Azuma Yeonchi: "With the end of the Thirteenth…"

YeonchiDoctor Who 2022 Easter Special Review: Legend of the Sea DevilsAir date: 17 April 2022 So it’s been a little while since the boring slogfest that was the 2022 New Year Special, Eve of the Daleks. Let’s take a look into the 2022 Easter Special and see if it is a little breath of fresh air in a polluted landscape. This episode is another first for Asian representation in a while outside of my personal project fanfiction, with Chinese pirates being the focus of this episode which is also directed by Chinese director Haolu Wang. This episode is also another episode to not be solely written by Chris Chibnall as it was co-written by Ella Road, so it’ll be nice to see how it differs from Chibnall’s notable episodes. My spoiler-free thought for this episode comes in the form of a song which I’ve been dying to use when I heard that Madam Ching would be featured in this episode: Spoilers continue after the break. About the featured song OK, I feel like I should explain my choice of song that I used for the spoiler-free thought of this episode in case people tell me, “Cheung Po Tsai? He wasn’t featured in the episode!” It’s true that he wasn’t featured, but the figure himself was related to Madam Ching at some point in time, so he is kind of relevant. The song is the opening theme to the 2015 TVB drama Captain of Destiny, with the Chinese title literally being named after Cheung Po Tsai (張保仔). I’ve never watched the drama since I stopped following TVB dramas a year or two before after adapting some pretty violent storylines in my personal project (see Kisekae Insights #15 and #16), but from what I’ve read of Cheung Po Tsai, he was adopted by Madam Ching along with her husband, Zheng Yi (鄭一) after the latter either kidnapped or was attracted to him. After Zheng Yi died (in 1807), Madam Ching made Cheung Po Tsai her assistant to solidify her position among the Red Flag Fleet before they were later married. Easter airdates Member when new Doctor Who series used to start in late-March or early-April? I member. In the past, a new series would have started by this point as new series typically start on the Saturday before Easter, with 2007 and 2008 being the exception as Series 3 started a week before and Series 4 started a week after, but then Series 7 came and really screwed things up for five years until a brief reprieve in 2017 for Series 10 (Series 7 Part 2 technically was also a reprieve, but it wasn’t actually the start of the series so it doesn’t count). It’s also been 13 years since we got a proper Easter Special with Planet of the Dead in 2009, one of David Tennant’s final episodes as the Doctor. Thing is, while the prospect of an Easter Special was redundant in the past due to new series starting around Easter, it would have been nice to have an Easter Special in the Peter Capaldi or Jodie Whittaker years given the excruciating wait between series. Aside from that, even Planet of the Dead was broadcast on Easter Saturday, but knowing how the Chibnall era treats traditions, this special was broadcast on Easter Sunday. Am I the only one who totally knew that this was going to be the case? Anyway, enough faffing about. Let’s get on with the review. The return of the Sea Devils The episode starts off in 1807 with Madam Ching going into a village and breaking a piece off a statue of a sealed Sea Devil apparently known as Marsissus, releasing it in the process. The Sea Devil kills the statue’s protector, Ying Wai, and everyone else in the village, leaving his son, Ying Ki, and Madam Ching alive just as the Doctor, Yaz and Dan arrive, having been dragged off course by a geomagnetic disturbance. Having managed to escape capture, Marsissus returns to his kind while the Doctor and Yaz attempt to seek a lost ship helmed by the great captain Xin Ji-Hun, which contained the lost treasure of the Flor de la Mar that Madam Ching was seeking. Meanwhile, a creature known as the Hua Shen engulfs a fisherman and his boat while Dan and Ying Ki wander off and sneak onto Madam Ching’s ship, where Madam Ching initially captures them before allowing them to join her. The Doctor and Yaz head to the past and they see Ji-Hun in 1533 apparently throwing his crew off his ship and bowing to Marsissus, who presumably uses the Hua Shen to sink Ji-Hun’s ship just as the Doctor and Yaz escape. They head back to 1807 to the exact coordinates of Ji-Hun’s ship, but it isn’t there. The ocean floor suddenly collapses and the TARDIS is eaten by the Hua Shen… Madam Ching tries to use celestial navigation when none of their equipment works, but the stars begin to move. Dan asks Madam Ching why the treasure is so important to her, to which she explains that her crew and her two sons are being held hostage by Guo Podai (郭婆帶) and the Black Flag Fleet and that she agreed to give them the treasure as ransom. When the apparently mythical Hua Shen