Story 299: Legend of the Sea Devils

In which the Doctor encounters an old enemy when visiting 19th Century China...

A lady pirate arrives in a small fishing village in search of a statue depicting a strange creature. An old man named Ying Wai, who is sworn to protect it, challenges her - against the advice of his son Ying Ki. Having tampered with it, the pirate sees the statue break open to reveal a living Sea Devil entombed within. It kills Ying Wai. His son fails to see what happened as a storm has struck and assumes that the woman killed his father, and so vows revenge.

The TARDIS materialises on a beach nearby and the Doctor, Yaz and Dan make their way to the village after the Doctor discovers a powerful magnetic force emanating from the sea.

They witness the Sea Devil massacring the villagers. Only the pirate woman and Ying Ki survive. An attempt to capture the creature fails as it uses a glowing sword to cut the fishing net they have used, and then a huge sailing ship appears - floating through the air. The Sea Devil is picked up and the ship sails away.

The Doctor recognises the pirate queen as Zheng Yi Sao, the notorious pirate queen known as Madam Ching. She reveals that she is hunting for the lost treasure of the Flor de la Mar, which sank near here in the 16th Century. The wreck had been found by the famous captain Sin Ji-Hun, only for his own ship to sink soon after.

On the flying ship, the Sea Devil - Marsissus - takes command. It is a Chief Sea Devil who has been in hibernation for generations, trapped within the statue in the village. It orders the summoning of the Hua-Shen, a great sea serpent.

Madam Ching returns to her own ship, and Dan follows Ying Ki there, as the young man is still intent on killing her since she is still responsible for his father's death having awakened the Sea Devil.

They are quickly captured by the pirate queen and discover that she is alone on the ship. They must become her crew.

Knowing that Madam Ching will not negotiate with them directly, the Doctor decides that they should use the TARDIS to travel back in time to discover the whereabouts of the lost treasure, by finding out what happened to Sin Ji-Hun's ship. This will give them a bargaining tool.

They arrive on his vessel in 1533 and witness him forcing his crew overboard before Marsissus teleports on board. The captain is surrendering the vessel to the Sea Devil, and it begins to sink with only him and Marsissus on deck.

Knowing now where the ship went down, the Doctor and Yaz return to 1807 and the seabed location, but find no trace of the wreck. What they do find is the Hua-Shen, which attempts to devour the TARDIS.

Madam Ching discovers that her compass is acting erratically, and when they go to check their position by the stars they are shocked to see them moving around them. Dan and Ying Ki learn that her crew were abducted - including her two sons - and she must locate and hand over the treasure of the Flor de la Mar as ransom to get them back.

They are then attacked by the Huan-Shen, which has the ability to deflect cannonballs.

The creature had earlier taken the TARDIS to the Sea Devil base, where the Doctor is confronted by Marsissus. She learns that the reason they did not find Sin Ji-Hun's ship is that it was converted into the flying vessel they saw earlier. The Sea Devil seeks one further gem, known as the Keystone, which was supposed to be with the lost treasure, and which Sin Ji-Hun claimed to possess. When he failed to hand it over, Marsissus had him placed in a stasis chamber as punishment. He is here in the base, in enforced hibernation. 

The Hua-Shen has now located the Keystone on the surface nearby. The Doctor creates a diversion by forcing the Sea Devil ship to the surface and frees Sin Ji-Hun. They have surfaced next to Madam Ching's ship. The Doctor and Yaz swing over to Madam Ching's ship where they discover that the Keystone is actually being worn by Ying Ki as a pendant. It has been passed down through his family from the man who had been Sin Ji-Hun's first mate, given to him for safekeeping to prevent it falling into the hands of Marsissus.

The crystal can trigger a device that would cause the Earth's oceans to rise and sink all landmasses - freeing the planet for the Sea Devils alone. Before Marsissus can sink his ship and return to his base, a swordfight breaks out. The Sea Devil commander is killed by Sin Ji-Hun, but not before the Keystone has been transported to the base.

The Doctor therefore sinks the ship to stop the rest of the Sea Devils activating their device. She will cause the entire base to increase its density so that the weight will cause it to collapse in on itself. To do  this she will have to remain behind. Sin Ji-Hun elects to sacrifice himself in her place and the base is destroyed.

Fortunately, the treasure of the Flor de la Mar has been moved into the TARDIS before the sabotage begins. Madam Ching can now free her crew and sons. She regrets not having helped save Ying Ki's father earlier, and so offers the young man the chance to stay with her as part of her crew.

