2nd Opinion, Take 1 “Legend of the Sea Devils” – Hit-and-Miss
Gustaff Behr’s take on the 2022 Easter special.
It says a lot about an episode when the next time trailer
But that’s a good thing if you ignore the weird cut-to-black pauses that are littered throughout the story. No doubt those scenes were meant to transition into Flux side plots, but due to COVID, had to be dropped. Unfortunately, if this is the case, it’s not good enough. The production team would have had more than enough time to properly rework this script to change-up those cut-to-black pauses into scenes that act as proper transitions.
And let’s be honest, this episode could do with an extra fifteen minutes. For one thing, Pirate Lady’s motive: Saving her crew — you could have dedicated a scene to show them being captured…or even returned. This episode is asking us to care about people who we’ve never even met. Why should we? I mean, I’m over here in the corner googling whether Pirate Lady is guilty of involuntary manslaughter or gross negligence on my phone after she gets an entire village massacred.
I also would have appreciated at least one scene where we learn that Dan is missing Diane. Him ringing her up feels like a payoff that doesn’t have a setup, so again, why should we care? Other than that, I quite enjoyed Dan in this episode. Yaz comes across as mean-spirited, duping him into dressing like that, but he gets his own heroic showing later on, which I found equal parts funny and confusing. More on that a bit later.
Yaz gets to do a lot in this episode, but her pining after the Doctor feels like someone has pressed pause on the TV remote. The action stops dead in its tracks over this subplot that was set up, I want to say two episodes ago, acknowledged like one episode ago, and has not been referenced or directly hinted at in either Series 11 or 12. It also doesn’t bode well for the episode or Chris Chibnall when the Doctor shuts down this ‘romance’, citing reasons that, again, don’t make a lot of sense to me. The entire half-assed Thasmin subplot feels like queerbaiting to the nth degree. Even if Chibnall walks it back and has the Doctor and Yaz kiss next episode, it’s a guarantee that the Doctor will regenerate (RTD2 coming ya’ll!) in the next episode or Yaz will die, so what was the point really? This isn’t like the Rose or River romance which spanned multiple seasons and was cultivated into a proper relationship with stand-out moments, regardless of how you feel about those subplots.
But even without all the above, this episode is hit-and-miss on its own merit. The most distracting aspect for me was the visuals. While the CGI is amazing, the green screen it’s shot against is wonky as hell and made a lot of the scenes where characters are acting against them look fake.
Also, there is a lot of unnecessary exposition in this episode, but I’m not going to dedicate a paragraph to it because by now we all know. Instead, I will credit Chris Chibnall for finally writing a script that does not have a count-down timer… Oh wait. No, there is one just as the Doctor is explaining the climax to us. My bad.
I genuinely enjoyed the look of the Sea Devils. I know of them, but I have never seen The Sea Devils or Warriors of the Deep. I like the design, and I’m happy that the show now has yet another classic monster revived for future use. I am also now inspired to spend some money on Doctor Who DVDs.
Jodie Whittaker’s performance is hit-and-miss, though I will say that her misses are mostly the fault of the script. She does act Doctor-ish in this episode, but several moments glaringly point out that this incarnation is wildly out-of-character for our beloved Time Lord. And not just in general, but within her own era too. She berates the Sea Devils for imprisoning the general in stasis, whilst aware of the passage of time, essentially mentally torturing him when she should be praising them…because that’s what she did in the Series 11 finale for Graham and Ryan. Remember?
The Doctor stands by and does not attempt to intervene when she sees the crew members being thrown overboard, despite knowing that they will most likely drown. Later, she berates the general for murdering one Sea Devil, citing ‘you didn’t have to do that’, but then has no reaction when Dan straight up kills six or seven of them. And don’t come at me with the ‘she wasn’t there for that’ excuse. We all know a bloke like Dan is going to brag about taking out half a dozen Sea Devils.
Likewise, the Doctor doesn’t hold Pirate Lady accountable when she learns that the latter’s actions resulted in the murder of an entire village. We don’t even get one speech about ‘actions have consequences’. Even her reasoning for not reciprocating Yaz’s feelings feel off. She claims she doesn’t want to be hurt again, which for this incarnation doesn’t make sense because she is very dependent on her companions to be her ‘fam’ (see “Arachnids in the UK” and “It Takes You Away” for glaring examples). Her reluctance feels like it belongs with late Tenth, Eleventh and maybe the Twelfth Doctor after saying goodbye to River Song.
Ladies and gentlemen, I genuinely don’t understand this incarnation’s moral compass. One minute she’s okay with murder, the next she isn’t. I do though understand why all her companions are written as blank yes men: Because they legit have no idea if their response to any question or statement at any given moment will contradict the Thirteenth Doctor’s current mood…which swings like a pendulum. At least in the television series. Thirteen is amazing in the comics and books. I recommend picking them up if you want a more coherent, consistent Jodie Doctor.
