An Easter special about pirates, with a classic monster back after nearly forty years, shot on what’s clearly a decent budget in some lovely locations. It should work. “Legend of the Sea Devils” doesn’t really work at all, and it’s the weakest thing this era has put out. It didn’t do much for me.
The trouble isn’t any single bad decision. It’s that the episode never settles on what it’s about. There’s a pirate queen, a sunken ship, a Sea Devil warlord, a treasure that isn’t treasure, a stolen key, a planet-drowning scheme and a man who’s been waiting years for someone to come back, all crammed into roughly forty-five minutes. None of it gets room, so none of it sticks, and the whole thing slides past without leaving a mark.
The Sea Devils deserved better
Bringing these back is a genuinely nice idea. They’re a good design, they’ve been off screen for decades, and a maritime setting is the obvious place to put them. The updated look is decent too, all scaled armour and fish-eyed helmets, and the underwater shots are the best-looking thing in the hour. What they don’t get is a reason to be here. Madame Ching’s crew, the Sea Devils and the Doctor all want the same object for different reasons, and the episode explains those reasons at speed while people run along a deck.
Marsissus, the Sea Devil leader, is played as an imperious warlord and given almost nothing to do beyond stand in the shallows and make declarations. That’s the recurring failure of this era. It can design a monster and put it somewhere interesting, and then it declines to give the monster a plan I can follow. The Sontarans a few months earlier got a doctrine, a routine and a weakness that paid off. Marsissus gets a scheme about flooding the planet that I couldn’t summarise for you now if you asked, and even the Myrka, dragged out for a cameo, is gone in seconds.
The pirate half is more promising
The location work is the one clear win. Shooting on real coastline in genuinely miserable weather gives the special a cold, wet, physical feel that a studio would never have managed, and the ship interiors have real timber and real candlelight. Crystal Yu is good value as Madame Ching, and the historical hook is a strong one. A real pirate queen who commanded an enormous fleet in the South China Sea is exactly the sort of figure this show should build an episode around. There are flashes of that better version here, particularly her flat refusal to be impressed by any of it.
Ji-Hun’s story is the part with actual feeling in it. He’s a man who stayed at his post for years waiting for someone who never came, and he gets a quiet ending instead of a heroic one. It works because the episode gives him one clear thing and lets it stand, which is exactly what everything else is missing. Too much of the hour reaches for emotional beats it hasn’t built any foundation for, and Ji-Hun is the exception. The swordfighting has the opposite problem, with a lot of it staged flatly and several minutes where nothing happens except people clanging blades on a deck.
The special barely uses Dan, either. He’s given a running gag about wanting to go home and then spends most of the hour standing at the back of shots. After Flux made him the most immediately likeable thing in the era, watching the show forget he’s there is a waste. Nothing here seems to cost anybody anything, and that’s the deeper issue. The Sea Devils threaten to drown a planet and are talked out of it, a ship goes down with nobody I care about on board, and when the Doctor finally sets things right with the sonic, it only feels like an ending because the running time is up.
The Doctor and Yaz conversation
The one thread the special genuinely commits to is Yaz, and I’m glad it finally does, even if the outcome is frustrating. Dan pushes her to say something and she does. The Doctor’s answer is that she can’t, because she knows how it ends and she can’t put herself through another one. There’s a decent scene at sunset where Whittaker plays that as tiredness instead of tragedy, and Mandip Gill plays being turned down without collapsing about it. It’s the right conversation and it’s three years late.
It also arrives with one episode left, which means the show has raised it, answered it and left no room to live with the answer. I keep thinking of Doomsday, where the show spent two full series earning a goodbye before it cashed it in, and this gets one sunset. What strikes me more is how little the refusal changes. Yaz says her piece, the Doctor says no, and they get back in the TARDIS and carry on exactly as before. A rejection that costs the relationship nothing isn’t really a rejection, it’s an announcement, and it leaves Gill playing a woman turned down by someone she travels with every day as though nothing has happened.
The timing makes it sting a little more. This is the last story before the Thirteenth Doctor’s finale, the final chance to build any momentum into her ending, and it’s spent on a special that resolves nothing and moves nothing forward except one conversation. Whatever I thought of Flux, it at least had an argument it was trying to make. This is a placeholder in an expensive costume.
Rating: 2/5. Not my favourite. It looks expensive, the locations are lovely, Crystal Yu is good and Ji-Hun’s thread has some real feeling in it. Everything else is a string of scenes happening near each other, with a returning monster wasted on a plot that never comes into focus. The Yaz conversation is the only part I’d go back to.