A great set-up ruined by... well, almost everything else.

If The Five Doctors was the perfect party, then Warriors Of The Deep is the bleary morning after where the whole world's in a spin.

This shouldn't be the case – it's got not one but TWO! returning monsters from the Pertwee years. The Silurians and Sea Devils have joined in force to reclaim the planet which they think is rightfully theirs via a futuristic sea base in the near future. Now that sounds like a great story – especially if you're coming to Doctor Who afresh and bought the Beneath The Surface DVD set. What emerges though isn't so much a damp squib, more a floody disaster.

It's telling that this is another season opener written by Johnny Byrne, especially when you consider that Arc Of Infinity was a load of pants – well-made pants admittedly, but still pants. Warriors Of The Deep goes one worse by being badly realised on screen, and this time around, I don't think that the blame can be laid at Byrne's door. The premise of two awesome superpowers at each other's throats with the threat of nuclear strikes was (and still is) typically topical. You've also got The Doctor trying to still negotiate peace between the humans and the two angry races.

Indeed, this is a story tailor-made for the sensitive Fifth Doctor, and begins the season's loose story arc of a compassionate man lost in a sea of nastiness. At least four of the Season 21 stories feature Doctor Number Five thrown into perilous situations where his peaceful manner is tried to the limit. This is one of them, and seriously questions The Doctor's pacifism after failing to broker a deal between the Silurians and Sea Devils and the humans. Even in part two, he's handing his gun to base commander Vorshak, and it sets the tone for the remainder of the story.

It's effective stuff, and about the only decent element of the script. Even with the crew base dropping like flies, The Doctor's still clinging to the hope that some sort of peace can be reached. By part four, it's becoming blatantly obvious that events are spiralling out of control, and it's brought The Doctor to his knees. He literally just stands on the spot at one point, as Teabag shouts at him to find some sort of solution. It's only then that The Doctor decides that any sort of harmony can't be restored and decides to start to use the Hexachromite gas as a weapon.

"Peter Davison is easily the best thing about Warriors Of The Deep – he provides a lot of previously unseen grit to The Doctor, and makes his final anguish all the more convincing"

Interestingly, it's one rule for Sea Devils and Silurians and another for humans. At one point The Doctor snarls “I sometimes wonder why I like the pathetic people of this planet so much” after Preston has dared to say that the two alien races should be wiped out – fair enough, since a sizeable number of crewmembers have bitten the dust. Even near the story's climax, The Doctor's telling his companions to make sure that the aliens are to be taken care of, and yet says nothing when Vorshak is fatally wounded. I guess that by the end of the show, when The Doctor stands around in too much eyeliner muttering sadly “There should have been another way”, he could be referring to himself and his aims of peace that could never have been reached between two opposing factions that worked on the old adage of Survival Of The Fittest. And needless to say, Peter Davison is easily the best thing about Warriors Of The Deep – he provides a lot of previously unseen grit to The Doctor, and makes his final anguish all the more convincing.

So, great setup to the Season 21 arc, and a fine performance from the main man. That's where the plaudits end. Trouble is, Johnny Byrne's script has - I'm guessing - been rewritten a wee bit. Hmmm, I'm not naming any names, but I'm (again) guessing that the culprit has an iffy bowlcut and a slight grudge against JNT. And I'm not talking about Adric.

No, the end product of Warriors is the first in a line of mid-80s quasi-macho action thrillers, consisting of clunky quasi-macho characters and equally clumsy quasi-macho dialogue. So you get rubbish along the lines of “If your conscience bothers you, lock it up in a box!” spouted by a baddie so inept he'd probably break into a bank wearing a jersey that bears his name and address. I guess that the production team thought that Earthshock was such a runaway hit, and so decided to start a long line of Earthshock clones in which people die horribly and fire guns every two seconds. The quality of these – ahem – homages varies greatly, but Warriors Of The Deep isn't the finest tribute.

Part of the problem is the lack of depth, both in the dialogue and the characters. Again, like Arc Of Infinity, characters act and speak in cardboard fashion, and worse still, without a whiff of irony. So we get the stoic, gruff commander. His over-cautious second banana. The traitor. The traitor's ineffectual second banana. The well-meaning dupe. The dupe's naïve girlfriend. You can almost picture the expressions on the faces of the actors when they read the scripts for the first time.

