of valorising a prelapsarian past, we valorise the present.

There’s something about this which almost appears to evoke the way Dennis Spooner made words like “revolutionary” into morally bad terms in The Reign of Terror. That said, it’s unlikely that The Smugglers is set on the Isles of Scilly—it’s more likely that it’s set in an “insignificant port” such as Looe, where the 17^th century customs collector Philip Stephens “had a finger in most of the fraud that occurred there.” Jeremy Rowett Johns writes that Stephens “habitually refrained from destroying large quantities of seized contraband… [and] he would extract a bribe rather than seize the goods.” This looks less like economic desperation from a community otherwise reliant on seasonal industries—Stephens looks more like an official abusing his power to enrich himself.

Perhaps we can see an analogue for men like Stephens in the form of the local Squire, leader of the fictitious smuggling ring at the heart of Hayles’ narrative. The Squire serves the local magistrate—he is “the law in these parts”—and, like the historical Stephens, is clearly corrupt and abusing the power of his office. In “Episode Two” the Squire meets with two pirates, Captain Pike and his henchman Cherub, who claim to be merchants approached by another member of the Cornish smuggling ring—a man named Kewper, who they are actually holding prisoner on their ship. The pirates claim to be interested in smuggling silks, brandy and tobacco. Instead of pressuring either of these supposed “merchants” for a bribe, however, the Squire instead seems to offer to assist them in an illegal landing:

SQUIRE: Indeed. Now, what would Kewper have me do?
PIKE: Sir, he thought you might spare the time of day to explain such petty matters as must trouble us poor sailors.
CHERUB: Aye, where to land, where to leave the goods, and things.

Doctor Who, The Smugglers, “Episode Two,” (Brian Hayles)

Yet illegal landings in the 17^th century, if we’re putting stock in Johns’ history, were mainly for French goods. Is the Squire smuggling in French contraband? There’s no mention of France throughout The Smugglers, let alone mention of any ongoing war or trade embargo. But, then, perhaps Hayles is conflating the broader history of Cornish smuggling—less interested in historical accuracy and more in creating a corrupt, superstitious world of unsavoury criminals. Rather than being its own “different way of conceiving the world,” the past is seen as lesser and uninformed—and, just as was the case with Katarina, this speaks more about the writers than it does the historical period and characters being depicted.

So a scene where Ben and Polly take advantage of 17^th century superstitions is a great scene for them—really making them rely on their wits to solve problems without the Doctor’s assistance. It’s a searing indictment, though, of how the current production team and writers view the historical genre.

But there is another character who seemingly takes advantage of the “terribly superstitious” people inhabiting Hayles’ Cornwall. The hand that they play, however, is a far defter one—and, in my opinion, far more interesting.

At the end of “Episode One,” the Doctor had been kidnapped by the pirate Cherub and taken to Captain Pike’s ship—the Black Albatross. There he remains a prisoner throughout “Episode Two,” joined not long after by the smuggler Kewper. It’s at the start of “Episode Three” that the pair make their escape, and it all hinges on the Doctor’s practicing of divination.

When Ben and Polly took advantage of how “terribly superstitious” the characters of Hayles’ 17^th century were, it was explicitly a performance: a desperate bluff that paid off. It’s easy to suggest that when the Doctor sits down in “Episode Three” to read Kewper’s fortune, this act of cartomancy a means to distract the pirate Jamaica who has been left as their guard, as merely another ruse.

And yet I think there’s something more going on here.

