When we took a look at the opening episodes of the new Doctor Who spinoff The War Between the Land and the Sea a few weeks ago, there were a few nuggets of potential swimming beneath its otherwise largely murky surface. But now that the show has come to an end, we know for a fact: that potential is dead and buried and has only sunk further into the depths the longer the show went on.
The remaining three episodes of War Between, after its premiere spent a great deal of time playing up the political relationship between the revived Sea Devils—reborn as “Homo Aqua”—and humanity, spending their time squandering the distinctly unsubtle, yet still intriguing, climate change messaging that sat at that plot’s core in order to focus on establishing a rapidly burgeoning romantic relationship between Salt (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Barclay (Russell Tovey).
Sparked by the former saving the latter after a diplomatic mission to Homo Aqua’s territory beneath the waves was disrupted by a double agent unleashing a bomb to kill the human and aquakind attendees alike, in spite of Mbatha-Raw and Tovey’s chemistry, the romance that suddenly becomes the primary driving subject of War Between comes off as a Great Value Shape of Water. Barclay’s infatuation with Salt above anything else is not really given any time to develop, putting him on an instantaneous 0-100 escalation, but it’s Salt who suffers the most ignominies in the process, no longer presented as Barclay’s political equal and the advocate of War Between‘s most radicalized notions of the climate crisis, and instead flattened into a walking embodiment of the “born sexy yesterday” trope, thematically and narratively taken out of the picture for much of the show’s middle act once Barclay rescues her from UNIT detention.
© BBC/DisneyThis jarring pivot in focus is broadly emblematic of War Between‘s most damning of issues: the series simply cannot commit, from moment to moment, on every level, to an idea of what it wants to be or say, rendering it completely inconsequential from both a thematic point of view and a narratively logistical one in its broader place in the Doctor Who universe. In some ways, this was a poison pill baked into the show’s very premise—more often than not, a Doctor Who story about the Doctor’s absence ultimately has to result in very little impact outside of that particular story, both because it calls into question what it takes for the Doctor to involve themself in a given crisis and because it calls into question just how much a spinoff series can feel supposedly “mandatory” to Doctor Who‘s status quo going forward.
The War Between could never deliver on the idea of aqua and humankind negotiating an amicable, symbiotic approach to their shared existence on earth, because it would shunt Doctor Who‘s depiction of the “real” Earth a step even further beyond our own reality. But instead of playing within that tight constraint to tell a contained but still interesting story, War Between tried to go big, only to be unable to deliver on that scale in a satisfactory way, abandoning anything that gave it weight as it hobbled towards a muddled end.
Multiple times in the series, both sides declare to each other that the titular war is coming, that it’s here, that it’s over, but we never really get to see that conflict, because Homo Aqua, after raising uncomfortably true concerns about humanity’s role in climate change, has to be first rendered unforgivably villainous—which is done in the bizarre opening sequence of the final episode that depicts a retaliatory act by Homo Aqua summoning, capturing, and eating every dog on the planet, a scenario that is raised within a matter of minutes and then never touched again—and then effectively eliminated as an ongoing concern, done so via an ill-explained engineered virus, dubbed “Severance,” that ultimately kills all but 10% of aquakind as quickly as it’s introduced in the back half of the show’s final episode.
© BBC/DisneyHumanity’s explicit genocide of Homo Aqua would be a fascinatingly dark point to end the show on, but War Between doesn’t actually care. The extermination and capitulation of Homo Aqua are executed and resolved in the back half of the show’s final episode, giving War Between very little time to have its human players wrestle with the moral cost of what it’s done (a few brief, awkwardly inserted flashforwards imply that what remains of Homo Aqua will get its comeuppance on the direct individuals responsible for Severance’s deployment, but that’s about it). Instead, it continues to focus on Barclay and Salt, the former rewarded for his allyship with what is now a minority species by being slowly transformed into an aquakind/human hybrid, the sole person allowed to live among the remnants of Homo Aqua at the expense of leaving his human life behind.
This lack of care extends across all of War Between‘s narrative threads. The impact of Homo Aqua’s radical attempts to shift humanity into action are dropped as quickly as they’re introduced. Episode two climaxes with Salt dumping every piece of water-bound waste onto land, effectively burying the planet in rubbish and severely disrupting the logistical bedrocks of society, but by episode five, that issue has been cleaned up in the background, never to be touched again. The series’ continued failure to interrogate UNIT’s role as an organization that is seemingly gleefully obsessed with weaponizing a surveillance state only compounds the issues raised by series co-creator Pete McTighe in his 2025 Doctor Who episode “Lucky Day,” climaxing not with a self-reckoning, but with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart threatening her private therapist with the exposure of her husband’s infidelity (why does UNIT have access to that kind of individual surveillance? The show doesn’t care; it’s just cool hero spy stuff) if she doesn’t let her keep having a role in the ongoing negotiations, a win for our hero, and by the show’s end, it’s consistent enough that Kate just starts threatening gross invasions of privacy as a jokey aside.
It’s Kate that War Between actually ends on, in a truly bizarre scene that is emblematic of War Between‘s incomprehensible idea of tone or message. Having seen off Barclay and Salt to live their new underwater life together, she comes across a runner on the beach who casually tosses his water bottle as litter beside her. The final shots of War Between—the final shots of Doctor Who‘s Disney era, the final shots of the franchise until this time next year—have an increasingly angry and manic Kate pull her gun on the runner, repeatedly screaming that he pick up the bottle as her finger inches closer to the trigger.
© BBC/DisneyTonally it immediately follows up an extended, dialogueless sequence of Barclay and Salt’s reunion set to a Goldfrapp cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes,” so it’d be almost funny if the show wasn’t suddenly trying to treat it as a serious, dark moment. It’s a bizarre end note on Kate’s character (for now, at least), introduced 13 years ago as the level-headed, “science leads” future stepping away from UNIT’s militarized past. But it’s also the literal last minutes of the show suddenly lurching back to an idea it had broadly abandoned for most of its runtime, as if it finally remembered that it once yearned to be a show that actually had a point to make, and that by addressing it in its dying gasps, the journey to get there meant something.
It’s a symbolic note for Doctor Who‘s awful year to go out on, reflecting the end of an era that had so much promise and potential when it began just two years ago only to get bogged down in an aimless malaise that muddled the series’ ability to really commit to commentary and reflection of the world we live in through its sci-fi lens. It’s fitting, perhaps then, that the less-than-amicable breakup between Disney and the BBC has resulted in much of the world not legally being able to see War Between until some nebulous point next year, when it’ll likely be dropped in its entirety with little in the way of fanfare: a show with nothing to say, buried in the deep to never be thought of again.
The War Between the Land and the Sea is now streaming in its entirety in the UK on BBC iPlayer. The series will stream on Disney+ internationally some time in 2026.
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