I’d not realised I’d neglected The Event Library for so long, despite several pressing reasons to leave it to one side. Doctor Who is still ticking over, as the 2022 specials make their appearances at selected holidays. Legend of the Sea Devils was perhaps the most theatrical (though not cinematic) Doctor Who for some time, most of the action taking place on sailing ship or underwater base sets. One could believe one was watching a live stage experience where the actors were on a giant multi-level stage and moving up and down between the two, with a water tank to the side and lighting indicating changes of ship or time, with plenty of dry ice to cover personnel moves.
The return of the Sea Devils for the first time since 1984 resurrected, deservedly, one of the most arresting monster realisations from all Doctor Who. I was pleased to see John Friedlander, who gave the amphibian people their boggle-eyed befinned appearance for 1972’s The Sea Devils, named in the closing credits as their original designer; a pity, though, that the creator of the Sea Devils was named as ‘Malcom Hulke’. That missing ‘l’ in Malcolm felt appropriate, as the Sea Devils’ reworking for this story diminished them a little. It took me a while to realise that the Sea Devil leader was meant to be teleporting in and out of scenes rather than using a cloaking device; this technology seemed too advanced for a species which until now have been paralleled fairly closely with contemporary humans. This sympathy, good and ill, was understood (regarding the Sea Devils’ reptilian equivalents the Silurians) by Chris Chibnall in his 2010 story The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, but here it is abandoned in favour of thoroughgoing othering. There’s a good amount of swashbuckling, as promised, though just not enough of the Doctor crossing swords in the main fight scene. The fate of Marsissus (as I don’t believe he was ever named in dialogue) at the end of Ji-Hun’s sword is a nod towards a pirate morality which the script doesn’t have time to explore. Yet the rapidity with which Ji-Hun and Dan earlier despatched the Sea Devil crew with two sword-slashes was alarmingly brutal, though I did laugh at Dan’s line about his mam nevertheless.
The summary deaths of the Sea Devils (perhaps budget prohibited their losing a wider battle more evenly and with more variety) is in keeping with the second consecutive Doctor Who story to work as a sort of game. Unlike in Eve of the Daleks, there are no restarts, though the Doctor and the Sea Devil leader are possessed of special access to specific levels in certain circumstances. The general sense was of actors negotiating their characters through a large obstacle course and making sure they were not in the wrong place when the balloon went up – or perhaps in this case the bubble went down.
There have been phases in the history of Doctor Who when the appeal of a story might lie in its potential rather than what was realised on screen. We might be living through one of those now. The failure of the episode to explain what made Madame Ching a ‘pirate queen’ has been widely commented upon. Ji-Hun is not a historical figure, but it’s been pointed out (by Jason Finch) that his name recalls the mariner Zheng He (1371-1433/35), who travelled across the coasts and islands of south and south-east Asia, East Africa and Arabia, commanding ‘treasure ships’ which impressed remote territories with Chinese wealth, might and trading opportunities. He and Madame Ching are made into bridges between historical fiction about Chinese pirates and the Eurocentric Caribbean pirates. Madam Ching is seeking the lost treasure of a ship with a Spanish name, which Ji-Hun had located nearly three centuries before. There’s more to be mined from the presentation in Doctor Who of two figures of fame and notoriety in China – though I think Zheng He has been depicted as a ‘national hero’ more than Madam Ching – and the incorporation of Chinese history into British mythologies.
Lingering in the memory is the episode’s treatment of the love felt by Yaz for the Doctor, and the Doctor for Yaz. The sequence on the ocean floor was a sublime still point, one of the rare glimpses of inner lives in this era, and more cherishable than most. It’s entirely characteristic of this Doctor that she should protect herself from expressions of feeling by combining them with more material existential crises. Chris Chibnall’s showrunnership has relied on the audience to fill in character development between episodes much more than his twenty-first-century predecessors did. The credibility of the Doctor-Yaz relationship has until very recently relied much more on the performances of Jodie Whittaker and Mandip Gill than on anything foregrounded in the text. Nevertheless, I appreciated the Doctor’s reluctance to commit to Yaz – and we can think of all the reasons why this relationship could and would hurt both of them – and Yaz’s maturity in being able to discuss and to some extent accept the Doctor’s frailty and fragility when the Doctor might be presuming Yaz’s position rather than understanding it, and of all the script – where co-writer Ella Road is credited before Chris Chibnall – this rings the most true.
There are several times when this armchair (well, settee) programme-maker would have made different choices, particularly regarding editing (from sunny beach to apparently nearby wet village) and dialogue which occasionally puts walls between viewer and audience. (Why does the lead Sea Devil refer to water as ‘aqua’ once? The Doctor’s ‘Lookng for adventure and often finding it’ falls as flat as ‘Next stop, everywhere’ at the end of Resolution three years ago.) However, performances more than held their lines even if few were really stretched, John Bishop and Marlowe Chan-Reeves worked well together as master sidekick and apprentice, though Madam Ching, if explored, is a problematic parallel for the Doctor. There were extraordinary moments and the closing scenes on the beach offered welcome possibilities. It was good to see Di again after her traumatised depature in The Vanquishers, and presumably she will turn up in the enticingly-trailed centenary episode. This was definitely Covid-era television – how absent the pirate crews! – and one felt the limitations. Nevertheless, Legend of the Sea Devils cut a dash through its unspecial running time with some wit and much dedication, though there remains a sense that a more polished and captivating version remains just out of reach in some unvisitable alternate universe.
The Event Library 