Legend Of The Sea Devils : Rank - 303

        Legend Of The Sea Devils

(Easter Special, Dr 13 Yaz and Dan, 17/4/2022, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writers: Ella Road/Chris Chibnall, director: Haolu Wang)

Rank: 303

'I am the very model of a modern Sea Deviril
 I’ve conquered human races and their spaces several
 I’ve got alien technology that’s on another levelel
 I have access to a life-changing keystone that gives me special powers
 I can run rings round any human and can do it for hours
 I am Earth’s greatest architect but not like Paradise Towers
 I’m the only reason that you humans are still alive
 I live in an underground base that surround me just like a hive
 When the camera’s looking the other way I’ve been known to dance the jive
 and I can quote all the lines from that internal nonsense ‘Orphan 55’
 In matters animal reptilian and mineral I am the very model of a modern Sea Devilil’ 

Avast me hearties! It's Mills and Dubloons all the way, as an old foe is revived from a watery grave, gravely in a story that’s part love story, part pirate story, part comedy, part scifi, almost no drama. The most obvious of these first and, well, shiver my timbers, if it isn’t yet another Dr Who pirate story! Because that worked out so well the last few times the series tried this didn’t it? There seems to be one every decade or so, as each new production team can’t remember the previously not that memorable instalment (Douglas Adams’ unforgettable ‘Pirate Planet’ aside) and suddenly thinks ‘gee, space is just like the sea – and the monsters are just like pirates! And this one is a particular shipwreck. We were hoping for something really special for Jodie Whittaker’s penultimate adventure, what with the improvement seen in ‘Eve Of The Daleks’ and the sense that the Chris Chibnall era was building to a climax, not to mention the much-publicised return of The Sea Devils for the first time in a massive thirty-nine years (beating the Macra’s record for ‘longest gap between appearances in the series, although at the time of writing The Celestial Toymaker is looking to smash this record), but this story disappoints not because it does anything particularly wrong compared to the horrors lower on the list but because it doesn’t anything particularly right either. This was a story with a lot of hope and faith riding on it, our penultimate chance to see these characters before the huge sea-change of 2023 and Russell T Davies/David Tennant’s return and with so few episodes of the series on air in the calendar year before this, ‘Sea Devils’ is a special that just had to be special. Instead what would been a minor disappointment in the middle of a strong season is magnified, this fishy tale feeling like a minor catch all round, a minnow where we were hoping for a shark. By 20222 fans were used to not getting their hopes up but, well, even the teaser trailer at the end of ‘Eve’ looked amazing: The sea! The boat! The CGI monster! A Chinese pirate who really looks the part! The Sea Devils themselves (at first glance way more convincing an update of an old design than the modern-day Silurians were!) All of this looked so promising, as if this was going to be a vintage cruise on the Titanic. Instead watching this episode feels more like being stuck in a lifeboat waiting to be rescued for days, with nothing to pass the time. 

 The problem comes when you see the episode and everyone moves, so you get to see that the boat is moored out in a harbour rather than out at sea, that the pirate hordes amount to three people and no extras and the Sea Devils strangely still suffer from the problems they had in the 1970s (namely the fact they can’t move their mouths in synchronicity with their speech, which is a bit of a handicap – anyone would think this was just another actor in another mask). If some natural disaster falls us over the next century and a war/Brexit red tape/environmental disaster/alien invasion befalls us and the Whoniverse on i-player and all the Dr Who DVDs/Blu-=Ray/Purple-Ray/whatever format is out by then somehow get wiped, leaving us just with a few stills, the soundtrack and some memories (just like the 1960s) this is one of those that everyone will naturally assume must be epic and brilliant. It’s when they move this story disappoints and I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad thing that this ends up being one of the most static Dr Who stories, being yet another 13th Doctor story that depicts one of the most interesting fascinating and downright violent eras anywhere in the world in the most boring way possible, with one brief swordfight and lots and lots of talking before we get to it. I’ve been a reporter on local council meetings that were more full of life than these pirates and Sea Devils (although admittedly that’s Runcorn for you). 

