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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?

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