Hogan Reviews

This year’s Fourth Doctor series finally gives us the debut of the Harry Sullivan / Naomi Cross duo that has had adventures after their time with the Fourth Doctor already released, thanks to the Fourth Doctor stuff being banked so far in advance. In their further adventures I’ve been critical of Naomi being really plain and her actress not emoting very well, and unsurprisingly I can’t say she started off great and got worse, let’s put it that way. Oh well, what about the rest of the story? Let’s find out!

Harry Sullivan (Christopher Naylor) is on holiday in Calcutta but is immediately pulled from the airport to assist the country’s branch of UNIT when locals have been caught drawing what Harry immediately recognises as a Sea Devil. He is soon asked to investigate Ramesh Kamal (Silas Carson) who has built a hotel in the middle of nowhere around the site where the Devils were sighted and who has requested a Doctor to help him. Harry is accompanied by Naomi Cross (Eleanor Crooks) who was sent to Calcutta’s UNIT but has done nothing but sit at a desk and is looking for some action, but when they get there their cover is almost immediately blown as not only has another Doctor already arrived but he’s The Doctor (Tom Baker) and he calls Harry by his real name as soon as he lays eyes on him. Ramesh doesn’t seem to mind though and he soon shows his guests both his wife Amita (Amina Zia) and the patient in question: Prof. Sanjay Billimoria (Raj Ghatak). While Harry tends to the wounded The Doctor and Naomi are given a tour but soon break away from it and have themselves a sneak around, where they soon find a locked swimming pool containing a chained Sea Devil called Shorak (Tracy Wiles).

Ramesh is initially unhappy about all this but when he sees Shorak actually talk to The Doctor he changes his mind, as the “beast” had never responded to Billimoria (well, apart from breaking his arm, anyway…) The Doctor is pressured to stay, Harry gets visited by a desperate Amita who wants to leave as she doesn’t feel safe with her husband in this location anymore, and Naomi manages to escape only to run into another Sea Devil called Taurix (Nicholas Briggs just doing his Ice Warrior voice to completely take me out of every scene he’s in) who takes her down to his lair, where other Sea Devils are being woken…

It’s a good cover, though it’s a shame you’d never know there was a second story in the box set!

I wanted to like this story, I really did, but everything about it was just so… plain. The villain ticked every cliché in the book (including have a killer crocodile pit!), the story of chained misunderstood creature leading to a showdown between two races due to one human’s mistreatment, the abused wife wanting to be free of her husband… just everything felt so familiar and at no point did the story twist in an unexpected way. It was well acted and everything (with the exception of Eleanor Crooks still only giving one tone to all her voice work no matter what situation she was in) but rarely did it excite, let’s put it that way.

The Continuity:

Not much to say, beyond obviously the Sea Devils having debuted in the Third Doctor story “The Sea Devils” and that they’ve made a few appearances on TV and across other media since. As mentioned we already know how Harry and Naomi’s travels with the Fourth Doctor end as we “catch back up with them” in the Seventh Doctor audio story “London Orbital”, which was released a couple of years ago! Usually the wibbly wobbly time stuff is kept in universe, not out!

Overall Thoughts:

Storm of the Sea Devils was inoffensive but bland, with characters you’ve seen/heard 100 times doing and saying exactly what you think they’d do and say before reaching a conclusion that was written on the wall in Part 1. It’s mostly well acted and the soundscape is great, but I can’t say I was ever engaged, and I certainly was never surprised…

For a quick sum up: The Doctor frees Shorak and the two escape to the Sea Devil base but Shorak is injured, which only convinces Taurix to initiate the attack on Ramesh’s hotel. As The Doctor and Naomi are chained up our titular Time Lord manages to rile Naomi up but instead of wanting revenge she says about how the two races need to come together, which immediately convinces Shorak that she was wrong about humanity so as the Sea Devils begin to close in on the last few humans in the hotel (the innocents ones, including Harry and Amita) Shorak and The Doctor make it in time to convince Taurix to stand down, though Ramesh soon appears and takes his own wife hostage in order to escape, only to end up knocked into his own crocodile pit and eaten when Amita gives the creatures her husband’s command. Villain is killed by his own mistreated creatures by his mistreated wife. Classic… like so classic that it was obvious in Part 1! Oh well…

UNIT agrees to stop people from moving into where the Sea Devils are and even peacefully talk to each other (which completely throws a wrench in the works of Fifth Doctor TV story “Warriors of the Deep” where he desperately laments that he keeps failing to create peace between the reptilian species and humans…) and Naomi wants to go on a trip with The Doctor and Harry is guilted into coming along, starting their long string of adventures!