The Sea Devils

 

Chapter The 206th, where there's a fishy situation going on with some underwater creatures, plus a Masterful prison break.

Plot:

The Doctor and Jo visit the Master, who is incarcerated in an island prison. The Doctor's also there to investigate ships that have sunk without a trace in the vicinity (or it may have been just a coincidence). The Master has secretly persuaded the governor of the prison Colonel Trenchard that enemy agents are responsible for the sinkings, and that together the two of them can foil this plot. The enemy agents turn out to be another group of reptiles woken from long hibernation, who were the dominant species on Earth before man evolved, the same that were previously incorrectly called Silurians, and here are politically incorrectly called Sea Devils. They are in underwater chambers, and have been woken by work being done on an old sea fort for the nearby secret naval base. (Just a tip for any fictional government in an adventure story that might be reading this: don't imprison your super-criminals near secret naval bases - it's just asking for trouble). The Master has learned all about the reptiles from Time Lord files he stole, and so somehow engineered to be imprisoned nearby where some might be awake (or it may have been just a coincidence).

The Master steals parts from the naval base and builds a communications device, bringing Sea Devils to attack the prison and kill Trenchard. The commander of the naval base, Captain Hart, having sent out and lost contact with a submarine to investigate underwater, allows the Doctor to descend in a diving bell. The Sea Devils take the Doctor into their underwater stronghold, and he offers to negotiate a peace between them and the humans, but the Master is also there - having offered his services to mend their faulty mass-revivification system - and agitates for war. Unfortunately, the UK government in the form of Permanent Private Secretary Walker has ordered an attack, which explodes around them just as the Doctor was starting to persuade the Sea Devil leader. The Doctor escapes, frees the submarine crew and goes back to the Naval base, but the Sea Devils attack and take over. The Master gets the Doctor to help him build a device to wake up the Sea Devils, and both Time Lords are taken back to the Sea Devils' underwater base. The Doctor has sabotaged the device, though, and after giving the creatures one more opportunity to seek a peaceful solution, which they refuse, he allows it to be set off. The Doctor and Master escape just before the Sea Devil base explodes, and are picked up by a Navy hovercraft. When everyone else is back on shore, the Master hijacks the hovercraft and escapes.

Context:

Watched an episode a day with a break or two over the course of around one week in October 2021. This followed a longer than usual gap after watching the last story for the blog, which may have had something to do with my catching up finally with Squid Game on Netflix in the interim (it's a good show, but it's no The Sea Devils!). Watching from the DVD, though the restoration work is very good, there's still an appreciable lift in picture quality for the latter three episodes, for which the original videotape masters exist (the first three are converted from the NTSC format). Members of the household joined me for different episodes, but no one managed to go the whole distance - six-parters can be a bit of an endurance test for the younger generation even when spread out across a week. The youngest (girl of of 9) was around most watching the first two episodes before getting a bit bored, but rejoining me for the end. She was very pleased with herself when she predicted how the action would play out a few times. When the two workers alone on the sea fort heard a noise, she said "You're going to get killed. Probably". As the cliffhanger for episode one was approaching (the Doctor and Jo hearing someone or something approaching them), she said "It'll be the man who escaped - he survived" and looked very smug next episode when it did indeed prove to be the case. Her eldest brother (boy of 15) only commented to wonder why the prison staff's vehicles didn't have doors, and I had to admit that I hadn't the foggiest.

First Time Round:

For six weeks starting in March 1992, BBC2 showed a repeat of The Sea Devils. It was the third of a series of repeats, one per Doctor, that had kicked off at the beginning of the year with The Time Meddler. The Sea Devils hadn't yet come out on VHS, so it was an exciting opportunity to see some new (to me) Doctor Who during the so called "Wilderness Years" period when the show was not being made as a regular ongoing concern by the BBC. I was at university in Durham at this point, armed with blank tapes, and would go to my friend Mike's room at 6.50pm-ish on each Friday evening to watch with him, and use his recorder (Mike was blessed to have a single room and his own TV and VCR) to make a copy of each episode to rewatch (until the official VHS came out and replaced my home-made copy later in the 1990s). This was a time before most people had access to other fans and series news on the internet, so I was somewhat surprised and miffed when the repeats season abruptly stopped after the Sea Devils had concluded. The story for the fourth Doctor Tom Baker would not be broadcast until January the following year. I must have watched that copy of The Sea Devils four or five more times in the next couple of years. A repeat of any Who was such a rare event at that point, and made such a proportional impact compared to the volume of my Who collection, which consisted then only of the few titles released   on official VHS, and the few more I'd taped from the TV in the late 1980s. As such, The Sea Devils has always held special place in my fan affections - a little extra gift from the scheduling gods.

