Warriors of the Deep

"The Silurians have long since abandoned the way of mediation."

Writer: Johnny Byrne 

Format: TV

Broadcast: 5th-13th January 1984

Season: 21.01

Featuring: Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Turlough

Synopsis 

Earth, 2084. Two global superpowers hover on the brink of war. When the TARDIS is forced to make an unplanned visit to Sea Base Four, the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough find themselves accused of being enemy agents. Quickly embroiled in a deadly game of paranoid intrigue, it becomes clear that others on the base have sabotage and murder in mind. However, there is a greater threat to mankind; the Silurians and the Sea Devils, prehistoric reptiles seeking to reclaim the Earth. Can the Doctor prevent them implementing their 'final solution' and triggering a war that could wipe out the entire human race?

Verdict 

Warriors of the Deep is a decent story but sadly it doesn't do itself justice on the television screen. The plot itself is very good but the costumes, set and some of the voicing were not great and that's what let things down. It wasn't brilliant and that's a shame because the Target novelisation shows just how good this story really is. It's a quite brilliant adventure but it's hard to buy into some of the decisions that were made by the production team. The design of the set didn't really suit the atmosphere of the story and that's something that wasn't a problem in the novelisation. In my blogging of The Myth Makers novelisation a couple of days ago, I mentioned that it was the first time that a television story and its novelisation have deviated by a raying of two points and as irony and coincidence would have it, this story has just been added to the list. It's a shame really but it just shows that the way a story is presented can have such a huge effect on somebody's enjoyment of it. These deviations now give me great hopes for the novelisations of The Gunfighters and Paradise Towers, two stories I really was not a fan of. I still maintain that the cliffhanger of part one is up there with the very best of all time and although the resolution is pretty non-existent, the ending itself was simply sublime and it's right up there with the likes of The Reign of Terror, The Stolen Earth and Dark Water. It really is excellent. Turlough is interesting as the companion here in his relatively early days and the relationship with Tegan is particularly intriguing. He was more than prepared to leave the Doctor for dead than risk himself in saving him and that was something that was so unlike a companion. That allowed the Doctor and Tegan to be closer in the story which was really fascinating as they haven't always enjoyed the best of relationships. The return of Icthar from the original Silurian Triad we saw in Doctor Who and the Silurians was fantastic and I liked how we also had a nice reference to The Sea Devils. For the viewers who weren't perhaps around during Jon Pertwee's tenure as the Third Doctor, it told them that the Doctor had met these two reptile species before. The Sea Devils themselves didn't look great in appearance and I thought they sounded a bit like the Ice Warriors which wasn't a good thing in all honesty. The design of the Silurians wasn't much changed from the last time we saw them which was good but I thought their voices sounded far too robotic and considering they were in need of oxygen and at the subject of gas during the latter stages of the story, I couldn't buy into it. Nilson was a pretty decent villainous character but he seemed pretty out of depth when it came to being challenged by the Doctor. I liked how our Time Lord hero again wanted mediation between humanity and the Silurians but as is the case with seemingly every Silurian story, they end up dead. The Doctor is always horrified and that was the case here with him being convinced there could have been another way. And that's kind of my thoughts on the story's presentation and production. The adventure is great but it just doesn't feel it on television.

Rating: 7/10