The Curse of the Black Spot is the third episode of the sixth series of Doctor Who. It stars Matt Smith as The Eleventh Doctor, Karen Gillam as Amy Pond and Arthur Darvill as Rory Williams.
After the epic, epoch-defining action of the last two episodes, we are back for a bit of a breather episode. The Doctor and the crew of the TARDIS land on a ship becalmed far from land, and where the crew members will disappear if they get so much as the smallest cut. And as the captain finds out, this is not just a normal merchant ship, but a pirate ship. This raises moral dilemmas, further heightened by the discovery that the "Curse of the Black Spot" is not supernatural, but is instead the result of malfunctioning alien technology. The Doctor solves the mystery, leaving everyone a little wiser. Everything seems to be solved, only we are left wondering why Amy momentarily saw a woman looking at her through a window in a wall that turned out to not be there.
"The Curse of the Black Spot" is considered to be one of the weaker episodes of Series 6, which says not so much about the episode itself, which is a pretty standard Doctor Who episode, as it says about Series 6. The story arc was epic and convoluted, and while this was a find stand-alone episode, its thematic and plot importance were dwarfed by the episodes around it.