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DOCTOR WHO: LEGEND OF THE SEA DEVILS

Written By:

Kieron Moore
A Sea Devil in Doctor Who: Legend of the Sea Devils

With the clock ticking for Jodie Whittaker’s Time Lord – she’s set to regenerate in her next and final special, airing this autumn – Legend of the Sea Devils set out to be one last fun run-around before the inevitably darker and more dramatic finale; a swashbuckling blockbuster befitting a bank holiday weekend.

On paper, this had a lot going for it. Not only does it have the return of a fan-favourite villain – the Sea Devils having last been seen in 1984’s Warriors of the Deep – but, with the inclusion of pirate queen Madam Ching, it plays into one of the major strengths of Chris Chibnall’s era as showrunner – bringing underexplored historical figures to the fore. The art of creating a good Doctor Who story is about juxtaposition, and in the same way as the excellently titled Mummy on the Orient Express, there’s something about pitting nineteenth-century pirates against Sea Devils – with their own pirate ship, no less – that hits just the right balance of exciting and wacky.

But it doesn’t take long into Legend of the Sea Devils for it to become apparent that the execution doesn’t match up to the concept. Like with the final instalments of the recent Flux, Chris Chibnall and Ella Road’s script tries to pack in a hell of a lot of plot, and not much of it adds up.

From the start, we’re bombarded with things happening, often without much in the way of explanation. There’s a Sea Devil on the loose after being imprisoned in a statue! (Why? If he can be freed by hitting him with a sword, why have the other Sea Devils sat around for 300 years not doing this?) There’s a giant sea monster! (Which attacks Madam Ching’s ship halfway through the episode and then is never seen again. What happens to it?)

It’s odd that so much feels unconcluded when the dialogue is full of so much explanation. That’s partly because there’s a lot to explain, and partly because we’re often being told things that don’t particularly need to be explained. So overbearing and clumsy is the exposition that it borders on funny, especially when crowbarred into the mouths of random character choices: “The Flor de la Mar? I thought that went down off the coast of Sumatra!” says Dan Lewis, a character who has never given any indication of an interest in naval history. It’s a late contender for the worst line of dialogue of the Chibnall era, taking the lead from Lenny Henry’s iconic taunt “Hello friends… or should I say, plane thieves?”

And in this dual mess of “too much plot happening” and “too much plot not making sense”, all the things that should make the episode more than just plot are neglected. There’s no attempt to go deeper into any themes, to make this story about anything. Even the indigenous nature of the Sea Devils – surely necessary to address in any story featuring them or their land-dwelling cousins the Silurians – is brushed over in a couple of expository lines. “That’s bad” says Yaz. Thanks, Yaz. It’s all extremely hollow. (To every idiot who’s ever complained that Doctor Who shouldn’t have politics in – here you go, here’s an episode that takes no stance on anything. Boring, isn’t it?)

The episode’s guest characters, too, are never given the focus they need to be more than just objects of the plot. This is most notable when it comes to Zheng Yi Sao, aka Madam Ching. Ching is a real historical character, a “pirate queen”. This is acknowledged when the Doctor shouts “Madam Ching, Pirate Queen!” But this one expositional outburst is the most we get to know about her. It’s also not backed up by how the plot then uses her. In real life, she truly was a pirate queen, in charge of a fleet of 400 ships, their crews numbering 40-60,000 pirates. So… where are they all?

Obviously, Doctor Who can’t afford 40,000 extras (and COVID restrictions played their part – more on that later), but having her appear on her own because of some vague explanation about everyone being kidnapped, and not even acknowledging the size of her fleet, is ludicrous. This disregard of the most basic, first-paragraph-of-Wikipedia fact about her is especially bad considering that interesting and educational depictions of lesser-known historical figures has been a key strength of Chris Chibnall’s Who; we were hoping for one more such depiction to match the depth given to Rosa Parks, Mary Shelley, and Nikola Tesla, and Legend seriously fails in that regard. There’s one reference to the loss of her sons, which is never picked up on again, and otherwise, she’s just… another character who’s there.

