The Myrka Takes Quite a Lot To Impress (Legend of the Sea Devils)
It’s April 17th, 2022. Harry Styles is at number one with “As It Was.” Jack Harlow, Dave, and Cat Burns also chart. The biggest news since Eve of the Daleks is Russia invading Ukraine. The Gray report on Boris Johnson’s COVID parties emerges, and Boris Johnson is subsequently fined for his breaking of the law. Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, Microsoft buys Activision, and the state of Florida outlaws telling children gay people exist.
Somewhere in there I download and watch this. I don’t really remember that, though. What I remember is a few weeks earlier, on April 2nd, when the trailer drops. I’m in Connecticut again, called in to take care of my father while my mother and sister go to a family wedding. It was over a decade on from his stroke now, and he was just frail and couldn’t safely be alone that long. Penn and I loaded our computers into the back of the cars—Wacom tablet and all for Penn—and we unpacked in the old office where I used to log onto rec.arts.doctorwho via the VAX and spent a few days just working there and taking care of him. I wrote a bunch of the Big Numbers chapter of Last War in Albion, and Penn drew issue 3 of Britain a Prophecy—the scene with Queen Elizabeth.
I watched The Sea Devils itself in that house, on tapes he made off PBS. I can’t remember how that tape worked. I think The Sea Devils was the thing labeled on it, and then there were probably two or three unlabeled bonus features—something like the poorly tracked version of The Time Warrior, or one of the Peter Cushing movies, or part four and only part four of The Caves of Androzani. But it could have been the other way around. I don’t know. The room where I watched them has long since been gut renovated, turned into the apartment where I spent some time living with my wife while writing the chunk of the blog from late Tom Baker into the Wilderness Years. It was where I lived when the shooting happened. Penn stayed in that apartment once too, dogsitting for me with the abusive ex-boyfriend he these days describes as the transmasc equivalent of joining the army to get the girl beaten out of you.
It’s wonderful to spend time with my dad. I cook for him—I remember chicken parmesan and steak au poivre. We watch a movie every night—CODA, But I’m a Cheerleader, Knives Out, and Annihilation, in his ranking. We leave and vow that we should just do it again some time, to give my mother a break from the constant caregiving, because it’s just so nice to see him.
It turns out to be the last time I do.
Legend of the Sea Devils, meanwhile, turns out to be another iteration of the Chibnall era’s paranoid recreation of the Nathan-Turner era—an episode of television that can, rather astonishingly, be described as Warriors of the Deep done wrong. (Warriors of the Deep I watched on a PAL videotape my mother imported for me.) It is an astonishing failure of television. The rumors for what exactly went wrong are substantial. Massive VFX failures caused by insufficient lead time? An incoherent edit mandated by Chinese broadcasters (who were making up a nontrivial portion of the budget) making unexpected post-shooting demands about the portrayal of Chinese history? Just a bunch of people who were very bad at their jobs working exhaustedly after a ten month stretch of pandemic filming? The stories haven’t leaked yet, but I’m sure they’re amazing.
I spent the second entry of this era carefully taking apart the failures of a standard issue Chris Chibnall script. Why not spend the second to last doing the same, savoring in detail just how breathtakingly incompetent it all was?
Let’s start in the cold open, which at first seems like it’s going to chug along at an ordinary level of Chibnall badness. You’ve got a “character is off to die” sequence that couldn’t be more clunkily transparent if the character were a veteran cop on his last day before retirement. You’ve got said character then arriving at the statue of a Sea Devil he’s sworn to defend shortly after it’s already been destroyed, because why would you give a character any agency or let their decisions matter. You’ve got sub-Whedon quippiness like “You have no idea what you’re doing!” “I was about to say the same to you… BEFORE I KILL YOU!” But then things get markedly odder—the statue explodes, and then the obviously about to die guy is struck down by a Sea Devil instead of by the pirate woman he’d been confronting.
What’s striking about this is how utterly incoherent the underlying pacing is. There’s the shot of the explosion (which leaves empty air in its wake, as opposed to a Sea Devil that had been trapped inside), then a shot of the man lying in the mud and waking up, then a reverse shot of the Sea Devil swinging his sword, then a shot of the man screaming but, conspicuously, not being struck by a sword or anything like that. Pirate lady, meanwhile, has simply vanished from the scene. It’s baffling, not simply in the sense of “why are you doing it this way,” but in the sense that the visual storytelling is simply not working, such that it is impossible to actually parse events on screen.
