What’s Happening With Doctor Who Villains?

I wasn’t going to do two Doctor Who related articles together, and then yesterday morning I get an article from Inverse in my recommendations feed. It seems that even when it comes to spinoffs like The War Between The Land And The Sea he still can’t stop himself from monkeying with classic villains.

Radio Times recently visited the set of The War Between the Land and the Sea, the upcoming Doctor Who spinoff miniseries following a battle between the humans and the Sea Devils, an aquatic humanoid race that first appeared in Doctor Who back in 1972. But according to showrunner Russell T. Davies, they’re not called Sea Devils anymore.

“It’s racist to say Sea Devil,” Davies said. Apparently, the species formerly known as Sea Devils prefer the more politically correct “Homo Aqua,” the Latin words for “man” and “water.” This report also included our first description of the plot of the series: “After years of humankind polluting the oceans, Homo Aqua have had enough, with violence brewing unless human negotiator Barclay (Russell Tovey) and aquatic ambassador Salt (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) can broker peace.”

While “homo” in this case is a scientific terms (humans are also homosapiens, which is not the same as homosexual), would anybody be surprised if he didn’t change it for the “homo” part? Apparently it’s all Davies knows how to write anymore, given his pre-Doctor records and what he did to the last two Doctors. The problem is that the classic enemies of the Doctor has been altered a lot in New Who and you can’t blame it all on Davies. Whether or not the change is for “wokeness” with the racist line, or as Inverse contributor Dais Johnson suggests ” a way to level the playing field for a story that doesn’t pit these creatures as villains set on taking over the world, but as fellow citizens of the world who don’t want to see it destroyed, even if that means conflict”, it’s still a change for the ecological message rather than the Sea Devils and their Silurian cousins wanting to take the Earth back from the damn dirty apes. Having the sea creatures as your enemy in a pro-ecology story, if indeed that’s what they’re going with, doesn’t look very good to your message of “man pollute water, it bad”.

Unfortunately all three of the recent showrunners have made the same error. Chris Chibnall changed the Sea Devils when he first got a hold on them, and while the “new subspecies” of Silurian was also Chibnall’s writing, it was done under Steven Moffat’s approval during his time as showrunner. Of course there’s also the change to Davros because we can’t make wheelchair bound people look bad even though fiction has more wheelchair bound heroes and neutral characters (aka the victims or supporting cast) than villains. This is the same guy who gave us farting space nudists who disguise themselves as obese people, literally get high on their own farts, and want to turn Earth into an intergalactic fuel station by blowing it up and selling off the radioactive material. That was his first run, and he wants to talk about offending people now. That was his first SEASON and it was a two-parter, and he brought them back twice, once in another spinoff, The Sarah Jane Adventures. I have to ask, outside of make-up that’s a byproduct of the budget and time period, what was wrong with the classic Who villains?

Davros may have been changed to not offend people in wheelchairs, but so far the Daleks are the only ones without major changes. The “Cult Of Skarro” was a one-off born of necessity on the Daleks’ part, and the multi-colored Daleks we had for a while could be seen as a callback to the movies. Any changes to them make sense as the Daleks have had civil wars, their own racist perspectives (Dalek or die, but you have to be born of the Kaled race or you’re impure except when we really need to boost our ranks and have to steal from the Cybermens’ playbook), and other bits of evolution as they become the most dangerous recurring race in the Whoniverse. (The Doctor did fight I Can’t Believe It’s Not Satan once.) It seems so many of the Who villains of the past return for the worst.

Just recently they brought back the Toymaker and, no offense to Neil Patrick Harris, just from what I saw he didn’t remind me of the only other time he’s shown up on TV. Comics and original novels/prose are not canon, or Davies couldn’t mine adventures of other Doctors and remake them for his Doctors (“Blink”, the Family Of Blood story, and the Meep of “Star Beast” most recently.) They’re like two different characters as Harris’ Toymaker was more like a discount Joker. So was the Master now that I think about it, at least as Saxon. The electric skeleton cannibal one is whole other discussion. At least the Master can blame regeneration, the same as the Doctor for some to most of the changes and the things that happened to him for others. For example WHY he became an electric skeleton cannibal.

