"The Space Pirates - Episode One"

Doctor Who
Airdate: March 8, 1969
Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Wendy Padbury
Written by Robert Holmes
Produced by Peter Bryant
Directed by Michael Hart

The TARDIS arrives on Beacon Alpha 5, an unmanned communications and navigation satellite somewhere in deep space. Usually unmanned, that is. In this case, a small party of Space Corps officers is onboard to defend the beacon from argonite pirates, who have been attacking other nearby beacons in order to salvage the valuable argonite contained in their hulls. The Doctor and friends are quickly discovered by Lt. Sorba, who assumes that they're pirates and issues shoot-to-kill orders to his men. Their search for the escaping strangers is interrupted by the arrival of the real pirates, Cavan and Dervish. Once the pirates deal with the Space Corps team, they depart and destroy the beacon from space. The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe are hurled around the interior of the beacon as it breaks apart into several segments...

The TARDIS doesn't actually arrive until more than halfway through this episode. The opening half is dedicated to establishing the pirates and the Space Corps officers tasked with catching them. As the episode opens, we see (or would see, if the episode still existed on video) the pirates attached magnetic charges and propulsion units to the outside of Beacon Alpha-1. The charges blast the beacon into segments, and the propulsion units pilot each segment to the pirate base. After General Hermack and his Space Corps troops are introduced, the pirates repeat the same procedure on Beacon Alpha-7, but General Hermack's V-Ship isn't fast enough to catch the pirates' Beta Dart. That's what leads General Hermack to man the remaining beacons, which sets the stage for the arrival of the TARDIS on Beacon Alpha-4.

That doesn't leave a lot of time for the Doctor and friends to do anything at all, but it allows the script to establish a great deal of plot. Robbed of the outer space visuals that would have depicted all this, what we're left with is a massive audio-only info dump. General Hermack gives a little speech to his men which explains to us everything that his men should already know, about how valuable the argonite beacons are to pirates. We also learn that the planet Ta is the home of the Issigri Mining Corporation, which is going to play a major role in the story.