Legend of the Sea Devils was written by Chris Chibnall and Ella Road, and was first broadcast on Easter Sunday, 17th April, 2022.

It is the second of the trio of Specials which would see out Chibnall as showrunner and Jodie Whitaker as the Doctor. Unusually for a special it runs to less than an hour in duration, clocking in at 50 minutes - the same as any normal episode since Chibnall took over. This might suggest that the script was originally going to form part of Series 13 until the Covid pandemic forced changes.

However, there are some jarring narrative leaps on show which suggest that the episode was supposed to have been longer, and has simply been badly edited to get it to fit the shorter time slot.

The fight at the village near the start jumps to the Doctor and her companions having a complicated trap set up only seconds after they have walked through the gates, and the story entirely fails to set up the Keystone, so its significance comes out of nowhere.

If the story seems rushed and disjointed, it at least looks great. VFX and character costumes are excellent. The ship was the largest set built for the series up to that point. Thankfully, the Sea Devil design has been kept faithful to the original John Friedlander masks, and he is given an on-screen credit. The costumes are far better than the padded Samurai outfits they were given on their last outing - way back in 1984's Warriors of the Deep - and the original, but impractical, "fishing net" look has also been ignored. The new period costumes look fine, whilst the masks make use of modern techniques to look more natural.

As well as the Sea Devil / Chinese pirate adventure, the episode takes time to explore certain relationship issues which came to prominence through the recent Flux series, though they had their origins in the series prior to that. Certain sections of fandom refer to this as "Thasmin" - a merging of The Doctor and Yasmin, like "Brangelina" or "Bennifer". I've argued before that Chibnall failed to plan properly ahead, making his series look as though he's making things up as he goes along rather than spending time carefully plotting things out in the style of both RTD and, especially, Moffat. They could sow seeds that wouldn't bear fruit until four or more years later.

It seems apparent that Chibnall, who claimed never to read anything the press or fandom said about the show during his tenure, took on board what fans were saying and so co-opted it into his writing.

The cast is headed by Crystal Yu as Madam Ching. She has featured in the second season of Good Omens and Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. Ying Ki is played by Marlon Chan-Reeves - only his first TV role. He has since appeared in crime drama Shetland.

Sin Ji-Hun is portrayed by Arthur Lee. He seems to do a lot of voice work for video games, but just before his Doctor Who role he featured in the Robert Pattinson Batman movie, and has done a stint on EastEnders.

Fresh from playing Karvanista in Flux, Marsissus is played by Craige Els.

You can tell that this episode was made under the strict Covid protocols as the guest cast is so small, with CG duplicating Sea Devils, and Madam Ching having her crew conveniently abducted and so never seen. The village complement seems to compose solely of Ying Ki and his dad.

Overall, you have to wonder how they could have got it so wrong. The return of the Sea Devils, coupled with Chinese Pirates, in a period setting, really should have been a classic. But the tiny cast robs it of its epic status, and the Sea Devils hardly feature. There's the issue of the editing mentioned above, and the narrative fails to flow coherently. Really ought to have been better.

Things you might like to know:

• The real Madam Ching was born c.1775. She was known as Zheng Yi Sao - "Wife of Zheng Yi". He was a pirate whom she married in 1801, and on his death in 1807 she took over his operations. She would later wed Zheng Yi's adopted son, who helped her run the pirate enterprise. This was said to comprise some 400 vessels, 24 of which she commanded personally. She died a wealthy woman in 1844, peacefully. She left behind a pirate code which was followed by many generations of successors. She has a climbing route named after her in the Austrian Alps.
• The Flor de la Mar - "Flower of the Sea" - was a Portuguese carrack which sank in November 1511. A nobleman was sailing home with a vast treasure destined for the Portuguese king when it sank off the coast of Sumatra. It was basically unseaworthy, having undergone continual repairs, and foundered in a storm with the loss of 400 men - though the nobleman survived. Some of the survivors were not found until a year later. The wreck has never been found.
• The overnight ratings were only 2.2 million, giving this the lowest viewing figures since the opening episode of Battlefield. The McCoy story's consolidated viewing figures actually beat those for this new Easter Special.
• In an interview later, Chibnall claimed that fans could consider the Myrka the offspring of the Hua-Shen.
• One of the costume makers used the codename "Green Gilberts" to conceal the return of the Sea Devils. This was a reference back to their first appearance, when one of the captured Royal Navy submariners calls them this.