approaches their ship, Madam Ching, Dan and Ying Ki fire cannons at it, but their cannonballs are deflected as they collide in mid-air. Inside Hua Shen, the Doctor and Yaz climb out of the TARDIS and confront Marsissus about Ji-Hun’s ship; Marsissus reveals that he made the ship his own and that he kept Ji-Hun himself alive for over two centuries. As the Doctor and Yaz talk with Ji-Hun, they learn that he made no pact with the Sea Devils and that he was actually allowing his men to escape, stating that he gave the keystone, a tiny part of the treasure of the Flor de la Mar with infinite powers which is actually a plutonic crystal created by the Sea Devils, to his most trusted crew member, Lei Bao, before throwing him off the ship. As such, this makes Ji-Hun yet another misunderstood villain, but not to the extent of the other misunderstood villains we saw so far because he was imprisoned for the first half of the story. When Marsissus manages to locate the keystone thanks to the Hua Shen, the Doctor brings the Sea Devils’ ship up and together with Yaz and Ji-Hun, they board Madam Ching’s ship. It is revealed that Lei Bao made it to land and ended up passing down the keystone through the generations, eventually ending up in Ying Ki’s possession. Marsissus had followed Lei Bao to land only to be sealed as a statue of stone thanks to the power of the keystone. Marsissus takes the keystone back and drops it into his systems in an effort to flip the poles and cause chaos on Earth in an effort to flood it. The Doctor and the others fight off the Sea Devils, with the Doctor knocking Marsissus’ sword out of his hands before Ji-Hun finishes him off, causing the Doctor to say, “You didn’t have to kill him!” Ah yes, the Doctor’s misguided moral outrage over someone killing someone who was previously a threat and would possibly remain a threat if kept alive, never gets old. She didn’t even give Marsissus a chance to stay in the ocean and never surface again to terrorise humans. The Doctor brings the ship back down into the ocean and together with Yaz, attempts to localise the power in an effort to flood the ship instead of the Earth while Dan and Ji-Hun fight off some Sea Devils and Madam Ching and Ying Ki gather Ji-Hun’s treasure from his ship. When the Doctor accidentally rips away a cable from a console and has to hold it together with only 50 seconds remaining, the Doctor is about to sacrifice herself to hold the cable when Ji-Hun offers to do it instead, saying that the world would be too different for him. I mean, if you consider the Ming Dynasty any different from the Qing Dynasty other than the latter being ruled by fucking Manchurians (lol) then ok. Oh wait, a few white people would be crawling around in China by 1807 before more of them would continue to flood China in the coming years. In that case, yeah, I understand why Ji-Hun would choose to sacrifice himself. The Doctor brings everyone back to Madam Ching’s ship with Ji-Hun’s treasure. The Doctor offers to bring Ying Ki back to his village, but Madam Ching allows him to join her crew. Later, the Doctor takes Yaz and Dan to a rocky beach where Dan leaves a message for Diane before she picks up the phone and calls him- wait, you’re still dating this woman, a woman who considers being ghosted by you worse than extradimensional threats threatening the universe? Man, do I feel sorry for you, Dan. Aside from that, yeah, having someone call you back while you’re in the middle of leaving a voice message is honestly relatable given what I do at work. Bringing up “Thasmin” The Doctor’s Yaz favouritism continues in this episode as they are shown together in a thread of this story, though some development is included as they try to address Yaz’s feelings for the Doctor. At this year’s Gallifrey One convention, which was held in February at the Airport Marriott in Los Angeles, executive producer Matt Strevens stated that the “Thasmin” ship wasn’t planned, but he incorporated it into Flux after forgetting about it in Series 12. I always knew that the Doctor’s Yaz favouritism from her first episode would lead to something, but I never thought we’d end up getting so little out of it. It’s like they’re making up for lost time at this point. I didn’t talk about this in the review for Eve of the Daleks, but some people thought that Dan telling the Doctor about Yaz’s feelings for her was “outing” her to the Doctor. I’m not LGBT so I never really touched on it because like I said, I’m not LGBT and I don’t know anything about the intricacies of being LGBT. As such, I can’t really comment on this. The main bulk of the “Thasmin” development happens towards the end of the episode. In the two minutes (that later gets reduced to 50 seconds, though it could have been excused as passing time given how long that scene went for) they have to prepare Ji-Hun’s ship, the Doctor mentions to Yaz how she is “not a bad date” and