The Doctor, after all, already has vaguely supernatural associations by this point. An aspect of the distancing that Wiles and Tosh oversaw through The Myth Makers and into The Daleks’ Master Plan recast the Doctor as a god-like being, a psychopomp inadequate in his role of guiding spirits to the afterlife. When we listen to what survives of this scene here in The Smugglers, with the Doctor performing this card reading, his claim that he sees death in the cards should start ringing alarm bells. Maybe this isn’t just a performance—a bluff to distract his captors and allow him to escape. Maybe this inadequate, reluctant psychopomp has actually seen and read Kewper’s death in this ordinary set of playing cards. So let’s focus on that reading:

KEWPER: What do these cards mean?
DOCTOR: Well, I’m afraid they’re rather unpleasant. Yes, the first one represents yourself, innkeeper.
KEWPER: I am no knave, sir!
DOCTOR: Well, the cards have it so, sir.
DOCTOR: And the second is master Cherub.
JAMAICA: See a dagger? That’s Cherub right enough.
DOCTOR: The third is the king. The blackest villain of them all.
KEWPER: Next, the ace?
DOCTOR: Yes, and that is death itself.
JAMAICA: The Captain.
KEWPER: What, Pike? And this one, the Jack of Diamonds, what is he?
DOCTOR: Well, I’m afraid I have no idea about that, sir, but I can assure you he will triumph in the end.

Doctor Who, The Smugglers, “Episode Three,” (Brian Hayles)

Of course, The Smugglers is missing. In what little visuals survive, we can’t clearly see which specific cards the Doctor is attempting to read. All we have are the cards revealed to us in dialogue: a “knave,” an ace, and the Jack of Diamonds.

Looking to the photonovel hosted on the BBC website, it lists the five cards as “the Jack of Clubs, the Jack of Spades, the King of Spades, the Ace of Spades and the Jack of Diamonds.” The novelisation of this story by Terrance Dicks in the late 1980s uses this same set of cards, so it seems safe to assume that these are the five cards that we’re working with.

And yet what do they mean? It seems simple enough. After all, isn’t the point of this scene that the Doctor gives us the meanings of cards we can’t quite see? However, we hit an issue when we try to rely strictly on what the dialogue tells us. A problematic line is “the third is the king,” which the Doctor reads as “the blackest villain of them all.” Is the Doctor reading the King of Spades—the card itself—as representing this “blackest villain”? Or, as the BBC photonovel claims, does the Doctor mean that the King of Spades represents an actual monarch—“the blackest villain,” in the end, being a king?

I’m not quite sure that this reading is right, however. Where is the King in The Smugglers? Sure, there’s a character acting as his agent—the revenue man Josiah Blake, investigating the smuggling ring operating in the town—but as for the King himself: nowhere. Like the pirate Avery, he merely haunts the narrative.

Dicks’ novelisation isn’t much help, instead tweaking the scene slightly so that Kewper and Jamaica latch onto the King of Spades—“the blackest villain”—as being Pike, rather than Pike being the Ace and “death itself” as they do in the broadcast episode. However, note how Jamaica and Kewper—even in “Episode Three”—are performing their own reading of the Doctor’s reading. They’re adding their own speculations—that the Ace, “death itself,” is Captain Pike. That’s not the Doctor’s reading.

So we have an ambiguous read on some cards and intradiegetic speculation about others. If the Doctor is practicing cartomancy, and he is prophesying death in his role as a reluctant psychopomp, it seems we need to step back from the episode itself for a moment.

Is there a tradition we can fall back on to give these cards meaning? Was Hayles actually engaging with something real, or did he vaguely know about the practice of card-reading and just invent associations out of thin air? He does, after all, write Polly as dismissive of the 17^th century as “terribly superstitious,” which suggests he holds himself somewhat at a distance from all of this occult business. But let’s just entertain the idea, for the moment, that these cards do have meanings that we can divine for ourselves.

One place to look might be in the work of Arthur Edward Waite, an early 20^th century scholarly mystic best known for overseeing the popular Rider-Waite Tarot deck. As Waite outlines which suits in his Tarot deck align with the familiar suits of regular playing cards, he concedes that the meanings and associations he has arrived at shouldn’t be taken as anything too rigid:

“The records of the art are ex hypothesi the records of findings in the past based upon experience; as such, they are a guide to memory, and those who can master the elements may—still ex hypothesi—give interpretations on their basis… On the other hand, those who have gifts of intuition, of second sight, of clairvoyance… will supplement the experience of the past by the findings of their own faculty.”