The one interesting bit of character development is in the burgeoning romance between the Doctor and Yaz. We’ll admit to being divided here – it would be hypocritical to be too grumpy about this after having spent the first half of Chibnall’s era moaning about the lack of LGBTQ+ representation compared to his predecessors, and it is nice to see a queer relationship foregrounded on the show. But this romance – Thasmin, as the kids of Who Twitter call it – feels very tacked on at the end of the era, and Yaz has been so underserved as a character that it’s hard to see what the Doctor sees in her; it’s difficult not to cringe at how forced some of the romantic dialogue is. “You’re one of the greatest people I’ve ever known”, the Doctor tells Yaz. No, she isn’t. She’s dull. She’s not even one of the greatest people the Doctor’s met in this episode.

But hey, it’s a swashbuckling pirate adventure, at least we get some swordfights and cool ships to look at, right? Well… It feels unsurprising by this point to be taking apart an episode of Chris Chibnall Doctor Who for not working on a plot level, but Legend also achieves the unusual feat of not fitting together on a visual level either.

There are some individually nice images – the shot of the TARDIS on the sea bed, with fish swimming around the light, is gorgeous, as are some of the sea vistas. But more often than not, it’s a confusing episode to look at. Actions don’t cut together – the heroes are all on Madam Ching’s ship, then run off camera as the Doctor calls “Geronimo!”; we see a wide shot of Ching’s ship about fifty metres away from, and below, the flying Sea Devil ship; and next, they’re all on board the Sea Devil ship, completely fine, and we’re meant to believe they made this massive jump. It’s not just the action sequences that jar – in their first confrontation, we never see the Sea Devil leader in the same shot as the Doctor and her companions. We go from the giant fish swallowing the TARDIS to the Doctor and Yaz emerging from the TARDIS, completely unfazed, in the middle of the Sea Devil base. It starts and stops raining between shots within the same scene.

It’s clear that, more than the usual script issues, something has gone wrong here.

Rumours are abound that there were disputes between the BBC and the VFX company over the workload required for this episode, which perhaps explains the giant monster not coming back for the climax. But the likely cause of the most disruption was the fact that the episode was shot under COVID restrictions; having to keep actors in their bubbles and keep the number of people on set to a minimum is an obvious explanation for how sparse a lot of scenes look, and you have to appreciate how difficult it must be to get anything on this scale made when people could have to drop out at a moment’s notice due to self-isolation needs.

But, the previous special, Eve of the Daleks, was perfectly suited to being made under pandemic conditions – the regular cast, two guest stars, some Daleks, one building. And while that episode had its own faults, it’s a much more coherent and enjoyable piece of TV, and that’s largely down to it having been tailored to the needs of shooting Doctor Who in 2021. We do have to question whether following it up with an attempt to do Pirates of the Caribbean was the best idea.

It’s not that ambition is bad, but Legend of the Sea Devils is ambitious in all the wrong ways – the unachievable ones. Doctor Who has a uniquely flexible format, and one that allows for all sorts of storytelling creativity, often on a tight budget. Look at 2008’s Midnight and 2015’s Heaven Sent for other examples of episodes that are very confined – daresay cheap – but narratively extremely ambitious. And right when the state of the world demanded that kind of episode, Chris Chibnall decided to go for a story that’s visually overambitious – and suffers massively for it – but narratively underambitious – like Flux, it shows us a lot of things happening, but offers nothing new or substantial, nothing to make us care.

Still… that next time trailer, eh? The Master! Ace! Tegan! It sounds like Jodie Whittaker’s final episode could be amazing… but then again, Legend of the Sea Devils sounded like it could be amazing. Let’s hope that the COVID conditions had calmed down enough by the time it was filmed to not scupper it as much as they did Legend, and that Chris Chibnall has got his act together and given the Thirteenth Doctor a better note to end on. We’ll find out in autumn.

Kieron Moore

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