The War Between The Land And The Sea

Hydro-whovia

The War Between 
The Land And The Sea
BBC1 Five Episodes
September 7-21 2025

Warning: Water logged spoilers washing in on the tide.

Okay... I have to admit that I was expecting the worst from this much heralded Doctor Who spin off. Not least since Disney have pulled the main show and are waiting until next year until they bother airing this one to the rest of the world. And yes, there are a few things which aren’t that great about The War Between The Land And The Sea and, yes, it might be said they didn’t really land the ending but, the thing is...

Well, this five episode mini series is a bit of a corker, in all honesty.

But let’s get the Water Buffalo in the room out of the way first because, it was my biggest stumbling block here and, while I can see a certain necessity to doing this if you want to express greater emotions with your non-human characters, well... just leave the original creations alone and pick something else. So... yeah, The Sea Devils, one of my favourite monsters from the Jon Pertwee era (and practically having all credibility destroyed by lack of budget during the Peter Davidson era of the show... and looking more like their old selves again fairly recently in the Jodie Whitaker era)... have once more been redesigned. So they’re much more like the new Silurians (who also, really didn’t need to be redesigned from their classic look) and, yeah, I can’t take the redesign seriously, in all honesty. 

To somewhat compensate for this, the Sea Devils have now been given a new name, Homo Aqua... which really doesn’t do much for me, to be honest. 

Okay, so we have Russel Tovey playing Barclay Pierre-Dupont, a very low level member of UNIT (various regular UNIT characters from the main show are also in this mini series) who accidentally gets picked by Homo Aqua to be the human negotiator at the table for talks, as the aquatic race come out to the humans and want our species to stop mucking around with their water and their fish families. Of course, the fish lady negotiator, called Salt and played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, falls in love with Barclay and, while there is a cold war going on with the underwater race as negotiations take place... we have a kind of inverted remake of The Little Mermaid, effectively... but with a bit of borrowing at the end from... wait, I’ll get there in a minute. 

And, despite some overly political correctness terms getting in the way again (please stop doing this, it ruined the main show), it’s really well written. I’m sure I can’t have been the first or last person to point out that, if the main show had been written as well as this was for the last few years then Doctor Who surely wouldn’t be facing the uncertain future it’s threatened with at the moment.  And it doesn’t hurt that Tovey’s, possibly overly vulnerable, performance and Mbatha-Raw’s confident warrior are absolutely brilliant together. In terms of the acting this one was great and, not forgetting Jemma Redgrave’s brilliant revival of her Kate Lethbridge-Stewart character (who gets a mid-end credits scene to herself in the last episode, stick around for it).

Other brilliant scenes include the ‘destructive rain of returned plastics from the oceans’ set piece, where mankind literally get everything thrown back at them, world wide, in a deluge of plastic death. And the shots of the gazillions of dead Homo Aqua floating to the surface of the world’s oceans is a sobering sequence too. 

Admittedly, the show is a little over preachy (no really, you dont always have to push the metaphor to the nth degree, we get it and didn’t need this show to point it all out) but all in all, I had a really great time with this one. 

Well... at least for the first four episodes. 

The fourth left it at a point where I was seriously doubting they could stick the landing on the ending and, yeah, when it came to the fifth episode, it kinda doesn’t work. Things are left unsaid about the way a certain virus was spread amongst the oceanic occupants and the last five minutes are a serious side swipe, seemingly lifted from Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape Of Water, it seems to me, with only one slight difference to the mechanics of the ending. 

So, yeah, the ending didn’t sit well with me on this one, for sure but... getting there was a lot of fun and, despite there being... and perhaps because of this...  there were hardly any action sequences in the entire show, I really thought quite a lot of it. Better than where the main show has been for the last few years, at any rate. And it’s got a nice score by Lorne Balfe to boot too so, I’m hoping that will be hitting compact disc before long. The War Between The Land And The Sea is one to watch, despite the irritating verbal mentions of The Doctor every now and again, to kind of remind people what they are watching.