The John Nathan Turner producership of Doctor Who (1980-1989) started well with a rich rennaisance of ideas and concepts and an up to date visual flair, but by 1984 this had given way to fan-pleasing nostalgia and depressing derivativeness, as old mosters that were now past their prime and had been absent for a decade were dug up to face the Doctor again. The reason is simple. The show wasn't getting the economic support it needed, and so the fan convention circuit became the show's lifeblood, and convention crowds gave heavy applause to announcements of returning monsters. In other words, the show sunk to doing its own fan fiction, although in the case of some of those stories, fan fiction would be a compliment.

But on paper this was one of the more promising examples that could be both nostalgic and up to date. Taking the show's more interesting old monsters, the Silurians and Sea Devils and using them to tell a cold war parable for an 80's era of nuclear stockpiling and power blocs and where it seemed like the finger was always on the button. On paper it certainly seemed more promising than the Master (by now a complete has-been) in his latest evil plan to steal Concorde or rewrite the Magna Carter, or the Cybermen travel back in time to change the events of a Cyberman story from the 1960's, or the Sontarans stand around in Spain whilst playing second fiddle to a bunch of cannibals.

The Silurians, and their aquatic cousins, the Sea Devils were basically an intelligent reptilian bipeds that were indigenous to Earth and had a great civilisation millions of years before man evolved, during the Eocene period to be precise. They had gone into hibernation in order to survive a planetary collision, and reawoken millions of years later to find that man now ruled their planet, and they were not best pleased, and inevitably hostilities broke out, despite the Doctor's attempts to broker peace.

They had appeared twice before in the series, and in this story we follow a group of surivors, a triad of Silurians and their army of Sea Devil grunts. The year is now 2084, and the world is once again on the brink of a nuclear war between opposed power blocs. The Silurians, having finally tired of man's violence and aggression plan to invade one of man's military seabases and set off their nukes, triggering the nuclear war that will wipe out mankind. The youthful, naive Fifth Doctor (played by Peter Davison), and his companions Tegan and Turlough land on the seabase just as the invasion begins and the Doctor is once again caught in the middle of their petty conflict.

Not for nothing has this story been unflatteringly dubbed 'Warriors on the Cheap'. As oftern happened in this period, the filming suffered to strikes and industrial action at the BBC. So things never really meshed visually, and some disastrous sequences made it to screen. The Silurians use a creature called the Myrka, a genetically modified reptilian behemoth with the deadly sting of an electric eel. In the original script the creature was supposed to move in darkness but this wasn't communicated to the lighting effects people, so we saw it in overlit detail as what's clearly a shoddy, bumbling pantomime horse. Which is a problem because actually the Myrka on paper is an effective monster that can kill with a single touch. Instead this blend of embarrasment and goulish death makes for a cocktail that's chilling and creepy in the wrong, most uncomfortable way.

This story was directed by Pennant Roberts who had directed for classic shows like Blakes' 7, Tenko, Howard's Way and Doomwatch. He'd directed several Doctor Who stories in the 70's, such as The Face of Evil, The Sunmakers and The Pirate Planet, and demonstrated a flair for making fairly cheap stories engaging and fun. Unfortunately this story was specifically written to be a joyless affair, so there was no room for frivolity. Furthermore Pennant Roberts was, in terms of Doctor Who, rather behind the times now. 80's Doctor Who was now aspiring for a cinematic, tactile vision. Pennant Roberts was still treating the show like televised theatre.

As a result, we have some very effective model work for the Sea base and the Silurian's submersible vessel (I can see why this seemed a promising choice for DVD release). And we have the interior sets, which are fairly solid before they start falling apart (indeed the Silurian ship's interior seems almost like something from a Cocteau Twins music video). But there's not really that sense of them both being the same location, of the exterior melding into the interior as suggesting the same space. Also, with the exception of Peter Davison as the Doctor, Pennant can't seem to coax good performances. The cast seem very apathetic.

