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 - 73 Yards

73 The Yard Way

Doctor Who - 73 Yards
Airdate: 25th May 2024
BBC 1

Warning: All the spoilers here.

So, Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson are back as The Doctor and Ruby Sunday in this fourth episode of the new series of Doctor Who entitled 73 Yards and, despite unpopular fan theory, this episode did not turn out to be connected to Ethel’s Sandwich Quiz on an old episode of No. 73. Instead, what we have is a bit of a dilemma for this reviewer because it’s easily one of the best (if not the best) of the current season but, when the final denouement is played out, it turns out that the main feature of the isolating element of Ruby Sunday’s character trajectory in this one makes... it has to be said... absolutely no sense whatsoever. I mean, what a load of codswallop!

But it did continue the tradition of a relatively ‘Doctor free’ episode being one of the strongest they’ve done. In fact, my two all time favourite episodes of the ‘new Who’ era, Blink and Love And Monsters, were very Doctor-lite, it has to be said.

So, basic set up and pretty much the whole of the story is (I said this was full on spoilers, right?)... The Doctor and Ruby land on a cliff in Wales and The Doctor accidentally breaks a man-made (or something-made) witchcraft style circle. With the least biggest surprise in the episode made completely predictable because of the odd way the camera holds the focus and movement on Ruby in close up for a longer than average length of time, she looks around and The Doctor has just disappeared. The TARDIS is locked and for the next 60 plus years, it doesn’t move. A strange woman who is making signs and is always standing exactly 73 Yards away from Ruby wherever she is... frightens anyone else away from Ruby with whatever she says to them. This includes her own foster mother, who locks her out and never speaks to her again and, even Kate Lethbridge-Stuart and UNIT, who goes to help Ruby, abandon her as soon as they hear what the woman says.

Then, because of something she heard The Doctor say about a prime minister bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war in 2046 (yeah, thanks for dating the show for future viewers, guys!), she manages to fix things so the woman who is always there talks to the guy before he starts a nuclear war and terrifies him away from his position of power. Another 40 years later and she dies in hospital, realises the woman is herself at her old age and then she goes back to where it all started in her past somehow, to warn her younger self, successfully this time, to not let The Doctor break the circle. The end.

And it’s great... the sense of suspense coupled with a relatively new companion both abandoned and with no way of helping herself pushes lots of the right buttons. It’s entertaining, starts off with a relatively early, extended Susan Twist sighting (oh yeah, that twist is coming at some point alright) and even has Anita Dobson’s Mrs. Flood from the Christmas special make an appearance too.

But it’s also very infuriating because, as the thing the woman, aka future Ruby, is saying is that The Doctor shouldn’t step on the circle... why the hell was everybody in the episode running away in fear? It made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Now... I’d like to hope that Russell T Davies has some kind of trick up his sleeve and that he’s going to revisit this story in some way before the series is done... to somehow make sense of that but, I dunno... I don’t trust that to happen. Rendering the whole story actually quite ineffective and, I dunno, a bit of a damp squib. It’s the kind of great build up and then complete anticlimax I would have expected from Steven Moffat as a show runner, to be honest and, yeah, I’m still not feeling that confident about this iteration of the series now, once again.

Still, with 73 Yards, getting there seems to be half the fun and, yeah, it’s entertaining and intriguing enough, for sure. I just wish it had actually gone somewhere, though, rather than just give us mind candy with no real substance, as seems to be the case here.

Doctor Who Flux - Survivors Of The Flux

Eon Flux

Doctor Who Flux
Chapter Five -
Survivors Of The Flux
Airdate: 28th November 2021
BBC 1

Warning: More spoilers.

Okay, so that was a fairly good episode as it happens and I would probably rate it a lot higher if it hadn’t proceeded from one huge... I’m going to call it a mistake or perhaps, more of an ‘error in judgement’ when some important information was perhaps cut for time?