Waite, A. E., The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Dover Publications, 2005, p. 194

Waite’s concession has been read as meaning that his alignments are based on “intuition, preference and inference” based on interpreting the “historical antecedents of the suits.” Or, as Tiffany Chaney puts it, “associations do vary” and it is up to the individual practitioner to “develop [their] own associations and understanding of the cards.” This is helpful—it does, after all, mean that Hayles has certain leeway in how he uses the cards. Maybe he is allowed a little bit of making things up on the spot. But it’s also unhelpful: it doesn’t give us a proper Rosetta Stone by which we can verify and further understand the Doctor’s reading.

That said, let’s do what we can.

Let’s start with the first card that the Doctor reads—a knave, representing the innkeeper Kewper. With reference to Dicks and the BBC photonovel, it seems that the specific knave is the Knave of Clubs. What “clubs” means can vary—Chaney, for instance, reads the suit as associated with the Tarot suit of Wands and representing creativity and action, whereas Waite associates it with Swords and ideas of authority, order and force. A Handbook of Cartomancy, published in 1891, suggests that the suit has positive associations and “rarely or never” offers a “bad augury”—however, it’s worth remembering that the Doctor declared that what the cards have revealed of Kewper is “rather unpleasant.” So, in this case, we have an incredibly rare “bad augury” associated with Clubs.

Speaking more specifically about the Knave, Chaney suggests that it can represent young people—which clearly doesn’t apply to Kewper—but can also be used to represent messengers and movement. Waite appears to agree, in part. He associates the Knave with the Page in his Tarot deck, which can be used to represent a valet or personal servant, but the Page of Swords also has associations with spying and vigilance—acts of watching and the passing of information. The Knave of Spades could also represent a hasty friend.

What does all of this say about Kewper? Well, we have a rare “bad augury” from a Club card, with Kewper implied to be both manservant and spy in the service of some higher figure of authority or force while engaged either in something creative of performing some kind of action. Considering he rather hastily approaches Captain Pike as an envoy for the Squire and the local smuggling ring, this doesn’t seem like a bad read of the man. Furthermore, if the Knave were to be reversed—suggesting, according to Waite, that we should read more into the malign, evil qualities of spying—we might understand why Kewper is seemingly insulted to be a knave. The cards have read his being, and he’s not just a messenger and servant of the Squire—it has recognised something evil about his person.

This leads us to the second Knave—Cherub. It seems fair to read Cherub as being a kind of messenger or personal servant to Pike, considering he appears to be the pirate captain’s highest-ranked henchman. This time around the Knave appears to be the Knave of Spades. Chaney reads the suit as associated with Swords, representing thinking and communication, whereas Waite associates it with the Suit of Pentacles. For Waite, the Page of Pentacles could represent either someone studious (which does not really apply to Cherub) or the bringer of news. If the card were to be reversed, we would find the meanings of the Page of Pentacles to alter: meaning that the Knave of Spades might associate Cherub with the bringing of unfavourable news. It’s also a card that might suggest something envious about the individual that it represents—perhaps foreshadowing Cherub’s attempts to find Avery’s cursed treasure for himself?  

And so lain out before the Doctor are two Knaves, one after another. Together, two Knaves might mean that the two men share some kind of evil intent, but what if they were reversed? We can’t see how the cards are positioned upon the table, after all. If the two Knaves are reversed this could mean danger—and that would be “rather unpleasant” wouldn’t it? Perhaps, then, the cards are coming up reversed.

“The third is the king. The blackest villain of them all.” Let’s set aside questions of who the King of Spades represents for the time being and focus strictly upon what meanings have been associated with the card. There are certain obvious meanings to read into the card—that the King represents some kind of authority, or is in some way above ordinary persons. If the card were reversed, Waite suggests that the card becomes an omen of something ugly, corrupt or even perilous—certainly qualities we might expect in “the blackest villain of them all.”