 So why did one of the most thrilling, exciting, dramatic and bloody periods of world history end up so deadly dull? One reason this production wasn’t ‘plain sailing’ is that covid got in the way, just as it had with the ‘Flux’ series and ‘Eve Of The Daleks’, leading to shortened filming days and the need to keep actors in smaller quarantine bubbles (funny they choose to revive the Silurian’s cousins just at this point: space plagues are two a penny in Dr Who but the one in the original Silurians story of 1970 is the closest to what happened with covid for real. Almost as if this is a real Silurian invasion and this story is a promotional video). While ‘Flux’ has mixed success in getting round these obstacles, ‘Eve’ had shown that all you needed to entertain/scare was three regulars, two incidental cast members, a claustrophobic warehouse and a Dalek – alas they can’t get do that here in a story that wants to re-create the China Seas and a pirate who, at her peak, was in charge of 124 pirate ships and 1400 crew. I’m actually impressed with the sheer courage of everyone trying to do this story anyway, ‘pretending’ that we’re in a quiet part of the seas and the battles are going on just out of reach. The availability of actors also excuses a couple of really weird casting decisions: while Crystal Hu is an excellent Madam Ching (and while, technically, she comes from Hong Kong, it’s nice to see an actor whose close to the country she’s meant to have come from, after disgraceful-but-normal-for-the-time-period depictions of white actors in ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ in the 1960s and ‘Talons Of Weng-Chiang’ in the 1970s) Craige Els is weird casting as Marissus, the chief Sea Devil, despite having all the jump-scare qualities of a Sensorite cuddly toy (it makes more sense when you realise that this production was restricted to people in the same covid bubble and, having just played Korvanista in ‘Flux’, Craige was still eligible without the risk of getting someone else involved. Even so he’s more Sea Angel than Sea Devil). Covid also excuses some of the weirder plot elements where people learn things they don’t appear to know, or arrive and disappear randomly (the most notorious one is the Doctor and Yaz discussing how to get out of the underwater base, which presumably they do given that we see them running away in the next scene, though how they achieve this feat goodness only knows). Also, the opening scene has that old standby of everyone thinking they’ve landed on a hot planet for a beach holiday: but already everyone (well, not Dan) is wrapped up warm. I’m all for not making actors go through the face-slapping the likes of poor Nicola Bryant went through when filming on location, but a tweak of the script could have explained it if, as I suspect, this conversation was meant to take place inside the Tardis not out. There are other bits though that feel disjointed and grafted on, to cope with who was available and who wasn’t. I would guess, too, that the cast was originally meant to be much bigger than just the three regulars, four Chinese pirates and (Briefly) Diane. Covid really damaged this story even more than the others and the fact this story is set up to show us the might and power of the Chinese pirate army and to have the Sea Devils as a powerful mass army hitting them head on, but without being able to use any extras or very much at all, means we don’t get that sense of scale.

That said, though, in a parallel universe where covid never happened (perhaps the one where John Lumic is in contact with Cybermen and the 10th Doctor’s spin-off band is hand in hand with Rose) this story would still have had problems and big ones too. This feels like a Dr Who story written by AI: there’s a problem, the Doctor tries to solve it, the incidental character solves it instead by sacrificing himself, the villains disappear and everything’s solved, more or less. As befits an Easter special in a way it’s just another Dr Who tale of sacrifice, of the Doctor trying to do the right thing only for (spoilers) the supporting cast to beat her to it. The good guys do some good stuff, the bad guys do some bad stuff and everyone goes home, lessons not really learnt. It’s characteristic of its era in so many ways, with all the things showrunner Chris Chibnall gets right and wrong all in one place. It’s great to have an obscure returning monster back again however oddly done, wonderful to have a story set somewhere other than London or Cardiff to give the series an international flavour it badly needs and Madam Ching is perfect for a modern Dr Who story: a woman before her tine, not only coping but thriving in a man’s world. Unfortunately it features all the worst aspects of the era too: this isn’t a drama that builds the tension and does something unexpected, just a collection of events that happen one after another, going exactly where you think they’re going to go. There are no twists in this story, no surprises, not much of anything really. The dialogue has some good lines but is mostly people lecturing each other and declaiming the plot, people passing information on and parroting each other more than pirating, with nobody speaking ‘normally’ (whether by 21st century viewer or 19th century pirate standards both) and none of the characters feel as if they’re real living, breathing people who exist outside this story, they’re just plot functions. Having more characters would help camouflage it and maybe give this story more of a sense of atmosphere, but it wouldn’t change how bland the characters we do have are – even the ones who were so incredibly fascinating in real life and the ‘monster’ who we know, along with the Silurians, has one of the most fascinating back stories of them all. 

