(604) Warriors of the Deep - Part 2

The previous episode ended with the Doctor being pushed over the railing and into the water and it wasn’t perhaps the best way to end the episode but it shows that cliffhangers can be improved when we see what happens next.

The diving sequence is quite impressive and not something that has been seen before in Doctor Who. In fact the first couple of minutes is quite interesting. I was genuinely thinking that this episode might change my opinion of this story because even after the first scene with the Sea Devils and the Silurians I thought things were picking up. Sadly things with the crew of the sea base start to take any fun that there was out of the story.

It was interesting to see that the Sea Devils would obey the Silurians. It would have been nice though to see a bit of conflict or tension leading up to them bowing to the Silurians. I still cant take the Silurians serious when they have huge smiles on their faces. It does slightly seriously ruin any chance they could have of coming across as a serious threat. The Sea Devils on the other hand are dressed in black and sound like they did in 1972 and so would have been the better choice.

Just after the midway point of the episode there is another mention of the Myrka. This is one of those instances where I wish I could go back in time and change the decision to include it in this story because its at this point of the story that the production problems start to appear on screen. When the Myrka breaks through the doors are really rubbish and look like plastic or rubber. The door ‘falls’ on Tegan and in the real world that door would have broken or shattered her leg into thousands of pieces yet she shows little to no real pain. The doors bend with tremendous ease and the problems are just starting but more of that in the next episode.

So far the story isn’t terrible but the things that are wrong are going to cause more problems. It’s a shame that Johnny Byrne’s story is being let down by some poor decision in the production. Any potential that this story had seems to disappeared in just this one episode. Well at least there are just two more episodes but its going to feel like twenty.