by Malcolm Hulke
DOCTOR WHO AND THE SEA-DEVILS
First published 17 October 1974*, which puts it between Planet of the Spiders and Robot
*http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Sea_Devils
"They are specially made to suit my taste. I don’t think you’d like them"
Unsurprisingly, as Hulke eradicates much of the second half of the TV story, Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils really emphasises how quickly he rattles through the plot points that made up almost all of Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters. The Chief Sea-Devil takes all of a minute to agree that the Doctor ‘will negotiate a truce between my people and the humans’. At that very moment, the humans start bombing the underwater base and the yet-to-begin peace process is immediately off.
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Before you know it, we’ve covered man’s poor custody of the planet, humanity’s inability to conceive of sharing the planet, rampant xenophobia and the bargaining that comes with any negotiation, here seemingly structured as a shoot-out at the naval base. The reptile men are then eradicated, in this case, by the Doctor alone, doing what the Brigadier did on TV but not in the novelisation (where he just sealed them in) of the earlier story and conceding without caveat to the Master’s accusation of ‘mass murder’.
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The increased pace lends an odd ease to the way the Doctor wipes out the Sea-Devils and contrasts unfortunately with the mercy he ‘made a personal plea’ be shown to the Master. His argument was based on the Master’s possession of ‘better qualities’, presumably evidence that he is not a complete monster, and that a belief in ‘the possibility of redemption’ is vital to civilised society and seems to have gone against the opinion of the ‘ordinary man in the street’, who felt he ‘deserved’ death, and even against that of the Brigadier, who expresses ‘amazement’ at the Doctor’s intervention.
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Though I suspect Hulke’s sympathies lie with the Doctor’s argument, the book conspires undermine it. Upon gaining his freedom, the Master, who was grateful for the mercy he was shown whilst in prison, immediately seeks ‘revenge’ for his imprisonment. It seems the whole experience washes off him once, as he puts it, he ‘can think clearly’, as if redemption can last only as long as punishment. Meanwhile, the Doctor is made to look a complete hypocrite, ruthlessly dispatching the Sea-Devils for their response to the humans’ attack but concealing ‘a wry smile’ following the Master’s escape despite the chaos and death he has wrought. He’s no more averse to the convenience of killing off an enemy than the average tax-payer as long as it’s not one of his own.
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Unfortunately, standing shoulder-to-shoulder isn’t a good place to be because the other effect of the increased pace, the absence of any disgust expressed towards the humans by the Sea-Devils, leaves people looking especially monstrous. The reptiles only mention apes three times, the first actually an acknowledgement that humans are no longer just apes (‘when Man was only an ape’), the second when the Chief Sea-Devil has just been subjected to immense pain and the frustration of his plans (‘you apes’) and the third from the newly and abruptly appointed Chief Sea-Devil as he betrays the Master and is more an unfortunate choice of noun than a derogatory term. No expressions of disgust, no talk of all the insects nestling in their fur. On the other hand, humans talk of putting Sea-Devils in the ‘zoo’ and don’t count their deaths as real deaths. The nicest demonstration of this comes when the Chief Sea-Devil is killed with such matter-of-fact brutality: ‘The Chief Sea-Devil’s sentence ended there because a bullet from a .44 service rifle, travelling at three times the speed of sound, and fired by one Petty Officer Myers, had just entered and destroyed its brain’. The Master mourns to its killer that ‘You have just killed one of the most intelligent creatures that ever walked on this earth’, seeming in earnest thanks to the double superlative. The response to this elegy to a creature of beauty? ‘“Really, sir?” said the petty officer. “They look like big frogs to me”’.
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It’s not just their attitude to the Sea-Devils that marks man out as a monster, it’s their attitude to all other life, ‘busily exterminating every other species on the planet’. We even get a roll call of the dead. Humanity’s such a seething mass of violence that, according to prison officer Crawley at least, there’s only ‘three groups of people—those who have been in prison, those who are in prison, and those who will be going to prison’. And then there’s the example of Trenchard, the main human character in the book, who manages to combine Hulke’s twin bug-bears of personal ambition and patriotic fervour on his way to getting all his staff killed and endangering all of humanity. His great inspiration in life appears to be his father, a man so determined in his efforts to suppress Indian self-governance that, faced with certain death, he heroically killed four people for no reason but to exact a price for his defeat and the one thing that might be said in Trenchard’s favour is that he fails in his attempts to imitate him to the last.
