Remember what I said before “The
Daemons” about some stories managing to live in the memory far longer than some
others? Well, “The Sea Devils” is another example of this. I’m not entirely
sure why this might be, but I’ll have a stab at it. The Sea Devils themselves
are very memorable. Their heads are modelled on turtles, and the masks were
created by monster maker extraordinaire John Friedlander. He cleverly designed
the masks to be worn like hats, with the elongated necks covering the actors’
faces. These gave the Sea Devils less of the man in a suit appearance than
other contemporary monsters. They wore these very simple questions made from
nylon netting. I’m not sure in which documentary I saw them talking about this,
but the costume designer was suddenly told out of the blue that they were not
going to be allowed ‘naked’ Sea Devils, and so they needed costumes of some
sort. With no money left to spend, she had some nylon netting around, and so
used it – and the effect was remarkably striking. I love their disc shaped
weapons as well.
It’s not necessarily just the visual
impression though. Now, I haven’t researched this, but I have distinct memories
of repeats of Doctor Who during the 70s, in which the chosen stories were
abridged and edited down to a lean and mean 90 minutes. I’m pretty sure that
“The Green Death” and “Genesis of the Daleks” also received this treatment. So
I saw this story more than once back in the day.
It isn’t even necessarily this,
though. The fact is that I have a distinct memory of the Master, in prison
(Isle of Wight? I’m sure it’s on an island somewhere) watching an episode of
The Clangers. I can only think that I must have been quite fond of the Clangers
at the time. Oliver Postgate certainly had one of the finest and most distinctive
voices on TV in the 70s, but I digress.
After Watching
Well, the Clangers thing happened in Episode One. It was
actually just one of several nice little ‘character bits’. The Master, who has
been on ice since the end of “The Daemons”, on a prison in a castle on an
island just off the mainland. The Doctor and Jo pay a visit ostensibly to check
that he is held securely, but also Jo discerns, the Doctor wants to check that
he is being looked after as well. When he holds his hand up to Jo’s accusation
the Doctor replies that they were once friends, in fact very good friend, and
then makes the strange comment “You might almost say that we were at school
together.” What I want to know is how you can almost be at school together with
anyone? Either you were, or you weren’t. Coming back to the Clangers, the
Master has won the Prison Governor, Colonel Trenchard, over to his side.
Trenchard is this story’s seemingly obligatory reactionary old buffer, and it
looks like the Master has played upon his misplaced ‘little Englander’ sense of
patriotism, which is, one senses, of the ‘hang and flog anyone whose hair
reaches down the ears’ variety. The Master, who has requested a colour TV in
his cell, is watching “The Clangers”. (“The Clangers” was a charming Oliver Postgate
animated series for young children, set on a different planet, where the
eponymous Clangers communicate with each other by imitating penny whistles, and
exist on blue string pudding and soup helpfully provided for them by a soup
dragon. In some episodes they help an iron chicken, and they can go into space
on a boat powered by music, the notes of which grow on trees. Utterly charming)
when Trenchard enters the cell, the Master makes a wry comment about unusual
extraterrestrial life forms that have been discovered, and Trenchard reacts as
if he really means it, and the Master’s expression reveals just what he thinks
of that. It’s a very subtle moment, but it’s clearly there, and beautifully
illustrates the Master’s contempt at the stupidity of people like Trenchard,
which is ironic since if Trenchard wasn’t a bear of quite so little brain it
would be nowhere near as easy for the Master to control him.
Speaking of little humourous moments, this isn’t the
only one. When Jo and the Doctor escape from the prison and make their way back
to the Naval Base, the ravenous Jo is given a plate of cheese sandwiches. The
Doctor reprimands her, snatches them off her, scoffs a couple then passes them
around, handing back the plate with the words ‘I really am most terribly
sorry.” Now maybe this would be funny if it wasn’t following on from a number
of incidents in the last few stories when the Doctor has been a bit of a pig
towards Jo, and not in a funny way either.
The way that we’re tantalised with views of the Sea
Devil’s hands before we get to see him full on is reminiscent of the way that
the Silurian was eventually revealed in the earlier story. The Sea Devils
themselves are rather more obviously war like than their land based cousins.
They have destroyed three marine craft, and this enables the Doctor to plot the
epicentre of the attacks as a Martello tower, currently being used by the navy
as a Sonar testing establishment. It’s here that the Doctor and Jo are first
attacked by a Sea Devil, and need to be rescued. Which brings me nicely to : -
Helicopter Watch
Barry Letts had persuaded the Royal Navy that this story
could be a good showcase for them, and the Navy fulfil the role that UNIT would
normally have taken. When the Doctor and Jo need rescuing from the sonar
testing station, Captain Hart dispatches a Navy Sea King to go and get them,
which is rather impressive, but a little bit like sending a sledgehammer to
crack a peanut.
