317 The Sea Devils Episode Six

EPISODE: The Sea Devils: Episode Six
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 317
STORY NUMBER: 062
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 01 April 1972
WRITER: Malcolm Hulke
DIRECTOR: Michael Briant
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Barry Letts
RATINGS: 8.5 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Beneath the Surface (The Silurians / The Sea Devils / Warriors of the Deep)
EPISODE FORMAT: 625 video

"I very much doubt it. You see, before you reactivated it, I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow!"

The Doctor, Jo, Hart and the naval base personnel are all captured by the Sea Devils. The Master wants the Doctor's help reviving the Sea Devils. Jo stages an escape through a small ventilation shaft. The Doctor starts to build a device the Master has designed, altering the plans to his own specification. Jo finds the room the Doctor is being kept in and the Doctor gives her instructions. He activates the machine incapacitating the Sea Devils allowing Jo to free Hart, while the cowardly Walker hides, and they both escape to sea in a hovercraft. The Master wants the Doctor taken back to the Sea Devil base with him & the machine. Jo & Hart return with a naval assault team which retakes the base. The Doctor is freed and the Master taken prisoner, but he uses his hypnotic powers to escape. He steels a powerboat but is pursued by the Doctor in another landing on a beach where the Doctor is taken prisoner by Sea Devils. The Sea Devils intend to wipe mankind out and retake Earth. The machine is activated to awaken the hibernating Sea Devils. Both the Master & the Doctor are imprisoned but the Doctor tells his foes that he has reversed the polarity on the neutron flow turning it into an explosive device that will destroy the base. He proposes they escape together which they do using the escape equipment taken off the submarine. They are rescued by hovercraft just as the base is destroyed beneath them, but the Master collapses as soon as he's aboard. Arriving on shore the Doctor is reunited with Jo, but the Master has staged his collapse and escapes in the hovercraft.

An all out action episode with the BBC using the full resources of the Navy and a few extra goodies beside.

The Hovercraft looks like it's from the Navy but I'd be willing to bet the jet skis were Jon Pertwee's idea. He looks like he's having a great time riding his while Roger Delgado is being doubled by a stuntman!

The Jet Ski sequence was shot at Priory Bay on the Isle of Wight which also provides the beach used for the Sea Devils capturing the Doctor at the end of it

Roger Delgado looks distinctly uncomfortable bobbing around in the sea at the end of the story: I'm pretty certain I read that he was afraid of the water!

If you're wondering where the gear they're using has come from, well that was setup in episode 5 Chekov's Gun style as the Doctor rescued the sub crew, who are missing this episode.

DOCTOR: Good afternoon, gentlemen. Er, look, would you mind keeping back for a moment? That is if you want to get out? Thank you!
RIDGEWAY: Who the blazes are you?
DOCTOR: Look, I've no time to explain now. Where are the rest of your men?
RIDGEWAY: Still in the submarine.
DOCTOR: Is the submarine still operational?
RIDGEWAY: Should be.
MITCHELL: They've ripped out the communicators and the escape gear, as you can see.
RIDGEWAY: But left the engines alone.
MITCHELL: Yes.
DOCTOR: Where's the sub now?
RIDGEWAY: In a kind of undersea harbour.
DOCTOR: Can you find the way?
RIDGEWAY: I think so, yes.
DOCTOR: Right, you'd better lead on. Here, take this. It's a gun. Now come on, let's hurry.

Captain Hart has a great episode playing the action hero leading from the front as first man out the episode blazing away with his gun and then operating heavy weaponry to help defend the base

PPS Walker meanwhile completely goes to pieces when under threat and locked up:

HART: It's no good! They've cut the power supply!
JO: Shush! Look, there's still some of them in there.
WALKER: This is monstrous! What are you going to do about it, Captain Hart?
JO: Captain Hart, what about this?
HART: Yes, we should be able to open it. But I could never get through the ventilation shaft up there.
JO: No, but I could.
HART: The table.
JO: Right.
HART: Here.
WALKER: What, what are you doing?
HART: We are going to put this table underneath that ventilation hatch and try to open it.
WALKER: Yes, but supposing you get caught? They might take reprisals against the innocent!
HART: A screwdriver. Jo, over there on the bench somewhere.
JO: Right.
WALKER: Don't you think we ought to leave these things to the Doctor? He said we ought to cooperate with them, you know?
HART: Tool kit. Underneath. Underneath the bench.
WALKER: Look, he's, er, he's not going to try and trick them, is he?
JO: Shush!
HART: That's it.
WALKER: This could have the most dreadful consequences! He, he, he made them a promise, you know.
HART: Yes, in order to save our lives! Now do you mind?

WALKER: Are you, are you really going to let a mere child risk her life?
HART: Well I could never get through that ventilation shaft. Would you like to try?

Come on, Jo. Now, once you're through the shaft, there's a hatch that comes out onto the roof of this building.

Unfortunately once free he quickly reverts to type wanting big explosions ....