Reaction:

Malcolm Hulke, writer of The Sea Devils, was the dependable workhorse of the Pertwee era, commissioned for six episodes per year like clockwork. Generally, his were the stories with deeper political themes than other Doctor Whos, dealing with colonialism, the impacts of multinational corporations, media manipulation of wars, etc. In his first story for Pertwee, Doctor Who and the Silurians (the only time he got to write a story longer than six episodes) he'd turned the tables on the invaders from outer space format, creating a race of reptiles that invaded from within the Earth, and - having ruled the planet long before humans - had a claim to the planet that gave rise to interesting discussions within the plot. The Silurians story looked at colonialism from a different angle, highlighted scientific and bureaucratic blindness, touched on the struggle between war and peace, the paranoia of a particularly cold war version of the dislike of the unlike, and lots more besides. The Sea Devils, a sequel to that story, dispenses with all that, dials down the nuance and just goes for action and adventure. It is the Hulke script that comes closest to - for example - Robert Holmes's way of working: no nonsense, no deeper theme, just thrills and spills. And it works a treat.

Particularly helpful to this are the monsters themselves. The only issue is the difficulty in naming them (Silurians is wrong, Eocenes is wrong, Sea Devils is just the rambling of one person in shock after being attacked), and it's a confusion that continues to this day (Homo Reptilia is super wrong). Otherwise, they are great: great masks, great vocal performances delivering their lines in a whisper, and - even though it was a relatively last minute decision as they looked too 'nude' to director Michael E Briant - the string vest costumes they wear are iconic. The early episodes do the traditional Doctor Who trick of holding off from the full monster reveal for as long as possible, just showing glimpses of a hand here and there. The big build up leads to the sequence where one Sea Devil emerges from the sea at the cliffhanger ending of episode 3. In my memory before this watch, and I'll gamble I'm not the only one, this was a whole group of Devils emerging all at once, but that happens (a couple of times) in the next episode, and isn't a cliffhanger; it is nonetheless an enduring image of early 1970s Who up there with shop window dummies coming to life, or giant maggots wriggling about on a coal heap. In general, Briant and crew shoot the Monsters well throughout, and get some good shots elsewhere too. I love the overhead shot of the ladder in the fort that various characters descend, for example. The sound design, with echo and metallic footfalls added, shouldn't be overlooked either, in selling the reality of these scenes.

Another key factor in the story's favour is the input of the Royal Navy. The production gets the most bang for their buck from what the RN provide, with hardware, stock footage and personnel all used to great effect. The final episode, which is mostly just a set of action set pieces utilising these resources, even features a hovercraft - I think the first of the Pertwee era, but it would not be the last. There's stunts and explosions and someone doing a fall from a height. There's a charmless civil servant character (the odious, food-obsessed Walker), there's lots of tinkering to build electronic devices, which then blow things up. The phrase "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" is said by the Doctor for the first time. It would be archetypal if it weren't for the absence of UNIT. It's essentially the same structure as a UNIT story, though, just with blue uniforms instead of green ones; Captain Hart takes the Brigadier role, and Blythe "lays on" sandwiches and tea. No disrespect to Nicholas Courtney and the boys, but it's refreshing to do something different, and the Naval characters are all good - the submarine crew, for example, featuring early performances by recognisable actors Donald Sumpter and David Griffin. Colonel Trenchard is another in Hulke's line of misguided patriots, but - in keeping with the reduction of nuance throughout - he's a less complex character than his others, such as Major Baker in The Silurians. It's difficult to see how he could have been fooled quite so thoroughly by the Master except to assume that he's very stupid (and Clive Morton pretty much plays him as such, but it's still very watchable).