The Master’s plan, then, which involves dressing up in a
naval uniform and popping over to the nearby naval base to steal some
electrical bits and pieces from the quartermaster’s stores to make a device
which will rouse the Sea Devils in numbers, so that they will rise up and
destroy Humanity as a way of taking revenge upon the Doctor, nyaa haa haa!
In a way this show almost plays out as two three
parters. Parts 1 – 3 being “Something is Sinking Our Ships”, and Parts 4-6
being “The Sea Devils Attack”. And to be honest, once it’s firmly established
what is sinking the ships, and how the Master fits into the storyline, it tends
to become a lot less interesting. After all, we have been here before with “The
Silurians” and in many ways it was done a little bit better in that show. So
there’s a very conspicuous use of hardware in the last two episodes. We’ve
already mentioned the navy Sea King helicopter. In the last two episodes not
only do we get a Royal Navy SRN6 Hovercraft, we also get a pair of what appear
to be very early proto-jet skis, in which the Doctor and the Master stage a
gratuitous and really rather unnecessary chase with each other. I’ve often seen
criticisms of certain of the Pertwee stories that the show is too heavily
influenced by the contemporary Bond movies. For the most part I think that this
is an oversimplification of what is actually going on, but when I watch “The
Sea Devils” I can kind of understand why the observation is made in the first
place. And I’m afraid that it is a negative criticism. Without wanting to write
an essay on the nature of Bond films, they are live action comic strips based
on some characters and occasionally some ideas from the original novels by Ian Fleming. That’s not actually a negative
criticism. That is what James Bond films are meant to be, and what they are
meant to do, and they do it extremely well. But it’s not what Doctor Who is, or
rather, not what it should be. Doctor Who is drama, or at least, when it is at
its very best, it is.
Here’s one of the differences between season 7, and the
two seasons which come after. At the end of “The Silurians” the Brigadier blows
up the caves containing the entrance to the Silurians’ base even though he has
given his guarantee to the Doctor that he will do no such thing. It takes real
confidence in your show to have one of the continuing ‘good guys’ act in such a
morally ambiguous way. It’s interesting that this is avoided in “The Sea
Devils”. For one thing, as previously stated, there is no UNIT in this story.
Having secured the cooperation of the Royal Navy, they take UNIT’s place. And
being given such liberal help on the show it is understandable that the Navy is
going to be shown in the best possible light. Hence it is not the Navy’s
decision to launch a nuclear attack on the base of the Sea Devils, it is the
decision of Walker, the parliamentary private secretary despatched by the
Ministry of Defence to take charge of the situation, and he takes the decision
ignoring the advice of the Navy’s Captain Hart. However, the attack doesn’t
even happen in the 3end, because the Doctor has conveniently already blown up
the Sea Devils’ base. The Master, displaying the one flaw in his character,
namely fatal stupidity, takes the Doctor back to the Sea Devils’ base with him
to help finish constructing and installing the machine that will waken the
thousands of Sea Devils in hibernation there. And he lets him get on with it by
himself. The Doctor, before activating the machine, which he has rigged to blow
up the base by the simple expedient of reversing the polarity of the neutron
flow – and this was the only story in which this was ever said seriously, in
the Five Doctors it was surely said as a tongue in cheek nod to the fans, -
before he activates it he satisfies himself that there is no possibility that
the Sea Devils will now negotiate. Faced with a choice, he makes the only decision
he can make – killing a few thousand Sea Devils to save the millions of humans
AND Sea Devils who would be killed in a war between the two species.
I can’t help thinking that in the 7th season,
an exploration of the ramifications of this decision might well have provided
the ending to the story. In this case it’s just glossed over, and the Doctor
never gets a chance to show any remorse for it. Instead we get a bit of a
disappointing scene when the Master, having been taken off the Hovercraft seemingly
at Death’s door, turns out to be a man in a bad rubber mask, while the real
Master drives off in the hovercraft. Seen it before, I’m afraid.
I can definitely understand why I enjoyed this story so
much when I was 8 years old. Despite its six part length it is full of action,
and full of great hardware. It’s got the Master, and it’s got one of the better
monsters – in my opinion the Sea Devils look better than their cousins, the
Silurians, even though they are not necessarily as well conceived – only one of
them ever gets to deal with the Doctor and the Master, and there is no sense of
individuals with them as there is with the Silurians. Even now, at the age of
50, I can still enjoy something like this. If I start to analyse it then I can
see the flaws, but the point is not to analyse it too much. With the benefit of
hindsight this was the direction that the show had taken at this time, and it’s
not as if it’s not watchable, because it is, and it’s not as if it wasn’t
popular, because it was. And it’s not as if it wouldn’t take a different
direction in the future, because it would. Not for a while yet, though.
What Have We
Learned?
The Doctor and
The Master were best buddies at Gallifrey Mixed Infants
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