 Putting these two together should be creating instant fireworks (not least because we’re on a boat in China). They’re both ruthless, merciless, have little regard for other people and are most at home in the water away from the ‘land parasites’. They ought to go together like, I don’t know, ‘Ben and Polly’, but instead they feel like Tegan and Turlough: opposites wanting different things who don’t feel as if they belong in the same story at all. Perhaps because for so much of this episode they don’t: this is one of the worst cases of ‘two companions have different adventures and meet up at the end’ plots in Dr Who, one a relatively faithful historical set in the China seas and another in the futuristic den of a Sea Devil. Neither is worthless: The 13th Dr gets to spend some late-on quality time with Yaz and they finally deliver some chemistry, while Marissus gets to deliver some good lines here and there. Dan gets all the good sub-plots this week. He’s a more natural pirate than either the Doctor or Yaz (policewomen being the antithesis of pirates I guess), dressing up for the part with gusto and even getting a swordfight. John Bishop is clearly having fun in the part and getting something to do that’s more than just being the comic relief and acts everyone else off the screen, making it all the sadder that it’s sort-of his final story (Dan leaving suddenly, twenty off minutes into ‘Power Of the Doctor’, a move that’s all the stranger given the brilliant time the character’s clearly having here). However, as welcome as it is to get some form of action going on, this is also the most slapstick Dr Who story we've had since Bonnie Langford was in lyrca. Nothing against John Bishop, whose a lot fitter for his age than I will ever be when I get there, but I thought if ever a Dr Who companion was going to resemble my co-ordination (i.e. fall over while standing up) I thought it would be him; it seems unlikely that he could single-handedly take down a Sea Devil fighter with just a sword (at least he doesn’t give a kung-fu kick like the last time the Sea Devils appeared in ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ I guess). His whole sub-plot feels at odds with the rest of the story: this is at heart a dour tale, without the thigh-slapping of Dr Who’s three other pirate stories (‘The Smugglers’ ‘Pirate Planet’ or ‘Black Spot’) so having a comedy scene just dresses up a story that was always at risk of looking silly in a clown costume. Also, it seems highly uncharacteristic even for this Doctor to just abandon Dan when they know they’re not in immediate danger but there is danger from two sides lurking (I mean, all Dr Who companions get in trouble but this is Dan. Sometimes its amazing he makes it past the opening credits intact). 

 It could and should have been so much more than this. Madam Ching is a fascinating character, at least in the history books. A Chinese pirate from the early 1800s, at a time when pirates weren’t normally women or Chinese, she was a simple sailor’s wife until her husband turned pirate and died at sea and, rather than be captured, Ching took over the ship and ran it herself, being far more successful than her hubby was. People were terrified of her, the way later generations would be terrified of Napoleon or in our age Boris Johnson. Nobody looking at her biography would come up with this plot for her though. There’s a sub-plot here about her pining for her lost love still (she still has an ear) and hunting the Sea Devils who killed her for revenge and to keep her songs safe from paying the ransom she does, which is all historical nonsense and for all this era’s talk of equality just makes her seem like a pining girl who can’t cope without her boy, a far cry from what she was like in real life. I understand the need for artistic license, but what’s the point when the real story is so much more fascinating than the fake made-up one? The real Madam Ching, too, was morally dubious, unlike most of the straightforward villains or heroes in the 14th Doctor era, so that you don’t quite know which way she’ll fall until pushed. After all, she’s a pirate, which in real life she’s be a bloodthirsty assassin bent on murdering innocent sailors but here as so often in Dr Who pirate stories means she’s been softened into an outsider-rebel who doesn’t want to be part of everyday society, not unlike the Doctor herself. Had the script drawn the parallels more between the two they might have had a classic on their hands here, but instead they barely exchange any lines with each other. The same goes for the Sea Devils which may be the Silurians more grunt-worthy army but nevertheless have a backstory that at least deserves some sympathy before they go round shooting humanity. The Earth used to be theirs, they have a claim to it and as far as they’re concerned humanity is just a chimpanzee from their era with ideas above its station, vermin best exterminated before it gets out of hand. Had the script drawn the parallels between the Doctor, Madam Ching and Marissus in an unholy Devil-laden trinity of conquest (and why its better to be explorers, like the Doctor, rather than pirates)we could have been in for a classic, a Malcolm Hulke style story where nobody is right and everybody’s wrong. I still can’t tell if the Chris Chibnall co-credit was responsible for all the bits that go right in newcomer Ella Road’s story, whether he took a generic idea and added a few interesting twists to it, or whether he was responsible for everything that went wrong, taking a promising idea and diluting it till all the good bits were taken out. Instead we end up with another story of being captured, escaping and being captured again, where Madam Ching talks about her life at length to Dan, while Marissus taunts the Doctor and talks about his plan at length. It’s all oddly dour and grim for a story featuring pirates and fancy dress, yet suffers from the other problem of not being serious enough to feel dangerous or scary either. 