But unfortunately many of the problems were out of Pennant Robert's control. When it came to disastrous sequences he didn't have the material to go for a retake, and John Nathan Turner overruled his wish to have the worst sequences cut, so there was no damage limitation whatsoever. Infact what appears to be an outtake ends up making it into the finished product, where Ingrid Pitt finds herself confronted with the deadly Myrka and tries to karate kick it.

There is a school of thought in fandom that this was a good script let down by disastrous production values. And I was won over by some of those arguments enough to give Warriors another viewing, having not watched it since I turned my nose up to it when I was 18. They say that the shoddy design and superficial faults disguises what's underneath the polystyrene walls, pantomime horses and Thunderbirds costumes. On that last note I think they're right, but for the wrong reasons.

Of course the cringeworthy sight of the Myrka, just looks like what it is, a pantomime horse being dragged forward by two amateurs. Something inherently daft diguises what's in plain view, which is that this daft monster brings about a lot of deaths. People think of the naff elements of the story, and overlook the fact that it's depicting a hopeless massacre. Just like the overlit seabase detracts from what a pitch black dark story this is at heart. So yes, the superficial faults disguise and draw attention away from whats underneath within the story. But what's underneath is far, far more ugly and nasty.

If there's one story that makes me bitterly regret the fact that Doctor Who continued running in the 80's whilst it was sinking and going from one apocryphal disaster to another, rather than ending on a high during its 70's golden age, it's this one. This wins my award for the worst Doctor Who story ever. Even over Time-Flight, Twin Dilemma, Time & The Rani, New Earth and Love & Monsters. To me this trounces all of them in repellent awfulness purely by being so mean spirited. Possibly the cruelest, most mean spirited Doctor Who story ever. This is supposed to be a story with an underlying peace message, but that's just hypocritical window dressing for what's simply a pointless massacre and a deeply scornful view on humanity.

I'm not against violence in TV and Cinema per se. I'm actually an avid viewer of films like Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs and Face/Off. One of my favourite Doctor Who audio spin-offs is Dalek Empire which is a series steeped in death, massacres, cruelty and bleakness. What I hate about Warriors of the Deep and much of Doctor Who during this particular period is that death is all there is, and there's no purpose to it, not even on a level of pure brutal honesty. Usually characters die in Doctor Who as a natural result of the plot and the conflict within it, or even have the seeds of their demise sowed earlier on. In this story, it seems like the writer is going out of his way to kill off characters, just as a blatant excuse to have the story end with no survivors. It feels like the writer simply got bored of the characters and lazily contrived a situation where they'd die.

The thing that I have to bear in mind about this story is that what the author Johnny Byrne intended was probably lost in translation since a lot of it was rewritten by script editor Eric Saward. And I get the strongest impression that the parts of it I hate are down to Eric Saward's additions. They certainly seem to have his fingerprints all over them. The thing is, unlike those above mentioned depth-plumming stories, the scripting seems for the most part to be very competent, and often quite witty with a great sense of rapport between characters and turning of phrases.

Vorshak: "Are you saying we shouldn't defend ourselves?"

Doctor: "I'm saying you have no defence"

The first part holds together very well. Of course the sea base itself is horrendously overlit and doesn't quite convey a sense of being underwater. But still the routine of life there is shown very well. We see a practice run which conveys the horror of a future where the man who launches the missiles has to have neurosurgery and psychotropic implants to condition him to interface with the computer, and to obey orders without emotion. And really it was a frightening idea that must have struck a nerve at the time, and still does for me now. This idea that 100 years from now, our existence on this planet as a species will still hang on a thread due to the belligerence and pig headedness of those in power who seriously think a nuclear war is in any way winnable.

The scene where the Doctor's Tardis materialises in orbit of Earth and is nearly shot down by a defence sattelite for being on someone's turf without a clearance code, really does stretch out the scope of this future world and how volatile the situation is. It gives one a real sense of temporal vertigo. It's also enough to make someone weep at such wasted potential, because it gives the impression that some real thought has gone into the whole concept.

