“There should have been another way.”
The TARDIS lands in an undersea military base in the year 2084. In the future as seen by Dr Who in the 1980s, the Cold War is still going on (though see below) and the Sea Base is a concealed nuclear launch platform. Cold-War-related troubles involving a couple of enemy agents trying to sabotage the place soon take a back seat to the return of creatures from the Third Doctor’s era: the Silurians and the Sea Devils, who attack the base and plan to launch its missiles, thus triggering a nuclear war that will cleanse the Earth of the “Ape Primitives” who have infested it while the intelligent reptiles were in suspended animation.
As in the two previous encounters with Earth’s original intelligent life form, the Doctor knows the Silurians are not alien invaders but are as much Earthlings as the humans, and tries as hard as he can to find a peaceful solution that will allow the two species to coexist. Equally as in the past, his attempts are futile, and the Doctor is eventually forced to stop the Silurians any way he can— because however legitimate their grievance, their plans are genocidal and he can’t allow that.
Besides featuring the return of a Pertwee-era creature, Warriors of the Deep is also very much a classic “base under siege” story that Dr Who favored heavily in the Second Doctor’s time. Watching it, you have to ask “Why is this story starting off season 21, when it clearly belonged in season 20, a lot more so than several episodes that were there?” (It wasn’t a question of being originally intended for season 20 and then getting bumped.)
This story is not well regarded by most fans. I like it better than the fan conventional wisdom but will agree that it’s a bit of a disappointment. The interesting question is: what went wrong? There’s a general consensus (at least across various Dr Who Magazine articles) that the story is well-written but suffers from poor production choices. The Sea Base sets actually look pretty good (especially for Dr Who’s budget) and are credible for an undersea base in the future— but they don’t fit the story very well. Everything is bright white, and brightly lit, while the story cries out for dark metal corridors with green “undersea gloom” lighting. The Silurians’ pet monster, the Myrka, looks okay in a still photograph but is ridiculous the moment it moves— it was performed by two men, pantomime-horse style, and looks it. Finally, there are a couple of very bad performances by the actors: not all of them, but the two who play enemy agents trying to sabotage the base. The scene when the female agent encounters the Myrka and attempts to fight it with— I suppose it’s meant to be some kind of karate or something— is a near perfect storm of awfulness that cannot fail to make any fan cringe in embarrassment.
Changing any of those factors would help. Picture this story performed on the sets from The Abyss and you can imagine it turning out one of Dr Who’s best. Even the Myrka might look good (with the right concealing shadows— but better yet if it was CGI). And there’s no possible question that the sea monster kung fu scene is bad enough to drag anything down.
But there has to be more to it than that. Dr Who has a long history of good writing overcoming its low-budget production: that’s almost the series defining trait. Consider The Ark in Space from Tom Baker’s first season. It’s my pick for the best episode of Dr Who ever, Classic or New, and even if it’s not everyone’s all time favorite it routinely places in the top ten of surveys. And yet also has bright white plastic sets (a good deal cheaper than Warriors), and a ridiculous monster. The giant-wasp Wirrn, like the Myrka, look good until they move— but when they move, they are far, far worse than the Myrka. And yet nobody seems to mind. So why doesn’t it work for Warriors of the Deep if, as most seem to agree, the writing for the story is good?
As I said above, I like the story better than its reputation, but I agree it’s disappointing. You might guess by now where I’m going to point the finger: the writing also isn’t all it could be. It’s good, but when Dr Who soars above its production values, it’s because the writing is great, and this isn’t. In particular, the story misses part of what makes the other Silurian adventures stand out:
The Silurians represent a tragic reversal of Dr Who’s usual alien-monster story. Not only are the Earthlings, not only were they here first, but in every other story where they appear, the Doctor initially succeeds in persuading key Silurian leaders to accept negotiations for peaceful coexistence, only to have his efforts derailed by needless hostility from the humans. Once the Silurians are provoked, their plans turn genocidal and the Doctor has to stop that— but he knows he’s forced to pick the side that’s in the wrong, and he’s not happy about it. Even the recent reintroduction of the Silurians during Matt Smith’s era, although it pulled back from the tragedy a bit by foretelling a time when humans and Silurians will finally coexist, pushes that happy ending off to 1000 years in the future.
Picture a story with human protagonists who survive a global catastrophe in suspended animation, then wake up to find the Earth inhabited by what to them seem like alien monsters. The group that wakes up have the mission of waking up the rest of the sleepers. Despite their horror at the monsters they start by trying to negotiate peaceful coexistence, but the new inhabitants just try to kill them on sight, and even begin systematically destroying the rest of the suspended animation chambers where the whole human race lies helpless. Would we root for the “monsters” or would we cheer when our human heroes decide to fight back, to save humanity from extinction? That’s what the Doctor sees every time he encounters the Silurians.
