Legend of the Sea Devils

[purplecat]

I really wanted to like Legend of the Sea Devils, the Doctor Who Easter Special. Marmalade Sparrow, who is largely unimpressed by Chibnall Who, expressed some doubts at the concept of spending an hour watching it but relented after I said "but pirates" a few times.

Doctor Who does not, it has to be said, have a good track record when it comes to pirates. I think the closest the classic show ever got to pirates were the slavers in The Highlanders. While one assumes a certain amount of swash and buckle was involved, with the best will in the world, it is hard to tell given only telesnaps of the action remain. Meanwhile the modern series gave us Curse of the Black Spot.

To be fair, Legend of the Sea Devils was better than Curse of the Black Spot but let's face it, that is not a high bar to clear.

It looked gorgeous, the costumes were great, the flying ghostly pirate ship crewed by Sea Devils was great, the Doctor and Yaz staring out at the bottom of the ocean was great. For a story with a, painfully obviously, small cast it clearly had high ambitions for sweep, grandeur, swash and buckle and it nearly achieved them - let down really only by the fact that the cast had so obviously been kept to a minimum and a slight clumsiness to some of the fight choreography which I suspect ultimately was limitations of time.

However, sadly, there wasn't a lot else there. There was a lot of running (or rope swinging) backwards and forwards between pirate ships and the Sea Devils lair, there was a magic maguffin whose plot function (even supposing one accepts the basic magicness of it), didn't quite stand up to scrutiny. Madam Ching who ought to have been this awesome pirate queen was reduced to taking orders from the fictional Ji-Hun and worrying about her kidnapped children.

And then I'm not that convinced by Yaz and Thirteen - I feel like we've been here before in various forms where NuWho wants there both to be and not to be a romance between the Doctor and companion and ends up with some variant on "I want to but I can't". I'm glad some people are happy about it, I suppose, but I found it neither convincing nor dramatically satisfying. Maybe its going somewhere, but this is Chibnall so I'm not convinced it is.


All that said, I think I liked this more than many. It was mostly fun and it looked good. It functioned just fine as a run-around. Part of the problem in fact, is that for one of a handful of stories we're getting this year and something billed as a "special", I'd have liked a bit more than a run-around. Mind you, thinking about it, it's also better than Planet of the Dead, so I suppose it's the best Easter Special the show has ever given us and on those terms a success.

Comments

[vivdunstan]

Big Finish’s Doctor Who and the Pirates is the best pirates story for Doctor Who by a long chalk I think. And that’s being rather generous, since I wasn’t a huge fan of it. But still it does pirates well. And singing!

I agree with much that you’ve written. And yes ditto re the Planet of the Dead comparison!

[purplecat]

Pirates AND Singing. It almost tempts me to look it out even though I'm not a big fan of audio drama.

I'm sad now I don't have a Gilbert and Sullivan icon.

[vivdunstan]

It’s Gilbert and Sullivan music throughout. I’m not sure if it’s on Spotify, but the audio download is now just £2.99 to buy. Sixth Doctor, who sings!

[purplecat]

I once wrote a Gilbert & Sullivan Doctor Who/MCU/Star Wars/Sapphire and Steel/Man from UNCLE crossover fanfic. It wasn't terribly good (since it was basically written as a joke and was written in a hurry for a deadline). I did get to rhyme exile with textiles in a song such by the Third Doctor, though.

[sir_guinglain]

The gossip is that as much as thirteen minutes was cut out, but I don't know if there is any real evidence for that.

[magister]

It felt like there were bits missing, particularly at the village at the start. The question is whether there was a late edit job or whether it dates to problems during filming. The DWM preview talks about how difficult location filming at the village was, so it may be a case of putting together a jigsaw without all the pieces.

[purplecat]

Assuming bits were cut, I'd guess it was more action sequences, since you can often lose them without losing too much plot coherence.

I did wonder if we missed some more stuff between Madam Ching, Dan and Ying Wai since Ying's conversion from "I must get revenge" to "I want to work for you" very much happened in the background - you could sort of see it but an awful lot was left to the viewer to join the dots there.

Actually, thinking about it, I wonder if we lost a lot of the Madam Ching moments. She seemed strangely underused, but it wouldn't surprise me if she'd been written some good stuff but in a way that ultimately turned out to be tangential to the main story and so could be sacrificed.

