The Sea Devils: Ranking - 36

 

The Sea Devils

(Season 9, Dr 3 with Jo, 26/2/1972-1/4/1972, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Malcolm Hulke, director; Michael E Briant)

Rank: 36

   'I should hate you Doctor, exterminate you Doctor, you got me in between the Sea Devils and the deep blue sea!' 

 

Does ‘The Sea Devils’ do any one thing better than any other DW story? No. Is there any great hidden extended metaphor, special insight into human life or particular intelligence going on underneath the surface of the script? Not really. Does it ask the big moral questions of its Silurian predecessor? Not a chance. Is it still one of the greatest DW stories of them all? Most definitely! You see, there’s a story in most DW eras that sums up everything it can do within one handy bite-sized piece, the moment when each production team of DW is running like a well-oiled machine that knows exactly what they’re doing without any of the things that, to use the underwater metaphor, torpedo the other stories around them and this is the 3^rd Dr’s example. Sometimes when you fish in DWs great waters you get a tasty fish, sometimes a whale, sometimes an old boot but in this one you get the catch of the day. Just look at some of the things on offer: alien beings rising from their great long slumber. The way the story has been shot using the help of one of the armed forces for extra location realism. The Master teaming up with a lesser foe for added top trump power. Wait, didn’t we have this one already?! Well yes we did – ‘The Sea Devils’ is a recycled story in so many ways, as reclaimed as the string vests the title creatures are wearing (from, so its hinted, all the nets fishermen keep throwing down to the bottom of the sea). However this isn’t just recycling but upcyling, sticking old bits together to make something that still feels impressively new so well you can’t see the join: it’s a particularly brilliant combination of things no other series could do but which DW can do better than anyone. ‘The Sea Devils’ draws from plot elements in favourite stories like ‘The Invasion’ (‘big shooty battles with the army as cybermen come out of the sewers’ becomes ‘big shooty battles with the navy as Sea Devils come out of the sea’), ‘Terror Of The Autons’ (‘The Master teams up with a mute alien foe’ becomes ‘The Master teams up with an alien foe...wearing a string vest!’) ‘The Mind Of Evil’ (‘The Master in prison with a machine!’) ‘Fury From The Deep’ (‘something alien has been attacking the oil rigs!’) ‘Inferno’ (fracking hell!’) and of course ‘The Silurians’ (‘a monster older than humanity coming back to reclaim their planet). All those earlier adventures were made by a production team who were too new to be fully comfortable in their roles yet or not that sure in the direction they were heading in. What this era of the show has that the people making those earlier stories didn’t is the extra boost of confidence that comes with stability. By the time of ‘The Sea Devils’ everyone’s had a while to get used to doing things (this is the first time in DW history we have the same Dr, main companion, producer and script editor all there for a second consecutive season) and what’s more they know they’re doing them well: the TV ratings are soaring, DW is the talk of the playgrounds once again and everyone is just having such a ball going in to work every day. That’s the big change: the confidence. 

The change between season 7 and 9 particularly is striking. Where ‘The Silurians’ was a gritty tense philosophical debate that asks big questions with a lot of talking across seven detailed episodes ‘The Sea Devils’ is a big bright cartoon that breezes through six parts and doesn’t ask anything bigger than ‘how are they going to get out of that cliffhanger then, eh?’ Where ‘The Silurians’ is a debate about what it is to be Human and what we might think if we find out that we are the species that are alien to Earth, ‘The Sea Devils goes ‘ooh look, monsters!’ There’s no great moral issue here, no hidden layer, no extended metaphor for life in Britain in 1972, no sense of ambition beyond making a blooming great set of episodes. And yet it is a blooming great set of episodes: there are few stories that are as consistently entertaining, inventive and watchable as this one in any era of DW. And its in the sea! That’s the big hook of this story, which allows everyone to get away with stuff they’d already done and its a surprise actually they hadn’t tried this before (aside from the distinctly fishy Atlantis tale of ‘The Underwater Menace’): the sea, after all, is where most scifi/fantasy tales of old used to be set, a world full of unknowable depths and scary sea monsters and ‘alien’ (as in ‘foreign’) people from cultures that were totally unlike yours. As times went on and mankind mapped the seas he turned first to the mountains, then to the Poles, then to the stars, but it’s a fact that we still know more about the moon than we do about what lies on the bottom of our deepest oceans and a lot more humans have been in space than have ever been all or even most of the way down our deepest seas. Of course a DW monster is lurking down there, sleeping, waiting to be woken up by our oil rigs – that all makes perfect sense (and explains a good few sea mysteries to boot). And seeing humans on the land through the big googly eyes of sea creatures allows some terrific variations on the old ‘ordinary becoming extraordinary’ DW theme, not to mention an imprisoned Master basically becoming native in episode one, watching our TV shows and guzzling our food. There is a sort of theme too if you look under the surface netting, about fitting in and trust, picked up from Malcolm Hulke’s earlier Silurians story. The Master’s been put in prison following the events of ‘The Daemons’ three stories before and he’s been stewing inside Britain’s (fictional) Fort Knox, an impregnable prison on an island between England and France even he can’t escape from outright. The 3^rd Dr, who knows what its like being trapped in one place when you used to be able to travel freely across all time and space, is sorry for him and pays a visit along with Jo. To all intents and purposes The Master has acclimatised to his new life better than the Dr ever has: he’s always been good at fitting in wherever he goes where the Dr can’t help but stand out and Roger Delgado is superb as a gentler, cuddlier Master whose enjoying passing the time of day, joking about putting on weight and passing the time watching The Clangers on TV (his joke – and yes it is a joke – that ‘they seem to be some strange alien life form’ is delightful: so few baddies in anything ever get the chance to be funny). Of course its all a ruse but, just for a moment, you think it might actually be true. The ruse is that while the Dr is off seeing to another case on behalf of UNIT about sightings of a monster on an oil rig, The Master’s heard about it too and is putting together a machine to control The Sea Devils. So far so normal almost, but its the way this story is told that makes it sing. The Master doesn’t just clash with the Dr in words but has a swordfight with him – and not the sort of ‘filler’ ones you get in other DW stories like ‘The Androids Of Tara’ or ‘The King’s Demons’ either but one that heightens the drama between the two (the Dr defeats The Master without even trying, being impossibly smug as he breaks off for a sandwich halfway through, but The Master wins by playing dirty!).