So, yeah, this is going to be a short review but, for the most part, Doctor Who Flux - Survivors Of The Flux, was an exciting and thoroughly entertaining installment. So The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) is not an Angel after all, just was shipped between universes in that form to where The Division are polishing off their last universe before travelling into another iteration of the multiverse.

Meanwhile, Yaz (Mandip Gill), Dan (John Bishop) and Professor Jericho (Kevin McNally), who had all been left in a shrinking village in last weeks episode, Village Of The Angels (reviewed here) are off on some kind of quest given to them by a hologram of The Doctor left in Yaz’s care, which activated once she had been separated from The Doctor for more than two weeks. So they are travelling all over the world of the early 1900s (and have been for three years) in search of various non-essential ‘busy work’ clues to give them something to do in the script... and that’s my one big problem with this episode. As entertaining as it was. Um... yeah... so does anyone remember that the village they were trapped in was getting rapidly smaller until they would soon end up as corpses floating in the void of space? Well then how the heck can they be globe hopping when it was made pretty clear that they were currently inhabiting a pretty finite version of what remained of Earth? So unless some pretty necessary information was left out of the story for some inexplicable reason... this makes no sense at all. What the heck?

In other story strands... Bel (Thaddea Graham) and Vinder (Jacob Anderson) are still looking for each other and keep playing with different parts of the story ark. Are they The Doctor’s parent’s who leave their child at the end of a wormhole or is something else less revelatory coming? Remembering we have only one episode left of this series.

And, of course The Doctor’s memories were suppressed in a Time Lord style pocket watch... except, hasn’t The Doctor (in David Tennant form) hidden his memories in a pocket watch before now? So, yeah, how does that work then? That must be traumatic. A kind of memory wipe on top of a memory wipe and, if so, then why weren’t all The Doctor’s memories restored to him in one hit back in the Tennant days? I guess this is why people need... I don’t know... some kind of show bible maybe, to refer to so they don’t get their stories bogged down with such inconsistencies. Yeah, okay, I’m being a touch sarcastic here, I’m sure they must have one but then why do they ignore it constantly? Because if someone like me can remember stuff like this, well I’m sure everyone else does too.

Okay, so... other than all this... yeah, really enjoyed this episode. Mandip Gill and John Bishop seem to have good chemistry together and Kevin McNally makes a nice third. It was nice hearing a sound bite from Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart during the early years of UNIT in 1968, maybe a month or two before he first met The Doctor as seen in the Patrick Troughton era story The Web Of Fear (reviewed here). And it was nice seeing Jemma Redgrave back as his daughter Kate Lethbridge-Stewart in the 2021 section of the story too.

And... yeah, I still don’t like the main villains in this and I still think it’s a deeply flawed series but, okay, this one was one of the more watchable episodes this year. I think how the show finally falls with the long term fans all hinges on next week’s episode which, honestly, will have move fairly rapidly to a quick conclusion to this season, for sure. I wonder if we’ll lose the companions by the end of that episode?

So yeah, short review from me again for Survivors Of The Flux and, I hope I’m still caring about the characters a tiny bit after any revelations visited upon us next week. I guess I’ll report back soon on that one.
 

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.

Doctor Who - The Zygon Invasion

Letting Zygons Be Zygons

Doctor Who - The Zygon Invasion
UK Airdate: 31st October 2015
BBC 1

Warning: Some light spoilers here.

Well alright then, this is probably the weakest in terms of ideas and intrigue in the current series of Doctor Who so far this season but, even so, I have to say that this was a pretty fun and highly entertaining romp.

Now, the problem with doing stories of this nature, involving the underused, possibly about to be overused, titular creatures, in only their third appearance since their debut opposite Tom  Baker in the 1970s... is that they’re probably underused for a reason. That reason being that you’re always going to get a version of a story which bares at least some resemblance to the science fiction classic, Jack Finney’s Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers, in one form or another.

So, unfortunately, no matter how twisty and turny things get in these kinds of stories, you never really particularly care about what strange antics any of the usual friendly faces are getting up to becaue you know that any moment one of them could turn out to be a Zygon disguising itself as your ally. This makes for dull viewing in terms of getting hooked on the storyline because, frankly, the writers have always got a safety net to revert to if one of your favourite characters get killed... one such character in this instance, of course, being the character of Osgood.