And the problems compound rapidly. There’s a subsequent scene of the Sea Devil massacring the village in which it is plainly obvious that they did not actually have a Sea Devil costume on set at the same time as the villagers. We get a series of preposterous shot/reverse sequences cutting between the Sea Devil swinging a glowing sword around and villagers falling over as if struck by a sword that is mysteriously completely absent from the frame. Then the Doctor, Yaz, and Dan show up in to have a confrontation in which, once again, they never actually appear on screen with the Sea Devil—we just alternate between direct to camera shots of the Doctor and the Sea Devil talking. This scene culminates in Yaz and Dan springing a trap on the Sea Devil despite the fact that they just arrived and clearly had no time in which to set up the trap. The Sea Devil escapes, and we immediately cut back to pirate lady (finally named as Madame Ching) getting up, having apparently just slept through the massacre of the village. She examines the body of dead guy, at which point dead guy’s son (who, astonishingly, never gets named on screen despite being one of the episode’s main characters) appears out of nowhere having also apparently not been killed in the aforementioned massacre of the village. This is followed shortly by the Doctor and company similarly apparating into the scene, at which point we finally cut to the Sea Devil doing a villain monologue to a bunch of other Sea Devils whose arrival is given the impressive non-explanation of “the call went out, and you awoke.” When we cut back to the heroes, Dan and Nameless Other Guy are sitting on the beach deciding to sneak onto a pirate ship. This is, to be clear, their first conversation.
And the thing is, the whole episode is assembled like this. There are fades to black that are simply inserted mid-scene, at wholly arbitrary points. As I’ve noted, theories on what happened here abound, but the result is an episode that looks literally unfinished—as though it should cut to an aging Mandip Gill narrating a missing sequence. Certainly that’s the implication of the forty-seven minute runtime—shorter than any regular season episode of the Chibnall era save the also blatantly botched Orphan 55. Even twenty-nine episodes into the Chibnall era this feels shockingly, jarringly incompetent.
But honestly, even if there is missing footage that would fill some of these gaps (and it would only ever be some—they clearly simply do not have the coverage needed to make a coherent fight scene) one is left to suspect that the episode would still be an incoherent mess. Like, sure, maybe that scene in which, as the ocean floor is visibly crumbling in front of them, the Doctor muses to Yaz “You know the ocean floor? It’s not really there anymore” is just a bit of botched CGI or a directorial error, just like the scene in which characters look up at the stars in what is plainly broad daylight. But this is still an episode that engages in such gripping exposition as the Doctor saying, in a horrified voice, “if that’s a plutonic crystal, and your systems below are fluo-geomagnetic” as if it makes any sense whatsoever. Like, that’s not even technobabble; that’s just babble. Apparently the Sea Devils’ plan is to reverse the Earth’s magnetic poles, “south to north, north to south, longitude to latitude,” which is both causing the stars to appear to move and will cause the polar ice caps to melt and flood the earth. The only way that any of this makes sense is if it’s a concentrated plot to murder Tat Wood when he tries to explain it in About Time someday, assuming he survives trying to explain how Chris Chibnall thinks cannonballs work. Otherwise it’s the sort of scheme that you could take to Professor Zaroff to streamline and clarify. And it doesn’t even have underwater ballet dancers.
Nobody else has coherent motivations either. Madame Ching’s crew have been captured by pirates who apparently demand that she recover a specific centuries-lost treasure to secure their release. Ji-Hun has looted said treasure in what is by all appearances an elaborate double cross against the Sea Devils, who it’s never really clear how or why lost it. Dan spontaneously becomes a killing machine with a sword. There’s nothing holding any of this together.
Back in 1984, with actual Warriors of the Deep, there was an inquest into why it was made given that it was “unfit for transmission.” And to some extent you wish something similar had happened here. But for all its flaws, Warriors of the Deep at least gives the sense that the people involved were trying. Yes, it was motivated by the same fanwank Ian Levine appeasement project that this was, still just as doomed thirty-eight years later, but Johnny Byrne and Eric Saward were at least trying to say things about violence, war, and automation. Whereas this has literally nothing beyond “look! Sea Devils!” This wasn’t just unfit for transmission; it was unfit for production.
And that’s not even about the Sea Devils. I’ve spent much of this era railing against the word “content” and howling about the horrors of franchises. But that’s not quite what’s wrong here, even if Sea Devils are perilously bottom of the barrel for returning monsters. (At this point the Ogrons are the only recurring classic series monsters never to be brought back, and given the racial implications of low-intelligence ape monsters they’re unlikely to be.) Substitute some brand new flavor of sea monster and you wouldn’t suddenly conjure themes or substance into being. Those who praise this sort of thing tend to use the word “escapism,” and to talk about how awful everything is and how people need a respite from reality. But at the end of the day, this confuses art with drinking yourself into a stupor. The idea that it’s for tuning out—that it exists for the quixotic pursuit of escaping reality—is a lie sold by people who would prefer us to just sit on our sofas and dutifully renew our HBO Max subscriptions. The purpose of art isn’t anesthetic.