 In a sign of the show’s confidence it actually breaks the cardinal sin of what film studies people call ‘Chekhov’s Gun’, that if you see something hanging on the wall in act one you know it’s going to be used in act two. I mean, why is there a sword hanging on the wall of the most hated criminal of this generation’s cell?! But so involving is the story that ultimately you don't care. The Sea Devils don’t just appear the way The Silurians did, kidnapping humans one by one, but in a mass invasion from the sea (one of those iconic DW images – not least because The Sea Devils seem too ‘big’ to be human; in reality the extras are wearing the Sea Devil heads as ‘hats’ on top of their heads). There’s the mother of all ‘chase’ sequences across a blooming great minefield, something they couldn’t have done without the navy’s help. And the extras! Boy are there extras! This is a story that feels as if the whole world is involved, not just the few people in front of the cameras. While ‘The Invasion’ made good use of the army and ‘The Mind Of Evil’ had one great battle sequence as a day-out for the airforce,‘The Sea Devils’ makes full use of the navy their goodwill and their weapons, personnel and locations. And yet this is more than just a recruitment video: Malcolm Hulke is too good a writer to just make this a tale of derring do between goodies and baddies; lurking, submerged, across this story is the issue of trust and manipulation. The Dr learns not to be so trusting even when he wants to think The Master has changed his ways. The Master learns that even he can’t control The Sea Devils. Humanity learns that maybe blowing up an intelligent race at the end of ‘The Silurians’ maybe isn’t the best solutions to their problems. Jo learns to think for herself without the Dr always there, in a story that gives her more to do than usual. And The Sea Devils? They learn to ignore the Dr (who keeps banging on about mankind’s good bits) and The Master (who keeps exploiting the bad) and are really just a force of nature, of inevitable change, who are woken up by mankind’s greed and reliance on oil and are only stopped through co-operation and, well, trust (with even The Master helping to clear up his own mess for once). Jon Pertwee is clearly having the time of his life revisiting his youth (he really was in the navy and was assigned to the Bismark, one of the bigger British casualties of WW2, though luckily for us he was on a training exercise the day it was sunk. In the meantime he’d spent so many years in a radio studio pretending to be on a boat in ‘The Navy Lark’ it must have been weird being back on board an actual ship again – and a majority of the DW audience would have got the ‘joke’ about that back then too; Writer Malcolm Hulke and producer Barry Letts had also been assigned to the navy during WW2 so I’m surprised Barry didn’t pick this one to direct himself; Patrick Troughton was in the navy too and higher up than any of them, which must have been hilarious for any of the sailors in his charge one who saw him running away from the fish ballet in ‘The Underwater Menace’. 

