Jodie Whittaker's penultimate Doctor Who left us with one question: will she get the girl?

I watched the Doctor Who Easter special (BBC One) with my children, nine and 11, and their response to the Sea Devils, the scary monsters du jour, was telling.

“Aww, so cute!” was presumably not what the programme-makers intended when they decided to unleash a malevolent alien master race dead set on ransacking the universe, but the kids had a point: somewhere along the line the Sea Devils had lost their devilry and turned in to this season’s must-have cuddly toy.

This wasn’t the fault of writers Ella Road and Chris Chibnall (unless they’d specifically stipulated a merch deal in the script) but it did undermine that most basic tenet of premium-grade Who: there has to be an element of menace beneath the Gallifreyian gallivanting, and if there isn’t the kids can spot it from a mile off.

Without that creeping dread, The Legend of the Sea Devils was reliant on a potpourri plot as watertight as a colander that featured a legendary pirate queen Madam Ching (Crystal Yu) who’d come to a 19th century Chinese fishing village searching for lost treasure. In between a bit of low level pillaging she smashed up a statue, unwittingly unleashing both the Sea Devils and an army of Whovians diving in to the Tardis Wiki trying to remember where we’d seen the Sea Devils before.

I did the same: the Sea Devils are Doctor Who villains from the prehistoric era – or, as we call it, 1984. Cousins to the bullet-headed Silurians, they’re seafaring marauders who were the previous inhabitants of the Earth, and now they were coming to take it back. And in my house, we’d have happily given it back for one big squishy snuggle with the lovely bug-eyed tortoise people.