Quite the opposite, in fact. The reason I’ve gone thirteen years and a million words writing about Doctor Who isn’t that it’s unique for providing a lens to look at the world in which it was made. All art does that. The purpose of art is that it sharpens and clarifies your engagement with the world. The only unique and interesting thing about Doctor Who that isn’t, at the end of the day, just an idiosyncratic pathology of my emotional relationship with it is the fact that there’s six decades of it, which is to say that it’s had enough time to engage with many different versions of the world. That’s why this blog worked and the one about video games from 1985 to 1994 didn’t.
But crawl this script for something it has to say and you’ll come up empty. There are no metaphors, no human relationships, no interesting ideas, nothing. The closest it comes is the Thasmin stuff, and as we noted last week the only thing it does there is decide against exploring the relationship for the explicit reason that there might actually be some substance there. It’s not merely a nadir of the era or of Doctor Who, but a nadir of art itself: a story with no ambitions to speak of that nevertheless manages to fail at all of them.
November 4, 2024 @ 5:45 am
And then, even after all of that, this is guaranteed to be someone’s favourite episode of Doctor Who.
One to go.
November 4, 2024 @ 6:59 am
At least its potentially iffy and insensitive content was defended loudly on his social media by Mick Lewis, who played one of the Sea Devil extras and was very quick to shout down any accusations of there ever having been anything tone-deaf in this production.
That’d be the same Mick Lewis who wrote “Combat Rock” and “Rags” for BBC Books, two of the wildest swings the PDAs ever made, in which there’s lots of savage Indonesian cannibals, penis gourds aplenty, copious repetition of “whore”, etc; and the man whose big idea in 2002 or so for bringing the character of the Doctor back was (and I quote) “as a whorin’, drinkin’ b*****d. One of the Wild Bunch with a sort of conscience, but you’re never too sure. That or bring her back as a prostitute. Doctor Whore? …am I being glib?”
You get the defenders you deserve!
November 4, 2024 @ 7:31 am
The PDAs did not always succeed with the 3rd Doctor.
“Devil Goblins from Neptune”. I dunno. They came from beyond Neptune and they were Devil Goblins or something.
“Last of the Gadarene” Gatiss runs a Letts emulator – I don’t see the point of utter traditionalism.
“Katastrophea” – Dicks running a Dicks emulator. Felt like discarded script from 1972.
“Verdigris” works if Iris Wildthyme is your character of choice, I suppose. But I left my copy in a motel room and didn’t bother to go back for it.
But “Rags” … I can’t remember much except thinking it was Ugly. I suppose I should credit the author for trying something different with the character and companions, but it was just Ugly.
November 4, 2024 @ 1:53 pm
I’ll go to bat for Verdigris as a masterpiece. Never bothered with the others, and there’s no way any book could live up to “Devil Goblins from Neptune” as a title, anyway.
November 4, 2024 @ 4:40 pm
I mean, in his defence the savage cannibals are the good guys in Combat Rock. The totally-not-the-Indonesian colonial government is worse!
November 4, 2024 @ 7:22 am
Bringing back Ogrons: I see the issues here. They’ve always been hench-beings, never protagonists or antagonists in their own right. Larry Miles had a go at rehabilitating Ogrons in Interference: Book One with a supporting character who helps Sarah Jane and K-9 at one point. As always with Miles, an interesting read with lots of intriguing ideas that, alas, would not automatically transfer to a TV episode.
November 4, 2024 @ 8:41 am
I think it would be reasonable and in-keeping with other stuff to bring the Ogrons back as “Badass Space-Mercenaries”, and reinterpret their low intelligence as rather being about toxic machismo, in the vein of Warhammer Orcs (Having said it out loud, omg, I’m falling in love with the idea of using Orgons as a proxy for Toxic Manosphere Figures who speak in broken english because pronouns are too woke, who the doctor defeats because actually spending effort to fight a WOMAN would be GAY), but perhaps this would be a little too easy). Use them in place of the Mire or swap them in place of the Judoon in “Fugitive of the Etc” in order to keep the Judoon as actual space-cops.
I dunno if it would be better than just forgetting about the Ogrons, but it wouldn’t be a Per-Se disaster like the Sea Devils.
The Ogrons were always a weird misdirect because it seemed like their purpose was to have someone to fight in episode 1 because it was contractually forbidden for the Daleks to show up until the cliffhanger. You were supposed to see them and think “Oh, it’s the generic mercenary mooks; I wonder who they are working for this time?” which is a strange expectation given that (a) despite the Doctor saying that they were generic space mercenaries who worked for whoever would pay them, they only ever worked for the Daleks and (b) “of the Daleks” was right there in the title.
November 5, 2024 @ 3:18 am
Hmm, I had been thinking about a story redeeming the Ogrons as people from an impoverished group who became mercenaries just to survive, with their seeming low intelligence being the result of not being able to produce the sounds for human languages very well or something like that. Not sure that would have worked, sure would have been a disaster if I had tried to write it…
Anyway I now prefer your idea of Manosphere Ogrons!
November 5, 2024 @ 6:13 am
“seeming low intelligence being the result of not being able to produce the sounds for human languages” is partly how Miles writes Lost Boy (?) in Interference. I like the mercenary angle, too.