In case you’re wondering Roger Delgado was a major in the army corps, which must have been fun for the people under his command watching him outwit UNIT every week). Katy Manning has worked out how to play Jo by now: she’s loyal and sweet but not just simpering, as ready to rescue the Dr as he is her and they make for a delightful double act. Roger Delgado is, as always, masterful, despite a phobia of water (or at least that’s how Pertwee remembered it, calling him ‘the bravest coward I ever knew’ for his scenes of drowning in this story; other people remember Delgado being on strict instructions that he couldn’t get his costume wet as there wasn’t a spare; either way his move from motoring along in charge to being out of his depth is note-perfect). In the supporting cast Clive Morton’s brainwashed prison warden Trenchard is one of the best mindless bureaucrats the 3^rd Dr ever had to challenge and Robert Walker a decent naval substitute for the Brigadier (though no one can measure up to Nicholas Courtney, who gets a holiday). The Sea Devils might not have the character of their Silurian cousins given that they can’t speak, but they look the part: they’re maybe the only DW monster that looks threatening lumbering around slowly, especially draped in seaweed and dripping in water. Scientists reckon that if life does exist on other planets then it’s most likely amphibious, given how crucial water is to life (and how life on our planets started in the sea): as a result The Sea Devils (and the Silurians and indeed Sil later on) are arguably as true to life as any DW monster we have (give or take the string vests added at the last minute to cover up how bare the costumes looked, an effect that works a lot better than it should).Unlike The Ogrons, stupid ape-aliens who seem an odd match for one of the smartest people the universe has ever seen, The Sea Devils make sense as part of the plan and give The Master a ‘navy’ of his very own; as Earth natives they know their way round this planet better than he does and can do all the underwater things he can’t. The only thing missing are UNIT and even they don’t feel like to big a hole given that they’ve been substituted with naval extras who actually look like they know what they’re doing. Often times a promising DW script collapses in the way its filmed and the sets and location work can make or break the best of them but not here: we get more outside shots than ever before, the navy’s extra support running to lots of filming round Portsmouth and The isle Of Wight (you only need to compare this story to the ’other’ underwater DW story, ‘The Underwater Menace’ – this story’s daft antithesis in every way – to see what difference it makes filming outside as compared to inside a big fish tank in a TV studio). The result is a story that might not do anything other stories don’t do but does most of it better: the plot moves at a rate of knots with some classic cliffhangers, the monsters are memorable, The Master is a real threat rather than a pantomime villain, all the parts are perfectly cast, there are action sequences a-plenty but some intelligence in the script and witty wordplay when the characters do actually speak, in an ‘underwater’ setting that hadn’t been tried before (and isn’t matched the few times they’ve tried it since)...basically if you don’t like this story then this series probably isn’t for you. Considering that this story only existed so that Hulke could ‘correct’ a mistake he’d made with the dating for ‘The Silurians’ ,which was pointed out in a snooty letter to The Radio Times (he picked the ‘Silurian’ period because it sounded a suitably DWish name but Earth wasn’t capable of supporting life as complex at the time so Hulke corrected the dating to the ‘Eocene’ period here, which sounds more like a washing detergent; most historians reckon the Eocene period is a tad ambitious for life too) it’s remarkable just how much this story gets right, trading the depth of the deep-sea dive of ‘The Silurians’ for a boating trip that’s far more fun and visual. Not many DW stories work all the way through without too much going wrong somewhere but this one manages to be pretty darn spiffing all round, nautical – but nice.

+ There’s a lot of model work in this story and a great number of oil rigs and submarines that look as impressive as any model shots in the series even now. A bit too impressive in one case: long-standing DW model maker and sub creator Mat Irvine was interviewed by Naval Intelligence over how he managed to build a prop that was identical to a secret sub they had been working on for years. It was actually a model kit picked up at Woolworths, but touched up with a number of other features including an extra propeller that happened to be in the exact place it was on the real one. The Navy were spooked by the coincidence and thought it had to be the result of a leak (never a good thing to have around a submarine), but really it just goes to show the extra thought and attention to detail that went into all the model shots in DW (though, because of time and budget, not all are as good as this one): if I was designing a vehicle from scratch Mat is exactly the sort of person I’d be hiring, making miracles out of next to nothing.

- You’re director Michael E Briant (on his second DW story but already seen as a ‘safe pair of hands’). You’ve been handed one of the better DW scripts to film. You’ve got the perfect actors lined up to say the words. The navy are bending backwards to be helpful. This looks as if its going to be one of the best DW stories ever, if only because everyone involved knows what they’re doing. And then composer Malcolm Clarke chooses this story to deliver a curve-ball with one of DW’s most experimental scores (music being the thing that tends to arrive at the last minute and which the director has least control over, no matter how many production meetings you try to have making sure everyone’s on the same page its impossible to direct a composer the same way you can an actor, cameraman or prop builder). It’s terribly distracting, often at all the worst moments and sounds like a cement mixer being played underwater by an orchestra at war with a jazz band while both are being bludgeoned to death with a synthesiser. While some DW monsters deserve a gonzo ‘theme tune’ of their own (‘The Krotons’ or ‘The Quarks’ come to mind) ‘The Sea Devils’ are the ‘wrong’ sort of monster for this, they’re too...earthy somehow. Even if they live under the sea. Some fans admittedly think this is one of the best musical scores of all if only for being so alien. While I’ll stand up for any fan’s rights to have any opinion they choose, let’s face it some fans are just plain weird: this score is the biggest atonal mess in the series.