The Sea Devils

Isn't it strange how few Doctor Who stories happen around the sea? For me it's the ideal location for the show, heady with historical atmosphere, from the formation of the land to smugglers of old. A liminal space, ebbing and flowing, frequently strewn with mist, fog, rain and waves. A Saturday outing sort of place. And then there's the deep mystery of the waves. I was rather thrown when I realised one of the guest cast here was Maggie, the seaweedy Linda Blair of Fury from the Deep.

What's going on, I wondered. Is the sea itself a recurring villain, disgorging infernal kelp one season, angry reptile people the next? Was Zaroff of Atlantis driven insane by something in the water? Is this, perhaps, Doctor Who in its element? (We are, at least, back in the astounding 1960s era of 'special sound', and I love it.)

I hadn't seen The Sea Devils before and I wasn't sure quite what to expect. In preparation, of sorts, I read David A McIntee's novel, The Face of the Enemy, which takes the genius step of imagining what was happening on Earth for the Master, the Brigadier and (for some reason) Ian and Barbara, while the Doctor and Jo are hobnobbing with giant phalluses in outer space. It even manages to deliver an unexpected, fully justified sequel to a prior Third Doctor story.

I wouldn't say it went to the sorts of places I would have liked it to go – despite seemingly focusing on some of the side-characters of the show, McIntee doesn't spend much time on exploring their characters or the dynamic between them. They remain side-characters. On a grander scale, though, it's a cynical, down-to-earth, 'gritty' story. It almost feels like a straightlaced response to the childlike naivety and colour of the story it parallels.

The oddest thing, following it up with The Sea Devils, is that half its raison d'etre – imagining the Master's incarceration, before the story in which he (spoilers!) escapes – makes no sense. If the Master had just managed to liberate himself/be rescued/kidnapped from a remote prison, would the Brigadier really pop him in the lax security establishment seen onscreen? Would the Doctor and Jo approach him with the same guilelessness, the mix of goody-goody opprobrium and forlorn sympathy?

The weird thing being, onscreen it reads very well. In the novelisation (which I picked up in Bromley at the same time...!) it reads even better. In the novel, a fisherman rowing the Doctor to the island makes it clear he feels the Master, a criminal celebrity (although nobody's heard of the Doctor: a nice touch) should have been executed. The continued references to 'the chateau', wrapped in red tape and not much else, produce a perfect setting: serene, stuffy, ripe for corruption and in fact destruction.

And yes, here's the Doctor feeling sorry for the Master, a man who (a couple of months back) was running a real black magic coven. Sympathy for the devil, indeed! The Master wasn't performing some petty fraud. He was trying to inherit the power of Satan (the actual Satan) and destroy the world.

If Curse of the Peladon is the story where Jo really springs to life, The Sea Devils lavishes some time on the Master and it's hugely rewarding. At the start of the story, he's already in control, and not because of a hypnoray but through the force of his personality – we see him at work. The Doctor is soon the prisoner of his mortal enemy, with Jo running desperately around a British prison where the guards have been told to shoot to kill. I've never heard anyone describe this as Who's take on The Prisoner, but it seems that way to me.

The Establishment takes more than one knock in this story – no sooner is the childlike prison governor Trenchard dead (and read the Target novelisation for how it really happened!) then his role is taken up by warmongering minister, Walker (just one letter away...). He's not evenly used in the story, but he does deliver one of the more pointed lines in the story:

Murder? War always is, my dear. Where on Earth's that girl with my toast?

It's almost a pity the Sea Devils have to turn up at all. The Cybermen are never in the right stories. What do the Sea Devils represent here? Upright seahorses with turtle faces, wrapped in netting (one of them, in a sort of fishnet cape, taking things a step too far) who begin with some light sabotage and quickly fall back on nuclear war.

When I was watching my latest Pertwee adventure, I happened to be reading Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban, or to be more exact, re-reading. Hoban, who passed away just a couple of years ago, was a prolific novelist of the eccentric variety, and his birthday is celebrated by fans every February 4th. I was re-reading Turtle Diary, in fact, for the third time I think. It turned out to be strangely resonant.

In the novel, two rather melancholy individuals independently decide to liberate the sea-turtles of London Zoo. There is nothing glib about the book. They simply realise, slowly, that the reality of the turtles' captivity is intolerable. The thought of liberating the turtles, once accepted as possible, is intolerable to suppress. The turtles represent all animal life – birds, gibbons, water-beetles – in their capacity to deal with the world as is, directly, not synthesised into, for example, cute animal stories or turtle soup.

Animals, like shamen, experience a higher level of reality. Not only that, they respond to it instinctively: 'A turtle doesn't have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on. Maybe that's why man kills everything: envy.'