then says that she doesn’t really do dates and if she wanted, she would have done it with Yaz, but she can’t because time always runs out at some point. River Song is also briefly referenced in this scene. Later, after the Doctor heads to the rocky beach with Yaz and Dan, the Doctor tells Yaz that she can’t fix herself to anything, anywhere or anyone and that she has never been able to because that is what her life is; if she fixes herself to somebody, it will hurt her sooner or later because it has happened before. Yaz tells the Doctor that her grandmother (Umbreen) told her that courage is knowing that something will hurt and then doing it anyway, which is also the definition of stupidity. The Doctor asks Yaz if they can just live in the present while they still have what they have, to which Yaz agrees and invites the Doctor to make a wish, which she does; the Doctor wishes that this could go on forever as she skips the stone into the sea. If you were expecting a kiss or anything significant, then you might be disappointed because the “Thasmin” development (so far, at least) was mostly just words put in towards the end because the production team failed to do so. Did you think this relationship was handled “delicately”, according to Ella Road and the production team? I don’t want to say for certain. Cantonese language representation This needs its own section because it’s just that important to me. When Madam Ching mentions the names of herself, Xin Ji-Hun or Guo Podai, you can hear her saying those names in Cantonese, but naturally, they’re not transliterated properly because the production team are a bunch of fucking normies. This can also be attributed to Madam Ching’s actress, Crystal Yu, being born in Hong Kong and being fluent in Cantonese as a result. Good on you for moving to the UK and not wasting your talents at a shithole like TVB (for all you normies out there, TVB has been the pinnacle of mainstream media in Hong Kong since 1967, but over the past decade, it has devolved into becoming the fake news of CNN combined with the banality of mainstream TV networks and the copyright Jewishness of Toei). Most of the pirates in the South China Sea in the 1800s either grew up in and/or operated in Guangdong Province, where Cantonese was more prolifically spoken (in addition to the province also being known as Canton), so having Madam Ching saying those names in Cantonese adds to the geographical accuracy and also provides some well-deserved language/dialect representation for Cantonese in a world where Mandarin/Putonghua is the more dominant dialect of the Chinese language because the Chinese government pushes its use within China at the cost of other local dialects. On top of that, there seem to be very few schools outside of China that teach the Chinese language in Cantonese and with traditional characters, and even then they’re mostly limited to weekend language schools and not LOTE classes in day schools. And let’s not forget the situation in Hong Kong either, which is also affecting the local culture there and leading people to emigrate to other countries. I have no disdain for Mandarin whatsoever, but I hope that normies can learn about the Cantonese language, the culture of its associated communities and their differences to the Mandarin language and their associated communities just like how the #StopAsianHate crybabies want white people to recognise the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Burmese, Malaysian, Indonesian and Filipino cultures along with other Asian cultures I may or may not have mentioned. You may like or dislike how the representation of minorities or the LGBT has been handled by this series or even the BBC (or any other company, for that matter) over the past few years, but if there’s one type of representation I’m glad to see, it’s language representation, specifically Cantonese language representation. Other general thoughts Surprisingly, no tokusatsu references in this episode that I could find. It’s nice to see Doctor Who standing on its own without needing to reference other franchises… only to end up referencing or ripping off older episodes. You know how the Doctor says “Geronimo!” while moving between the two ships? Literally ripped off from the Eleventh Doctor. There were a couple instances in Last Christmas where the Twelfth Doctor could have said that and it’d feel more like a callback rather than a ripoff, but in the case of this episode, it’s more like a ripoff because of how the Thirteenth Doctor is basically an expy of the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors. On that note, there’s no SJW red flags in that episode. I wish SJWs cared about marginalised dialects like Cantonese and their communities just as much as they care about black people and trans people. Yes, I basically just said “I wish SJWs cared about Hong Kong just as much as they care about Ukraine.” The