Part one only falls to pieces when we come up to the cliffhanger. And it falls apart because it's desperately trying to force a sense of urgency. The Doctor, whilst trying to evade capture on the base, decides to set off the base's nuclear reactor, feeling sure that the crew will be able to stabilise it, but it will keep them occupied enough that they can get back to the Tardis. It just makes the Doctor seem an unreasonable, rash belligerent who's practically prepared to pick up a smoking gun and incriminate himself. Then when the guards set upon him, the Doctor ends up being thrown into the pool below. The cliffhanger being that Tegan and Turlough declare that he has drowned when he has only been under a few seconds. And frankly that's just insulting the audience's intelligence.

But of course cliffhangers did tend to be script editor Eric Saward's department, and he often felt he needed to spice them up. Here he kind of drowns the story in excesses. Indeed the cliffhangers and the forced urgency are problematic. The next cliffhanger involves the entry of the Myrka, as an airlock door (okay a slab of thick polystyrene) has collapsed and has impailed Tegan's leg. Actually that's a fairly good cliffhanger, but again it assumes the audience to be too stupid to notice that such a heavy door would actually have squashed Tegan's leg to a pulp. And the third and last cliffhanger where the Sea Devils prepare to blast the Doctor is pretty limp in and of itself, made worse by a lousy copout in part four.

In terms of pacing it's actually rather good. There is a momentum to it all, and that definitely marks it as a cut above some of the dull and slow stories behind it like Time-Flight and Terminus. The kind of stories that are so lifeless and drag so much you find yourself forgetting what any of the characters are doing or why. It suggests that the JNT produced Doctor Who is actually improving and honing its 80's style somewhat. But as I said it ultimately shows how that lethargic storytelling is actually preferable to the actioneering stories that would follow this one, as the gratuitous violence and sadistic overtones does leave a far nastier aftertaste.

There is a sense that the writer really believed in this as a morality play and never intended for the final result to be so utterly twisted. I've often said that doing a third Silurian/Sea Devil story would be misconceived from the outset. Unless you're going to set it in a parrallel universe (as in the novel Blood Heat or the comic strip Final Genesis), there's only one way it can ever end, in tragedy. It's too predictable to care by that point and to follow up a tragedy is to cheapen it. In the other two TV stories, peace seemed like an option and worth getting worked up about as a possibility. By this point, that possibility doesn't exist because clearly the Silurians haven't changed their view on humanity and aren't going to.

The Silurians no longer have any validity, since they're taking reprisals on humanity for something that happened 100 years ago. And yet still that didn't have to be an issue. It didn't have to be about who was right or wrong, but simply that the Cold War situation left the door open for the Silurians to prevail against us. About us indulging in petty plotting and politicking against each other whilst greater forces surround us, and actually use our own weapons of annihilation against us. Had it featured the Doctor actually under custody by the paranoid humans and unable to stop the massacre, instead of failing out of sheer incompetence and misplaced sympathies, then you might have someting.

The problem is, it does focus on the idea that there's validity to what the Silurians are doing, which is quite simply warped. The Doctor places some twisted sympathies with the Silurians, and whilst the humans are being massacred by the invading Sea Devils he acts as a moral nuisance, having a go at the humans for shooting back against the aggressors. It's similar to what Simply Crispy once said about Land of the Dead "Has political correctness come so far that we now have to accept flesh eating zombies into our society?" The Doctor seems to have the ludicrous idea that there's somehow a moral dilemma attached to killing an armed and murderous enemy that is determined to wipe out all life on the planet. He may not approve of violent measures but he has no right to force his views on people who are fighting for survival, and so he loses all my respect. He describes the humans as 'pathetic savages' for defending themselves, and that the genocidal Silurians are somehow noble and misunderstood. If the humans were any near the savages he painted them as, they'd have given him a well deserved punch in the face by now. When he bites the head off one of the last survivors who urges him to use the reptile-repellant plot device that was under his nose all the time, he just seems hateful and like he's blaming the victim. Getting on his soap box like an obnoxious Jeremy Kyle-esque talk show host, trying to make someone feel ashamed for their words. Someone who's friends have been massacred, is worried about joining them and is also probably worried about their family back home being nuked.

