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. 

Doctor Who - Lucky Day

Suit Pursuit

Doctor Who - Lucky Day
UK/USA 2025
Airdate: 3rd May 2025

Warning: Very light spoilers.

Well, like I said in my review of the first episode of the current series of Doctor Who... these are probably going to be no more than very short capsule reviews for this new iteration of the show from hereon out. Mostly because the miss part of the hit and miss element of any bunch of episodes of a TV show has been somewhat elevated for this show for a few years now and, certainly with this latest story, Lucky Day, while better than last week’s shenanigans (reviewed here), it kind of winds up in the miss camp once again.

This one starts off with a boy, played by the excellent Benjamin Chivers (from The Devil’s Hour, reviewed here and here), although the IMDB is not listing him as being in this episode as yet, it seems*. Anyway, he stumbles upon The Doctor and then, because of his obsession with the encounter, grows up into someone who, it turns out, is just a wrong ‘un. Unfortunately, Chivers only plays the part for a couple of minutes before being replaced by an actor playing a grown up version of him for the remainder of the episode.

Now, this one is a Doctor lite episode and so I was kinda looking forward to this one because, two of my all time favourite episodes of the modern era of Doctor Who were similarly Doctor lite. Those being the wonderful fan favourite Blink and the equally wonderful, fan reviled Love And Monsters. So I was expecting more from this one, which is yet another story of the aftermath of an old companion getting left behind... and this time it’s the turn of this Doctor’s previous companion from last year’s series, Ruby Sunday (played once again by Millie Gibson).

And I don’t think I want to give any spoilers away on this one. It’s a clever story idea up to a point, with a central twist that you’re probably going to see coming a mile off and some questionable ways in which the story is pushed forward (in terms of future continuity of the show, I reckon). One of the bits of business in this episode shows two men in suits pretending to be aliens. Alas, when I first saw the real aliens, before this minor twist, I also thought they looked like men in suits so... yeah, where did all that Disney money go in this episode? The monsters look kind of pathetic, it has to be said.

Gibson was good in her role though and had good support from Jemma Redgrave as regular UNIT chief Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and a few of the other regular UNIT members. It was almost a good episode but... yeah, it just didn’t cut it and, if you care about what happens to the Ruby Sunday character, then you’re probably not going to be happy with the direction of her story arc in this one. I can only assume that we will be seeing her again in this year’s series finale (show finale?) because there are a few elements to this one that look like writers just positioning building blocks to set up for later use... including, of course, the now regular appearance of Anita Dobson as Mrs. Flood, once again turning up in places she shouldn’t be.

And that ‘s me done. Like I said, the best I can say about Lucky Day is... it’s not as bad as last week’s episode. I just wish Doctor Who could find a credible way to recover from what the show has now become. I guess I’ll keep watching ‘til the bitter end now.

*Okay, they’ve put it up this morning? Why was it not on there months ago? It’s not a spoiler.

The Beekeeper

Going Apiary

The Beekeeper
Directed by David Ayer
USA/UK
2024 Miramax
UK Cinema Print

Not to be confused with the many, many movies which have had the same title over the years (why do Hollywood keep doing this?), The Beekeeper is the latest Jason Statham action movie and, it’s one of his better ones, I’d have to say.

The plot is simple, Statham, who has retired and is an apiarist, rents a barn for his bees from a benevolent lady who is the only person who has ever shown him kindness. Then she gets scammed out of all her money by an online fraudster, part of a huge team of them working in group premises dotted around America, including the 2 million dollars she was managing for a charity. So she shoots herself. 

Enter her daughter, played by Emmy Raver-Lampman, an FBI agent who is trying to crack the gang and follow back the chain but, she’s having no luck. However, Statham is no ordinary retiree... he used to be a ‘beekeeper’... a shady organisation working above the law (most of the FBI and CIA don’t even know these people exist) who are there to ‘protect the hive’ and redress the balance when injustice is done. So, he goes on a rampage, killing and destroying his way to the top of the chain, pursued by the criminals themselves (for a while, they are mostly just trying to stay alive), the various law enforcement agencies, one of the active beekeepers and even his friend’s daughter, as he follows the chain right to the top.

And it’s great. Firstly, this is a solid Statham action thriller but it’s a heck of a lot grimmer and relentless (and wildly entertaining) compared to a fair amount of his other films. And the tone extends right back into Statham’s character, Adam Clay, who is not a typical anti-hero for this actor and couldn’t, for a moment, be mistaken for a bunch of his other, almost interchangeable action roles. This is one of those movies that shows that Statham really is as good an actor as he is a likeable personality (and star), his social skills being dialled back down almost to zero (even with people he likes) as he plays a somewhat unstoppable killing machine.

And that’s the other thing about this character... he doesn’t come out of any scrap in this badly, apart from taking some damage in a big fight with a truly tough guy played by Taylor James near the end of the film. He’s one of those invincible people who can walk into a room filled to the brim with trained FBI killers and wipe them all out within a matter of minutes, using only his bare hands and whatever he can pick up off the floor (and with whatever weapon he can steal from an opponent). Honestly, taking this back to schoolboy mentality for a second, I have no idea who would win in a fight between Adam Clay and John Wick, to be honest.

So, yeah, remember those brilliant Lone Wolf and Cub films of the 1970s... or the Zatoichi films of the 1960s/70s etc? Where the lone figure would take on hundreds of trained warriors and kill them all with barely a scratch? Same thing here. The writers have gone back to the roots of heroic adventure stories and given us one of those invincible characters who can cut through anything, in this case in quite a cynical and grim manner. Now, the trap with this kind of writing is that you can write yourself into a corner when you have nothing to really threaten a protagonist with, which was always the real Kryptonite for those early Superman comics. Here, though, just like Lester Dent did in his original Doc Savage pulps, the writers manage to get away with it and it just works marvellously well.

