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. 

The Cloverfield Paradox

Mostly Armless

The Cloverfield Paradox
USA 2018 Directed by Julius Onah
Paramount Pictures

Warning: Yeah... this one’s going to go right into
spoiler territory very quickly. You have been warned.

Okay, so... originally entitled God Particle, The Cloverfield Paradox is another ‘Clovered up’ movie which fits around the previous two Cloverfield pieces to give us a tale which actually, in some ways, goes a good deal of the way to explaining the cause of the events in them... and probably any others that come after it too. Although, with the information gleaned from this one, there probably doesn't need to be any further movies made in the cycle, to be honest as, well... this one seems to wrap it all up.

The film stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw (so brilliant in Miss Sloane, reviewed here) as Hamilton, a physicist who specialises in all that large Hadron Collider stuff you hear about from CERN. The film starts off in the not too far future with her making the decision to leave her husband on Earth, for what they hope will only be 6 months, in order to conduct experiments in smashing particles together on a space station orbiting the planet, where that is perceived as being less dangerous for everyone else. This is hastily undertaken with the object of creating a new energy source as various countries are in ‘oil wars’ with each other to take ownership of this rapidly diminishing resource.

So, yeah, from there we jump via the opening credits, ushering in Bear McCreary’s cool new score and with a similar typographic design to 10 Cloverfield Lane, to two years later when Hamilton and her fellow astronauts, played by a cast which includes such luminaries as Daniel Brühl, Chris O'Dowd and Ziyi Zhang, are still up in space trying to end the world’s escalating problems. And then, of course, everyone's worst nightmare is realised when the thing that they've has been trying to get right for the previous couple of years actually works. Particles collide and the Cloverfield space station is victim to what a pop culture scientist scaremonger on Earth has been referring to as The Cloverfield Paradox... not that there actually seems to be much of a paradox in this move but, you know, you can’t have everything.

From here on out the film starts getting both interesting and plain B-movie cream crackers, depending on whether you find yourself buying into the suspense of the situation or laughing uncontrollably at some of the 'bug nuts craziness' on show here. Or possibly, you know, a mixture of the two... which is how I reacted.

Okay so, for example, a scene where a hitherto unknown character just materialises inside the walls and wiring of the space station and has to be cut free of the all the various wires and pipes that are penetrating her body is pretty cool. Especially when we find out that she knows the crew but they don’t know her.

On the other hand, a wall metamorphosing itself and trying to pull Chris O’Dowd into it and then slicing off his arm perfectly, with absolutely no pain, no blood and no need for cauterising... that was pretty unique and just the silly side of funny, I have to confess. Especially when the crew later capture the arm wandering around on its own, put it in a box, realise it’s trying to communicate with them and then throw it a pen so it can write them a note. Yes, this happens, I’m not making it up... you aren’t in a 1930s Hollywood B-movie here... this is bang up-to-date movie making on display, not The Beast With Five Fingers, apparently. What’s even better is that it writes that they should cut open one of their fellow crew members. That’s okay because, when all the worms from the lab went missing, they took over the body of one of the team somehow and then exploded out from him in a little homage, in some ways, to the original ALIEN movie. So... hmm, yeah. Luckily for them, their essential missing giro which helped run their particle collider happens to have somehow materialised inside this guy’s body too... so, good for them.

Yeah, okay the film is quite ludicrous and you will probably point and ridicule it at some point in your viewing experience but it’s never boring and it did keep me guessing/entertained for a while. There are a fair few problems with it though...

One of these is with the fact that none of these shenanigans where the crew are getting attacked by their own ship in various ways make a lick of sense, even when you throw the Large Hadron Collider into the equation. How did Chris O’ Dowd’s arm know what to write, for instance. This is probably my biggest obstacle within the film, to be honest.

The other big problem is that this is set in the Earth’s future, whereas it’s implied that the previous movies weren’t in that time shift at all. That being said, though, it is kinda implied that the particle experimentation also effects time as well as various multiversal dimensions and so it’s conceivable (and highly probable, I suspect) that this event set up a similar set of various parallel worlds, one of which is our Earth as it was in the past, allowing ‘things’ that go slither in the night to touch down on our increasingly unstable planet... one of which is presumably our world as it was in the time of the first two movies.

So yeah, in those terms at least, the film finally answers the questions, albeit in no real detail (but who needs that?) as to where the monsters from Cloverfield (reviewed here) and 10 Cloverfield Lane (reviewed here) came from (or rather, how they came to be here in the first place). Which is good enough from me.

Amid all this cheesiness, though, we have some genuinely nice performances, some interesting shot set ups, nicely choreographed sequences and it’s all held together quite well by McCreary’s intense and never knowingly winking score, adding a much needed sense of gravitas (and indeed, gravity) to the film to stop it becoming too comedic when the script really is not doing itself any favours. Probably the least effective of the Cloverfield series of movies but certainly not without relevance and definitely something which, mostly, doesn’t let the side down. Probably only watch this one if you’ve seen the previous two, though. Or you might not want to watch the others.