Legend of the Sea Devils
Apr. 26th, 2022 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatI 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.
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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2022-04-28 09:34 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-04-29 05:08 pm (UTC)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.