November 4, 2024 @ 7:55 am
Maybe interesting to compare and contrast with Planet of the Dead: both thematically slight and light on ongoing character and plot arcs, intended to give the characters a fun time before the end. Both, indeed, hampered by behind the scenes trouble, though Planet of the Dead in the end could successfully incorporate its damaged bus into the action whereas the handling of whatever the hell happened here causes the episode to simply stop being coherent.
Planet of the Dead gets away with it (though not by much: I believe it was widely received as disappointing at the time, which must be right because that’s how I felt) because the era carries a lot of goodwill, because David Tennant had been a front and centre Doctor such that you sensibly can pitch This Doctor Just Has a Fun Adventure as an attraction shortly before he explodes forever, because the behind the scenes operation is well oiled enough that it can just make this work even though the key prop is smashed in halfway through filming.
Conversely, Legend of the Sea Devils comes from a series that’s been leaking goodwill with a lot of the audience (at least the audience that are here for this comparison) and that, crucially, has never really asked us to believe in the charisma of Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor. That’s not to say she’s not likeable, that she’s not fun to watch, but the show has never noticed or believed in that in the same way it clearly saw David Tennant through the eye of the camera and thought “what a guy!”. So to ask us to enjoy her and her friends swashbuckling around without any meaningful foundation is a weird stretch for the penultimate episode. She’s always been written lower in the mix, stumbling into things, equivocal, not necessarily able or even willing to topple empires and save the day. To pitch a ‘romp’ for this cast is to fundamentally understand the show you’ve been making for four years.
And of course, it’s a production that is not competently run enough to salvage something from whatever backstage blow this was dealt.
November 4, 2024 @ 8:16 am
There are a handful of stories which I just can not hold onto in my mind. I know they happened, I know I watched them, but no matter how many times I experience them, they just won’t stick in my mind. Like “The Awakening”.
Last Thursday, my son abruptly transitioned from being a not-we to being a dedicated Doctor Who fan. I am pleased with this development though I’d prefer if it hadn’t manifested as him downloading the entirety of series 5 onto his school chromebook so he could binge-watch it instead of paying attention during class time on Friday. So add “The Power of Three” and “Mummy on the Orient Express” to that list. He was upset that the Shakri have no impact on the rest of the series. He’s the sort of person who expects everything to be about “THE LORE”.
(Unrelated to Doctor Who, but for some reason, the movie ‘Alien’ also does this to me. I realize it is an important film in the history of sci-fi-horror, I can look at stills of it and recognize them as iconic, but the movie just will not stick in my brain)
Anyway, I remember that this happened and that I watched it. And most of the Chibnall era is a bit of a blur of course – someone recently quoted in my hearing a Trey Parker quote which, remarkably given the source, seemed apt: If your story can be described by a list of events separated with ‘and then’, you don’t have a plot, just a pile of things; to have a plot, your events should be joined by things like “and therefore” or, “but then”. But this is a big old nothing. I know it happens in China and there are pirates but no piracy and Sea Devils are there but I don’t recall anyone doing anything or why or how or… Anything at all.
November 4, 2024 @ 4:35 pm
Yep, I don’t even recognise the stuff El talks about as something I would be likely to remember if I watched it a second time. In fact, the only thing I remember at all (beyond the basic ‘historical China, with Sea Devils’) is a really ridiculous leap onto a boat that IIRC made me laugh out loud at how unconvincing it was.
I can’t find it in my heart to hate it, though; it’s not well made enough for that, and has too little to say. It takes something actively toxic and at least vaguely competent to really rouse my ire (Kerblam!, I’m looking at you).
November 4, 2024 @ 4:57 pm
Most of the Chibnell era episodes were like this for me in an extreme sense. My friend and I would avoid watching for a while, then hate watch a batch of three or four in an afternoon. And each time there was a “previously on…” bit at the beginning I was thankful because I could not remember what happened in the episode that we had finished literally minutes earlier.
In a way, it’s kind of like the show was produced by The Silence. So that’s neat, kinda.
November 4, 2024 @ 5:11 pm
There’s a LOT of the Chibnall era which has that real “slides directly out of your brain five seconds after you’ve watched it” forgettability factor, isn’t there? Legend of the Sea Devils might be the peak though because it’s an episode where I can’t even remember the title without looking it up, which given that four firths of it is the stultifyingly obvious “of the Sea Devils” is incredibly impressive.
November 4, 2024 @ 7:49 pm
I thought you were being hyperbolic here, and then I realised a few posts down that this episode is called “Legend of the Sea Devils” and NOT “Power of the Sea Devils”.
November 4, 2024 @ 8:42 pm
Right? It’s slotted into my head as “the one with the Sea Devils” and my brain refuses to remember more specifics about it – and I can’t really blame it.