But alas there are no survivors. The Doctor's stubborn decision to wait till the last minute results in virtually all the survivors dying. He even tells his companions to try and revive one of the dying Silurians, and once it comes round it shoots the last surviving human. At this point it's impossible to see the story as anything but an angry, contempt ridden piece. In Johnny Byrne's original script, there were human survivors, but Eric ensured that they all died in as contrived and nasty a fashion as possible. It's the same thing that contaminated other stories of this period such as The Two Doctors and Eric's own Resurrection of the Daleks. The kind of thing that made 80's Doctor Who as nauseating, sadistic and exploitative as anything in Saw III. It's like a writer trying to convey a sense of random death but writing it in such a contrived and deliberate fashion that it clearly isn't random death, and that feels a lot more sadistic and sickening.

And ultimately I'm not sure what the story is trying to say or who it holds in the most contempt. Does it despise the Doctor? It certainly goes the distance to neuter him and make an incompetent out of him, and portray him as a moral nuisance. In which case it works, this is one of few stories where I really hate the Doctor. Infact the characterisation seems based on the most stereotypical reading of the Doctor's character. There's a brief moment where the Doctor has to deal with an enemy agent who takes Tegan hostage, and he demonstrates the kind of quick thinking ingenuity that makes him briefly seem like the pro-active reliable Doctor of old, but immediately after he has his teeth removed again.

Then again it seems just as likely that the story regards humanity itself with deep contempt. After all anyone who opposes the Doctor gets killed very swiftly afterwards, as if the story shares the Doctor's twisted scorn on anyone and everyone who doesn't subscribe to the worst kind of suicidal turn-the-other-cheek pascifism. Or simply thinks these characters got what they deserved simply for doing their jobs. Fair enough the humans aren't exactly saints, but the Silurian attack is completely unprovoked so it's clear who has the moral high ground and who's the aggressors of the two. And really for the Doctor to despise humanity for being prepared to nuke their enemies, but sympathise with the Silurians who are also prepared to nuke their enemies really is just backwards. It's as if it's aimed at the kind of adolescents impressed by thoughtless anger and humanity-hating misanthropes who think that if mankind built nukes they all deserve to be destroyed by them. Us as an entire species. Which would of course include the anti-nuke protestors and the people who write political dramas like this, and their families and children.

That's the problem. Ideally what this story is, is a view of the Cold War and human behaviour from an alien perspective. It's meant to be a story where we see ourselves as a dangerously petty and belligerent race who have evolved our weapons systems to the point where we have become a risk to our own planet. Where we are meant to see why the Silurians would have a problem with sharing their planet with us, and why the Doctor may look down his nose at us and wonder whether we were a species worth saving. That's a good premise, but the story doesn't gague our sympathies for the Silurians, it twists our arms into agreeing. And it doesn't give us a fair trial. Instead of considering that there is something worthy about humanity after all, and making the point that on the Silurians' part, the ends never justify the means, the Silurians and the Doctor simply spit scorn at us. Instead of making an argument, the story simply sneers, and condemns us at every oppurtunity in a horribly contrived, manipulative and absolutist way of scorning us for all our violence, even if it's in self defence in a kill or be killed situation, just like a cotton field slave master would. It's just a negative and irredemable story.

And yet I can't help but think that if the last survivors hadn't been killed off due to Eric Saward's twisted script revision, it wouldn't seem like such a nasty story. After all in the novel Blood Heat, the Doctor takes a similar 'blame the victim' stance and sides with the Silurians aggressors. But we're presented with other prominent characters with a credible opposing point of view. We're not just given ciphers and a Doctor who forces his warped message down the viewer's throat. And we're given a positive outcome, a chance to see what would happen if the Doctor's words had any effect. More importantly it doesn't just kill off those characters. So there's something salvaged from it, an outcome that can be learned from. But nothing is learned here, and anyone who could learn is silenced by the Doctor's unreasonable outbursts and then killed.