So far we have had two knaves—which, assuming that they are reversed, suggests some kind of danger—and now “the blackest villain of them all” in the form of the King of Spades. And following them all is the Ace, “death itself,” which appears to have been the Ace of Spades. The Handbook of Cartomancy suggests that it represents “great misfortune,” and for Waite the Ace of represents prosperity and wealth, “but whether these are of advantage to the possessor will depend on whether the card is reversed or not.” Consider we know that the Ace represents “death itself,” we must assume that the card is reversed if it is working according to Waite’s schema.

But this is interesting, isn’t it? After all, neither The Handbook nor Waite associate the Ace explicitly with “death itself” as the Doctor does. This suggests that the Doctor is applying a unique interpretation to his reading. Let’s consider the broader context of The Smugglers again for a moment though. There is, after all, a literal chest of gold buried deep within this story—Avery’s cursed gold, damning “the souls of those who come after [him], seeking and finding the cursed treasure.” Is this damnation, then, what “death itself” looks like? In fact, if we associate the King of Spades with Pike, the future that the Doctor divines in the cards is one where these three men, Kewper, Cherub and Pike, are in danger and peril due to the cursed gold that they all seek.

Assuming that this is the sequence—Kewper, Cherub, and finally Pike—we could further read not merely the order that each man ultimately dies in both “Episode Three” and into “Episode Four,” but also who each man will be murdered by in succession. Kewper, after all, is shot at the end of “Episode Three” by Cherub—and Cherub is, in turn, brutally murdered by Captain Pike during the course of “Episode Four.”

If the Doctor continues to be written as a kind-of-psychopomp, continuing an association developed during the brief tenure of Wiles and Tosh, it seems entirely possible that he has effortlessly and accurately divined the deaths that are yet to come for those pursuing Avery’s gold. However, he doesn’t really fulfil the role of a guide here, escorting the dead to the afterlife: in performing this card reading, he more fills the role of a messenger.

Perhaps, instead of being invited to a consider a “different way of perceiving the world,” The Smugglers is subtly part of a broader trend in Doctor Who of this period asking its viewers to consider a new “way of perceiving” the Doctor himself. History isn’t serving some Nashean purpose where theatre can resurrect the past and reject modernity—nor is it revealing history itself as a theatrical performance. History is here to place the Doctor within an aesthetic that draws out his own connections to a “terribly superstitious” tradition of the 17^th century. It’s just a shame that The Smugglers seems to simultaneously judge the believers of those traditions as uninformed and lesser—it is, after all, a “different way of perceiving the world.”

But before we wrap things up, I just want to linger on two final points. Firstly I want to consider the final card in the Doctor’s reading—the Jack of Diamonds.

It’s the only card that the Doctor admits he has “no idea about,” only that “he will triumph in the end.” Chaney suggests that Diamonds represent the material world, and so perhaps the Jack is its messenger. Waite suggests that we might read the Knave of Diamonds—or the Page of Wands—as an envoy, perhaps. If the Jack of Diamonds is someone the Doctor doesn’t know, but “will triumph in the end,” it seems clear that it represents Josiah Blake—the King’s envoy, investigating the smuggling ring embedded in this small Cornish town. He is, after all, entirely uninterested in Avery’s gold and his is the only card not haunted by “death itself.”

And secondly, I want to very briefly consider Captain Pike.

He is a pirate, obviously, and potentially the “blackest villain of them all” if we read him as being the King of Spades. He also seems partially drawn from the image of Captain Hook—much as that pirate captain has replaced a missing hand with a cruel hook, so too has Pike replaced his own missing hand with a brutal pike. Unless what we have here is a case of nominative determinism, it seems likely that Pike has renamed himself in light of his new weapon.

There’s something unsettling about this. The pike, after all, makes Pike into a kind of monstrous human—capable of using a body he has refashioned into a weapon to kill other people. It’s how he’s able to brutally murder Cherub in “Episode Four,” for example.

But there’s something else, something that The Smugglers itself doesn’t really emphasise. A small idea that Doctor Who is about to address explicitly very, very soon.

Captain Pike has begun to replace his body with “spare parts.”