Doctor, Yaz and Dan are not shown in modern attire in this episode, with the Doctor and Yaz wearing traditional Chinese clothing while Dan dresses up like an actual pirate. Joking about cultural appropriation aside, Dan’s costume really suits the comedic tone of his character. The geomagnetic disturbance somehow manages to attract the jewellery on the Doctor’s ear until she uses her sonic screwdriver to demagnetise it. Even though it’s probably a one-time thing, I’m still going to press X to doubt. Xin Ji-Hun appears to be a fictional character created for this story, so out of interest, let’s work out what his name is. Ji-Hun sounds like a Korean name so it doesn’t really help (he was probably only named that way because his actor, Arthur Lee, is of Korean descent, meaning that this tokenised casting decision is racist), but from the way Madam Ching says his name, I can deduce that his Chinese name is 仙子恒 (Sin Ji Hang), 仙 being a rare surname in China that mostly originated from the emperor bestowing that surname onto someone. I don’t think Madam Ching would have called herself Zheng Shi/Ching Shih (鄭氏), because that title basically translates to Madam Ching anyway, which means that she basically said it twice when she was introducing herself. Chinese articles don’t use that exact name to refer to Madam Ching, which means that it’s just normies assuming things just so her actor can have a Mandarin name to say. If I wrote the episode I would have used her birth name, Shi Yang (石陽), or just omitted the Mandarin name altogether. Also, Ching Shih isn’t exactly an accurate transliteration either because it was based on the Wade-Giles system and not the Hanyu Pinyin system, meaning that the name Madam(e) Ching is another wypipo assumption, but I’ll forgive this because dub-sub debate and all that. The transliteration of Guo Podai’s surname in Cantonese should be Kwok - the name itself is passable enough. Ying Ki and his father, Ying Wai, are never mentioned by name in this episode. You’d think that with someone that important to the story you’d mention their name at least once or twice, but somehow you can just get away with not mentioning their name at all. Marsissus, the chief Sea Devil, was played by Craige Els, who previously played Karvanista in Flux. Kudos on managing to get him back. It was probably cheaper and easier to do it anyway because of coronavirus restrictions. By the way, he’s only credited as “Chief Sea Devil” in this episode - the name Marsissus apparently comes from IMDb or Radio Times (but then in the latter article, Ying Wai is credited as “Ying Was”, the state of journalism in current year I swear to God). Ying Ki wanted to kill Madam Ching and avenge his father because he stated that Madam Ching killed him when we clearly saw that it was the Sea Devil who killed his father. Yes, Madam Ching was the one who released the Sea Devil and therefore, indirectly caused Ying Wai’s death, but that’s us Chinese people for you; blaming the people who indirectly cause the death of our loved ones even though there were probably other circumstances to it. 我個家人都因為你而被害死啊! The last time the Sea Devils were featured was in 1984′s Warriors of the Deep. That story also featured their sister species the Silurians, who would be reintroduced to the revived series in Series 5′s The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood twelve years earlier. Come to think of it, this is the only classic series enemy to be reintroduced in the Chibnall era (if you don’t count the Eternals, that is). Anyway, the Hua Shen appears to be the revived series’ counterpart of the Myrka, a monster that was notable for contributing to the ridiculousness of Warriors of the Deep, shall we say. On a side note, I adapted that story in my personal project for my Eleventh Doctor-expy in 2014, meaning that I “reintroduced” the Sea Devils to my canon exactly thirty years after their original appearance. Anyway, let’s move on. Unless I missed something, this is the first time that the Doctor opens the doors of the TARDIS while underwater in a manner similar to when the doors are opened while in space. In this case, the oxygen bubble around the TARDIS is reinforced with an aquashield. In my personal project, when the TARDIS goes into Salacia (fr. Sea Princesses), the Doctor doesn’t need an oxygen bubble or an aquashield because the Salacians have equipment to create a signal that will allow humans to breathe underwater and also allow sea creatures to swim and breathe normally on land. This “special” is just under 50 minutes long, which is enough to constitute a normal episode of Doctor Who, given how nobody says “Happy Easter!” in this Easter Special. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ten extra minutes got moved to the Centenary Special, though given how it was promised to be “feature-length”, if it ends up only being 70 minutes long I’m going to be disappointed. Hiatusbreaker Update 3 I have no plans on doing another hiatusbreaker update post this year because we only have this and the Centenary Special left. Also, I’m too busy these days to analyse every Doctor Who-related article that seems interesting to me, plus it’s not like I end up covering every article I save anyway. In the lead-up to every new special or series, I’ve noticed that the news cycle begins talking about Doctor Who to hype it up, aided by all the social media pages that repost things, and in the end, I just can’t keep up with everything. As such, here is the third hiatusbreaker update. So yeah, now that his role in producing the series is all but over, Chris Chibnall said that he’s done with Doctor Who and that we shouldn’t expect him to return. Yeah, that’s what Russell T Davies said in 2018 and now look what’s happened. On the other hand, Steven Moffat did also say as much, but given that NoelZone’s rumour from 2020 did mention Moffat along with RTD, I probably wouldn’t rule it out for the next 5-10 years. Chibnall also said that he would have left after Series 12 because of the coronavirus pandemic if he and Jodie Whittaker hadn’t planned on staying on for Series 13, which would have made The Timeless Children an even bigger spit in the face to the fandom. Chibnall has also stated that he expects RTD to ignore the changes he made to the series, because who could forget a massive canon-destroying retcon like the Timeless Child? To be honest, ignoring it can only do so much because if RTD wants to retcon the Timeless Child, he needs to explicitly retcon it by firmly establishing that William Hartnell always was and always will be the First Doctor and maybe also saying that the Timeless Child was just some random kid the Time Lords experimented on with NO connection to the Doctor whatsoever. But I wouldn’t bet on it personally because RTD seems to be more subtle with things like this, though if we see the montage from The Timeless Children being reused as stock footage in another episode, then we’ll know that it’s real. In slightly unrelated news, the BBC has had its funding frozen for the next two years with the licence fee system to be abolished in 2027. Honestly, to that I say good riddance. The ABC in Australia runs off government funding while PBS in the US runs off both government funding and public contributions. For years they’ve never needed to chase up people for not paying their licence fee, particularly if they’re elderly or they just managed to find a roundabout way of watching television without exactly using the television to watch it. Also, from what I’ve been hearing, the BBC’s efforts at diversity and representation look more like tokenisation of minorities for the sake of diversity and representation and not hiring based on merit. Doctor Who probably isn’t the only show that has had this problem and I doubt that the Timeless Child storyline alone was the main factor in this decision, but regardless I say good riddance. Apparently, while speaking at Gallifrey One in February this year, Matt Strevens stated that the production crew didn’t know that there would be another series of Doctor Who and that they were only told of RTD’s return the day before the announcement on 24 September 2021. I don’t know why it took the BBC so long to find a new showrunner and while I don’t doubt that the coronavirus pandemic played a part in the delay, I still believe that they sought out RTD because of the backlash that The Timeless Children got and they waited that long to tell the production team because they weren’t happy with them for some reason, leading to rumours that the series would be cancelled. It’s just a theory, but it’s good that we’re getting RTD back regardless, otherwise I’d be finding myself sharing Doctor in Distress unironically as a response to this era. Oh what the heck, let’s get it over with. Also, Matt Strevens told Doctor Who Magazine that Flux was a gamble given the coronavirus pandemic and that the plan was always “to do something a bit different in the third season”. Yay, I suppose? And finally, don’t quote me on this but I think I saw somewhere that the Centenary Special will just end on the Thirteenth Doctor’s regeneration and not feature the Fourteenth Doctor. The main reason I say this is because the announcement of RTD’s return seemed very last minute, being announced over three weeks before filming on the Centenary Special concluded on 13 October 2021 (and remember, the production didn’t know about RTD’s return until the day before the announcement). At the time of writing, no new Doctor has been announced, meaning that they were either cast in absolute secrecy or RTD’s plans for the 60th Anniversary didn’t involve casting a new Doctor (for the time being at least). However, this article states that Jodie Whittaker’s replacement “is expected to be revealed in the coming weeks”, so it’s likely that