Written by Tom
If there’s been one superlative element of Doctor Who so far, it’s been the show’s production. At its best, like the first two episodes of the Dalek serial, the production team have pumped out iconic element after iconic element in ways which have elevated the scripts to classic status. At its worst, like the final two episodes of the Dalek serial, the production team have experimented with novel ideas which helped to make up for the pure emptiness of the scripts. More than this, the show obviously knows that production is their strong point and have started to actively rely on it: when the show got extended and everyone decided to grandstand for seven weeks, it was the production standards that they decided to highlight. Doctor Who in 1963 was an incredibly well made show.
This is a fact that you have to hold onto pretty hard during “The Sea of Death” because, let’s be honest, it’s a complete fucking mess.
Team TARDIS land on an island made of glass surrounded by an acid sea. They enter a mysterious building run by an old man in a robe who’s trying to protect the building from the Voord, a race of slaves who gained sentience and are rebelling. The old man requests that Team TARDIS collect the five keys of Marinus that, when reunited, will put the Voord back under control. They don’t want to but are forced to do it anyway. And so off to the first key they go.
As episodes go, it’s a simple one that goes about its job in as efficient a way as possible: set up the location, set up the villain, set up the plot, have a cliffhanger, get out. Draped over this functional structure are a bunch of strange and evocative images that are used to give everything a vaguely mythic heft: the glass beach is a very J.G. Ballard idea, and it centers around this obelisk-esque structure that rises over proceedings in a very Tower of Babel-esque way. So what we have here is a highly functional mix of pulp adventure serial stuff enthused with mythic imagery. And people think Star Wars was so advanced when it provided the same thing in 1977.
Of course, being efficiently composed doesn’t stop there having been some batshit decisions at the writing stage. At the end of the episode, Team TARDIS are offered their quest by the old guy and refuse to help him, getting into a massive argument before eventually deciding to help. Or at least, that’s what we’re told happens. Instead, this is what we get on screen: the old guy asks them for their help and the screen fades to black; then it fades up again with Team TARDIS back on the beach having apparently told the Old Man to sod off; then it turns out that the Old Man’s put a forcefield around the TARDIS; then we fade to black again and return to see Team TARDIS and the Old Man planning how to get the keys. It’s a weird way of doing this beat which basically shifts all of the plot advancement and drama off-screen while inserting an extra scene into proceedings that just doesn’t feel needed. Why not write a scene of Team TARDIS arguing with the man and him directly forcing them to help – why have these things happen off-screen either side of a wild tangent? If you can’t be arsed to write the argument, why not have them just decide to help the Old Man? With a script this simple, it’s so bizarre to have something this malformed in the middle of it. The result in a script which aims for competency and hits it, up until the final five minutes when it suddenly goes off the rails.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the episode’s direction is actively hampering the parts of the script which do work. As usual, the production design itself is actually quite good – the beach itself is an angular and strange place straight from a German Expressionist film while the large obelisk carries overtones of films like Metropolis, all good things to be taking from. The Voord are… evil gimp suits, but that’s at least a striking image.
But pretty much everything else is rubbish. The camera wobbles around all over the place while actors keep messing up the lines. When investigating the outside of the obelisk, Team TARDIS keep entering and leaving shots from all different directions, destroying the sense that anything is spatially related to anything else. When Team TARDIS start walking through the beach and the Voord is revealed, how the hell did no-one notice him given that he starts walking into shot before Team TARDIS have even left it? The scene where Barbara knocks Susan’s shoes into the acid pool is awkwardly structured, missing an establishing shot of the shoes pre-being-dissolved. A lot of shock attacks and fight scenes also start off incredibly awkwardly, almost as if none of the actors are quite sure exactly when they’re meant to start fighting with each other. The overall impression is just that the episode mustn’t have been rehearsed a lot – bits feel like the cast and crew are improvising them while the cameras roll. (The nature of TV recording at the time means that this is probably exactly the case, though this episode feels particularly rough in that regard.)
And this is a particularly bad episode to have this problem in. Ultimately the script is using mythic imagery to cover for the fact that it’s aiming for pure competency. It’s an episode that has a job to do and is dedicated to doing it as efficiently as possible. This doesn’t leave you any room for error though: when things are this basic, you have to get them right. And this episode spends a lot of time getting things wrong. You can excuse production errors when the show is being experimental and strange. They become a much bigger problem when what you’re watching is meant to be rigorously straightforward.
The result is a pretty rubbish episode of Doctor Who, albeit one that’s rubbish in a very different way to the usual. So far, Doctor Who has been a show whose frequent script defects have been compensated by the fact that it’s full of cool images that were realised incredibly well. With that slipping slightly, you’re left with a weird bunch of misfiring genre trappings that have just been thrown at each other. And this right after the Marco Polo serial, a part of the show whose structural issues were felt more than others. The period immediately after Doctor Who‘s extension has been weirdly rough for the show overall.
FNORD 
Welcome back! Hope all is well.
And, of course, an interesting review as always.
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