Now, we already saw Osgood killed by Missy in the conclusion of last year’s series, Death In Heaven (reviewed by me here) and at the time I said there’s always the chance that the dead Osgood could be a Zygon. That, of course, is because of the absolutely massive plot thread left loose and dangling from the 50th anniversary special from a couple of years ago, The Day Of The Doctor (reviewed by me here), which also included a half heartedly unresolved Zygon story as a sub-plot and which also featured the very first appearance of Peter Capaldi as The Doctor, as it happened, in a brief cameo of the future incarnation of the character. Producer Steven Moffatt has obviously decided to go back to the story and resolve one of the two dangling plot threads and, as it happens, I’m pretty sure the other thread from that special episode will also be revisited sometime this series too... although possibly not in this story. We even had a little recap of The Day Of The Doctor at the start of this episode to remind us how things had been left, to an extent.

All that being said, however, the more into this episode I got, the more I believed it was the human version of Osgood who got killed back in Death In Heaven... although I’m not really sure anymore and I’ve kinda stopped caring because the writers can now just play the ‘I’m a Zygon’ card whenever they want. And, I have to say, they do play it quite a lot in this episode.

Doesn’t matter though because there are some nice character moments in here and the episode moves along at quite a pace. There’s some great acting from all involved and the dialogue of the way the characters interact is... yeah, it’s quite impressive. There’s absolutely nothing to tax your brain in this one but the writers still manage to make it interesting, in spite of the tired old doubles plot... done so well in four movie versions of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers and, alas, a little less well but perfectly competently here. There are also some interesting musical moments from composer Murray Gold including an action orchestrated version of The Doctor’s A Good Man sub theme and a strangley poppy version of Clara’s theme which... I’m not sure about, to be honest.

We have a fast paced and, very much, a globe hopping episode here with the story cross-cutting between The Doctor (or possibly his double) in one location, Clara (certainly her double) in London and Kate Stewart, the Brigadier’s daughter, in a third location. And it’s all very exciting and dynamic enough to keep one distracted from the inadequacies of the plot. There’s some bad stuff too, of course...

Three big things for me that let the episode down as much as its reliance on the shape shifting abilities of the Zygons were the reappearance, once again, of The Doctor’s sonic sunglasses, yet another guitar playing scene with The Doctor plucking away at his instrument (not again, kill me now) and, unfortunately, a cliffhanger ending which really doesn’t have much sting or audience investment because... hey... how do we know that the character we’ve been following as The Doctor wasn’t a Zygon for the majority of the episode anyway. They’ve already said there are good Zygons and a splinter group, so how do we know the only people in danger at the end of the story we care about aren’t all just Zygons anyway. It’s an audacious try for a cliffhanger but... it really doesn’t work.

So that’s my review of this episode sorted, I think. The Zygon Invasion is the weakest of the new series so far but still head and shoulders above the majority of the post-Tennant era and it does have its moments. Alas, because I have important things afoot next weekend, I won’t be able to see the concluding part of this story until, quite probably, two days after it is broadcast... so I don’t know where this one is going yet but I suspect it won’t leave everything as cut and dried for the main characters as many might hope. I won’t know if I’m right about that until the Monday though so... yeah, I’ll catch up on the review as soon as I am able to after that. So there will be two more reviews this week and then a gap of a few days before the next post after those. So please, join me here, if you can, for my take on the concluding part of this story. Hopefuly there will be a little more to think about after the next one.

Doctor Who - The Power Of Three

The Three Whomigos

Doctor Who - The Power Of Three
Airdate: 22nd September 2012. UK. BBC1

Warning: A few right angled spoilers lurking in this one.

