Warriors of the Deep

Chapter The 207th, the start of a new series of Doctor Who, but probably not the one you were expecting.

Plot:

The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are looking to visit the near future of Earth, but the TARDIS overshoots and they end up in 2084. It's a time of cold war tensions between two international power blocs, when it is common to have underwater military bases with missile strike capability. The TARDIS trio find themselves in such a base.There are two enemy sleeper agents in the crew committing sabotage; that is just a side show, though, as the real danger is an attack by Silurians and Sea Devils (not their real names, but they seem to have adopted these handles now), reptiles who were the dominant species on Earth millions of years before man evolved. They want to launch the base's missiles to provoke a nuclear war that will destroy all the humans, allowing them to take back the planet without directly being responsible. Luckily, the Doctor found a kind of Chekhov's Gas on the base in episode 1 that's lethal to reptile life. After a fruitless search for alternatives, the Doctor regretfully disperses the gas into the base's air supply. All the reptiles are killed, but not before they - and their pet sea monster the Myrka - have killed everyone else except the TARDIS team. The Doctor is regretful that a more peaceful solution couldn't be found.

Context:

I put this on during the kids' half term break, when I also had time off from the day job. It was watched at the rate of two episodes a day over two days, from the DVD. All three children (boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9) joined me for the first half; none of them returned for episodes three and four. Whether this had anything to do with the Myrka moments in the cliffhanger to episode two (which I'll get on to in the Reaction section below), or whether they had just got bored anyway, I couldn't say. In the first half, they all seemed fairly well engaged, asking how far into the future the story was set, wondering if Mark Strickson's Turlough was "still evil", and discussing and agreeing between themselves that the Doctor couldn't have drowned at the end of episode one, as he otherwise "would have turned into another Doctor". The youngest particularly liked the gag early on where both the male regular characters strain to push open a door, before the female character steps forward and slides it open with ease.

First Time Round:

January 1984. I had first watched Doctor Who just over two years earlier and had rapidly become a fan. Warriors of the Deep episode one was the start of the third new season of Doctor Who that I had sat down to watch from the outset on its BBC1 debut broadcast; maybe this only counted as the second time really, as every other episode of  Davison's first season clashed with my weekly session of cubs (including the very episode that year, Castrovalva episode one). The big celebrations of November 1983, Doctor Who's 20th anniversary, including the broadcast of The Five Doctors special, were still relatively fresh in my mind, so I was filled with fan enthusiasm and expectation. I'd read the snippets of preview of Warriors of the Deep in Doctor Who Magazine issue 85, the cover of which I can still recall in detail from memory (it was now titled The Official Doctor Who Magazine, presumably to differentiate it from the many many unofficial Doctor Who magazines that weren't lining the racks of newsagents at the time). There was a fighting chance I'd have read the listing in the Radio Times too (in the early 80s, my family only took that publication at Christmas and New Year). My anticipation levels were high. This all sounds like I'm setting up to say the story was a crushing disappointment, but this was not the case. I enjoyed it unreservedly as an eleven year old in 1984; I enjoyed it watching in 2021 too, even though I had a few more reservations this time out.  

Reaction:

Let's get it out of the way up front: the elephant in the room (or sea monster in the studio) of Warriors of the Deep is the Myrka. It's one of only a handful of occasions in the classic Doctor Who era (26 years long, remember) where the visualisation of some part of the script is so egregious that it tends to leap to one's memory way ahead of anything else in the story that was more successful. Every aspect of the Myrka is wrong: it's unwieldy; its head looks misshapen; its design and build are not clever enough to disguise the way it is powered (by two performer / puppeteers, pantomime horse-style); the way those performers move the creature is clumpy and risible. Even after it's dead, and a couple of characters collide with its corpse with a rubbery bounce, it's letting the side down. The build up to the cliffhanger of episode two sees various non-speaking Sea Base 'red shirts' manoeuvre themselves into its path so they can get killed, as it would have no chance of getting anywhere near them otherwise. Tegan is then trapped under a similarly rubbery fake door, struggling to make it look like she couldn't escape by just loudly sighing, while the Doctor pushes and prods at the flimsy door so tentatively or else he'd ruin the illusion, such as it is. The Myrka advances clumsily, and the front-end performer does a gesture with the front limbs that looks something like Henry Winkler as the Fonz whenever he appeared on set in Happy Days. This all then gets reprised at the start of the following week's episode, so we can endure it again. It would definitely be 'jump the shark' territory, if it weren't that the Myrka only appears in a limited number of sequences, and even with the reprise only takes up a scant few minutes of the run time; the rest of the story is perfectly good and well realised.