November 5, 2024 @ 5:59 am
Quite the opposite for me. I find it much more memorable than most of the era because of how incompetently it was put together. The early scenes Sandifer describes can’t be washed out of my brain, nor can the murderer-Dan bit.
(I mean that bit really gets me; of all Doctor Who monsters, it’s really the Silurians and Sea Devils that get the “these are actually a people with a good point, as well as monsters” treatment regularly. Even the Ice Warriors with their Klingon-nobility don’t get that. So making Sea Devils the monsters that Dan happily slays is a baffling idea even before you get to the point that the “everyday bloke” archetype is the one that can take on marauding trained warriors with a sword and win.)
Orphan-55 literally doesn’t ring any bells for me. I’ve watched it, but I’m really not sure if it’s the one with Jay from the Inbetweeners with green hair or the plastic waste one where the Earth dies at the end. But The Legend of the Sea Devils will always bring to mind that incredibly poor sword fight between the Doctor and the Sea Devil leader, as well as those bits above.
In my opinion, it’s not forgettable. Although I might wish it was.
November 5, 2024 @ 7:24 am
I can remind you of Orphan 55 with one word: “BENNYYYYYYY!”
November 4, 2024 @ 9:27 am
I’ve recently rewatched the Pip and Jane Baker stories and they gave me a similar feeling to this , in that they are just a load of things that happen strung together without much sense of a story. The scene where they spring the trap on the Sea Devil was one of those “eh?” moments. It was reminsiscent of a 1960s Batman epsiode except that there it would be an intentional joke that Batman was so implausibly well prepared for every eventuality. Halfway through this episode I seriously began to think that this was the moment that I should stopped watching Doctor Who.
November 4, 2024 @ 9:29 am
Surely there would be “no complications” with bringing the Ogrons back?
November 4, 2024 @ 9:29 am
Sorry, couldn’t resist
November 4, 2024 @ 10:37 am
Honestly one of the more baffling aspects about this story is the co-writing credit because there are few ways in which it makes any sense. Was this a “Ella Road writes it and Chris Chibnall rewrites it to a sufficient degree that he feels he should put his name on it” situation? Because if so it’s an absolutely dismal failure of a rewrite. Was she fulfilling a Malorie Blackman role of providing, like, historical/cultural background or something along those lines? Chris Chibnall single-handedly producing a disaster of a script on this level would be one thing, par for the course by this point in the era. The fact that two writers couldn’t manage something even 10% competent? I mean, face it Tegan, he’s drowned.
November 4, 2024 @ 11:29 am
Pip and Jane Baker?
November 4, 2024 @ 11:48 am
It sounds like Ella Road was brought in mega-frantically with a last minute panic to write a draft in about two or three days, which is why this was never going to be her best work, regardless of her apparent acclaim elsewhere. I assume she had particular input into the Thasmin scene(s), but admittedly that could just be me leaping to that assumption because she’s a queer woman.
November 4, 2024 @ 11:50 am
Wikipedia says “Road wrote the episode with Chibnall at his house in Wales over the course of three days. Road stated that she initially expected Chibnall to have an idea for the story drafted when she was hired, but this was not the case. Script editors Becky Roughan and Caroline Buckley also participated in brainstorming sessions.”
So, it actually took four people to make something this competent.
November 4, 2024 @ 12:10 pm
You’ve gotta love that middle sentence, which is peak “oh you haven’t even… you mean there’s no…? righty-ho then”. Similar with how Aisling Bea’s agent asked to see the Eve of the Daleks script before agreeing, and Chibnall couldn’t send it to them because it wasn’t written yet.
November 5, 2024 @ 7:39 pm
I remember a review from a buffy forum back in the day that talked about how the more names on an episode, the worse it was going to be, because all the visions would crowd each other out and edit over each other until mush is leftover. Throwing more talent at a problem is more indicative of insecurity and fretting than the actual ability of those talents to create something cool. That observation feels somewhat relevant here—four people banging out a script under the leadership of an already deficient writer/editor was always going to be a mess. Then beyond that you have whatever the hell happened behind the scenes on this episode, which we know tantalizingly little about.
November 4, 2024 @ 11:48 am
Chibnall’s written two stories for the Pertwee Lizardmen. The first is about how they’re messy, ordinary people just like us; the second has John Bishop slaughter five of them as a bit.
The obvious comparison for this is Orphan 55, both are blatant examples of “something visibly went horribly wrong here” in ways that NuWho generally avoids. Thing is, I’m one of a slim few who’ll meekly go to bat for there being a decent episode buried somewhere within O55; LotSD might not be my least favourite episode, but it’s the only one where I genuinely cannot find an episode that works in there.