Warriors of the Deep misses the point by having the Silurians on a genocidal campaign from the start. They say they’re reacting to the previous encounters, but by pushing that phase of the Silurian tragedy off into the backstory, the present story loses all those undercurrents. The Silurians come onto the Sea Base with guns blazing, and the rest is a straight fight between them and the humans, who for once (in a Silurian story) are simply defending themselves. When the Doctor tries to make peace, it’s the Silurians he has to persuade— but they never even consider it. His final line, quoted at the top of the page, is one he could say at the end of any Silurian story. In all the others, it would be the humans he’d be criticizing. Here, it’s the Silurians. That leaves the story with a missing layer.
The characters, in turn, aren’t as well-rounded and interesting as those in stories better able to overcome the series’ limitations. Again, I don’t find them badly written (a few bits of clumsy dialog here and there excepted) but they’re just not good enough to overcome the other problems the way a story like Ark in Space could.
Details
- Is it still the same Cold War that was going on in 1983 that the TARDIS crew find in 2084? Warriors of the Deep divides the Sea Base crew up (by both character name and accent) between Western and Eastern Europe, perhaps trying to suggest the same East-bloc/West-bloc division as the then-present Cold War— while at the same time carefully hiding which side the Sea Base was on. On the other hand, Dr Who’s glimpses of the future have often hinted as massive geopolitical realignments, as when we heard once that World War VI will be fought between global superpowers Iceland and the Philippines. Since the previous Cold War had ended (at least for the moment), fans who like to play the game are free to speculate: what new Cold War will have one side building Sea Bases with “proton missiles” in the year 2084?
- Speaking of that question, we’d better hope that the Sea Base was controlled by the side we won’t want to win that future conflict. The “enemy” agents’ only mission was to sabotage the Sea Base and take it out of action. By the end of the story, the Silurians have failed to cause a nuclear war but they have managed to completely achieve the “enemy’s” goal.
- I should have mentioned this last week, because it was introduced in The Five Doctors, but better late than never: there’s a new TARDIS console, the fourth since the series began. The 1963 original got a lot of rebuilds, repainting, and redressing, but stayed in use until the Fourth Doctor temporarily switched to the wood-paneled console room. When the series returned to the “original” console room (actually a new set) a new 6-sided console was introduced at the same time, and used until the end of season 20. Along with the new console, the set for the console room gets a minor update, although you have to look close to see the differences. The changes were introduced in-universe in The Five Doctors, with the Doctor proudly showing off the new design to Tegan, who is then dismayed to hear it’s cosmetic only and he hasn’t actually repaired anything.
- Both Silurians and Sea Devils get minor costume upgrades over their previous appearances, but not any real redesign. Though credit for the original design goes back to the designers of the Pertwee era, I might as well mention here that I still think they’re better designs than the new-series Silurians. While I understand the reasoning behind showing the actor’s face and so allowing a real performance, the modern green-faced human is far less imaginative a concept than either the original Silurian or Sea Devil.
- This is nit-picking, but: in their first appearance, the reptilian humanoids were called “Silurians” by the Doctor, after the human-named Silurian period when they supposedly lived. It wasn’t what they called themselves. In the second encounter, the Doctor said that “whoever” named them that (he ignores that it was himself) was completely wrong and should have called them the “Eocenes”— which is also wrong as far as geological periods go. “The Sea Devils,” meanwhile, was the title of the episode where they appeared but was never given as their name by anyone. In Warriors of the Deep, however, the Silurians and Sea Devils call themselves by those names. This has happened in Dr Who before (the “Ice Warriors” were called that by humans who found them frozen in a glacier, then a couple of appearances later were calling themselves that).
- Having brought up the subject of nit-picking: by this time John Nathan-Turner was employing Ian Levene as “continuity adviser” on scripts, to make sure everything agreed with whatever Dr Who had said in the past. This made a bit of sense during the 20th-anniversary run-up, when the show was trying to call back to its past and wanted to do it correctly. Levene looked at the first draft of Warriors of the Deep and handed in a list of 28 mistakes compared to previous Silurian episodes. Writer Johnny Byrne revised the script, correcting all 28 errors, but Levene’s second look found he had introduced 27 new ones. When he handed this list in, script editor Eric Saward basically said “screw this” and went back to ordinary script editing without worrying about the nit-pickers. I’ve said before I blame Saward more than JN-T for the decline of Dr Who in this era, but this is one case where I’m on his side: continuity has never been much on Dr Who’s mind, and probably shouldn’t be.
- The female enemy agent (the one with the horrible karate scene) was played by Ingrid Pitt, a prominent “scream queen” of the Hammer Horror films era in the 60s. I haven’t seen any of her movies, but even given Hammer Horror’s low budget standards she must have been a far better actress than she is here. Seriously, what happened?
Next Week:
“The Awakening,” 2 episodes.