And, of course, the acting is credible and equally entertaining. And I just loved that it took me a while to realise the president of the United States was played by Jemma Redgrave (who I and, probably many readers, would best recognise as playing Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stuart’s daughter Kate, who took over UNIT in the modern version of Doctor Who). And Jeremy Irons adds a good presence to the movie too, playing a somewhat three dimensional character with an interesting history. And all of this is packaged together with an incredibly good score co-composed by Jared Michael Fry and David Sardy, which includes an outstanding opening title piece where the various facts about bees on the visuals are matched with various strings to musically represent their buzzing. I wish they’d release this thing into the wild, preferably on a nice physical CD so I can have a listen.

And that’s me done with The Beekeeper, I think. I enjoyed this one a lot and, if this is the first of a franchise (which doesn’t have to feature Statham as the lead each time but, it would sure be better if it did), then I am all for it and would love to see some more of this kind of action writing in modern cinema.

Doctor Who - The Zygon Inversion

Inverted Comas

Doctor Who - The Zygon Inversion
UK Airdate: 7th November 2015
BBC 1

Warning: Again, some minor spoilers.

Okay... this is going to be yet another of a series of much shorter reviews of Doctor Who this season, purely because I really don’t have much to say about this one and, certainly, not much bad to say at all. The Zygon Inversion continues where The Zygon Invasion (reviewed here) left off and, rather than doing what I thought it would do by giving us a weak link conclusion to last week’s set up that really wasn’t, in all honesty, the most interesting opening salvo, it surprised me by dumping a lot of the mindless action and exploring the ideas inherent in the basic storyline with a little more detail. This is something Doctor Who has been doing a lot this season and, I have to say, it continues being one of the more riveting series' of the last five years of the show because of it. I’m not saying it’s a great idea to dumb down on the action completely but they are doing less of it, it seems to me, and I think the writers are getting a pretty cool mix of elements so far.

So this week started up exactly where we left off as the writers and Jenna Coleman commenced an exploration of the link of the comatose body of Clara that the Zygon version of her had been using as a master template, so to speak. We are inside ‘comatose Clara’s’ head as she starts to influence the mind-link between her and her Zygon copy, trying to manipulate events from the inside of her mind. Clara’s always been written as a pretty strong character from the outset... starting off when she was the mystery character who kept dying before the revelation of just why that was... and once again we have her full-on in a pitch mental battle with The Doctor’s foes and, at the end of the day, cited by The Doctor as being the one who made him rethink his approach to the options of death and destruction in the first place, by direct reference to the 50th Anniversary special The Day Of The Doctor (reviewed here) once more. A story which, incidentally, was also the first return of the Zygons after their original appearance opposite Tom Baker in the 1970s.

So we have Clara and, presumably, a lot of dead UNIT soldiers, including at least one regular, who seem to have been just swept under the carpet a little since their certain death cliff hanger from the previous week. We also have a great lack of reveal of The Doctor as a Zygon... hooray, the script writers didn’t play that card after all while still managing to make good on the promise of last week’s stonking cliff hanger and, instead, plumping for an answer which is... well it’s maybe less of a Doctor Who solution but it’s a valid ‘adventure story’ kind of moment so, yeah, it kinda works and it’s a lot less deux ex machina than the scenario I just assumed they were going to use... so there’s that.

We also have Jemma Redgrave returning again as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, heading up UNIT and fooling absolutely nobody watching that she wasn’t a Zygon after all but, that’s okay, the punchline to her flash back moment where she shot her would-be Zygon murderer with the words “Five Rounds Rapid” was a fan pleasing moment since it’s what her fictional father, Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge Stewart, famously said for the first time in the Jon Pertwee era story The Daemons (reviewed by me here). A round of applause to the team behind the show for that one... and for the William Hartnell painting moment which I thought I’d glimpsed the week before (now confirmed) and the references to The Doctor’s old companion Harry Sullivan from that original Tom Baker story of yesteryear, Terror Of The Zygons.

Okay so... all well and good. We have Osgood back now too, as what could either be a human and a Zygon or two Zygons. Something tells me we’ll find out the answer to that conundrum at some point over the next two years... and the show’s writers do keep teasing her as a more regular companion at every chance they get throughout the show so... watch this space. I was also glad she took a verbal swipe at The Doctor’s new ‘sonic sunglasses’, pointing out how ridiculous they are. Hopefully Moffat is just teasing us with the absence of our favourite timelord’s sonic device.

And to top it off we have some pretty cool moments of Murray Gold scoring in a kind of action/horror vein... coming up with some tension building motifs just when they are required. So, yeah... all in all a great episode, well written (better than the set up hook), well performed and with a nice, quite dark heart involving The Doctor in a talking solution. Admittedly, he was doing an impersonation of Hughie Green in Opportunity Knocks for a lot of that but it was all still pretty good. That being said, I don’t know what younger viewers of the show are going to make of Peter Capaldi doing an impersonation of a famous presenter who hasn’t really been seen on British screens since the late 1970s... and  I mean that most sincerely, I really do, viewers! Still, it brought back memories for us ‘oldies’ in the audience and this current series of the show certainly seems to be more adult oriented, it has to be said.

Perhaps that’s on of the reasons I’m happy to continue to report that this year’s episodes have made up a stonking good season so far. Only four episodes proper to go now but, of course, all that good work could change at a moment’s notice if a really bad episode comes to light. I have a suspicion that the next four episodes may be very tightly linked and I’m thinking something pretty big with some serious repercussions for the characters in the show may be just around the corner. Will it be in next week’s episode that the pennies finally start dropping? We shall see I guess. Let ‘em bring it on.