As far as I can tell the only real reason for this to exist was to neatly wrap up Thasmin so they didn’t have to deal with it in Power, and, uh, wow. There’s very little I can say that hasn’t been said better elsewhere, but it really astonishes me how eagerly this thin gruel was swallowed. I cannot believe that this was genuinely one of the best queer romances people have seen, and frankly I find it hilarious how “10/Martha was toxic” has become received fan wisdom while the Doctor telling Yaz “yeah I had a wife, but I won’t fw you for, uh, reasons” and it never being fucking brought up again is even a debate.
Honestly this was the first time I wondered if the show as a whole should’ve ended with 12. There have been some fantastic episodes since (I still love Demons, and RTD2 has had a fair few bangers), but is this all it’s gonna be now? The Doctor going from Curse-Of-The-Time-Lords to “oh I should let people in” and back again in an endless circle? Surely we must be able to do something else with the character?
November 4, 2024 @ 2:36 pm
My main memories of this are people swinging onto the deck of a ship from… somewhere? Maybe the magical place that net came from?
The Doctor calling them “Sea Devils”, when that was clearly just a nickname given to them in their initial appearance. And the “Sea Devils” just reacting like “Yep, that’s our name.”
And wondering why, in the midst of Covid, one would do a story that would require an explanation for why a town is missing most of its citizens, and a ship is missing all of its crew. If you’ve got limitations, make them work for you, not against you.
Also, yet another story that ends with The Doctor about to sacrifice themselves, only for someone to step up and say “No, please, let me be the one to die.”
They could have just skipped this one and put the extra money into the surrounding episodes.
November 5, 2024 @ 10:17 pm
It is kind of… impressive(?) that in an era of stories that lack aboutism and only really exist for the sake of having Doctor Who on the telly, we get this one managing to feel so outrageously pointless. In terms of sheer dropoff in coherency and point, it’s to the rest of the Chibnall era what the Chibnall era is to the rest of Doctor Who.
November 4, 2024 @ 3:49 pm
the visual storytelling is simply not working, such that it is impossible to actually parse events on screen
I watched this one with my younger kid, and we quickly realized that the story would never be as entertaining as picking apart the basic continuity failures we were witnessing. So…thanks for the father-daughter bonding experience, anyway.
November 4, 2024 @ 5:42 pm
On the episode: for me, the most notable thing about Legend of the Sea Devils is how perfectly it sums up the total collapse of Chibnall’s ambitions for the historical episodes in Series 11.
I’m sure I’ve gone on about this before here or on your Discord before, but hell with it, I’ll rehash it again because it merits repeating: Chibnall historicals did not used to be like this. They used to be Rosa, Demons of the Punjab, and The Witchfinders, and for all that those stories had their issues, they were going for something a damn slight more ambitious than this, and there was a distinct and specific niche for them which had a different purpose from the “light sci-fi adventure” episodes. They’re clearly positioned to inform and educate as much as entertain in a way the show hadn’t tried since the early Hartnell era.
Trying to bring back the spirit of season 1 nearly 60 years later might have been a quixotic endeavour, but on the other hand it’s a motive which simultaneously would please the Ian Levine sorts (and the corner of Chibnall’s heart which will always be that awkward teen taking Pip and Jane Baker to task) but also represents a worthwhile experiment, if only because it had been so long since the show had tried anything of that nature that merely making the attempt was in and of itself novel.
Sure, we can have legitimate objections to how Rosa wrangles the Doctor and her fam into doing a racist act for the sake of timeline conservation or the perfunctory nature in which The Witchfinders engages with 13’s gender (something the rest of the era simply hasn’t bothered to touch), or the way Demons of the Punjab attempts to engage with Partition whilst chickening out of properly examine the British responsibility for it, but it is at least possible to have philosophical objections to that episode of that level of depth.
(OK, Demons also expects us to believe characters investigating the body of a murdered holy man would somehow miss the gunshot wound that killed him, that’s kind of bad, but it doesn’t derail people’s appreciation of that episode to nearly the extent the conga line of catastrophe does with this episode.)
In other words, there’s substance there to take issue with the way there just isn’t with Legend, and part of the reason there is that substance is that there is a good faith attempt to attempt to engage with the history. There just isn’t in Legend; you could transpose the entire story to an alien planet or the far future or the prehistoric past or any other historical culture we know of which had a seafaring tradition and bandits predating thereon and it would mean just as much: nothing.
On the behind-the-scenes story of this episode: yeah, I’m kind of frantic to hear about that too, because there’s clearly a saga here which we know only fragments of. In terms of the show’s fortunes at this point in time, the closest comparison in the classic show is the collapse of the Sixth Doctor era, and in that case we were spoiled by Eric Saward being rampagingly unprofessional enough to start airing all his grievances in interviews more or less as soon as he walked off the show. The Chibnall era hasn’t yet had its Starburst moment, where someone closely involved in its process rips the mask off to show what was going on underneath the surface.
