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“History books? Captain Hart, Horatio Nelson was a personal friend of mine.”

There was a time, early on in my own personal obsession with Doctor Who – which is to say, before I hooked up with any kind of collective fandom, organized or otherwise – that the Jon Pertwee era of the 1970s seemed very exotic, at least from a distance. This was the early ‘80s, long before the internet of course, and I was getting most of my information from the quaintly odd fanzine Fantasy Empire, and particularly the year-by-year episode guide written by the late John Peel. (Peel was ultimately a bit of a controversial figure in Who fandom; he wrote two barking mad Dalek novels for the early BBC line that did some ret-conning of the classic series, and his very vocal opinions often flew in the face of accepted fan-lore, including [but not limited to] citing the legendary “Genesis of the Daleks” as a travesty.) Peel was obviously a huge fan of the Pertwee era, and seemed to praise each serial even more highly than the last; plus, there were grainily intriguing photos of Silurians, Deamons, Drashigs, Ice Warriors, and Sea Devils.

But, perhaps most importantly, they were elusive and unseen. As with most PBS stations of the era, Channel 9 out of St. Louis, MO (where I watched and taped the show religiously) had been running the Tom Baker serials in a fairly endless stream for several years, with “Logopolis” looping back into “Robot” at least three times before the Peter Davison catalog was finally acquired, stretching the run to the almost-contemporary “Caves of Androzani.” But Jon Pertwee, Baker’s predecessor, and the third actor to play the Doctor, remained only a pre-regenerate face glimpsed briefly at the beginning of “Robot,” and a curiously avuncular figure, rescuing Sarah Jane Smith from gentle slopes in “The Five Doctors.” The actual adventures of the Third Doctor did not debut in my area until several years into the show’s PBS run, and by that time, my excitement was palpable.

Alas, as with so many things, the actual reality did not meet my over-built expectations, and the Pertwee epoch – in which the Doctor is stranded on Earth, grounded by the Time Lords as punishment for his meddlings in time and space – proved to be a series of overlong and overly-familiar serials (as “Sea Devils” writer Malcolm Hulke had once predicted, the run broke down mainly into “alien invasion” and “mad scientist” stories in various combinations) that kept the most flexible format in science fiction history earthbound and routine. Sort of like the current BBC Wales series. But don’t get me started.

Nothing is absolute, however, and the Pertwee era does have some things to recommend it: it was here (in “Terror of the Autons” to be precise) that the Doctor’s arch-nemesis the Master debuted, played in this era by the elegant and wonderful Roger Delgado. And even though the stories tended to be hopelessly padded (decisions on story length were often made on the basis of cost, rather than organic storytelling; since “The Sea Devils” would require six brand-new monster costumes, it had to be a six-parter rather than four, in order to absorb the cost of the extra foam rubber), there are some gems scattered through Pertwee’s five year tenure. Thankfully, today’s offering, “The Sea Devils” (9.3, 1972) is one of those gems, albeit a minor one.

Incarcerated since the events of “The Daemons” (8.5, 1971), renegade Time Lord the Master (Roger Delgado) is now interned in a small island castle, under the command of Trenchard (Clive Morton). The Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and Jo Grant (Katy Manning) come to visit him, but also to investigate the disappearance of several ships in the area. They enlist the aid of Capt. Hart (Edmund Richfield) at the nearby naval base, and it soon becomes apparent that the Master has Trenchard under his thrall, and has managed to set up contact with undersea creatures that are related to the Silurians the Doctor encountered two years earlier. These so-called Sea Devils want the Earth for themselves, and are plotting with the Master to wipe humanity from the face of the planet.