they were cast in absolute secrecy. Adding on to that last point is the possibility that the plan for the second RTD era is a reboot detached from the series so far, starting the series on a clean slate. This can be cited from a 4chan rumour that Noel of The TARDIS Zone retweeted a few days before this episode aired. According to that rumour, the show was going to be cancelled until this was pitched and that RTD was willing to do it. If that ends up being reported by the media, then I suppose that The Timeless Children did more damage than we thought and all the fans defending it will have egg on their faces. Summary and verdict Unsurprisingly, given how this episode was co-written, this was another one of the better episodes in this series so far, next to Village of the Angels. Surprisingly, Ella Road is the first to be credited as writer next to Chris Chibnall, which seems to indicate that Chibnall wasn’t as involved in the writing of the story as much compared to Village of the Angela. Nonetheless, this was a pretty great episode. They didn’t feel the need to double down on the Timeless Child again (the Flux wasn’t mentioned as well for that matter), the Sea Devils got a great return and nobody’s death was unnecessary. After all the negativity and disappointment that came with Flux and Eve of the Daleks, I feel like this episode is good enough to deserve this score. Rating: 8/10 Series 13 cumulative total (with Eve of the Daleks): 3/70 (4%) Series 13 cumulative total (with Legend of the Sea Devils): 11/80 (14%) Centenary Special preview Ladies and gentlemen, we have nearly reached the end. At the end of this episode, a teaser for the Centenary Special, Jodie Whittaker’s final episode on Doctor Who, was shown. Although no indication of a title or release date was given, we got a sneak peek of what to expect; Daleks, Cybermen, the Lone Cyberman (Ashad), the Master, Kate Stewart, Vinder, and even Tegan Jovanka and Ace, who were introduced as the companions of the Fourth/Fifth and Seventh Doctors. I must say, I don’t recognise Janet Fielding as Tegan, particularly in the scene where she and Ace are shooting machine guns at an enemy (presumably), given how Tegan left the Fifth Doctor because the violence of her adventures made it stop being fun. It has been nearly forty years, but I guess we’ll see how that gets addressed in the Centenary Special, which, knowing Chibnall, is pretty unlikely. By the way, talk about desperate attempts at nostalgia baiting… Given how Bradley Walsh was also seen during the filming of the Centenary Special, Graham wasn’t seen in the trailer. I swear, if Graham doesn’t end up in the Centenary Special, or heck, even Jo Martin as Ruth… In the epilogue for my Series 13 (Flux) reviews, I said that I hoped to finally get around to doing Doctor Who 10 for 10, which is me stating 10 things about the revived series up to Series 10, between now and the Centenary Special. Right now, I’m currently occupied with writing Kamen Rider Zi-O for my personal project and doing the Dynasty Warriors Weapon Moveset Power Rankings - I’ve dedicated a whole day to writing this review just so I could get it done the same day it became available on ABC iView. I was going to post Doctor Who 10 for 10 concurrently with the Power Rankings, but then I slowly realised that I work better when I focus on one thing at a time, so they’re going to be posted separately from each other. Here’s my projection for what’s going to happen. The BBC’s Centenary is on Tuesday 18 October, but knowing the Chibnall era, it’s probably going to be on either 16 or 23 October, both days being Sundays. Since there are no public holidays during those weeks, the review definitely won’t be out the same day it becomes available on ABC iView (Monday), but I’ll reserve the week after it airs for the review to come out. Given this, the latest I can start posting Doctor Who 10 for 10 will be the start of August. As for the Power Rankings, there will be 12 instalments plus a prologue and epilogue, making for a total of 14 instalments. The plan for it is to post 2 instalments per week, which means that the start of June will be the latest that I can start posting the Power Rankings without having it overlap. Kamen Rider Zi-O will be finished when I finish it and speaking of which, I dread my schedule for Kisekae Insights right now, because at this rate, it’ll probably end up going into 2023. I guess that’s what I get for having high expectations of myself while working a full-time job. Anyway, that’s more than enough rambling and ranting from me. Feel free to follow me on Facebook and Tumblr to see more content from me, otherwise I’ll see you all in about six months (hopefully) when I review the BBC Centenary Special and Jodie Whittaker’s final episode on Doctor Who, the title of which is yet to be revealed at the time of writing.

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