The brief, consciously or subconsciously, seems to have been to do Earthshock with Silurians. Earthshock was the big hit of Peter Davison's first year as the Doctor, but for some reason wasn't used as a template for a while. Davison's second year stories were much more lyrical and thoughtful, but from this point on the action mini-movie style becomes more prevalent (this season's later stories Resurrection of the Daleks and The Caves of Androzani definitely fit the mould, and many others after that). Like Earthshock, the story brings back old monsters that hadn't been seen for a number of years, with a snazzy makeover. Both Silurian and Sea Devil costumes look great; not quite as effective as the Cybermen's new look, but very good nonetheless. The Samurai style uniform for the Sea Devils is particularly apt, and the script is clever to define them as the warrior caste of the Earth reptiles. They score one point less than the 1970s versions, though, as the mouth of the mask doesn't move, meaning that the creature performers have to make their head movements and gesticulations a little larger than life so you know which one of them is speaking. As such, I'm fine with the decision to make the Silurians third eye flash in time with their conversation, as the originals had to similarly do lots of head wobbling without this visual cue. The voices too are updated but nicely in keeping with what went before. It may just be me, but the voice treatment makes Silurian Icthar addressing Sauvix, sound like he's actually saying 'Cervix'. That was a little distracting.

The plotting of Warriors of the Deep is much more solid and more coherent than Earthshock's was. This is not just a stringing together of action set pieces. This is handy, as the action sequences are a bit flat, with director Pennant Roberts not able to get much dynamism into the scenes made in a Television Centre studio. The climactic sequence of the Doctor cancelling the missile launch includes the base commander getting fatally shot, but I had to rewind it to see where that happened as it is staged so poorly. The fight and stunt fall into the water from episode one, filmed at Shepperton, is much better. The sets for the sea base come in for a bit of flak for being dull and over-lit. I don't think this is fair; each part of the sea base, including some split-level sets, looks fantastic to me, and there's a feeling that this a connected real space. The bright lighting also counterpoints the gloomy undersea sequences of the Silurians and Sea Devils before they come to the base: these are moodily lit, and shot well, but nobody ever gives any credit for this. The shell suits that the base crew wear are very 80s, but are also perfectly serviceable, and the model work is uniformly good. With only that one very big exception, Warriors of the Deep looks amazing, as well as having interesting story material at its heart: there's almost moral complexity in the reptiles working around their moral code, and the Doctor desperately trying to find an alternative to the inevitable destructive conclusion. There's even a couple of jokes. And it's all underlined by a fine score by Jonathan Gibbs.

The cold war nuclear tension theme and the spy subplot are very much of the time. Writer Johnny Byrne puts a futuristic spin on things, establishing that the technology and security protocols of 2084 require an individual who has been cyber-augmented, a Sync Ops, to control the missile firing computers. (Well, one has to assume there's some cyber augmentation, and it's not just that the Sync Ops has had a socket drilled into his head.) This is an interesting part of the story (despite the subplot not having anything much to the main Silurian plot at all), as it gives us some honest to goodness empathetic moments of emotion, which is rarer than you'd think in Doctor Who stories of this vintage: the Sync Ops Maddox's anxiety about the responsibility of having to fire the first shot in a nuclear war, and then being controlled by the enemy agents and made to betray his base, and kill his friend. It's good stuff. One of the sabre-rattling cold war politicians in the wider world of the time was UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and - as it turns out - she was the one most responsible for the disastrous nature of the Myrka as it finally turned out. By calling a snap election in 1983, which then had an impact of BBC studio allocation prioritising election-related programming, she drastically reduced the prep time before Warriors of the Deep went before the cameras. This meant that there was insufficient time for special effects to build the costume, and no time at all for the performers to rehearse while wearing it. If you were looking for someone to blame, I don't think you could find anyone better.

