Originally screened: 17 April 2022
First seen: Original broadcast
Number of times seen: 1
Two years already? On the memory of one watch I’m recalling a very shoddy opening sequence, bordering on incomprehensible; a weird imbalance whereby neither the pirates nor the Sea Devils occupy the plot well as secondary characters; the creature that should have been the Myrka yet inexplicably is not. Repeated references to the scene online have kept the Sea Devil leader’s rocket-powered leap from pirate ship to floating vessel in my mind. Dan’s bizarre bloodthirstiness, and the show failing to remark the fact that he mercilessly slices up a whole troop of Sea Devils (also, the fact they reuse the wounded creatures’ screams from their original appearance). Doctor Who and pirates seldom mix well. Somewhere in this sorry mixup of a story (in memory; maybe it’s amazing in rewatch?) I think there’s a sense that someone somewhere (Chris Chibnall, or cowriter Ella Road?) read a reference to historical pirates as ‘devils of the sea’, went ‘Aha!’, and didn’t then do much to tie things together. Maybe it’s all redeemed by the scene on the beach at the end which addresses Yaz’s feelings for the Doctor in a way that is characteristic of the Chibnall era: surprisingly mature and adult, but – or therefore, because this approach is very consistent and deliberate – understated to the point that it doesn’t quite land. The challenge for making Doctor Who with a bit of emotional intelligence to it is that the human stuff needs to be a bit heightened, in text or performance; Chibnall goes for something subtler, and it’s often lovely and nuanced and so underplayed it vanishes. Here, two awkward people who have immense difficulty being honest with themselves make a tentative effort to be frank with each other, but it’s a coda to a story of pirates and lizard monsters and leviathans of the sea, and it needed something of that brightly coloured intensity to make its point.
The rewatch: Overall, a shade better than I remember, which may be damning with faint praise. It looks beautiful, and there are some decent, underplayed jokes I had completely forgotten. Even the notorious giant leap by Marsisssus/the Chief Sea Devil actually makes sense – he’s riding the same field that sends the Doctor and team’s skimming stones off course a little earlier. I maintain that if this had appeared midway through a full ten-part season, in the ‘Arachnids in the UK’ or ‘Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror’ slot, it would be rather more highly thought of, or at least have more defenders. As it is, the sole Doctor Who episode transmitted in a period of nearly ten months and advertised as a ‘special’, it falls short. Even its trim 48-minute running time gets it critics. That’s not an issue in itself – longer is not better, as ‘Deep Breath’ and ‘Twice Upon a Time’ exhaustingly remind us – though it may contribute something to the flaws ‘Legend of the Sea Devils’ does have.
For one, the geography of the story is confused and confusing. There is no sense of the distance between the overcast village where we begin the story and the sunny beach where the TARDIS lands. When the two Doctor, Yaz and Dan turn up to confront the Sea Devil and Madam Ching, therefore, we don’t know how far they have come, whether they have stumbled upon this scene within seconds of arrival or were drawn to it by the sounds of conflict. The distance of vessels from the shore or from one another seems inconsistent: it seems deeply implausible that Dan and Ying Ki could have swum from the shore to Ching’s ship. (Now that I think about it, how was Ching planning to pilot her ship solo, or even with a crew of three?) Elsewhere, jump cuts elide not just exposition but explanation. The Huasen seems to devour the TARDIS, then dumps it in the Sea Devil base: how? Dan and Ying Ki discuss overpowering Ching, then we cut to their hanging upside down from ropes. How did that play out? Aren’t we meant to ask? I get a sneaking suspicion that this is just meant to be ‘the kind of stuff that happens in Doctor Who’, a kind of meta-version of a typical adventure. And that’s no fun.
Some of it points to failures in editing or directing, or maybe storyboarding. How and when – a well-worn complaint – do Yas and Dan decide to snare Marsissus in netting, and how does the Doctor discern their plan? A persistent, unkind fan rumour has it that culturally insensitive material which had somehow made it to the filming stage was edited out, hence the short running time and choppy scenes such as this, but there’s no evidence and it would be a weird coincidence if it was this very material which would have filled in these logical gaps. The audience is literate and doesn’t need to be spoonfed, but failing to show us the things we needs in order to make sense of a sequence is a fatal error. And these are low-stakes scenes: this isn’t trying to do that Moffat Who thing of trusting the audience to fill in narrative gaps, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, but is treating the viewer as an adult. ‘Legend’ isn’t a story for thinking adults, really, and I doubt it was ever trying for anything so sophisticated.
Most offensive of all, I think is Dan’s (also very implausible) swing of the sword in which he kills half a dozen Sea Devils. This is misjudged in terms of character – we’re meant to like this guy! – and script: he makes a quip over the bodies of his victims and … that’s it. The Doctor’s now travelling with an unrepentant mass murderer. Someone should have a word with Di before he goes on that date with her. (It has emerged this week as I write this up that the line ‘Don’t let the swords touch your skin’ is, rightly, ridiculed as one of Doctor Who’s worst – which is true, but I admit I’d kind of given it a free pass on this watch. The dialogue is often so mundane or over-telling in the Chibnall/Whittaker era that lines like these don’t really even register any more. This is not a good thing.)
Less scuppering, and maybe not ‘Legends’ own problem, is the way that pirates as antiheroes just don’t work in Doctor Who. Solomon in ‘Dinosaurs on a Spaceship’ is a properly sadistic villain, a rarity in contemporary Who. Like Avery in ‘Curse of the Black Spot’ before her, the seemingly feared and awesome Madam Ching ends up a sympathetic figure struggling to do right by her offspring. This is partly cultural, I think: storybook pirates have gone from feared villains to antiheroes, Robin Hoods on water. Like Avery, whose very ‘nice guy’ (at the time…) casting points at a redemptive reading for the character, Ching ends up literally cuddly.
In considering ‘The Power of the Doctor’, which I will get to fairly soon I think and didn’t much rate on first viewing, I’ve been trying to think of this whole era as based around stories Chris Chibnall ‘always’ wanted to write. Any longterm fan with a creative bent probably has a file, literal or imagined, of ‘great story ideas’ they would draw on if they were magically anointed showrunner (in its every-monster-ever, old-companions greatest hits routine, ‘Power’ represents a grown-up letting his uncynical inner child write a love letter back to ‘The Five Doctors’). ‘Legend of the Sea Devils’ has a similarly excitable story idea at its heart – a ‘wouldn’t it be cool if’ synthesis of swashbuckling and sea monsters. That’s a good starting point, I guess, and the results are pacy enough to keep us interested. But it sacrifices logic to keep that pace and level of incident going, to get characters where the script needs to be, and it makes them do unwarranted, nonsensical things in service of the story. It feels dangerously close to a first draft, and, at a time when Doctor Who stories were few and far between, that’s not at all good enough.