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Mind you, if the likes of the prison governor are bad, they’re nothing compared to humanity’s leaders. When trying to confess his conspiracy with the Master, Trenchard is met simply with the query ‘Does the Minister know you?’ as if that is more likely to get you his attention that being the governor of a massively expensive single-inmate prison who needs to speak ‘urgently’. The fact that it’s a ‘matter of life and death’ concerning ‘the nation’ simply prompts the advice that he write to them (admittedly ‘by first-class post’) because ‘tomorrow morning’ is the earliest he can deal with any issue not involving a chum. On a similar note, Captain Hart is remarkably appalling at picking up on Trenchard’s behaviour, presumably because he is a ‘friend’ and it falls to poor old Jane Blythe, whose duties seem to include fetching coffee, to rescue the farce that is naval intelligence from exposure, which apparently makes her ‘suspicious’ rather than observant, whilst carefully side-stepping Hart’s pride by gently leading him to investigate rather than just telling him he’s a fucking idiot.
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And then there’s prime pig Walker, sorry ‘Parliamentary Private Secretary the Right Honourable Robert Walker’. Childish, as when hoarding his sweets, outdated, through his association with archaic weaponry, cowardly, shrieking ‘Don’t kill us!’ the moment he sees a Sea-Devil, hypocritical, refusing the Doctor’s call for peace until his life is threatened, useless, he can’t even engage in talks with the Sea-Devils because of his alleged sea-sickness, Walker, who’s more concerned with shovelling food into his face than surveying the situation (he clears Hart’s desk for his meal) or dealing with it: ‘As soon as I’ve finished my lunch, I shall order that atomic weapons be used’. Like Trenchard, the only good thing to be said about him is that his ineptitude acts as a sufficient buffer against the appalling deeds he would otherwise commit.
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This punnet of human catastrophe is so staggering awful that even the Master gets shoved the sidelines once he’s out of prison. He talks of using the Sea-Devils ‘just as I’ve used the Ogrons’. Leaving aside the continuity wrangle here, this just draws attention to the fact that the Master’s alliances always end in disaster. That would chime with the vacuousness of his attested goal of ‘power’, rubbing in how he doesn’t really put any thought into any of his schemes and just wanders around making the same mistake over and over again, such as cocking up the supervision of the Doctor’s work on the machine at the heart of his plans twice in this story and then just meekly following the Doctor as he devises their escape at the end. His only moment of pleasure once he’s divorced from Trenchard comes when he gets to advise the Chief Sea-Devil to kill a guard and use his body to end the humans’ attack and that turns out to achieve nothing too.
It’s so bleak, you’ve got to worry for Malcolm. Nothing escapes this novelisation unscathed, even Unit, whose one contribution is to encourage the navy to blow the Sea-Devils to kingdom come. With all the props of the Pertwee era lying in tatters, we can only be grateful that Tom Baker’s taken over the role on telly and the next novelisation’s casting its eye back to Patrick Troughton.
‘The lids of the Chief Sea-Devil’s eyes slowly closed, and for a full minute he seemed almost to be asleep’
‘You will negotiate a truce between my people and the humans’
‘more explosions rocked the shelter. He pointed at the Doctor. “Take him away and kill him!”’
I should be clear that this is hardly unique to the novelisation, as Phil Sandifer points out at http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/a-finely-tuned-response-the-sea-devils/: ‘Where The Silurians spent the bulk of its time fretting with the possibility that peace could be negotiated between the Silurians and humans, The Sea Devils spends only 5-10 minutes on this before the Master manages to exploit a human attack on the base to foreclose all possibility of peace’ – However, that was 5-10 minutes; this is about a paragraph.
‘“We hardly know how,” said Walker, prodding about in his mixed salad to find a slice of tomato, “to share the planet with each other, my dear fellow. Look at the Middle East, or Northern Ireland. If we could catch some of these things alive and put them in a zoo, to that I could agree. But the rest must be destroyed”' – he sort of has a point at the start, though the uncomfortable split of his sentence for the tomato makes clear that even he’s not that invested in it. And then the zoo thing completely undermines him.
Xenophobia: ‘“Won’t be any deaths,” said Walker, sipping his white wine appreciatively, “except for them”' – he just can’t conceive of the Sea-Devils as people. I especially like the contrast between his so-very-civilised appreciative sipping of his white wine with the blank horror of his worldview.
‘not peace at any price’
‘“Very clever of you,” said the Master. “Do you realise you have just committed mass murder?” The Doctor looked down at the seething waters as the helicopter turned and flew them back to safety. He said nothing. What the Master had just said was true’
‘put on trial at a special Court of Justice. Although the horror of capital punishment had long been established in Great Britain, many people had wanted to see the Master put to death. To the amazement of the Brigadier, however, the Doctor had made a personal plea to the Court for the Master’s life to be spared […] the Doctor talked of the Master’s better qualities—his intelligence, and his occasional wit and good humour. Jo well-remembered the Doctor’s final words to the Judges: “My Lords, I beg you to spare the prisoner’s life, for by so doing you will acknowledge that there is always the possibility of redemption, and that is an important principle for us all. If we do not believe that anyone, even the worst criminal, can be saved from wickedness, then in what can we ever believe?”’
