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When we took a look at the first episodes of new Doctor Who spin-off The war between land and sea A a few weeks agothere were a few nuggets of potential swimming beneath its otherwise largely murky surface. But now that the series is over, we know for a fact: that potential is dead and buried and has only sunk deeper into the depths as the series has lasted.
The remaining three episodes of War betweenafter its premiere, spent a lot of time playing on the political relationship between the resurrected Sea Devils – reborn as “Homo Aqua” – and humanity, spending their time wasting the clearly unsubtle, but still intriguing, message about climate change that was at the heart of this plot in order to focus on establishing a burgeoning romantic relationship between Salt (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Barclay (Russell Tovey).
Triggered by the former saving the latter after a diplomatic mission to Homo Aqua territory beneath the waves is disrupted by a double agent dropping a bomb to kill the humans and aquakinds present, despite Mbatha-Raw and Tovey’s chemistry, the romance that suddenly becomes the main driving force of War between presents itself as great value Water shape. Barclay’s infatuation with Salt above all else doesn’t really have time to develop, putting him in an instant escalation from 0 to 100, but it is Salt who suffers the most ignominies in the process, no longer being presented as Barclay’s political equal and Salt’s advocate. War betweenThe most radicalized notions of the climate crisis, and rather flattened into a walking incarnation of the “born sexy yesterday” trope, thematically and narratively removed from the picture for much of the show’s middle act once Barclay rescues her from UNIT custody.
This jarring change of direction is largely emblematic of War betweenThe show’s most damning problem: The show simply can’t commit, moment to moment, on any level, to any idea of what it wants to be or say, rendering it completely inconsequential both thematically and narratively logistically within its broader place in the Doctor Who universe. In a way, it was a poison pill built into the very premise of the series – more often than not, a Doctor Who The story of the Doctor’s absence must ultimately have very little impact outside of this particular story, both because it calls into question what it takes for the Doctor to become involved in a given crisis and because it questions the extent to which a spin-off series can feel meant to be “obligatory” to Doctor Whothe status quo in the future.
The war between could never realize the idea that water and humanity negotiate a friendly, symbiotic approach to their shared existence on earth, because it would distract Doctor WhoThe representation of the “real” Earth goes even further beyond our own reality. But instead of playing with this strict constraint to tell a contained but nevertheless interesting story, War between tried to think big, but was unable to satisfactorily respond to that scale, abandoning everything that gave it weight as it limped toward a confusing end.
Repeatedly in the series, both sides declare to each other that the titular war is coming, that it is here, that it is over, but we never really get to see that conflict, as Homo Aqua, after raising genuine concerns about humanity’s role in climate change, must first be made unforgivably evil – which is done in the final episode’s bizarre opening sequence which depicts a retaliatory act of Homo Aqua summoning, capturing and eating. all the dogs on the planeta storyline that is brought up in a matter of minutes and never touched again – and then effectively eliminated as an ongoing concern, thanks to a poorly explained virus, dubbed “Severance”, which ultimately kills all but 10% of aquakind as quickly as it is introduced in the second half of the series’ final episode.
Humanity’s explicit genocide of Homo Aqua would be a fascinating and dark point on which to end the series, but War between doesn’t really care. Homo Aqua’s extermination and capitulation is carried out and resolved in the second half of the series’ final episode, giving War between very little time for his human players to grapple with the moral cost of what he’s done (a few brief and awkwardly inserted flashforwards imply that what’s left of Homo Aqua will get its comeuppance on the direct individuals responsible for deploying Severance, but that’s it). Instead, it continues to focus on Barclay and Salt, the former rewarded for his alliance with what is now a minority species by slowly transforming into an aquakind/human hybrid, the only person allowed to live among the remains of Homo Aqua at the cost of leaving their human life behind.
This lack of care extends to the whole War betweenthe narrative threads of . The impact of Homo Aqua’s radical attempts to move humanity into action is abandoned as quickly as it is introduced. Episode two culminates with Salt dumping every bit of water-related waste onto the earth, effectively burying the planet in garbage and severely disrupting the logistical foundations of society, but by episode five this problem has been scrubbed away in the background, never to be touched again. The series’ continued failure to interrogate UNIT’s role as an organization seemingly gleefully obsessed with the militarization of a surveillance state only compounds the issues raised by series co-creator Pete McTighe in his work. 2025 Doctor Who episode “Lucky Day”, culminating not with a reflection on herself, but with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart threatening her private therapist to reveal her husband’s infidelity (why do Does the UNIT have access to this type of individual monitoring? The show doesn’t care; it’s just cool hero spy stuff) if she doesn’t let her continue to play a role in the ongoing negotiations, a win for our hero, and by the end of the series he’s coherent enough that Kate just starts threatening gross invasions of privacy as a joke aside.
It was Kate who War between actually ends, in a truly bizarre and iconic scene from War betweenThis is an incomprehensible idea of tone or message. After accompanying Barclay and Salt to live their new underwater life together, she comes across a runner on the beach who nonchalantly throws his water bottle as trash next to her. The latest photos of War between—the latest plans of Doctor WhoDisney’s Disney Era, the franchise’s final shots through this time next year, show an increasingly angry and maniacal Kate pulling her gun on the runner, repeatedly shouting for him to pick up the bottle as her finger moves closer to the trigger.
Tonally, it immediately follows a long, dialogue-free sequence of Barclay and Salt’s reunion set to a Goldfrapp cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes,” so it would almost be funny if the show didn’t suddenly try to treat it as a serious, dark moment. It’s a weird ending note to Kate’s character (for now, at least), presented 13 years ago as a balanced future and “science leads” moving away from UNI’s militarized past. But it’s also the show’s literal final minutes that suddenly return to an idea it had largely abandoned for most of its run, as if finally remembering that it once aspired to be a series that actually had a point to make, and that by addressing it in its final breaths, the journey to get there meant something.
It is a symbolic note for Doctor Whoit’s a horrible year continue, reflecting the end of an era that had so much promise and potential when it began just two years ago only to become bogged down in an aimless malaise that has muddled the series’ ability to truly engage in commentary and reflection on the world we live in through its sci-fi lens. It is therefore perhaps appropriate that the unfriendly breakup between Disney and the BBC has resulted in much of the world not being legally able to see War between until some nebulous point next year, when it will likely be abandoned in its entirety without much fanfare: a show with nothing to say, buried in the depths never to be thought of again.
The war between land and sea is now streaming in its entirety in the UK on BBC iPlayer. The series will be broadcast on Disney+ internationally in 2026.
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