 

Connectivity: 

No cheating involved, I promise: the random number generator plumped for Warriors of the Deep, the sequel to the last story blogged, The Sea Devils. (Both it and The Sea Devils are also sequels of Doctor Who and the Silurians - over a decade had passed since those earlier stories, though, so it would be a stretch to say Warriors is the third part of a trilogy). There are therefore lots of connections such as bases underwater, ships being destroyed, the build up to a missile launch, the Doctor trying to keep the peace between trigger-happy humans and Earth reptiles, etc. etc. No string vests in Warriors, though; or, none that can be seen at any rate - Turlough could be wearing one under his school uniform for all I know! 

Deeper Thoughts:

The Continuity of Philosophy. What exactly is the Silurian credo? The Doctor says that "Everything you Silurians hold sacred forbids" genocide. They themselves state that their law forbids all but "defensive war". There's been some continuity retrofitting, or perhaps just plain continuity error, from what was established in the earlier two stories about these Earth reptiles (more on that in a moment), but if we take what's presented in Warriors of the Deep at face value, they have changed tack from trying to find a peaceful solution to the dilemma of both themselves and the humans having a claim upon the same planet. They have stormed a sea base belonging to one of the two international power blocs, and they are going to hack the base's systems and then set off a missile attack at a target or targets in the other bloc. This is expected to be interpreted as a human act of aggression, which will mean retaliation, and eventually mutually assured destruction of both blocs meaning the death of all the humans. The reptiles will then be able to take back the planet, having not directly caused the genocide. As the Silurian leader Icthar puts it: "We will harm no one - these ape primitives will destroy themselves. We, Doctor, will merely provide the pretext." They are convinced that this new plan fits within their overall value system. Now, I've learnt a bit about moral philosophy (and yes, this was mainly from watching episodes of The Good Place on Netflix), and I'm finding it difficult to pin down exactly what school of thought underpins the reptiles' plan in this story.

Whatever philosophy they believe in, it can't be basic consequentialism, which would measure the morality of an act on the consequences that arise from that act. If the consequence is genocide, the act is clearly immoral. Maybe they believe the opposite of consequentialism. I googled it, and the internet came up with Kantian deontology, but that opposes consequentialism not in allowing any consequences altogether, but instead in changing the area of consideration for how to judge the act. Instead of measuring the consequences, one has to judge whether the act itself is right or wrong based on a set of rules. Given that the creatures have expressed that they have laws defining 'just wars'  as being defensive wars only, they do seem to lean more towards the philosophy of Kant's rules and obligations. They are, though, directly responsible for firing the first shot in the proposed human war. This is not a defensive act, so would break their explicitly stated law. Let's say they have the benefit of the doubt, and that the first missiles were aimed at unpopulated areas (this is a bit of a stretch given the need to set one bloc against another, and the destructiveness of the weaponry mentioned in the narrative, even if they are never specifically identified as nuclear weapons). Even then, though, how can they be excused from the raiding of the base and killing of almost everyone within it? It's a military target, and those actions constitute an act of (offensive) war. The only way would be to not count the humans as sentient beings at all (they do talk about humans as if they are animals); but if they are happy to make that moral descent, then they don't need any pretext at all.

Utilitarianism? The reptiles' actions can only be seen to be for the greatest overall good if one again doesn't count humans or their feelings. Virtue ethics? You can't kill multiple people and claim that you are acting with inherent virtue. The only teachings that might justify their plan, trying to find a just and moral seeming cover for unethical actions, are the teachings of Machiavelli. So, though it seems momentarily that the reptiles in Warriors of the Deep have a more interesting ethical outlook, it doesn't take much examination to reveal that they are pretty much the same as all the other Doctor Who baddies. This isn't a problem, though, as they always were like this. Icthar - who, if he's supposed to be the same Silurian leader seen in the story with Jon Pertwee, has changed his name - has dialogue thus: "Twice we offered the hand of friendship to these ape-descended primitives". This isn't true, though. In neither of the earlier stories did a peaceful solution go any further than a hypothetical discussion with the Doctor, but the stories did see the Silurians try to wipe out humanity with a plague, and see the Sea Devils blowing up boats and attacking a naval base. Warriors of the Deep was made in a period where the producer had an unofficial continuity adviser, but I don't think we can blame that person for this. The writer clearly saw an interesting story about a third party manipulating a nuclear stand-off similar to the one between the US and the Soviet Union in the 1980s; the continuity and the ethics were just window dressing, and considerations about them were not allowed to get in the way of the story, which is as it should be.

  

In Summary:

It's mostly good, like an underwater Earthshock; the bad moments - like most bad moments in the 1980s - are all the fault of Margaret Thatcher.