The Devil's Armada

Philip Hinchcliffe Presents #1.2

Released: 5 September 2014

Listened: 4/1/22

This one is a four-parter, but it still feels nicely paced, like the previous story. It’s almost a historical, taking place in 1588, at the time of the failed Spanish Armada. There’s also plenty of witch-hunting and Catholic-hunting going on in the countryside. Against that historical backdrop, there’s an alien invasion to deal with, of demonic-looking creatures who are crossing a dimensional barrier, which plays right into the witch-hunters’ hands. All the Catholics who appear are quite sympathetic characters on the wrong end of unfair persecution. The action bounces from a village to a castle to London and then to the English fleet and back, so this story likely would have been unfilmable as a TV episode. The monsters are fairly stock, and not particularly clever, which leaves room for the humans to be the real monsters. Watch out for Beth Chalmers as one of Queen Elizabeth’s handmaidens, but the Queen herself doesn’t appear, nor do Raleigh, Drake, or Walsingham, which is probably good, given the number of versions of the Doctor running around in this time period. Although there are some tonal similarities between this story and the last, the historical elements make for a nice differentiator.