22 - Warriors of the Deep

Composer: Jonathan Gibbs
Director: Pennant Roberts

What's the score?
Were it but for the interruption of The Five Doctors, this would be another instance of one composer bridging the gap between seasons. In fact, barring the transition from the Radiophonic Season 22 into the mostly freelance Season 23, this is the only time on the Radiophonic Workshop's watch that musical continuity across seasons is broken.
Not that it matters much - Jonathan Gibbs is attentive to the needs of whichever story he's working on and keen to experiment, and so the score for Warriors of the Deep is very different from the "olde worlde" strains of The King's Demons. It's futuristic and heavy on the action - some might even call it hyperactive. There's a fair amount of repetition in the score; Gibbs relies less on melodic themes than on repeated structural elements, with short phrases passed between the tuned and percussive synth "instruments" in a way that often feels like call and response.

Musical notes

• A variety of watery sounds - bass burblings, undulating echoes and submarine hull clankings - feature in exterior underwater scenes and in scenes set inside the Sea Devils' hibernation chamber. They come across as a more accessible interpretation of Malcolm Clarke's The Sea Devils score. These sounds are most prominently used in Parts One and Two as the Silurians travel to the underwater Sea Devil installation and then on to the Sea Base. It's a stretch, albeit a thematic fit for the story, but there may be hints of the chords of Holst's "Mars, Bringer of War" in the more brooding passages in Part One.
• The first notable repeated element of the score is the stuttering drum sound that introduces the Sea Base crew and is liberally used throughout the story to punctuate any action inside the Sea Base. It's often intercut with cyclical patterns of stabbing synth sounds in the treble range.
• The second notable element is the pair of identical notes. Gibbs starts out with one pair followed by a higher pair, usually repeated with some additional development in the repetition. Before long they've become groups of three pairs (first pair, higher pair and lower pair). The pairs first appear in the scenes of Nilson and Solow scheming in Part One, but are also heard as the Doctor creeps into the Sea Base in Part Two, as various pairs of characters escape from captivity and crawl through air ducts in Part Four, and in a disparate variety of other contexts. 
• There's the merest ghostly echo of the theme tune in Part Two when the Sea Base security staff discover the TARDIS.
• The Radiophonic Workshop's vibraslap - remember it from Meglos? - is put back into service here as the signature sound of the Myrka in Part Three. It may be meant to represent the creature's electric sting - there's certainly a loud rattling blast when it kills Solow. The lumbering beast also gets a tremendous funereal march that's far better than it deserves. The march is recycled after the Myrka's death, without the vibraslap, as the Silurians and Sea Devils parade through the Sea Base towards the bridge.
• The Sea Devils also have a five-note fanfare that goes through several variations during the story, reaching its most triumphant expression in Part Three as they force their way into the Sea Base. The first clear occurrence of it is at the start of Part Three as the Myrka makes its grand entrance as the vanguard of the Sea Devils' strike force. Faster, quieter and inverted variations pop up elsewhere during Parts Three and Four. (Not to be confused with the recurring five-note motif Malcolm Clarke employed in his score for The Sea Devils, although it may be that there's a subtle homage here. Fun fact: Malcolm Clarke's five-note motif is a direct reference to the first five notes of the "Dies irae" from Berlioz's Requiem!)
• In the chaotic fight for control of the Sea Base towards the end of the story, the Silurians succeed in setting off a nuclear missile countdown; this scene is scored with an energetic action cue overlaid with descending wailing sounds that might suggest falling missiles to the listener.
• I said above that this score is a far cry from Gibbs' previous score, but there is just one moment in which something very like the avant garde sci-fi Kamelion cues from The King's Demons can be heard. It's the penultimate cue from Part Four, the one that plays when the Doctor links his mind into the synch-op machine to abort the missile launch. Kamelion was also a machine that the Doctor had to struggle to control with his mind, so there's a clear connection here.

Vox pop
A confident start to the season. Although not a personal favourite of mine, it's a smarter score than the first hearing might suggest - the more I listen to it, the more I seem to find in it. This is one that definitely benefits from being listened to in isolation.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• Doctor Who - The Music II included a suite of music from this story.