Twice this week I’ve had the simple concept of lesbians shouted at me in the most ham-fisted way possible. The other occasion was HBO’s Julia, because the concept of someone menopausal in 1963 also being uncomfortable having a relationship with anyone that’s LGBTQ+ is such an outlandish idea. I could write a whole article about how not to poorly write your show to lull the viewer into feeling bad for enjoying a character as presented previously. Nonetheless, my current job is to talk about bland, poorly constructed, and god-awful conceptual ideas spread so thin the episode had nothing to do.

Honestly, I had forgotten it would be Ella Road and Chris Chibnall writing for this one. It is, in fact, breaking the general rule that Chibnall’s co-written work is good. Malorie Blackman knocked it out of the park with the historical of “Rosa,” Vinay Patel did fantastic work for “Fugitive of the Judoon,” Charlene James had a solid enough foundation for “Can You Hear Me?,” and the only good episode of the last series was Maxine Alderton’s “Village of the Angels.” I skipped Pete McTighe’s “Praxeus,” because that was dull, and wanted to fridge the gays. That happens to be something Twitter seems to ignore as Chris puts a rainbow ticking clock around Yaz’s neck.

“Legend of the Sea Devils” is a historical episode with a character I knew very little about beforehand, and came out knowing nothing new. Correction, she had three sons who weren’t entirely important to the plot or character, at all. Zheng Yi Sao, or Ching Shih, was a young woman who married into the pirate life and took the control of the confederation her husband ran before his death in 1807. With that single sentence, I’ve given you more information about her life at the time of the episode, than the episode did in 50-minutes. Why did we need the historical character?

This is my problem with Chris Chibnall’s work. He understands that there are tropes in Doctor Who, but he doesn’t comprehend the order they go in or how they function. The epitome of that statement is character. Yaz is a police officer that forgets she’s a police officer, Dan is dull and will spout historical facts without rhyme or reason, and the Doctor is an amoralistic psychopath without any understanding of who they are. Character is seeing someone walk into a situation and knowing what they will do. The Doctor accosted Arthur Lee’s Ji-Hun for killing a Sea Devil with a sword, then she handed it to Dan so he could stab several of them in the next scene.

Dan played a better Doctor for a minute with Marlowe Chan-Reeves’ Ying Ki, trying to talk him out of attempting revenge on Madame Ching. Nevertheless, we’ve seen time and time again with Jodie’s Doctor that she’s not anything beyond a surface-level peculiar alien with a northern accent. The morals, the background and the gravity that pulled you into loving Eccleston, Tennent, Smith, and only sometimes with Capaldi, are gone. All of those basics are gone because the person that was handed the keys to a car a million people want to drive, doesn’t understand a single thing about this character and their motivations.

Even the queer bait where we’re supposed to apprehend the Doctor and Yaz’s relationship completely, something we’ve seen for four years now, lacks emotion. I’m not knocking the actors nor I am blaming Ella Road, who got the short end of the stick. I’m kicking the legacy of Chris Chibnall and Matt Stevens to death with all the might I have. Since October 28th, 2018, we’ve had Yaz and the Doctor teased, tugged, and pulled, to get a very elicit response from a specific community. Yet, every bit of that so-called pay-off is stuck on the side, so it could be cut out like the six seconds of “gay wizards go fighting” or whatever that new Fantastic Beasts film is called.

To construct a crude visual of what it feels like to make my point crystal clear, this is like marching out Al Jolson and saying, “look, representation!” It is not, it is performative nonsense dressed up attempting to tick a box and nothing more. Just look at every gay character throughout Chibnall’s run. Every single one of them, aside from Alan Cumming playing King James, is dead or full of tragedy. I’ve said it before, I assume when we did the non-commital suicidal Yaz thing, I don’t expect this to end with anything beyond Yaz kicking the chair in a cupboard under the stairs.

Shall we move on to the fact that this big-budget sci-fi drama, (for publically funded television) looks like a children’s theater show put on by the Wombles? It looked like someone blew sixteen inches of dust off of the costumes used in the 70s for Pertwee’s interaction with the Sea Devils then tried to CGI over the top of that. We know animatronics and rubber masks can be made to look so much better than this, the Judoon are the embodiment of this argument, so why did this look so unexpressive. Call me a space-racist if you like but I couldn’t tell them apart.

Give them different shades of that ugly brown with hints of green and orange or something so I am not left looking at the Ferengi and saying they look better. Which reminds me, why did the leader have a translator thing around his neck? It explicitly lit up when he spoke, so I am taking a leap here and assuming it to be a translator for the Doctor, Yaz, Dan, and others. Are we ignoring that the TARDIS already does that for our crew? I wouldn’t mind a line saying it is for everyone else, but it has to be in there first to count.

