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Commander Vorshak on his bridge with two Silurians and a Sea
Devil. (Warriors of the Deep Part Four) ©BBC |
These episodes are a bit better, just because there's more action going on, but they're still not much fun to look at. Let's be perfectly honest, though; the Myrka really isn't
that bad. It's not great, and it generally moves with great silliness (and giving it arms was a bad move), but it doesn't look that bad, and it's at least a huge imposing presence in a story that needs a huge imposing presence. It's just that, taken as a whole with all the other misfires in this serial, the Myrka does nothing to counteract criticisms (and Ingrid Pitt's ludicrous-looking death, where she tries to karate-chop the Myrka into submission, doesn't help at all).
But perhaps the most frustrating thing about
Warriors of the Deep is that the basic script is actually rather good. It's a proper base-under-siege tale, of the sort we haven't really had since
Horror of Fang Rock, and while the reasoning behind the Silurians' actions is a bit woolly (they can't kill off humanity but they can make it so humanity kills off itself, which is somehow more noble), it still makes a sort of sense. Other than the fact that it's an incredibly bloodthirsty script -- at least with script editor Eric Saward's rewrites -- and that it has the occasional lapses in consistency I mentioned last time, this is actually a reasonable action story. But the whole thing is sabotaged by all sorts of production problems.
Some of this can be blamed on Margaret Thatcher (she called a surprise election in the wake of the Falklands which threw the production for this story into chaos, as studios had to be reallocated to cover that instead), but some of it looks like it was going to be a problem no matter what. The red flashing eyes are incredibly stupid-looking, but that's because no one's thought to include moving mouths for the Silurians (or the Sea Devils for that matter, but as there's really one talking Sea Devil at any one time it's less of a problem for them) and so it's the only way to tell which one is talking. The Sea Devil heads appear to be top-heavy, and so they wander through the corridors of Sea Base 4, cocking their heads quizzically at everything they see. Sea Base 4 is all gleaming white walls (not the rusting, forgotten place writer Johnny Byrne originally scripted) and thus is rather boring to look at, and the whole thing is generally very brightly illuminated, which leads to a lack of shadows for characters to hide and lurk in -- allegedly there was going to be a power cut when the Sea Devils began their assault, but there's no evidence of this on screen. (One version of the story claims that the lighting director simply refused to lower the lighting for the action moments.) And it's probably churlish to criticize the computer graphics again, but even at the time they weren't very impressive. At least the model work is really nice.
So it's too brightly lit, it's often excessively macho ("You'll get no help from me,
Silurian"), and it's incredibly bloodthirsty -- the only survivors at the end appear to be the TARDIS crew and Bulic (and the cynical side of me assumes that's because Eric Saward, who added the extra deaths to Byrne's script, forgot to kill him off at the end). While the final line ("There should have been another way") is powerfully delivered by Davison, it's also a bit hypocritical, because nothing about this feels inevitable. There's no sense of tragedy behind the characters but every sense of being cannon fodder. If they'd managed to get the look of
Warriors of the Deep right, they could have pulled this off -- as I said before, despite the occasional problem the basic script is quite good, and there's enough going on that we haven't seen for a while/at all to give the story a sense of potential. But they didn't; that potential is squandered, and the final result is sadly a mess. You're better off reading the Terrance Dicks novelization instead.