WALKER: Now, perhaps you'll admit I was right all along. Massive nuclear strike. It's the only way.
JO: But not until we know what's happened to the Doctor.
BLYTHE: Excuse me, sir. I've just seen Lieutenant Scott. He said he saw the Doctor heading out to sea.
WALKER: Ha ha, gone to join his friends. Gone over to the other side.
BLYTHE: He seemed to be chasing another boat.
JO: He must have been after the Master.
WALKER: Well, be that as it may, they'll both have to take their chances. I'm going to put an end to these creatures right away. Kindly get me the Minister on the phone. I'm going to request that we launch a nuclear strike. Now.

And once that's organised he wants something to eat!

BOWMAN: Ships moving into position now, sir.
WALKER: Very well. This time we'll continue the attack until those creatures are finally destroyed. Now, how about some tea?

WALKER: Ah, thank you, my dear. Ah ha! Smoked salmon. Delicious.

The Doctor then gets to be delightfully devious twice in this episode.

First he sabotages The Master's "Revive The Sea Devils" machine so it incapacitates the ones that are awake:

And then, once they've been taken to the Sea Devil base, he rigs the machine AGAIN ....

MASTER: Once they see that the device works properly, they'll release me.
DOCTOR: I very much doubt it. You see, before you reactivated it, I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow.
MASTER: You did what? You realise what will happen?
DOCTOR: Oh, yes. Do you?
MASTER: Well, there'll be a massive reverse feedback into their whole power system.
DOCTOR: Exactly. In about ten minutes from now the whole place should go up. Enjoy your revenge.

MASTER: Guards! Guards, come back! You must release me! I must talk to your chief! Let me out! We're all in danger! Let me out!
DOCTOR: You're wasting your time, you know. Even if they heard you, they couldn't do anything about it.
MASTER: Why?
DOCTOR: Well, I built a self-destruct mechanism into the main control switch. You can't turn it off.
MASTER: But but we'll both be killed.
DOCTOR: That's right. Unless we can both escape.

At this point we're half way through the Third Doctor/Jon Pertwee era. There were 25 episodes in each of the first two seasons and this is the fourteenth of this season making a total of 64. There's 12 more to come this season and then two seasons of 26 episodes. We're also halfway through Jo's tenure as companion: this is her 39th episode and there's 38 more to come. So how does the third Doctor celebrate? By saying, for the only time during his five year tenure, his supposed catch phrase: "I've reversed the polarity of the neutron flow!" The Doctor reverses the polarity of many things and does lots of things to the neutron flow but here's the only time during the five years Pertwee was the Doctor that he uses the full phrase, though it later makes an encore appearance in the five Doctors. Pertwee, and subsequently in his absence Terrance Dicks, tells a story where Pertwee found he could sing it, and thus memorise it, to the tune of the Sailor's Hornpipe and encouraged Dicks to use it more often. Since this is the phrase's only appearance while he was the Third Doctor you can tell that this, like so many of Pertwee's stories, appears to have grown somewhat in the telling. We have one new cast member to mention here:

John Caesar plays C.P.O. Myers, the sailor who frees the Doctor and holds the Master prisoner. He was in The Dalek Invasion of Earth as a Roboman, The Romans as a Man in Market, The Daleks' Master Plan as an Egyptian Soldier, The Ark as a Monoid, The Gunfighters as a Cowboy, The Macra Terror as a Guard, The Space Pirates as a Spacesuited Pirate & Pirate Guard and Colony in Space as a Colonist and will return in Invasion of the Dinosaurs as an R/T Soldier. He's been in Paul of Tarsus, which starred Patrick Troughton as Paul, as a soldier in Herod the King and The Feast of Pentecost and appeared in A for Andromeda as a MP Corporal.

The Master's escape at the end of the story is an effective reuse of the end of his first appearance in Terror of the Autons: someone else is dressed up in a mask and his clothes while he makes a getaway. But a getaway in a hovercraft is rather more stylish than the small coach seen in that story!

Malcolm Hulke novelised the Sea Devils in 1974 as well as documenting the making of the story in the original version of The Making of Doctor Who which he wrote with Terrance Dicks. This book contains the first mention of the Brigadier's first name which we're still, four years after he first appeared, yet to hear on television. This is the first publication to really look behind the scenes at the show and contains the first story guide as well. Several years later Dicks would substantially revise the guide centring it around the production of the fourth Doctor's first story, the Dicks penned Robot.

The Sea Devils is one of the most repeated Pertwee stories being reshown as a 90-minute compilation on 27th December 1972 which was repeated on 27 May 1974 as an Unscheduled repeat of compilation, replacing a cricket match. A little dig through Cricinfo's 1974 archive reveals that England weren't playing that day so it must have been a first class game either in the county championship or involving the Indian tourists. The program was eventually repeated episodically as the third Doctor's initial entry into the 1992 repeat season. Of the Pertwee stories Spearhead from Space, The Dæmons, The Sea Devils & The Green Death have each been repeated three times by the BBC while The Silurians, Day of the Daleks, The Curse of Peladon, The Three Doctors, Carnival of Monsters, Planet of the Daleks & Planet of the Spiders have been repeated once. The overall winner of the repeat game has had four return appearances and we'll be seeing that in a little while....

The Sea Devils was released in a double video pack in 1995. It was released on DVD on 14 Jan 2008 as part of Doctor Who - Beneath the Surface with it's predecessor The Silurians and their joint sequel Warriors of the Deep.