So after heading to Earth and then Outer Space, what could The Doctor possibly do next in this third box in the Ninth Doctor’s second “season”? Well… a mix of both, in other words like all Doctor Who seasons. Anyway, enough of making fun of the boxset naming this was a fun double bill but neither story particularly stood out as memorable, which is a shame because its always nice to “see” the Sea Devils pop up… Let’s take a look!
In “The Seas of Titan” The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) arrives on a submersible that’s dipping into the, well, seas of Titan and befriends the experiment’s lead researcher Diana Hendry (Sasha Behar) but her cohort Rachel Bates (Yasmin Mwanza) is less thrilled with a strange man suddenly appearing. They head back to their base, which is abandoned aside from the two ladies due to a lack of funding, and in fact we soon find out that the whole Titan colony is on the verge of collapse due to the great Earth Empire losing interest in their previously needed resource mining. Despite all of this The Doctor is happy to see Diana still trying to prove life is in the ocean and helps her with her next dive, one that goes wrong (or is sabotaged) and leads them to being captured by a group of Sea Devils who have created an underwater city.
Great cover, though the sea creature doesn’t actually appear often enough to really justify being on it… Looks cool though, so I’ll allow it!
This leads to the usual conundrum: some Sea Devils wish to live in peace with humanity if they’d just stop polluting their seas, others wish to take out the human colony before they can “get them” first, and likewise when the colony finds out about the Sea Devils the colony head Soloman (Ferdy Roberts) starts to prepare to “fight back” all while The Doctor is in the middle, a member of neither species just wanting a peaceful solution. It works well, it’s just a bit copy and paste with a lot of Silurian / Sea Devil stories…
“Lay Down Your Arms” is an odd one as its more of a comedy than anything else though does have a strong anti-war message, which makes sense when your key historical character is Bertha Kinzky (played here by Kate Sissons), more commonly known as Bertha von Suttner, the first female Nobel Peace Prize winner for her anti-war book “Lay Down Your Arms”, funnily enough! Anyway The Doctor is helping out at her family spa disguised as Bertha’s opera teacher, a role he himself has no idea how he got, and he soon notices an outbreak of violence across the building. Originally thinking it was an attempt at the life of soon-visiting Tsar Alexander II (Jamie Parker) it turns out to be something far more elaborate, and deadly for more than just the one person…
Kind of fed up of floating hexagons on these covers… Plus the weird werewolve-things aren’t really as big a deal as they seem here… Oh well, again, great looking cover!
Like I said, it’s a fun story and Kate Sissons bounces off Eccleston’s Doctor really well but overall it wasn’t something that made me take notice and applaud it, I’m sure it’ll fade from my memory quite quickly, which at least means I won’t remember it for being bad either. It just neatly slots into the middle.
The Continuity:
The overall boxset cover, featuring pretty much only assets from the third story of the box, plus a Sea Devil. Oh well!
The Sea Devils have only appeared on TV three times, their debut Third Doctor story “The Sea Devils”, the Fifth Doctor story “Warriors of the Deep” and the recent Thirteenth Doctor story “Legend of the Sea Devils”. Sadly those stories get worse as they go along, but hey-ho. Oddly this the Sea Devil’s first mainline (as in “featuring The Doctor”) audio story ever, though I believe a Fourth Doctor story featuring them was recorded a year or two ago and has yet to be released, as is often the case with that range…
Overall Thoughts:
“The Seas of Titan” is a bog-standard Silurian/Sea Devil story that does no harm and is still fun to listen to but doesn’t really break any new ground; while “Lay Down Your Arms” has a good sense of humour about itself and a fun temporary companion but doesn’t really leave much of a lasting impression. Sounds like both stories get the bronze!
“The Seas of Titan” go in a slightly different direction in the end. After several Sea Devils and several humans die in a riot caused by people on both sides disagreeing with a purposed alliance (including Rachael, who was responsible for the sabotage that sank The Doctor and Diana in the first place, so hooray!) a new compromise is struck: the remaining humans head down to the ocean floor to live in the Sea Devil colony, where they can actually have food and support unlike what they were getting from their own people. They shut down the pollution causing machines before doing so as well, and with no way of telling other humans where they are the Sea Devils are happy with this scenario as well. So, instead of humans killing them all or Silurians/Sea Devils being stopped from killing all humans both sides ended in peace. I’d use the old Ninth Doctor quote of “Just this once everybody lives!” but a lot of people died before the peaceful conclusion, so…
As for “Lay Down Your Arms”? Well the violent behaviour turns out to be because of alien bath salts that were intentionally put there by “Trinity”, a three-headed Snake creature who not only look over the body of the Tsar but has taken his people to Earth and decided to set up a big cage fighting arena for their viewing pleasure. Using the bath salts to drive them into a frenzy and then separating them into a Red Team and a Blue Team, Trinity and his fellow kin then sit back and enjoy the team warfare. There’s a great line when Bertha claims her mother “would never kill someone because they’re a different colour than she is!” leading to The Doctor to dryly counter with “you really don’t know how things are yet, do you?” or something to that degree anyway. The Doctor, Bertha and Spa owner Ludwig (Joseph Kloska) who I haven’t mentioned yet join forces to stop them, ending with a nice “this woman goes on to do great things” scene.
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