Sea Devils! It’s always fun when classic Who monsters make their new Who debut. This Easter special (which, like “Planet of the Dead” before it, has nothing to do with Easter) brings the Sea Devils into the modern Who era and has some enjoyable stuff to recommend it. Unfortunately, it also has pacing issues and seems to struggle to manage its reasonably-small cast of characters.
The Doctor, Yaz, and Dan land outside a small Chinese village in 1807, where the locals are being terrorized by a “demon” that’s just escaped its centuries-old prison. The Doctor recognizes the monster as a Sea Devil, a prehistoric inhabitant of Earth similar to the Silurians. It turns out that both the Sea Devil and Madame Ching, a pirate queen, are after the same long-lost sunken treasure, and it’s up to team TARDIS to 1) figure out why and 2) stop a worldwide calamity. All in a day’s work!
I was excited about this episode going in, but it wound up being pretty middling for me. For some reason, the COVID limitations feel more impactful here than they did across the Flux storyline and in “Eve of the Daleks.” The suspiciously-empty spaces feel conspicuous, and it’s noticeable when action scenes are filmed with lots of quick cuts and tight close-ups to disguise how few extras there are. More significantly, though, Flux and “Eve of the Daleks” both make strong use of a fairly small cast, but I didn’t come away from this special knowing or caring as much about Madame Ching, Ying Ki, or Ji-Hun as I wanted to. The plot is kind of fragmented, and I feel like we jump back-and-forth between settings a lot without learning who these characters are or what makes them tick. Madame Ching is a figure ripe for the celebrity historical treatment, but the show doesn’t take enough advantage of that potential.
(I do want to disclaim that I wasn’t able to watch this episode with the same level of focus that I normally do. I was watching with family, and there was some talking/commenting during the episode as well as someone fiddling with the TV’s picture mode on and off throughout the whole thing. As such, some of the distance I felt towards the characters and some of the confusion I had with the plot is at least in part because I was distracted by other things going on in the room.)
None of this issue is down to the oneshot actors, who do well with the thin material they’re given. And I really appreciate the fact that the Chinese characters speak with British accents. The whole idea of the TARDIS translation circuit is that the companions hear people speak in a way they’re familiar with/understand, and if characters from Venice, Provence, and Skaro can sound like a Brit, it would’ve been annoying to have Asian guest stars who sound like “foreigners.”
The
main cast fare better. In particular, the Doctor and Yaz make an excellent tag
team digging into the mystery of the lost treasure and confronting the Sea
Devils. There’s a great bit where the main Sea Devil definitely twigs that the
Doctor’s endless stream of chatter is a tactic to buy herself time to come up
with a plan, and the Doctor and Yaz nicely mix plot-focused action and running
around with more personal dialogue. Meanwhile, Dan is initially framed in more
of a “comic incompetent” vein, dressed in a silly pirate getup and accidentally
getting himself separated from the others, but he manages to hold it together
pretty well on his own.
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