Most of the plot concerns that other Dr Who standby, a gem with enormous powers that the Sea Devil left behind and this sudden mention of a 'keystone' macguffin out of nowhere is particularly, well, keystone cops. That’s the sort of thing you get in series when they start to be silly, a race that’s powerful only because of what they possess and not who they actually are. Despite this not having anything in common with the Silurian/Sea Devil technology we’ve seen in the past, they accidentally got turned to stone (as you do) and have been waiting centuries, Melkur-style, till Madam Ching accidentally stumbles across its special powers and releases everyone. It’s a sub-plot uncomfortably close to magic for a show that always tried to ground itself in science: despite the amount of talking in this episode we never really hear the background to this gem or why it does what it does, we just take it on trust that it does what people tell us it does. Ditto the idea of Chinese pirates, descended down the family line, guarding the statue and keeping it safe till one messes up as a ritual they don’t know is really keeping the Sea Devil in stasis. Yet another sub-plot concerns Ji-Hun, whose the other old Dr Who stand by, a collaborator, ready to sell out his people in return for staying alive. Who tehn turns out to be sabotaging from the inside instead. Had this story not been made under covid conditions I suspect we’d have had more of a ‘who might the collaborator be?’ mystery to keep this sub-plot running, but as it happens we don’t have enough characters to be in doubt who the ‘baddy’ is so this part of the story is a bit of a no-starter too. In the end its all saved by two cables touching. Which feels like a cheat. They could at least make it a story about gunpowder given we’re in china, with not much alteration to the script needed. So then, that’s a woefully unlikely main plot, leading to two boring sub-plots and a romance that’s barely sketched in plus an ending that’s ridiculously simple; even with the good bits this is all uneven enough to make you seasick. 

 Oddly enough, despite the promise of spectacle, the best bits are all small this week: the moments when the regulars have time to talk to each other as friends. It feels as if this line-up have been around for a lot longer than it seemed in Flux (when Yaz and Dan had spent a year in the past together). Dan adds to his speech in ‘Eve Of the Daleks’ about seeing Yaz’s growing feelings for the Doctor and acting like a big brother (despite being roughly the same age as Graham's more grandfatherly advice), urging Yaz to tell her friends that she’d like to be more than that (which I couldn’t see, whatever Dan might say, given the absolute lack of chemistry between Mandip Gill and Jodie Whittaker, but half of fandom could and asked for it apparently and, well, there’s weirder love stories in the show and a lesbian romance between main characters in this series somewhere was long overdue by 2022). We think its going to be forgotten again butYaz finally gets that talk at story’s end and, contrary to expectations, the Doctor doesn’t just immediately shut it down (which would be entirely in character for in many ways the most antisocial and oblivious of regenerations) but nor does she encourage it; instead she looks sad and talks about having ‘run out of time’ in what, against the odds, is actually a very sweet and touching moment (‘but if I ever were to it would be with you, but I can’t’ is a gentle way of letting her down). Which, sadly, is true: had they thought about this sub-plot even a series earlier they could have really made something out of it, looking at a Dr-Rose style relationship that wasn’t instant but grew out of friendship and admiration while giving the lesbian half of the LGBTQ audience a relationship to properly get into alongside the gay characters of the Russell T years, but alas there’s only one story to go and to make that all about the romance would have been ‘wrong’ somehow. So instead this is pretty much it and we get an ending that’s sadly true to life for so many same-sex couples: all that time spent trying to work out how friends feel, all that beating around the bush, all that endless waiting and now that one of them is finally brave enough to speak up its all too late. Yaz has never seemed more like a real life person than when she sits with the Doctor, bantering about their different cultures, throwing stones and wishing they could have eternity together. By contrast Dan chooses a weird time to try to kickstart his on-again off-again relationship with Diane, calling her out the blue at the end to check in and not sure what to tell her. It feels grafted on this scene (did John Bishop hand his notice in at the last minute so they used this bit to set up him leaving?) and its clunkiness and awkwardness just shows up how good and natural the other bits are. The regulars all come out of this story better than Madam Ching anyway. 