As a result, the acting tends to hover between unenthusiastic and dreadful. It doesn't help that most of the dramatis personae are miscast in the first place. Take the baddies, Nilson and Solow, played respectively by Ian McCulloch and horror temptress Ingrid Pitt (RIP). McCulloch's Nilson is a pixel-eyed non-scoundrel, forever sneering and betraying his people to limited effect. Even The Doctor says that there isn't time for his petty squabbles – Nilson's no more than pointless small fry, working for the opposite power bloc, but it needed someone to deliver a more subtle performance that conveyed the shiftiness of the character. In the end, McCulloch's one-note performance just doesn't work. Same goes for Pitt's Solow, but this isn't really her fault – in the script, Solow was a man, and while it's a brave move of Pennant Roberts to cast against type, you can't help but feel that some moustachioed rapscallion would fit the picture better.

Pitt just seems out of place, and to be honest, her dusky charms would have worked better in a role like Krau Timinin from The Caves Of Androzani. Of course, Pitt was allegedly responsible for the inexplicable bit when Solow attempts to defeat the Myrka (oh, the horror) with a bit of karate. Now, when you're faced with a great lumbering pantomime dinosaur, the last thing you're going to do is shout at it like a loon while delivering a karate chop with your foot. The end result is a good contender for the Biggest Folly In Doctor Who, although the Myrka itself is some pretty stiff competition.

"The Myrka's terribly realised, and appropriately manned by the two blokes who used to play Dobbin the pantomime horse in Rentaghost"

Little wonder that Michael Grade (Boo!) selected footage of the Myrka when choosing Doctor Who to enter Room 101 (Hiss!). OK, so the man's a Grade-A fool, but even he's got a point when it comes to the Myrka. It's terribly realised, and appropriately manned by the two blokes who used to play Dobbin the pantomime horse in Rentaghost. The costume isn't the sole problem, the way in which it's shot is terrible. We get great big long shots of the thing blundering about like a blind elephant in all its misplaced glory, and what's more it's so overlit that The Doctor's ultra-violet light generator is subdued by comparison.

Ahhh, so that's why the story looks so cheap. It looks like all the budget was spent on a billion and one lighting generators. Really, the whole story looks like it was shot in a floodlit football stadium – apparently, all the cast were required to attend the local opticians for urgent eye tests the day after filming wrapped. Pennant Roberts' direction doesn't compensate for such goofs – given that he'd worked on some strong 70s stories, you'd expect the direction to be half decent. But no – there's a complete lack of urgency, odd camera angles, clumsy fight sequences and poor casting choices. Apart from the baddies, Tom Adams struts through the story like he's in the latest sofa commercial (his last death cry of “He did it!” is said as if he's just got a bad case of wind), Nigel Humphreys scowls a lot, while Nitza Saul looks a bit like Eva Longoria auditioning for The Kids From Fame. Even the music's rubbish – sounding like it was performed on a breakdancing fax machine.

"That last cry of “There should have been another way” is highly apt, considering the story's many shortcomings"

To add insult to injury, the returning monsters are massively inferior. The Sea Devils are probably the more successful of the two. They've wisely ditched the string vests in favour of Samurai-style battle garb, while still speaking like Baron Greenback. The Silurians though are less successful – you can see the joins between the masks and the costumes, and they now speak in slow, high-pitched voices like a patronising teacher who's just been at the helium. We're also expected to believe that The Doctor's met Icthar before, presumably from the Third Doctor story – even though he looks and sounds nothing like any of the waggly-headed ones from the earlier classic. In the end, both races just become generic baddies of the fortnight. They don't really have any sound gameplan, apart from to shoot the first bugger that gets in their way, or to let a rubbish muppet loose on the base. Both monster races are sadly cheapened as a result.

That last cry of “There should have been another way” is highly apt, considering the story's many shortcomings. It's got a good premise and an excellent central performance from Davison, but the whole tale got botched along the way, a casualty of sloppy direction, poor guest acting, cheapo production values and what I suspect is a bit of ill-advised tinkering with Byrne's original script. Everybody's dead at the end (Oh yeah? What about Bulic – or did he die of a hernia from lugging that great big canister of gas around?) but it's impossible to give a damn, since the story's so unengaging. Deep-ly tedious.

John Bensalhia limbered up for this mammoth task with a full four-series review of Blake's 7, and writes professionally and recreationally all over the web. Check out his portfolio of work at Wordprofectors.

Check out John's previous Doctor Who review, The Five Doctors

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