(Photo: BBC)
Anyone watching the teaser trailer that followed “Eve of the Daleks” on New Year’s Day will have been made aware that our next trip aboard the TARDIS takes the Doctor and friends off to meet pirates and some turtle-faced aquatic creatures with big bulging eyes and what look like head-wings. “Legend of the Sea Devils” provides a long-awaited return appearance for one of classic Who’s most beloved monsters, after a gap of some 40 years. They may have only taken an active role in two encounters with the Doctor, but the Sea Devils are now such an iconic part of the show’s history (and a costume design classic to boot) that they’ve become an eternal fan favorite.
So, here are just a few things that it’d be useful to know before these aquatic rotters make their return to active duty!
Their origins are prehistoric. The Third Doctor had two encounters with races of ancient people who had resurfaced from multi-million-year hibernations only to discover a planet occupied by ape-descended mammals. “The Silurians” were the first, descended from lizards, and their cousins, the amphibious Sea Devils, came second, awoken by the Master.Like the Silurians, the Sea Devils lived in a very technologically advanced society, including guns that looked a little like shallow metal cones. They could live in the sea, and their frames were adapted to withstand huge amounts of water pressure, so they were very strong. They built huge underwater colonies in caves and cliff sides on the sea floor, partly to house their formidable weaponry.
The other reason for developing these huge caverns was that both Silurian and Sea Devil scientists were convinced that all life was about to be destroyed on Earth by a catastrophic event, not unlike the meteor which finished off the dinosaurs. They felt that the moon and Earth were in a collision course, and took precautionary measures to ensure their survival. Sadly, the parts of their technology which should have reawakened them malfunctioned, leaving them in permanent stasis until they were awoken by the Master’s sonic call.
In a series of events fairly similar to those that took place between humanity and the Silurians, the Third Doctor attempted to prevent a state of all-out war between humanity and these reptilian warriors, but was thwarted by human politics. A minister ordered the Royal Navy to attack the Sea Devil base after they made it clear that their stated intent was to wipe humanity off the face of the Earth. This was thwarted only when the Doctor managed to blow up the base himself. And how did he do this? By “reversing the polarity of the neutron flow” – a phrase that has become as celebrated within Doctor Who fandom as the Sea Devils themselves.
That would have been enough to secure their fan status, but ten years after first staggering out of the briny deeps, the Sea Devils were back in “Warriors of the Deep.” They lined up alongside the Silurians, who had woken a different colony of their undersea relatives in 2084, in order to get them to attack a sea base. Thankfully, the Fifth Doctor was on hand to repel their advances.As this clip illustrates, these Sea Devils were less inclined to wear fishing nets as fashion, preferring a helmet and body plates that bear a striking resemblance to Samurai armor. Not that it did them any good. The Doctor wiped them all out, this time with Hexachromite gas, which has lasted less well as a catchphrase than that polarity stuff.
But that’s not all. Despite their relatively fleeting appearances, Sea Devils have popped up three times in montage sequences. The first was almost immediate, with poor Jo Grant being terrorized by her most feared recent memories when under the control of the Master in “Frontier in Space.” They also appeared in the celebrated moment that the Eleventh Doctor faced down the Atraxi in “The Eleventh Hour,” and Thirteen’s attempt to overwhelm the Time Lord Matrix in “The Timeless Children” by downloading all of her memories into the system.
They have also made guest appearances in other sci-fi media. Alan Moore’s comic book League of Extraordinary Gentlemen suggests they’re connected to the creature from the Black Lagoon, while Silurians and Sea Devils appear in Martian cave paintings in the steampunk novel Scarlet Traces: The Great Game by D’Israeli.
But perhaps the greatest real life honor for these prehistoric humanoid races came in 2018, when Adam Frank, astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, gave themselves the challenge of considering whether such an advance society could genuinely have existed and left no record.
Writing in the International Journal of Astrobiology, they explicitly referred to this thought experiment as the "Silurian hypothesis," using the Doctor Who concept as a way of reframing research so that archaeologists and researchers might consider what kind of proof a prehistoric industrialized race might leave behind. And no, disc-shaped guns weren’t on the list of things to look for.
Are you excited for the return of the Sea Devils?!