Coming almost exactly at the mid-way point in the Pertwee run, “The Sea Devils” has many classic elements of this era, including a contemporary Earthbound story (the TARDIS is never shown, and barely mentioned), the Master misleading an alien (or at least nonhuman) force in an attempt to enslave/destroy humanity, and lots of chase scenes featuring exotic modes of transport. Famously, producer Barry Letts enlisted the aid of the Royal Navy in making the story, and the verisimilitude this lends cannot be overstated; there’s a definite grit to this tale that is lacking in more studio-bound stories, and the sheer number of people on-screen (many sailors were enlisted as unpaid extras) gives “The Sea Devils” a certain scope that early-70s Doctor Who rarely managed.  The story is, of course, a semi-sequel to “Doctor Who and the Silurians” (and was originally titled “The Sea Silurians”) from Pertwee’s first year, although returning writer Malcolm Hulke has eschewed much of the political subtext that laced the earlier story. This was perhaps a reaction to comments about the slow pace and preponderance of talking-head stuff in “The Silurians,” but here he seems content to craft a rather sprawling adventure. Sure, the Doctor makes his usual plea for the Sea Devils and humans to Live In Peace, but for the most part this is a straight-ahead action romp, and a pretty entertaining one. It’s said by many (and usually by me as well) that six-part Who stories are at least 33% too long, but “The Sea Devils” works because of the variety of cool stuff on display, most of it provided by the Navy. Director Michael Briant keeps the action moving briskly, shifting between multiple interesting locations. And the parts that do drag – such as the Doctor’s descent in a diving bell – have a nuts-and-bolts “procedural” quality that probably fascinated the UK tykes of 1972, and you can hardly blame the show for that. Even the stock footage is pretty well-integrated; the restoration of the image quality makes it more obvious, but it generally works. Plus, any story that features Roger Delgado’s Master is guaranteed to have a top villain. He is simply superb. Oh, and one bit of geeky trivia: the catchphrase “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” is often associated with the Third Doctor, but this is the only story in which he actually says it.

One aspect of the story that has not aged well (and frankly, most people thought it was crap back in the ‘70s as well) is the bizarre musical score by Malcolm Clarke. Clarke had apparently been asked to deliver something “different,” and he did that, in spades. Less incidental music than a series of bizarre synthesizer gurglings which twitter and chirrup and oscillate, and which rarely seem to connect to anything that’s happening visually, this is certainly the oddest of all Doctor Who scores. The closest antecedent I can think of would be the “electronic tonalities” of the classic Forbidden Planet (1956), but with less cohesion; the amorphous “Sea Devils” score was once described as sounding like an outer space laser dogfight happening just off-screen. (At one point, in the audio commentary, producer Barry Letts relates that he had to ask director Michael Briant to remove some aspects of the score because they sounded like footsteps and gunfire that didn’t correspond to anything on-screen, and were utterly confusing!) It’s a fairly legendary misstep among hard-core Who fans, though it is distinctive (it got it’s own CD release for crying out loud!) and at least varied enough that it is a minor improvement over the vaguely similar but repetitive music used on “The Silurians.” However, I must admit that, after a couple of episodes, you sort of get used to the weird music, and it becomes progressively less distracting.

As for the Sea Devils themselves… well, it must be said, they aren’t particularly convincing. The head sculpt – based on a sea turtle – is fairly detailed, but utterly expressionless with glassy cartoonish eyes, and doesn’t seem particularly threatening. Worse is the fact that the heads are quite obviously mounted on top of the performers heads (worn like a hat), while the extended necks are all too obviously hiding the actor’s own faces; this was done to give the Sea Devils more height, but the ruse is all too obvious and a little silly-looking. Ironically enough, they actually look better in bright daylight, where the details of the sculpture can be seen, whereas when bathed in shadows, they tend to congeal into darkish blobs which somehow seem even less realistic, and more plastic-y. Those odd mesh “dresses” they wear don’t help matters either, but as director Briant is fond repeating, he didn’t think it proper to have a band of naked Sea Devils running around. Children of the day apparently found them terrifying, but they don’t hold up well to modern scrutiny. Briant does the best he can in not holding shots on them for too long, but there’s still altogether too much evidence of their shabby appearance. Still, they have a certain charm, something that can be said of much of vintage Doctor Who’s production values.

The British Restoration Team have done their usual sterling job in sharpening up the image quality and sound; as opposed to “Doctor Who and the Silurians” (see review), they at least had color materials to work with (although only epsidoes 3-6 were the original PAL masters, unfortunately; the rest are reversed-standards NTSC prints recovered from North America), and while the image quality is a bit soft generally, and not quite up to the standards of ‘80s Who on DVD, it is more than acceptable, and occasionally quite pleasingly crisp, especially in the later episodes.

Given that “The Sea Devils” is a six-episoder on a single disc, the special features are going to necessarily be limited by encoding space, but they’re not bad at all. As follows:

Hello Sailor: Making “The Sea Devils” is a pleasant little featurette (36 minutes) about how the gang all went down to the coastal city of Portsmouth and filmed this little adventure. The usual suspects are here, including producer Barry Letts, script editor Terrance Dicks, and the still-adorable Katy Manning, supplemented by comments from very enthusiastic director Michael Briant (seriously, with this and the commentary track, you gotta love this guy for being so gung-ho on making good Who), stuntman Stuart Fell, and others, including some of the seamen that were assigned to help the BBC get this thing in the can. Everyone seems to have good memories of the experience, and some amusing anecdotes are related.