It’ll come sooner or later, obviously. People stew in their feelings about this sort of thing until they blab, or people retire from the industry and decide “Well, what’s the worst they can do, fire me?” and happen to have sufficient receipts to make a libel action unlikely, or people decide that, god damn it, they’d worked hard on this stuff and people have been terribly unfair about it and it’s at last time to set the record straight about the conditions they were working under so people would give their efforts a fair chance. Personnel will shift over at the management side of the BBC and new regimes will be more relaxed about the errors of their predecessors being exposed – look at how much official Doctor Who stuff acknowledges how badly Colin Baker was treated these days.
Until then, all we have is speculation and innuendo about Chaos In Cardiff.
On the Nathan-Turner comparison: yeah, when I reviewed the 2022 specials on my blog (click my name on this comment for link) I led in with a schtick about Chris Chibnall having nightmares in which he transforms into JNT. Except… there’s a big difference here. John Nathan-Turner didn’t write jack shit, and I don’t think he ever had any intention of doing so, because he at least recognised that limitation and because the BBC had rules against producers and script editors commissioning their own scripts and because word-wrangling was his script editors’ job. And like Graham Williams before him, JNT seems to me to be a producer who was very dependent on the script editor he had – Williams starts out strong because he had Robert Holmes on the job and had a pretty solid final season thanks to Douglas Adams, and JNT started out strong with Christopher Bidmead, ended brilliantly with Andrew Cartmel, and what happened in between we all know and shudder at.
Chibnall doesn’t have that alibi. He doesn’t have a Saward or a Pip and Jane to blame anything on. It’s all on him.
On the blog: dang it, your mention that you were mirroring your article on Ghost Monument with this one made me go and check whether there’s a mirroring pattern throughout the entire Whittaker Eruditorium, so the Rosa article and Eve of the Daleks article would parallel each other and so on until the whole thing meets in the middle at Fugitive of the Judoon. I either didn’t spot the parallels or they aren’t there in many of the pairings, but the idea of that Fugitive of the Judoon is the omphalos at the centre of the era is horribly tempting, if only because Jo Martin was such a tantalising possibility, and led to such a weird conclusion in The Timeless Children which constitutes more or less the sole fragment (other than “the Flux destroyed a bunch of stuff”) that has survived to RTD2.
November 8, 2024 @ 12:09 pm
Obviously this is all on chibnall but one does wonder about the role of matt strevens in all this given that he was consistently the co-exec for the entire era. He seems almost an invisible figure; his only notable contribution seems popping up to give that ill-fated quote about queer representation.
November 8, 2024 @ 1:55 pm
A legitimate question, as is “What was his intended role?”, those being two different things.
November 4, 2024 @ 6:45 pm
I’ve nothing to say about an episode with nothing to say, so instead here’s a minor typo correction for the eventual book: rec.arts.drwho (not “doctorwho”). #quotefileitawayforlater
November 5, 2024 @ 6:22 am
I can honestly say that the only thing I liked about this story was that it inspired a special trailer in which Tiktok breakout star Nathan Evans provided a Doctor Who adaptation of his chart-topping sea-shanty “Wellerman”.
“Soon may the Doctor come to bring us danger, adventure then some; one day when the saving is done she’ll take her leave and go.”
Weirdly, by this time knowing Whittaker was “on the way out”, I found that slightly… melancholic. Which is a stronger reaction than anything the actual episode inspired, apart from: “Oh, they went to the trouble of sourcing the original sound effect from 1972 of a Sea Devil in distress.”
November 5, 2024 @ 7:36 pm
I have nothing as insightful as the rest of the commenters here, but I do want to say this: when was the time that Chibnall got closest to writing competent technobabble/exposition? Like, it’s such a ridiculous gap in his DW writing ability—the man cannot write technobabble to save his life. In this episode he handwaves some shit about inverting the earth’s magnetic fields to melt glaciers. This is stooping low even by the standards of the show where David Tennant fought a monster awoken from vestigial genes in humanity by playing piano at it.
I think the only marginally clever bit of Technobabble I can remember from the Chris Chibnall era was Villa Diodati’s psychic mansion, which of course has the big asterisk of “not actually Chibnall,” and also was somewhat derivative to begin with. Maybe it was the Pting? I genuinely don’t know.
November 7, 2024 @ 7:48 pm
Pretty poor if a writer who grew up on classic Who can’t write decent technobabble. What did he learn from classic Who exactly if he didn’t learn that?
November 5, 2024 @ 10:49 pm
I think what I remember about this one (besides “Don’t let the swords touch your skin!”) is just how revealingly cynical it is: I doubt that Chibnall any interest or passion in the Doctor meeting Madame Ching beyond him googling “FAMOUS HISTORICAL WOMEN”, which… well, makes the fact that Rosa Parks, Mary Seacole and Mary Shelley appeared in the era clearly less about them being worthwhile historical figures who are worth featuring in this show on their own merits. It’s painfully obvious that we only had them show up in Doctor Who because they’re a checklist of Women with Wikipedia pages for the Woman Doctor to meet and rattle off. (No way we’d see the 13th Doctor meet Ada Lovelace if Chibnall had cast a man in the role.) I just think that’s miserable.