The sad fact is that this is a product of the 80's of the worst kind. A time when most American cinema was dripping with contempt for society and people. At a time when socially and politically there was no such thing as a middle ground, between left wing, right wing, pascifism and the lynch mob mentality, and of course gender politics were the worst of all for no middle ground between snobs and creeps. And the fact is I'm very anti-war, anti-nuclear. And yet a story like this makes me want to go completely to the other side in shame at how ridiculous, stupid, unreasonable and scornful it makes pascifist thought look. As if all forms of violence are unacceptable, even self-defence. It makes me ashamed to be a Doctor Who fan too, and I feel it would make a lot of burgeoning new fans want to run a mile from the old series.

The argument goes that such deaths and the failure of the Doctor at either realising he was wrong or saving the seabase crew is part of what makes the show uncertain. It's a show where anyone can die and the Doctor is never guaranteed to pull through, so anything can happen at the end. But this brings those ideas in like a shopping list of requirements. There's actually no struggle to avoid the outcome, and as such I can't care. Like a lot of 80's violent trash, it's just obfuscation for the sake of it. More importantly it's defeatism casts a long shadow over whether I should ever care about the show again. If the Doctor can't be bothered to save the day, if our lethargic, incompetent hero considers it an affront to his pascifist principles to ever do anything to save lives, then all I'm watching is a parade of death where nothing matters and even survival isn't worth fighting for.

But that's what happens when you make a show purely for fans. When the show is done so cynically with a shopping list of elements, then there just is little or none of the writer's actual heart and soul in it anymore, and that's how you end up with cold blooded, nihilistic stories like this. The other two Silurian/Sea Devils stories were written by Malcolm Hulke, who's heart really was in the moral stories he wrote, in every aspect of it. Watch his Ambassadors of Death for the best example of a story rich in intriguing sub plots and mysteries and a very humanistic ending, and you'll see the kind of writer he was. My first memory of watching Doctor Who was seeing a clip from The Sea Devils where we see the Navy ships bombing the Sea Devil base, and we see corpses of Sea Devils rising to the water's surface. That's all I saw, but it was enough to tell me everything the story was trying to say about the military's excessive aggression and mankind's failure to communicate. Warriors of the Deep spends four episodes very loudly and forcefully trying to tell me the same thing, but all it ammounts to is unreasoning, meaningless sound and fury. It has none of that classic symbiosis of 70's Doctor who, it's all lost in schizophrenia and hypocrisy. There are episodes of Terrahawks that convey a better moral point than this.

But of course this is what the fans wanted, or at least what they had asked for. Generally amongst fans, the best period of Doctor Who was the early Tom Baker era under producer Philip Hinchcliffe. An era where there was a lot of violence and death and where often the Doctor couldn't simply make a planet's problems go away. The Hinchcliffe era has always been involked as the show's golden age that nothing after could compare to. Even today it's used as the standard for criticising the New Series. I'm not saying that criticisms of the New Series aren't valid, except maybe when fans hold stories like this over New Who. Many fans begrudge the fact that the Hinchcliffe era couldn't last as Mary Whitehose ensured it became cleaned up in the late 70's, and Doctor Who in the eyes of many became a children's show again.

And fans have often wanted Doctor Who to be an adult show, for the sake of the validity of being a fan of something that is viewed as a naff children's show. So for many fans Eric Saward's blood splatter approach (which really got off the ground with this story) was welcomed, as was the neutering of the Doctor and making him a fallible figure. Clearly looking at the Fifth Doctor's final year and Colin Baker's first, it's clear that the arching development was of showing the failures of the idealist Fifth Doctor in a nasty universe that eventually finishes him off, and then his replacement, the Sixth Doctor being a less squeamish, more violent hero unafraid to get his hands dirty and more suited for the hostile terrain he was now in.