8mm is easily the most delightful extra included here, just under four minutes of amateur film footage shot by Navy gob Dave King while the cast was on the Naval base. This remarkably sharp-looking footage (which was likely polished a bit by the Restoration Team, but simply wouldn’t look this good without a strong source image) features Pertwee clowning with sailors and being interviewed by the local paper, as well as copious footage of the Sea Devil charge on the beach, and of various Devils milling around while waiting to be filmed. Narrated by Briant (and, briefly, Dicks), this is quite simply one of the niftiest “non-official” bits to be included only any Who disc.

The Audio Commentary features Briant, Dicks, and Letts, and is moderated by McCoy-era script editor Andrew Cartmell, who has very little to do, and in fact makes some bizarre comments, such as asking if the first five episodes were shot entirely on film (rather than the traditional mix of primarily video with some filmed inserts, which they quite obviously were). No moderator is actually needed here—Letts and especially Dicks have never been at loss for words in the past, but both are left in the dust by director Michael Briant, who gushes throughout, has plenty to say about the story, and is refreshingly forthright about his occasional weaknesses as a young director. Briant’s enthusiasm, along with Letts’ extensive and impressive knowledge of Naval procedures, and Dicks’ usual candor make this possibly the very best Pertwee commentary ever.

Production Trivia Subtitle Track is by the illustrious Dr. Martin Wiggins, and is up to his usual high standards, offering tons of interesting information about the show, and carefully timing certain tidbits so that they have the most impact in concert with what’s being shown on-screen. As with most of these releases, there’s a certain amount of repetition between the featurette, audio commentary and subtitle track, but it seems less so with this disc, thankfully.

Trails and Continuities are the usual collection of vintage lead-ins (with amusingly deadpan BBC announcers), but also includes an extended montage from episode one, which was broadcast at the beginning of episode two, since the first installment was little-seen by the British public due energy blackouts caused by a utilities strike. Unfortunately, due to a shortage of encoding space, the trailers for the 1992 compilation rerun of “The Sea Devils” could not be included, as originally planned.

DVD Rom Content is not something I usually pay a whole lot of attention to (despite some fun entries on past releases, like the color comic strips), but this time they’ve gone the extra mile and included something quite intriguing, especially for American fans: the complete text of the original edition of The Making of Doctor Who paperback by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke, originally issued in the UK in 1972. Much of the material in the book relates to the making of “The Sea Devils,” and a lot of it looks very odd to modern eyes: much of the information about the series (including an episode guide of sorts, without story titles) is presented as “evidence” in the Doctor’s Time Lord trial, and there’s some downright surreal religious content – the kind of thing you’d never get away with today. Dicks ultimately revised the book in 1976, eliminating most of Hulke’s material in favor of behind-the-scenes bits on Dicks’ own debut Tom Baker script “Robot,” and including a rather more traditional episode guide. This noticeably slimmer edition is the one that most U.S. fans own or have seen; it’s so ubiquitous one can’t help but wonder if the print run was in the trillions. The vintage version as presented here, is one of the coolest extras “The Sea Devils” has to offer. In addition to the book, the usual Radio Times listings (supplemented with a couple of other nifty news clippings, including the winners of a Dalek contest) are also included.

On tap as well is the usual Photo Gallery (a decent collection of color and b/w stills from the show, set to that gurgly incidental music), a rather overamped Coming Soon to DVD trailer for William Hartnell classic “The Time Meddler,” and an Isolated Music Track, as if anyone on earth would subject themselves to that wonki-fonic score without the benefit of the dialogue in-between laser skirmishes. And, as with virtually all the recent releases, the disc defaults to a Doctor Who Series 3 DVD trailer, which was fun the first six hundred times, and is at least skippable.

Subtitles are provided for all elements of the DVD, always a welcome commodity.

“The Sea Devils” is available as a separate release, or as part of the Beneath the Sea box set; with most on-line retailers, the box set is by far the better deal, offering four discs for essentially the price of two; think of it as getting “Doctor Who and the Silurians” for free.

While it will rarely be listed among the very top Third Doctor stories, “The Sea Devils” is a solid, colorful entertainment that makes for a pretty good representation of the Jon Pertwee era. It has helicopters, hovercraft, big artillery, diving bells, atomic submarines, and six goofy monsters who rise up out of the salty sea. It’s a million miles from David Tennant and his CGI wonderlands, but as a fairly vigorous bit of vintage Doctor Who, it is more than satisfying.

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