Doctor Who: Legend Of The Sea Devils Review - 6 Ups & 7 Downs

6. UP - Dan Living His Best Life

Throughout Doctor Who: Flux, we consistently put Dan’s total irrelevance in almost every episode in the DOWN category. But, you know what? We’ve had a change of heart. Dan is just in this for the craic, and maybe it was about time we had a companion like him.

Dan decides fairly early on that he’s not really that interested in the plot of the episode and decides to follow Ying Ki, a bloke who he’s literally just met, on what appears to be a suicide mission to board and commandeer a fully-manned galleon. After all, they don’t know that it’s a one-woman crew at this point. Still, he’s got a hook and an eyepatch so he’s fairly confident he’s a real pirate now (plus, if things get super dicey, he can always whack out his wok and go to town). Dan may act like he didn’t sign up for any murdering. Dan knew full well what he signed up for. Rule #1: Dan lies.

Once captured, he decides to enlist with a pirate crew for the bants, despite the fact that he doesn’t know how to sail a boat, in a further attempt to ensure that he spends as little time with The Doctor as possible. This has been too much of a reoccurring trend for us to continue to buy into the coincidence, therefore, we’ve come to a fairly concrete conclusion: Dan secretly really hates Thirteen, but loves dressing up and going on adventures, so he just sort of does his own thing.

Later in the episode, he watches on as Ji Hun executes Unnamed Sea Devil #1, and receives a firm scolding from The Doctor. Apparently, according to her rules, murder is a big no-no. Of course, Dan doesn’t give a toss about that hippy nonsense, so he goes off with his new pirate buddy to do pirate things, like literally killing four Sea Devils with his cool new sword and cracking a happy little joke about it. He’s having a lovely time.

Because he knows that The Doctor will probably tell him off for all the murdering, he decides to keep this to himself, and instead calls Di from Liverpool, saviour of the universe, to boast of his conquests.

We didn’t understand what Chibnall was going for with Dan in the past, but we’ve been blind. His motivations are now clear and retroactively, his actions in Flux all slot into place. Dan is a complex character: he’s a subtle anti-hero, an impulsive renegade, a true agent of chaos. Dan would have won the Time War.

View him through this lens and you will realise, Dan is the best companion of the modern era.