The Master in prison: ‘“if you really wants my opinion, as an ordinary man in the street, as a taxpayer that’s got to pay for all the guards and everything, I’ll tell you what they should have done.” He drew a finger swiftly across his throat. “That’s what he deserved”’
‘“It was they,” said the Doctor, “who did not sentence you to death. They had good reason to execute you. Instead, they showed mercy.” “For that,” said the Master, adding another component to the already complex device. “I was truly grateful—while I was a prisoner. But now that I’m free, I can think clearly. And I want revenge!”’ – did they have good reason to execute him? Didn’t the Doctor earlier argue how there was no such thing? And then just the gloriousness of the Master’s childish pettiness
‘The Doctor tried to conceal a wry smile. ”I don’t think it will do any good, Mr. Walker. Something tells me we are not going to see the Master again—at least, not until he wants us to”’
A quick acknowledgement of Tat Wood in About Time 3: ‘This story is set in a world where the Sea Devils are “normality”, and everything the humans do is alien’ – I’m not really going to do anything with this (it’s difficult to read a Target novelisation as a Sea-Devil product) but it’s pretty much the same idea as humanity as the monsters.
‘“This is our planet,” said the Chief Sea-Devil. “My people ruled Earth when Man was only an ape”’
‘“We never forgive,” said the Chief Sea-Devil, levelling his raygun at the Doctor. “We are the rulers of this planet. It was ours millions of years before you apes developed and took it over from us. We shall destroy all Mankind, and all mammals. Only the reptiles shall survive—“’
‘“We make no pacts with apes,” said the Chief Sea-Devil. “Take them away!”’
‘The Chief Sea-Devil’s sentence ended there because a bullet from a .44 service rifle, travelling at three times the speed of sound, and fired by one Petty Officer Myers, had just entered and destroyed its brain’ – this feels psychopathic thanks the very detailed but unemotive description of the killing, almost as if tools and actions like this are what really sum humanity up.
‘The Master looked down at the Chief Sea-Devil’s body. “You have just killed one of the most intelligent creatures that ever walked on this earth,” he told Petty Officer Myers. “Really, sir?” said the petty officer. “They look like big frogs to me”'
‘“Why not share the planet with Man?” The Master laughed. “Don’t listen to this person, I beg you. Man is busily exterminating every other species on the planet”’ – it’s a fair cop
‘“The dodo,” cut in the Master, “the passenger pigeon, the great auk, the blue buck, marsupials in Australia”’ – when did we wipe out the marsupials?
Prison Officer Crawley: ‘the way I look at it, the world’s divided into three groups of people—those who have been in prison, those who are in prison, and those who will be going to prison. Got it?’
‘The Master’s plan was that he and Trenchard would work together to get to the root of the problem; then Trenchard would truly qualify for the recognition he so richly deserved, while the Master would remain quietly in the background. Already Trenchard could see himself receiving a knight-hood for his services to England in detecting and exposing its enemies’
‘Captain Hart turned to the Doctor. “If what you say is true, why did George Trenchard help the Master?” “What would you say was Trenchard’s strongest characteristic?” the Doctor replied. Hart shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps patriotism, love of country.” “Exactly,” agreed the Doctor. “My guess is that the Master utilised that in some way”’ – this really is a crap explanation and it’s unnecessary for the reader as we already understand in greater detail and nuance than this. It just seems to be there so that Hulke can rub in his point that patriotism is the root of all evil.
‘Trenchard knew that everything he feared was true. The Master had not only made a complete fool of him, but the Master’s ‘friends’ had murdered all his staff’ – which one’s the bigger deal?