(To say nothing how vilely reductive it is to ignore the intersectionality of Rosa Parks’ identity as a black woman in favour of just marketing her as a famous woman so all the white girlies at home can go “omg she’s such an inspiration” as they hear a generic pop song about rising up, but that’s a bigger can of worms.)
November 7, 2024 @ 11:37 am
nitpick but IIRC that song was used frequently in BLM protests (and the director said that’s why it was used)
November 6, 2024 @ 6:33 am
Maybe the single most embarrassing episode of the revived series to watch with non-fans. I mean, is there any competition there?
November 11, 2024 @ 11:37 am
Can confirm with gusto – I watched this with my parents in the room, and watching hardcore pornography would have been a less unpleasant experience.
Not sure if my dad’s constant riffing on the episode’s absolutely glaring failures or my mum snapping at him to give it a rest because we could all see how bad it was and it was making me uncomfortable to keep harping on was worse, but they were a 1-2 punch that takes some beating…
November 11, 2024 @ 11:08 am
(Re-hoisting this from the patreon. If you give El money you could read me blather much earlier. If this is not appealing to you maybe she’ll create a “no-Doctor-Memory tier” for her patreon that will filter me out?)
At last. I’ve been waiting for this one for so long now. Because here is my hot take: this is not the most bewilderingly incompetent episode of Doctor Who produced in the modern era. That’s just the wrong lens to look at it through. What this is, is an unofficial sequel to The Wrath of Eukor.
Okay, a quick digression: back in the 1980s, a newly graduated student filmmaker in Seattle WA by the name of Ryan K. Johnson made a series of unauthorized Doctor Who episodes to be screened at some local conventions. He cast a local stage actress by the name of Barbara Benedetti as the Doctor, and everyone adopted British accents of… let’s say variable levels of fealty. The videos were actually kinda popular on the fan circuit at the time: I remember watching them (on the inevitable 4th-gen VHS copy) at a tiny Doctor Who fan club meeting in Michigan as a teenager. And of course the hook was obvious: a female Doctor! What a novel, quirky concept!
Flash forward nearly 40 years, wherein a female Doctor is still a novel, quirky concept, and we come to Legend of the Sea Devils. From all accounts a last-minute order tacked on to the end of the production run at a time when Chibnall was probably already packing up his office, this obviously presented a number of logistical problems of a really basic sort like “who the hell am I going to get to make this?” And rather than doing what showrunners have traditionally done in this kind of jam and gotten a reliable old hand to crank out a script that could be shot in a warehouse, Chris Chibnall decided to… let a pair of just-graduated students do it.
There’s no getting around this. Haolu Wang, the director, doesn’t even have a wikipedia entry. She does have an IMDB page however, and prior to being hired to shoot the penultimate episode of a season of the BBC’s flagship export show, her directing credits consisted of six short films, the final one of which (“The Pregnant Ground”) was per her website her final film school project.
The resume of Ella Road, the credited co-writer, is at this point nearly as thin: prior to writing the script, her credits consisted of two stage plays and an episode of the British remake of “Call My Agent.”
So yeah: why is this episode like this? Why does everything about it make no sense, from the pacing to the blocking to the setting to the characters’ motivations to the scene-to-scene edits? Because it was literally made by a just-graduated film student. This is a student film being aired under the banner of “Doctor Who”, nominally the most famous show the BBC produces.
You could look at this as the ultimate failure of Chris Chibnall’s alleged primary advantage as a showrunner: a man who was on paper a seasoned professional with decades of TV experience was confronted with a crisis and rather than managing his way out of it, he dumped it into the laps of a pair of talented but inexperienced recent graduates (quite possibly having thought no more about the matter than “let’s hire a director who’s Chinese!”) and let them completely humiliate themselves in public by producing the most unwatchably bad episode of Doctor Who in four decades. And there is a lot to recommend that point of view: little things like “nearly all of the available evidence” and “seriously, just look at it.”
But I choose a redemptive reading: think of “Legend of the Sea Devils” not as a shocking faceplant by a team of alleged professionals. Think of it instead as the highest-budgeted unauthorized fan-made Doctor Who episode ever created, and a long-simmering sequel to one of the most obscure bits of Doctor Who “content” ever produced. Ms. Benedetti and Ms. Whitaker even rocked similar haircuts: it’s the Revenge of Eukor!
And there’s even a kind of happy ending here: amazingly and happily, this did not murder Haolu Wang’s career in its infancy! She’s gone on to do more TV work, including an upcoming episode of Black Mirror. Frankly, RTD should bring her on to do some 2nd-unit work at a minimum: the show owes her one.
Anyway if you’re curious, you can watch The Wrath of Eukor on youtube. It’s not great, but it’s definitely better than “Legend of the Sea Devils”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LgCYTZn1tw