Of all the weird ways the BBC’s partnership with Disney on Doctor Who could’ve spectacularly combusted after just a couple of years, few could’ve imagined that it would ultimately end the way it did with The War Between the Land and the Sea. A miniseries somehow even worse than the season of Doctor Who that preceded it that has spent the last few months in international release limbo after the BBC took its proverbial ball home and debuted it exclusively in the UK last December, thematically, perhaps it was a fitting end to the deal. But there was almost a point in time when it would’ve been one of the first things the BBC and Disney did on Who together.
“It’s worth saying how long ago this production begins. I must have written ‘The Star Beast’ and The War Between as the launch, as this is what we’re going to make, and this is our ambition,” Who showrunner Russell T. Davies said in a new behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of War Between released by the BBC this week. However, as Davies continued to explain, the twin issues of preparing to manage to make both a new season of Doctor Who and trying to figure out how to make a smaller-scaled spinoff at the same time meant that the latter kept getting pushed back.
“We then had to learn all this time how to make a program with this budget and how to settle into Bad Wolf Studios,” Davies continued. “So we kept on intending to make The War Between—and never quite getting it. After season 1 and then finally after season 2 [of Doctor Who], we did it.”
Davies had previously made it clear that War Between was one of his earliest ideas when asked by the BBC to return to Doctor Who in 2021, part of an ambitious plan to try and flesh out Who into a franchise that could support multiple spinoff series. Would it have made a difference to the overall quality of War Between if it had been sandwiched around the launch of the 60th anniversary specials rather than where it ultimately fell, filling a December-gap in Doctor Who‘s schedule last year to make up for the lack of a Christmas special for the first time in 20 years?
It’s hard to say, given that it’s difficult to chalk up if the series’ issues were down to the production delays, or just inherent to the series’ premise and creation (for all its faults, War Between doesn’t show the obvious signs of behind-the-scenes mishaps as “The Reality War” did before it). But given that we’re still waiting, months after its UK launch, for the show to get its international release and close the books on Disney’s partnership for good, maybe it would’ve been for the best to get this one out quicker instead of leaving it to linger.
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