[purplecat]

I'd believe it - though I'd also believe that it isn't necessarily 13 minutes that would have made a lot of difference, Chibnall who often seems to struggling with pacing.

[a_cubed]

It felt very "meh" to me. Too long for the content it had, and missing a bunch of stuff. I think it was constrained by CV filming restrictions but instead of managing to write a tight story like the New Year Special which made very effective use of a "bottle" episode and very limited cast, it felt like something which was put together with paper and sealing wax. The lack of a crew on the pirate ship felt like such a cheat. Having her children hostage was fine. Having the whole crew hostage was just stupid. She's supposed to get what the Sea Devil wanted without having any backup whatsoever? That's just stupid. Who sent her on the mission which freed the head Sea Devil, anyway? There were no other Sea Devil speaking parts, but the one in charge had been frozen for centuries...

The characterisation of the Sea Devils was also jarring. Harking back to the Pertwee version but then showing a race completely at odds with that (without even the saving grace of an intra-species difference as they did with the Silurians in The Hungry Earth) just felt sloppy.

[purplecat]

I was OK with the children when first mentioned. I mean, in Curse of the Black Spot, Henry Avery is motivated by concern for his son (and, yes, its a terrible episode, but Avery's concern frankly isn't what is dragging it down). It was when Ji-Hun appears and the whole tone of the piece is leaning into "and now there is a hero here to take charge" that my viewpoint on the way Madam Ching seemed to be somewhat lacklustre switched to thinking there was some rather lazy gendered writing going on and then that casts earlier script choices in a different light - if you see what I mean. I'm sure the writers weren't thinking "Oh she needs a man to tell her what to do and she's a woman so her motivation must be all about her children" but I also think they didn't stop to question why those two tropes so readily seemed to fit into the story and whether they were really best for the character and the story they wanted to tell.

I thought the Sea Devil characterisation was OK. They're surprisingly war-like (or at least I was surprised how war-like they were) when I saw The Sea Devils, so I'm prepared to accept that they are all about defeating the Land Parasites from the get go here. Their technology seemed way out of keeping with anything we'd seen before though.

[john_amend_all]

There were some pirates in The Smugglers IIRC.

Can't comment on the rest. My girlfriend suggested watching LotSD, but we ended up going for 60s Star Trek instead.

[purplecat]

Oh yes! The Smugglers! I had a feeling there was another black and white run in with Pirate like characters, but nothing was springing to mind.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

It didn't really engage me, but Chibnall Who generally doesn't. Moffat Who mostly did engage me; Davies Who sometimes engaged me and sometimes enraged me, but Chibnall Who is mostly just there. It wasn't awful.

I suppose some people like this sort of thing, just like some people like Doctor-companion romance. Still, it was the first episode I watched with my fiancee that neither of us had seen before, so I'll probably hold it in nostalgic regard a few years down the line.

Re: Madame Ching, I feel a common failing "celebrity historicals" is to present us with someone from the past, tell us that they are amazing, but not actually show the amazing things they did. Rosa was probably the best story in this regard, as Rosa Parks was famous for one, very specific, thing that can be dramatised easily and effectively on TV.

Re: pirates, the original series had The Smugglers. I'm fond of it, but there isn't much swashbuckling, as far as I can tell from the soundtrack and telesnaps.

[purplecat]

Having tried once or twice, to write historical celebrity fanfic, it is suprisingly tricky not to get boxed in by knowing the historical figures actual story can't be changed while giving the Doctor something to do. I think mostly NuWho has managed reasonably well - The Unquiet Dead for instance made use of a lot of what we know about Dickens character and interests and shaping a Doctor Who adventure around those themes and ideas so he seemed to fit even though he could actually have been any random supporting character really.

This failed with Madam Ching. I'm not an expert on her but she wasn't a random pirate lady. She was clearly a talented leader, politician (she didn't have a ship, she had a fleet of ships at her command - in fact she led a confederation of pirates), and negotiator (she negotiated her surrender to the Chinese authorities which still left her in command of several ships and she lived to die of old age). I don't think we got any of that here. It felt like Madam Ching written by someone who had heard there was a famous Chinese female pirate leader called Madam Ching but couldn't be bothered to read up on her.