While we’re on the unexplained, what was the deal with the sea snake? It was used for nothing more than a device to get us places and was never employed again, explained, or resolved. So somewhere in the south China Sea is a massive ugly Sea Devil-looking monster, to which, the Doctor doesn’t care. How about Dan’s unexplained knowledge of China at that time? Or for that matter, the underwater “air bubble” that wasn’t seen at all around the TARDIS, yet was a massive point in the story to show the Doctor and Yaz are kind of “in lesbians” with each other. There is more, but I’ll move on.

We’ve advanced from “Look at how international this adventure is,” which has become a staple of Chibnall-Who. He has advanced into Moffat’s big problem of trying to add needless time travel into this show that isn’t about time travel but does have a vehicle to get us places. Throughout the episode, there was a pause button hit somewhere so we could walk off the set to have a chat about how the Doctor can’t love someone so fantastically ordinary as Yaz, however, that pause to head to 1553 was entirely unnecessary too.

I nearly kicked the telly in when Jodie plopped out, “No ship Sherlock.” Which was only the first time I was close to starting fights with the episode for idiotic decisions made, the second being when it was both day and night. It was so bright outside I thought there was about to be a lovely big blast wave that would turn everyone to dust and leave the metal of the ship irradiated. Nonetheless, the later afternoon, almost sunset scene was apparently peak star-gazing hour. That is another failure to show character by using the Latin names instead of what would be appropriate, using the Chinese constellations.

What I don’t understand at all is how someone thinks this was a solid piece of television. It was queer-baiting set-piece after ’80s Who set-piece, with nothing connecting it all together. It doesn’t even feel like the first draft, it is most akin to the log-line spread over the run time without any expansion on those 20-40 words on a post-it note. There was no logical character beat or reasonable progression of events, and no conclusive final hurrah for our leads to go into their final story. The last Easter special we had was actually an Easter special, David Tennant ate some chocolate on a bus as Lee Evans was lovely. That was the caliber we had fourteen years ago, now we’ve got this.

A large portion of the episode (or at least the theming) was pirates and making Dan dress inappropriately for all of this, which completely fails on me. Currently, I’m surrounded by fantastic pirate adventures in the wonderfully gay and trans Our Flag Means Death, as well as Tricia Levenseller’s Daughter of the Pirate King. Both are so much better at not only using the theming overall, as they are both longer than 50-minutes, but they have character beats. They have a story that’s being told reasonably well, I understand the motives, and there isn’t shoehorned in nonsense to get an interesting image out of a situation.

What we’re stuck with in “Legend of the Sea Devils” is something not telling the tale of the Sea Devils or an interesting fact about the historical character, and it isn’t a fun episode. What this run of Doctor Who seems to have been for a lot of people, especially if you look at Twitter, is screenshot sharing. “Look at this pretty shot” they seem to say, without defining why the episode is worth watching. More often than not, they aren’t worth rewatching. That’s what I’ve seen from this episode, the TARDIS at the bottom of the sea and excitement for a gobby Australian to return alongside Ace.

What I keep returning to here is the question of “What’s the point?” Why did we need the Sea Devils? Why did we need Madame Ching, why did we need the historical bits at all? Nothing that is used is complete. That’s where the episode falters, as every bit of it feels unnecessary when it is all so incomplete. Any attempts at thematic cohesion are gone when we have aliens that aren’t part of the plot or historical characters that have no bearing on the situation. Until it became important, the gem the Sea Devils were looking for wasn’t hinted at or noticed. It was all exposition to get to the next dull grey set-piece.

Ultimately, it was a desperately contrived piece of nonsense spread so thin that understanding the plot would require the task of someone raking the bins out the back of Chris Chibnall’s house to find all that is absent. The push to present the lesbian relationship between Yaz, a nothing character, and the worst characterization of the Doctor is an afterthought. It is a tick of the box to please someone in a suit trying to please a group of people. If I have to write another word about this bland episode, I’ll chew my own hands off. That alone will be a better plot as it will require character development.

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Doctor Who "Legend of the Sea Devils"

1

Score

1.0/10

Pros

• Dan provided levity.

Cons

• Yay, Queer bate that is nothing.
• Yaz is still a nothing character.
• I will need the contense of a bin to figure out the plot.
• What was the point in having the Sea Devils.
• Such a big statue for such a small man.