 This story featured a great deal of action courtesy both the stunt organisation HAVOC and the British Royal Navy. The Royal Navy waived royalty fees on the use of stock footage and clips instead relying on the positive publicity generated by the show. Many sailors also volunteered to help with the filming, so that most of the extras during the sequence at the Naval Base were actual service personnel, except in some of the stunts.
This story introduces the aquatic cousins of the Silurians, the Sea Devils. The Silurians first appear in the 1970 story "Doctor Who and the Silurians", and both later returned in the 1984 Fifth Doctor story "Warriors of the Deep". Both the Sea Devils and the Silurians also appear in the Virgin Books' The New Adventures story "Blood Heat".
Because the earlier story "Doctor Who and the Silurians" had resulted in many letters from scientists and geologists, who argued that it was impossible for a reptilian lifeform to have existed in the Silurian era, The Doctor is heard to state, in this story, that the name ‘Silurians’ is incorrect, and they instead date from the Eocene period and so should more properly be called ‘Eocenes’. Unfortunately, it has been claimed that this too is an unlikely candidate for the creatures' own era.
During this story, the term ‘Sea Devil’ is used only by humans, although Silurians and Sea Devils are heard to use this term in "Warriors of the Deep".
Unlike their land-based species, the Sea Devils do not have a biological heat weapon, but instead have hand-held devices. It is hinted that there are colonies of perhaps millions of the creatures throughout the world.
Keep an eye out for the scene, in the first episode, where Jo Grant and The Doctor climb up a ladder to get into a sea fortress. As the ladder proved too slippery for Katy Manning stuntman Stuart Fell did the shot dressed as Jo.
The Master is seen imprisoned in a high-security island establishment, having been finally caught at the conclusion of the story "The Dæmons" – the last story of Season Eight.
Whilst imprisoned, The Master is seen to watch (and claims complete misinterpretation of) the children's television show The Clangers. The episode used was "The Rock Collector" which was first shown six months earlier. This scene was repeated in the 2007 Tenth Doctor story "The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords" where The Master is seen watching The Teletubbies. In this later story The Master is also heard to mention fighting the Sea Devils.
The Doctor is heard to use the oft-quoted phrase, 'I've reversed the polarity of the neutron flow' (the first and only occasion he does during the Third Doctor era). 'Reversing the polarity' became a standard piece of Doctor techno-babble used throughout many of his subsequent regenerations.
In this story The Doctor is heard to claim to have been a close personal friend of Admiral Lord Nelson.
In episode two, Director Michael Briant himself provided the voice of the radio DJ.
Because of this story's location filming requirements it was allocated the second slot in the production run so as to allow filming in October - rather than December or January which would have been the case if this story had been filmed in the correct order. However, to enable the alternating between stories set on Earth and those set on other worlds it was transmitted third in the season. This was the first time in the show’s history that stories were produced out of transmission order.
The story was mainly filmed around Portsmouth – namely: Fraser Gunnery Range, No Man's Land Fort in the Solent and various locations on the Isle of Wight. Footage was also shot onboard HMS Reclaim - a deep diving and submarine rescue vessel used by the Royal Navy from 1948 until her decommissioning and breaking up in 1982.
No Man's Land Fort is one of three sea defence forts in the Solent built in the 1860s off the coast in anticipation of a feared French invasion which never came to pass. Abandoned at the time of the story's filming, it has since become a hotel resort.
The footage of the submarine was created by purchasing a submarine model kit and then altering the propeller to make it look more advanced. In doing so visual effects man Peter Day had accidentally included design features to the model that strongly resembled an actual a top-secret prototype submarine being developed by the Ministry of Defence at the time. After broadcast producer Barry Letts received a visit from two Ministry of Defence officials, who were concerned that the footage was of the prototype.
This is not the first story that the Ministry of Defence had been involved in. During Season Eight, Producer Barry Letts had been successful in securing the involvement of the Royal Air Force for "The Mind of Evil".
This is the last instance of Derek Ware's stunt organisation HAVOC being contracted to perform a story's stunt work.
To offset the expenses involved with the location filming, Director Michael Briant opted not to hire regular Doctor Who incidental music composer Dudley Simpson, but instead have the score created in-house by a member of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. John Baker was originally assigned to this story but after he fell ill, the duties were allocated to Malcolm Clarke, whose unusual electronic score would prove to be one of the story's most remembered element. The music was presented as a suite on the 1983 LP "Doctor Who - The Music", and was released in full on the 2000 compilation album "Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Volume 2: New Beginnings 1970-1980". Parts of the incidental music, as well as a line of dialogue, were sampled by Orbital on their track "Doctor Look Out".
The story was repeated on BBC One as a 90 minute omnibus over Christmas in 1972. This was shown three days before the broadcast of the first episode of "The Three Doctors" – the first story for Season Ten. This omnibus was repeated again in August 1973. It also had an unscheduled repeat, in place of a cancelled cricket match, in May 1974.
Sadly in the late 1970’s it was discovered that only the first three episodes had survived in colour and episode five was in a very bad state. Thankfully the black and white telerecordings, that had been made for overseas sales, had been kept and in the early 1980s NTSC transfers of all six episodes were returned from broadcasters in Canada. This enabled the missing episodes from this story to be converted back to the original PAL format.
This story again was repeated in full on BBC2 in 1992 representing the Pertwee years as part of a series of repeats of stories from all seven Doctors. This repeat included the NTSC copy of episode five due to the PAL copy having a nasty scratch on it. This story was then released on VHS in September 1995. Strangely the NTSC version of episode five was again used, despite the fact work had been done a year or so previously to remove the scratch from the PAL version.
A novelisation of this story, written by Malcolm Hulke, was published by Target Books in October 1974 and was originally to be titled "The Sea Monsters". There are, as usual with Malcolm Hulke’s adaptations, many added sections – including an ironic death for Trenchard as he makes a last stand against the Sea Devils and forgets to take the safety catch off his pistol, as well as a subsequent scene where The Doctor, Jo and Captain Hart discover Trenchard's body and, when Jo and Captain Hart are not looking, The Doctor secretly resets the gun so that no-one will ever know Trenchard died a failure. Also, The Master makes reference to his alliance with the Ogrons in the later story "Frontier in Space" (also written by Malcolm Hulke). This novelisation was the very first cover to feature a companion (Katy Manning as Jo Grant in this case).
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The Firsts:
The first appearance of the Sea Devils.
The first use of the often-quoted phrase 'I've reversed the polarity of the neutron flow'.
The first time in the show’s history that a story was produced out of transmission order.
This story is the first to be novelised where its cover features a companion.
Malcolm Clarke's first involvement in the show providing the incidental music.
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(Position = 40 out of 159)
(Position = 50 out of 200)