Trenchard’s Dad: ‘Knowing that there was no escape, and that the mob outside killed anyone who tried to be taken prisoner, the Major loaded his gun, went outside and shot dead four mutineers before he himself was cut to pieces’
‘In his last moment of life he realised that he had forgotten to turn the safety catch of his revolver’
‘“I need to speak to the Minister,” he said, “urgently?” “Who is that?” said the girl’s voice. “George Trenchard,” he said, “Prison Governor.” “Does the Minister know you?” queried the voice. Trenchard winced at the question […] “The prison that contains the Master. Now will you please put me through to the Minister. It’s a matter of life and death.” “Hold on,” said the girl’s voice. While he waited, his mind turned back to what might happen to him once he had confessed his intrigue with the Master... […] “The Master is very well,” said Trenchard. “The matter of life and death happens to concern the nation.” “Well, the Minister’s very busy,” said the girl. “Could you write to us about it?” “Yes,” said Trenchard, with a touch of heavy sarcasm, “I shall write to you about it.” “If you send it by first-class post,” the girl said, “we should get it tomorrow morning, and I’ll put it on the Minister’s desk straight away”’
‘“Exactly, sir,” said Jane, not wishing to say outright that Captain Hart’s friend must be a liar’
‘Jane Blythe hurried in with a pot of fresh coffee’
‘You have a very suspicious mind’
‘“Yes, sir,” said Jane, clearly not convinced that what Captain Hart had done was right’
‘Walker blustered, and tried to think of a reason. “They are specially made to suit my taste. I don’t think you’d like them”’
‘bayoneting a slice of chicken’
‘Walker shrieked, “We come in peace! Don’t kill us!”’
Doctor: ‘This is a time to make peace, not war’, Walker: ‘the rest must be destroyed’; however, when Sea-Devils attack: ‘He was quivering with fear. “This is only going to annoy them,” he said. “Have you no thought for others? We should make peace, not war”’
‘get terribly sea-sick. It’s just one of those little problems that one has to put up with in life’ - 1. It’s clearly bollocks and he’s just terrified. 2. He’s not putting up with it. He’s sending someone else to do the job instead
‘All Captain Hart’s files and ink bottles and pencils had been removed from the desk top in order to turn it into a dining table for the man from the Government’
‘As soon as I’ve finished my lunch, I shall order that atomic weapons be used against these monsters’
‘The Doctor asked, “What do you hope to gain by helping the Sea-Devils?” “Power,” said the Master. “I shall use them just as I’ve used the Ogrons”’
‘“Send to the surface one dead member of your species. That will convince the humans that their underwater bombs have been successful, and they will go away.” “None of my people have been killed,” said the Chief Sea-Devil. The Master looked round at the guards, finding it difficult not to smile. “Then you will have to arrange that, won’t you?”’ – this is a lovely Master moment but it’s petty rather than meaningful, much like him in fact.
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‘I’ve checked with Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart of UNIT about the creatures that were in those caves in Derbyshire. If they all start to emerge from their underground shelters throughout the world, we won’t know what’s hit us!’
Hulkisms
You’ve got to love Hulke’s little touches: ‘The Jamaican, who really came from Trinidad and had never been to Jamaica in his life’
Return of the Educational Remit
‘“What’s May Day got to do with it?” Jo asked. “French for “aid me”,” replied the Doctor. “Look,” and he scribbled it down on a piece of paper so that Jo would understand. M’aidez. “It’s used internationally nowadays,” he added, “instead of SOS”' – which inadvertently just sounds like the inspiration for that bit in the Red Dwarf episode ‘Marooned’.
‘Sonar, a form of underwater radar, sends out regular signals, and these can be heard as ‘pings’ over the operator’s earphones. If the beam of electronic signals hits anything metal, the signals echo back and the operator hears a ‘ping-ping’. The time span between the first and the second ‘ping’ gives the operator an idea of the distance to the metal object. By prodding with the beam in slightly different directions, the operator may be able to sketch out the outline of a sunken ship or the hull of another submarine’
Height Attack!!
‘“Lizard,” said the man. “Tall as a man—taller!”’
When was ET made?
And when did they start letting prisoners wear ties?
Miscellania
‘It always astounded Jo how many things he could produce from those enormous pockets’ – it’s Tom Baker!
In fact, Hulke has a lovely, mischievous concept of the Doctor, really not based on Pertwee at all: ‘“Are you aware,” said Captain Hart severely, ‘that you have trespassed on Government property, and that that is a very serious offence?” “Actually,” said the Doctor, “no, because I had not the means to become aware.” Captain Hart tried to contain his patience. “There are signs, in very large letters, warning the public to keep out, and you ignored these!” “I didn’t see any signs,” pleaded the Doctor. Again Hart cut in. “Because you entered by way of the sea! Obviously, we can’t have signs bobbing up and down on the waves.” “There you are, then,” said the Doctor. “So the way I arrived, there were no signs to be seen.” “But you had no right to enter by way of the sea!” thundered Captain Hart. “Ah,” said the Doctor soothingly, “but I was not to know that I had no right unless I saw some sign to tell me”’ – wonder where he got that from.
More Time Lord trivia: ‘I mean it seriously, my dear Trenchard. I have two hearts, a temperature of only sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and, if you care to observe closely, my breathing rate is four breaths to the minute compared with your twelve to sixteen’
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