The three regulars are all on fine form too. Pertwee doesn't have any moments of charmlessness that sometimes creep in (though he does steal all Jo's sandwiches, the cad); the script and the performances of him and Katy Manning are gently sending things up just a little, the series now exuding confidence in its winning set-up. Roger Delgado is magnificent throughout, and The Sea Devils is a definite contender for the best Master story of this period. He even gets to have a swordfight with the Doctor, in a fun scene. His best moment is joshing with Trenchard that he believes the characters in the kid's TV show The Clangers on his cell's TV are real - just look at Delgado's impression as the Master turns away from Trenchard after realising the duffer doesn't realise he's joking. There's also great location work filmed in the Isle of Wight, and there's great model work (so realistic was this that the production got into trouble with the Ministry of Defence who thought they must have seen top secret plans for a new propeller). And there's fantastic music by Malcolm Clarke. This is a contentious view, as many dislike the experimental all-synthesised score but they're all wrong: it's perfect, in keeping with the action, and rarely obtrusive. So there!

 

Connectivity: 

Both this story and The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People feature action set on an island with a repurposed old building (a castle as prison in the Jon Pertwee story, a monastery - though actually filmed at a castle - as acid processing facility in the Matt Smith one). 

Deeper Thoughts:

The Paradise of Death. In the early 1990s, Jon Pertwee became the current Doctor again. After The Sea Devils repeat on BBC2 (see First Time Round section above), some clever methods were devised of restoring the colour to his stories only held in broadcast standard as black and white film copies, and he was on telly again in another repeat that had had this treatment (The Daemons in the autumn on BBC2). The following year, one of his stories was chosen as the repeat shown to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Doctor Who, on BBC1 no less. Even the tie-in Children in Need sketch around the same time, in which he featured heavily, was introduced by him in costume and in character. From all the available evidence, any Earth reptile awakening after hibernation would have thought that Pertwee was the incumbent. He looked like he was loving it too, which was great to see. At around this time, the third Doctor also featured in Doctor Who episodes that weren't second-hand. In August and September of 1993, BBC Radio 5 broadcast five weekly audio episodes of a story called The Paradise of Death, written by Pertwee's 1970s television producer, Barry Letts, and directed by Phil Clarke (later a successful television comedy producer). Returning with Pertwee were Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, and Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, and it had a good guest cast including Harold Innocent and Peter Miles. I remember the excitement of sitting waiting for the first episode, poised to record it onto a cassette; I'd forgotten this, but Wikipedia tells me the story started on my birthday. By the time the fourth and fifth episodes went out, I had much less enthusiasm, and it wasn't because it was no longer my birthday.

I never bought the story on CD when it was reissued this century, such was my indifference towards it. I did recently however - prepare for the contradictions of the collector's mindset - shell out a reasonable amount of money for the story in paperback form. It didn't count (at least in my mind) as a CD to collect, as I only collect missing televised story audios; the book, though, plugged the final gap in my Target collection. This was the run of paperback novelisations published on the Target imprint throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and now I own at least one copy of them all! I'd collected all the titles over the years except three from the early 90s that were harder to come by. In 1991, there were almost no titles left to writet hat didn't have complications blocking their inclusion in the Target range, and a new range of original novels (the Virgin New Adventures, or VNAs) featuring the Sylvester McCoy Doctor (who the publishers insisted was the current one, despite everyone else knowing it was Jon Pertwee) had started. As something of an afterthought, though, three novelisations came out a few years later, well into the run of VNAs. The first two were adaptations of the two Patrick Troughton Dalek stories, which I recently bought, read and reviewed in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post. The final one of the three, the last one of the range until it was resurrected this century, Target Library number 156, and the final book I had left to complete my collection, was Barry Letts's prose version of The Paradise of Death. It was published in early 1994, when I had finals looming and not enough cash to collect Doctor Who books (mainly because I spent it all on Doctor Who videos). 

The story sees the Doctor and Brigadier investigating a new space themed amusement park on Hampstead Heath where a body has been found killed by something not of this Earth. Sarah, seeking a scoop, tags along accompanied by a colleague from Metropolitan magazine, Jeremy Fitzoliver, an upper class twit added to the regular cast to make mistakes, get into trouble and twist his ankle. The amusement park is run by the Parakon Corporation, whose sadistic Vice Chairman Tragen had an intruder killed by one of his pet monsters, hence the body. The corporation are trying to negotiate a business deal with world leaders using the soft power of their Experienced Reality (ER) technology - immersive first-person movies where you feel the feelings of the protagonists - showcased in the amusement park. They are running a kind of intergalactic pyramid scheme. The Earth would plant a wonder crop called rapine that can be used for everything from buildings to food, providing a percentage of that crop back to Parakon, and for a while everyone would be in paradise enjoying their ER. But rapine rapidly makes the land in which it is planted barren, leaching the nutrients from the soil, and more and more fertiliser is needed to get it to grow. The planet would have dwindling growing space eventually, and fall into wars (for which the Parakon corporation would sell them arms), and finally the wounded and the refugees would be rounded up by the corporation and turned into fertiliser for another planet not as far through the grim cycle. Sarah is investigating in the amusement park and finds herself trapped aboard a spaceship that heads back to Parakon. The Doc, Brig and Jeremy chase after her in the TARDIS, and piece all of this backstory together.