I wouldn’t mind if they were just the alternate universe design, but this is basically what main universe Cybermen look like now, down to the Steven Hawking voice.

As for the Cybermen, I don’t think we got the main universe version until Moffat, and even then I’m willing to believe they were Cybex Cybermen, “Cybusmen” according to the TARDIS wiki where I’m getting the images, from the alternate Earth who managed to stick around, as everyone seems to have forgotten Mondas. Did we NEED alternate universe Cybermen just to get rid of Mickey and later Rose and her mum? Or to make the Doctor’s getting Mickey’s name wrong, maybe on purpose, be funny as it’s the name of his gay counterpart in the other universe because Davies hates Mickey? We actually did have Cybermen at home and they were just fine the way they were. Do your AU story so Earth can create Cybermen without the sister planet if you want, but just use the regular versions after that. Still, that’s a minor crime at best. Cybex Cybermen were still acting like the Cybermen we know and fear. Although given the reasons for restoring Davros’ body from the radiation mutation I wouldn’t be surprised if we never see them again due to not offending people with prosthetic limbs or something.

The only physical update and they downgrade their personalities.

The Sontarans are a joke now. From the Klingon wanna-bes doing their “Sontar-Ha” dance to the Paternoster Gang’s messed up clone soldier Strax, these hardly seem like the fearsome clone soldiers who warred against the Rutans. We got to meet a Rutan once, and frankly the Sontarans did the universe a favor if the mind-controlling jellyfish are all wiped out. Nobody brings them up anymore in the episodes I got to see (I started missing episodes around the time of the Eleventh Doctor due to playing musical cable services, losing BBC America back when it earned the name, and having other things to occupy my attention around that time like being sick). Instead they were upset the Time Lords didn’t bring them into the Time War because they have to fight somebody. Ignore that the Sontarans once tried to conquer said Time Lords in a plot that involved killing their President and spent the latter part of the classic series trying to gain time travel for themselves. Or created experiments on Earthlings to speed up the killing. We never even really saw them fighting Rutans as they only make one appearance in the franchise, but at least you believed they were fighting this long time war offscreen. Now you wonder if they could win a paintball match against college kids.

I can totally see the family resemblance. Can’t you?

There may be others I’m missing, but the Silurians and Sea Devils seem to be getting the worst of it. Chibnall under Moffat created an alleged subspecies of Silurian, or some other name I can’t find again as the classic show had to retcon because of fans saying the Silurian period of Earth history couldn’t create human-sized beings or something–we all still called them Silurians, as did the show. They went from looking for like fish with psychic third eyes from the classic series, and under New Who are now something out of the miniseries V (either the 1980s or the 200os, take your pick). Odd then that the fish looking guys were the ground creatures and the Sea Devils the water based cousins. Also they became matriarchal for some reason. They pushed out the old design and took their names for…reasons. I don’t know. It’s not the same race to me.

It’s the same picture. Honest.

And now the Sea Devils/Water Men or whatever they’re called are a new race with new faces but an old name. They don’t even really look like the old design. Apparently they couldn’t think of a proper update like they did with the Cybermen and even the Sontarans in make-up/costume design so they scrapped it and insisted their new “better” design was the real design and what we’re going with from now on. I don’t see the point.

New Who since it appeared never really felt like Doctor Who to me as someone who grew up with the classic show. Even the TV movie felt more like what I knew and that underwent some Americanization, which is one of the complaints against Disney’s version since Disney controlled airtimes and Davies brought in the first Doctor from outside the United Kingdom. Even Sylvester McCoy and David Tennant were Scottish while everyone else under Ncuti Gatwa were decidedly British. That’s an argument for another time. I just want to know why the old enemies never feel like the same ones. What’s next? The Dominators start a K-Pop boy band? The Mechanoids get bodies more like the Movellans, perhaps even learning they ARE ancient Movellians? There was nothing wrong with the villains back then. They were only hampered by the couch cushion budget the BBC gave it. There’s a reason they’re memorable enough to bring back. Instead of bringing them back, we get more remake namesakes. Are we sure Disney only joined in recently?