 All of this is seaweed decoration, though, which is no good if the fishcake is burned. There are worse Who stories out there, ones that get the basics even more wrong than this story does, but worst of all ‘Legend Of The Sea Devils commits the cardinal sin of being boring worse than most. You can do something else, skip forward ten minutes and still nothing has really moved on, except maybe somebody has been re-captured or escaped. How? I mean, this is a story about pirates: it should grab you by the lapels and whallop you over the head with its pegleg, but no: any treasure in this story is buried, in the nuances between the cracks, a few good lines here and there (most of them, as usual, Dan’s although one of the best comes with the meta joke of the Sea Devils finally hearing what the humans call them and being outraged: Marrissus calls the Doctor a ‘land parasite’ in retaliation. Now this is what we’ve waited fifty years for! Second best is the Doctor’s muddled conversation with Yaz: ‘Ready to pimp my ride! Do people still say that?’ ‘It’s 1807!) We should have been used to disappointment by now, after a period even a lot of Jodie Whittaker’s defenders would admit has been variable, but the promise of a proper pirate story, the China setting and the return of the Sea Devils all made us hope for something way better than this. ‘Legend Of The Sea Devils’ still stands, at the time of writing, as the lowest rated Dr Who story of the 21st century on just 2.2million in overnight ratings: to be fair the ratings for every programme have grown lower, with the rise of streaming and so much more competition than there ever used to be, while the figures don’t take into account people who caught up with the story on i-player. Even so, I’d be intrigued to know how many of those 2.2million people were still watching by the end: even for longterm committed fans this one’s a bit of a slog that will have you wanting to hurl yourself off the nearest gangplank. As much as we should applaud the fact that the production team worked overtime to get anything out at all at such a difficult time, you have to ask yourself if it was worth it. Some stories really benefit from the pulling-together background of things going wrong (‘The Mind Robber’ and ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy to name but two) but this is another ‘Horns Of Nimon’ or ‘Planet Of the Dead’ where all the difficulties end up on screen, the holes in the script made worse by not having the usual production gloss and the luxury of time to work out how to fill it. Honestly it wouldn’t mattered have too much in the great pantheon of Dr who stories if they’d skipped this one altogether and we’d have gone straight to ‘Power Of the Doctor’. It’s not as wretched as ‘Orphan 55’ or as blasphemous as ‘The Timeless Children’ by any means, but it’s still a shockingly poor bit of television that doesn’t engage, doesn’t excite, doesn’t thrill and doesn’t entertain. And if you can’t do that in a story about pirates and Sea Devils then something has gone very very wrong indeed. Once again the curse of the Who pirate episode strikes with a story that's more 'arrrgh' than 'arrr!' 

POSITIVES + The return to filming in Cornwall in the same places as 'original' Who pirate story ('The Smugglers') in 1966 is delightful. While I can’t say Cornwall was an obvious double for China when I went there on my holidays (although given how much the bill came to I wouldn’t have put the landlords past a bit of piracy) there’s just enough attention to detail for them to get away with it. The re-creation of a pirate ship (the biggest set used so far?) and various Chinese junks are impressive too and knocks spots off even the ‘Black Spot’ one, both when we see a CGI creation in the sea and when we’re actually on board it. 

NEGATIVES - Somehow though the Sea Devils themselves seem less impressive than they did in 1972. Their mouths staying static are a real giveaway they're just men in masks, while for all the ‘improvements’ they lumber as only old-fashioned Dr Who creatures can. Their voices are truly awful, lacking the distinctive ‘underwater fluttering’ of the olden days, when they really sounded reptilian – now they just sound like any generic monster and mucuy as I sympathise with the casting Craige Else is just wrong for the part (not sure what that says about him but he’s a more natural fit as a sarcastic dog than a cold-blooded reptilian warrior). Worse still, the Sea Devils have taken off their string vests – they were a great touch in the original! With this many needless changes, though, why bring the Sea Devils back at all? They’re just another forgettable Who monster whose big character point is that they live underwater. We could have had the sentient seaweed from ‘Fury From The Deep’ for all the difference it makes to the plot (and, some would say, the acting). For all its faults at inventing things, the Chibnall era tends to be better at re-inventing old monsters than this, leaving you so disappointed you kind of hope that it might be another forty years before we see them come back again. 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘Where did you learn to take down your enemies like that?’ Dan ‘You should meet me mum’