Doctor Who has brought back the Sea Devils, and their design honors the classic series. Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall grew up loving the classic series, and it shows. Although he began his tenure as showrunner with an entire season featuring only original villains, since then he’s brought back a remarkable number of classic foes; in fact, there hasn’t been a single episode without a classic villain since Doctor Who season 12, episode 6.
Chibnall hasn’t just brought back iconic villains like the Daleks and the Cybermen, he’s also reintroduced lesser-known enemies such as the Eternals and the Sontarans, handling them with remarkable care and updating them for the twenty-first century. The Doctor Who Spring Special 2022 will continue the trend, reintroducing a race called the Sea Devils. Although an official synopsis claims they are aliens, in reality, their origins are far more terrestrial because the Sea Devils and their cousins the Silurians were the first sentient species to evolve on Earth. An extinction-level event prompted them to go into hibernation, but the circumstances required for their systems to reawken never quite happened, and the Sea Devils and Silurians slumbered while humans evolved.
The promotional trailer for the Doctor Who Spring special gives viewers a brief glimpse of the new Sea Devil design, and it’s remarkably faithful to the classic series. The Silurians were humanized when Doctor Who brought them back during the Moffat era, but the Sea Devils are just as quasi-alien as ever, with their strangely-shaped faces and scaled skin. It’s interesting to note that the Sea Devils are clearly humans wearing rubber outfits; the traditional approach to making a Doctor Who monster rather than using CGI, and one that’s coming back into fashion in science-fiction again after The Mandalorian.
One thing has changed, though; unlike the Sea Devils seen in the Jon Pertwee era, this version isn’t simply wearing tattered fishing nets, a look that never made all that much sense. They do seem to have adopted fashions from the local time, however, but in this case, because they’ve emerged in 19th century China they look a whole lot cooler. One of them is wearing a strange, stylized necklace—presumably a plot point because nothing like it has ever been seen before.
Doctor Who‘s 2022 specials are avoiding the mistakes of recent seasons, but they still bear all the stylistic hallmarks of Chris Chibnall—especially his love of classic Doctor Who. The Sea Devils seen in the trailer look absolutely superb, proving modern Doctor Who can make a man in a rubber mask look truly imposing. It will be interesting to see whether returning showrunner Russell T. Davies continues this approach, or returns to CGI instead.