The turtle-like, even child-like Sea Devils complicate Hulke's narrative. The story of the Master's takeover of his own prison is the story of a nation state that is weak and self-interested enough to be led, by the devil himself, into corruption and violence. Perhaps there is something about the minister's ability to bomb an enemy he can't see. But what actually excites us about these tadpole-men from the deeps? Are they inhuman, un-human, better than apes? What a shame the story resolves in so bizarre a mirror of The Silurians. What about the Doctor? Is he alien? Inhuman? Doctor who?

And next - The Mutants! Another story I've never seen...

Doctor Who and the Silurians

Like a holographic image, perspective is crucial with Doctor Who. From a certain angle, it appears to be a single, coherent structure: a series of adventures about a hero with a changing face, stretching continuously across five decades and more. This illusion is preserved because of certain choices by production teams - unlike John Steed of The Avengers, the Doctor never actually experiences the same adventure twice (despite his earliest stories being unavailable to audiences immediately they were broadcast) and changes in cast and location are woven into the series with various attempts at dramatic seriousness (the sadness of a companion leaving, the upheaval of a Doctor's regeneration).

It's all a complete illusion, of course. Successive writers brought their interpretation of the character to the script, the script editor ensured nothing jarred too badly, the actor incorporated it into his performance, and the fans did the rest.

I thought about this illusion again this week, when some friends were discussing how best to watch Doctor Who if you were entirely new to it. I, typically, found myself on the fence. (Ouch.) I couldn't help agreeing that the chronological viewing experience is not really 'orthodox' or even very representative. There have never been more than a small handful of viewers who have seen the show in that way, and it was never made for them. Every audience of the show has had a successive, idiosyncratic, partial, selective and slightly mistaken idea of what the Doctor was doing before the current adventure.

That's how I saw the show. I was six when the series ended, and ten when I became a fan. I watched stories based on their availability at my local library, or based on relatives' decisions at Christmas, completely out of order till 2005.

But there is something alluring about that idea of an ongoing narrative. Like the idea that Ian and Barbara introduce an element of humanity into the Doctor's life which make him the man he is today, or that the Second Doctor and Jamie travlled as agents of the Time Lords between stories. The illusion is particularly strong during Season 7, when some attention has been given to the Doctor's relationship with his new surroundings.

This wonderfully dark (in all senses) story, and particularly its ending, are a moment of lost innocence for the Doctor. For a hundred years or so, it seems, he's been the one in charge - the hero of the hour, with young humans aboard his Tardis, who generally do what he says. Now he's like a companion to the Brigadier, somewhat subservient to his priorities and his morality. In this story, his trust is abused and the slightly starchy young human - with whom he was so matey when they encountered the Yeti and Cybermen - turns out to be disobedient, somewhat powerful, and rather dangerous.

The Brigadier becomes an interesting figure, partly because the writers are not very interested in his psychology, and therefore he comes off as slightly unreal - perhaps even unwell. In The Web of Fear, he's impressively open-minded. In The Invasion, we see that he has established this military 'unit' to deal with the unexplained. By Spearhead from Space, despite his charm, he is something of a loner. He replies to Liz Shaw's scepticism with the practiced calm of someone who has trod a solitary path for quite a while. He is waiting for his one true ally, the Doctor, to come back.

But he treats the Doctor - whose change of appearance he finds impossible and then credible within a short space of time - with suspicion, even as a child. The pair behave as if it was the same early days of their friendship, but in fact they are increasingly uncertain of one another. In this story he trusts the Doctor throughout, in spite of all hell breaking loose. He is patient to the end. But the Doctor learns not to mistake that for friendship.

This is the story of the Doctor being taken to the Wenley Moor research station by the Brigadier, much as the Doctor once took his companions to new and mysterious places. The Brigadier has an impressive eye for weird shit waiting to go off - the eye of a fanatic, almost. And not only are the Silurians an unknown 'weird shit' quantity for all concerned, but the Doctor himself proves to be a dangerous quantity. The Brigadier saves his life and provides the resolution to the story. The Doctor, by contrast, nearly gets the Brigadier killed.

It's a fascinating new development in the life of a man who used to be carefree and now finds himself involved in other people's lives: Liz, the Brigadier, the planet Earth, the Silurians. The Doctor is involved in a bigger adventure now - the ongoing history of the human race. At one point, he recklessly gambles humankind's safety, hoping to set history on a new course, a 1970s or 1980s Earth shared by humans and intelligent reptiles. The denouement is not merely a revelation about the Brigadier's powers, but also the Doctor;s disempowerment.

Of course, it's all in my mind. Jon Pertwee doesn't know how matey he used to be with the Brigadier. He doesn't realise how much things have changed for them - and Malcolm Hulke doesn't know that the Doctor will end the season by meeting a dark mirror of his friend (or begin the next season with his own dodgy doppelganger turning up). It's all a product of watching the series in sequence, a series made by people deeply engaged with its possibilities, its ideas of morality and terror. The effect is perverse and illusory - but also fascinating.