And on that note the problem can be summed up well. Doctor Who is a children's show. It can have an adult edge but crucially it's a show where naive idealism and a hero loathe to use violence wins more often than not. To put the Doctor in a hopeless situation where his methods don't work. To question the effectiveness of the Doctor in the real world is asking the very question that causes the whole premise of the show to fall apart. The Doctor always stressed thinking, negotiation, and reading between the lines before taking rash violent action. And the purpose of this story seems to be to show what if there was nothing between the lines and Doctor's hesitation and futile search for other ways, led to everyone around him dying, and that's all it seems to aspire to say, repeatedly until you're sick of it. As one poster on Outpost Gallifrey once said, it's rather like a magic show where Eric Saward is backstage yelling to the rest of the audience 'it's up his sleeve'. And likewise this is just being nihilistic and demoralising for the sake of it. No wonder this simply leads to a dead end for the Fifth Doctor, and a Sixth Doctor with no direction beyond random violence and tastelessness.

Indeed I'd say that the continuity issue was part of a greater problem in that Doctor Who was simply turning inwards on itself, digging desperately for new approaches to the point where it was dissecting itself and revealing a lot of nauseating ugliness within and presenting it in explicit detail. Whilst the show and its hero might have had some dubious, hypocritical or plain unforgiving ethics in the past (i.e. Day of the Daleks, The Seeds of Doom, The Invisible Enemy), with this po-faced, oh so serious tone of the 80's it suddenly felt as if the program really meant it, which was very discomforting, and this is a particularly, spirit-crushingly humourless story.

And really that's the probblem. Continuity was used as an excuse to indulge in amoral content during this period. Sometimes putting Cybermen and references to their first story in Attack of the Cybermen to please the fans enough to not mind a story featuring a trigger happy Doctor who's willing to praise an assassin who was once employed by the Daleks. Or likewise teaming the Second and Sixth Doctor up against the Sontarans in The Two Doctors, a story with fascistic overtones. A story like this one relies on the show's older precedents. The Doctor's twisted sympathies with the genocidal Silurians whilst pouring twisted scorn on humanity, is like his twisted sympathies to the Master, a very warped distortion of the Doctor's humanistic stance in the Pertwee era.

Or worst of all, the Twin Dilemma, where Colin Baker's Doctor debuted as a deranged psychotic who tried to strangle his female companion, in one of the cheapest most vile shock tactics the show ever relied upon. But it was done to evoke the 1963 pilot story An Unearthly Child, where the Doctor was a more ambiguous character more prone to violence and caveman bludgeoning. Which really misses the point that this was a character trait of the Doctor that didn't get revisited for a damn good reason. Neurotic no longer covered it, Doctor Who had simply become an awful, desperate, scornful series.

It's as if having the Doctor beating his female companion was somehow more responsible and acceptable than having him so much as flirt with her. Worse still, the Doctor is forgiven by his companion. It's no wonder the morality of the show turns sour here. This is the point where Doctor Who ceases to be a series that explores the reasons why people do terrible things, and instead relies on the excuses instead.

Indeed I really would like to pretend this story never happened, but in an era where the show was fixatedly conscious of its canon and its past and at making stories such as this an essential part of that canon, it's not really possible. Maybe if I close my eyes tightly, maybe I can pretend it ended in 1980 with a finished Shada or in 1981 with a happy ending version of Keeper of Traken, and that stories like this were never made.

The final line "There should have been another way", is wonderfully delivered by Peter Davison but belies the fact that if there was 'another way' the REAL Doctor would have found it. Infact it's Doctor Who's most cheap and hypocritical lines. All we've seen is a sadistic, pointless massacre with nothing whatsoever to say on peace or humanity. This is a nihilistic story, and worse still it doesn't even have the sincerity to admit it. Really this story has nothing to recommend it. It has nothing worthy to say except a deeply twisted scorn on humanity. Cheap design and poor monsters and a complete lack of damage limitation. Not to mention an unpleasant feeling that as a viewer, my capacity to think for myself is being sapped and crushed by the heavy handed moral scorn of this story. But it's the sheer cruelty and trashy defeatist pointlessness of the story that consigns it to the bin for me. Utter garbage!

Don't bother, just stick with Cloverfield. Now that is a sea monster horror flick well worth seeing!

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older