On Parakon, the kindly President is oblivious to what his planet's corporation is up to, and won't easily be persuaded as the Chairman of the corporation is his son Freeth. Luckily, our heroes, reunited with Sarah, find a resistance group and manage to defeat the baddies and show the president evidence, and he halts the work of the corporation (well, we have to assume he does, as the story ends before all that tedious clearing up); he's even okay when his son gets killed. Tragen is killed also. Sarah had become smitten with one of the president's guards, Waldo, but he's killed too and she's sad. The End. It's quite a lot of plot, firing off in a lot of directions. In a way, it serves as a greatest hits of Pertwee's era, apt for the anniversary year in which it was broadcast. The aliens bearing gifts that are too good to be true echoes The Claws of Axos, and the image of a spaceship landing on Hampstead Heath is lifted from an early draft of the Axos story. The material going into the politics of corporations and colonialism is very like the work of Malcolm Hulke, and the spirituality versus capitalism message is very like Letts's own stories for Pertwee writing with Robert Sloman. The creature in the latter part that will follow the scent of its (human) prey forever until it catches up is like the Drashigs in Carnival of Monsters. There's also the Doctor crooning his Venusian lullaby one more time, and the polarity of the neutron flow gets reversed at one point.

In some ways, though, it departs from the Pertwee era, particularly tonally. Sarah's crush on Waldo, for example, does not fit well nor feel right to me; it would have worked for Jo Grant's character but Sarah Jane never displayed any romantic inclinations towards any characters in the whole of her time on the show. It goes beyond romantic, too, there's a passage of her thoughts as she admires the shape of Waldo's bum! This and a few other moments more earthy in outlook would be more at home in the VNAs than in a Target novelisation. It was written, as mentioned above, in a time of transition between the two ranges and has the page count of a VNA, substantially thicker than the Targets of old. A few months after its publication, another Virgin range started, the Missing Adventures, original novels for the six Doctors before McCoy. It might have been better to save The Paradise of Death a while so it could have been part of that range (the radio play sequel to Paradise, The Ghosts of N-Space, was novelised and published a few years later as a Missing Adventure). One tonal problem with the radio series is solved when rendered into prose, though. There's a tendency because one's doing fantasy on the wireless to make all the vistas and creatures bigger and stranger than they possibly could be if created in a Television Centre studio. I think this is the wrong call, and that radio plays work much better when they are localised and intimate. Otherwise you suffer from dialogue like "Oh my goodness look at that giant creature swooping down toward me, it looks like a bat but it's six-foot tall and orange" and the radio version of Paradise suffers a bit from that. In a book, though, it works fine.

There are a few more quibbles: the story might have done better to just concentrate on taking the dangers of ER to a logical conclusion (as it seems to be about to do in the earlier part of the story) or have the rapine gift in from the beginning instead of ER: as it is, the story switches in the middle and the dangers of ER aren't dwelt on in the second half of the story. There's also a bit of a judgemental pious tone about people enjoying violent entertainment that suggests that it leads to violence, which I don't believe is the case. The hippy resistance characters are quite dull, and learning their backstory slows down the latter part of the action. Plus, the ending is quite abrupt: the villains are killed and everything put right in the last two pages. All told, though, I enjoyed it much more than expected, and greatly more than the radio play. It wasn't a bad way to finish off my Target collecting, something I've been doing even longer than I have been collecting Doctor Who on video or shiny disc. The end of all that has felt a bit abrupt too. I'm not going to be tempted to start collecting the New Adventures, though; life's too short.

In Summary:

Atypical (given the replacement of UNIT with the Navy) but nonetheless traditional Pertwee action fare.