You know, I'll be kinda relieved about not having to write any more of these Saturday night reviews once Doctor Who takes a little break from our airwaves after next week's episode. Not because they’re in any way terrible, similarly, not because I am having to heap praise on them on a weekly basis (I wish). That’s the thing though... these episodes aren’t that terrible but they aren’t that great either. The last two series especially had their share of “not so great” episodes in them... but they also had some great “stand out” event episodes in them too. This season it all feels just a little bit... I dunno... a bit humdrum?

I was expecting, quite honestly, for this weeks episode to be the best of the current bunch re-materialising onto our television screens. Truth be told though, if you’re comparing just the stories from the last four weeks, that honour has to go to the season opener, Asylum Of The Daleks. This weeks installment though, it has to be said, runs it a close second in the entertainment stakes and I have to admit I found myself well and truly entertained this time around... up until a point.

The episode had a great slow burn premise of an invasion of harmless seeming black cubes which lay low for a bit while the entire population of the planet get used to them. The Doctor, therefore, comes to stay with the Ponds and also, we see a welcome return from Rory’s dad from the Dinosaurs On A Spaceship episode... as played, wonderfully, by Mark Williams. The cubes stay for a few months or a year... depending on whether you believe what Amy Pond says in UNITs secret Tower Of London base or, if you believe the much more credible evidence of Rory’s dad’s invasion log, which lasts for over 361 days. These little and easily fixed continuity errors creeping into Doctor Who again is actually quite alarming and it should be stopped. I’m not saying it’s limited to this programme... it seems every movie I see has problems which seem to have been based on decisions to cut stuff out or use alternate takes of a scene which doesn't match up with others. It seems to be a blasé attitude which has crept into modern day thinking and which allows for these kind of slap-dash decisions to be made. I’m not impressed.

But anyway... moving swiftly on...

The Doctor comes to stay with The Ponds and though it would be true to say that the episode has a lot of scope for comic moments and genuine feeling, it doesn’t quite take all the opportunities it presents itself with, if truth be told... but I don’t care really because if you get a script which places The Ponds and The Doctor in a social setting, then I’m all for it.

Unfortunately, this one did seem like a combination of two old episodes combined. The “coming to stay” scenes did seem to feel like they’d been stolen from a previous Matt Smith story, The Lodger, from his debut season... while the invasion of the cubes who are accepted into humanity as an anxious UNIT ponder their meaning was very similar to the opening of the two part finale of David Tennant’s second season... Army Of Ghosts. Still, self referential plaguerism aside, the episode kinda worked well, with Rory and Amy in the process of making a decision as to whether to stop their adventuring with The Doctor for good or carry on “in the loop” so to speak. Along the way there were some references to a new adventure with the Zygons (last seen in their debut episode in Tom Bakers Fourth Doctor story Terror Of The Zygons) and a new UNIT character introduced called Kate Stewart, who happens to be the daughter of a long serving and endearing character from Doctor Who history, Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge Stewart... so that was a nice touch.

So yeah, the episode was good, like I said... up to a point.

Alas, that point was roughly the last fifteen minutes when things started going all "extra-terrestrial action stations" and the threat was finally understood, only to be reversed in mere minutes as The Doctor became a really terrible example of a "deus ex machina" and everything was as it was again. Pretty rubbish and definitely felt a little rushed if you ask me. Could have done with being a two parter, perhaps, and adding more dramatic weight and a more harder earned victory, don’t you think?

The whole episode led up to the dramatic point that Rory’s dad has encouraged The Ponds to carry on their adventures, after The Doctor has all but promised that they’ll never die on him. Yeah, right, well we can all see where this one is going can’t we? Maybe they’ll just die of old age but next week is being touted as The Ponds last episode on the series, so we’ll just have to see. Personally, I’m hoping that we don’t lose River Song too in the process, but I’m guessing we will. I think something funny and irreversible may be about to happen on the show concerning the last few years of Doctor Who history... and all I can say is, I hope I’m wrong.

Not a bad episode, though...on the whole. Could have done with a little more emotion and a little less running about but I’m guessing there’s going to be a lot of running about next week so maybe that’ll make up for it. Still looking forward to it... just about.