Doctor Who‘s weird 2025 is wrapping up in a suitably weird fashion. Over the weekend in the UK, the spinoff miniseries The War Between the Land and the Sea—the final gasp of the BBC and Disney’s exterminated partnership—began airing, breaking from years of international same-day broadcasts while the US and the rest of the world waits for Disney to release the series sometime next year.
But behind-the-scenes drama around the series—the last Who of the Disney era, the last Who at all until Christmas 2026 and whatever uncertain future lies beyond it—isn’t the only weird thing lurking in the waters of War Between. Across its two-episode premiere (of five total), the show itself feels almost hamstrung by its connection to Doctor Who at large, confused at just how much it wants to really connect to its parent show: not only between how much it wants to make explicit acknowledgment of that universe while paradoxically undervaluing a baked-in drama from its past, but also the push and pull between striking a seriously conveyed message while occasionally dipping into a tonally jarring sense of humor.
War Between follows the suddenly upended life of Barclay Pierre-Dupont (Russell Tovey, marking a return to the Who universe after playing Midshipman Alonso Frame fifteen years ago; my, how time flies), a low-level logistics clerk working for the Unified Intelligence Task Force who finds himself on the front lines of humanity re-encountering the aquatic precursor race who lived on planet Earth millions of years before them, the Sea Devils.
Now dubbed the more diplomatically amiable “Homo Aqua”—”Sea Devil” is used once pejoratively, as is a truly awkwardly clumsy homophobic joke about the new name, but the classic naming isn’t brought up again beyond that—the species has re-emerged from the oceans in the wake of the killing of a scout by scared fishermen. Both sides have already drawn blood, but after a hurried scramble by UNIT in the wake of Homo Aqua publicly re-unveiling itself to the entire planet, the stage is set for a tense negotiation between denizens of the land and sea to decide the future of Earth as we currently know it. A negotiation that only becomes more complicated for both sides when Homo Aqua’s leading representative, the mysterious Salt (a more humanoid variant of the species akin to Doctor Who‘s own revitization of the Sea Devils’ sister species, the Silurians, and played by another Doctor Who alum this time in Loki‘s Gugu Mbatha-Raw), demands that humanity’s ambassador for the peace talks be replaced by an incredibly out-of-his-depth Barclay.
Across its slow-paced opening episodes (contemporary Doctor Who this is not; the modern miniseries format almost feeling akin to the classic era of the show’s serialized framing), War Between yearns to be a show that is taken seriously. Without the Doctor to fall back on, replacing a know-it-all alien hero with Barclay’s affably baffled everyman persona, the series envisions a more grounded approach to the idea of humanity’s first major contact with another sentient species. By and large, this means the show trades broad adventure spectacle for scene after scene of people in suits hurriedly whispering to each other and moving in and out of rooms or standing behind computer-monitor-laden desks (outside of a particularly effective sequence in the second episode, where Salt aggressively negotiates with Earth by dumping all its plastic waste back onto land). But it also means that, with all the subtlety of its parent show at times, War Between wants you to know that it is a show with Something to Say as much as it actually wants to have something to say.
That something is, perhaps unsurprisingly given the premise, climate change. It’s here that War Between is bursting with its most potential, with Homo Aqua serving as an aggressive catalyst to try and shake humankind out of its lacking response to the climate crisis, an example of what Doctor Who can be at its very best, utilizing its sci-fi premise to push a politically charged message around the world in which we live.
Although Barclay and the human diplomatic contingent preparing to meet with Homo Aqua initially think demands will be made over territorial occupancy, from the get-go Salt repeatedly makes it clear that the issue here is strictly humanity’s failings to look after the waterways of Earth, slowly poisoning the beings that still live and sleep deep beneath them.
The show gets to dig into this reaction on a logistical level, as Homo Aqua demands the nations of the world immediately adapt to resolving the crisis, and a personal one, as the series frames this us-vs-them, elite-vs-everyman framing between Salt and Barclay, the former seemingly in a position of power in Homo Aqua society, the latter utilizing his sudden prominence in the negotiations to bristle at the average person’s sufferance at the hands of out-of-touch politicians and business magnates twiddling their thumbs while the planet burns.
There’s plenty of time for the show to devolve into a more typically Doctor Who-y plot of a monster invasion, but for now, War Between‘s key conflict is rooted in conveying a sense of realism the parent show doesn’t always have the time to really dig into, anchored in a sizzling chemistry between Tovey and Mbatha-Raw (even though the latter spends her entire time in the series so far standing in one spot being somewhat menacing).
Unfortunately, that fascinating core is bogged down by pretty much everything else in the show so far. When it’s not depicting grim-faced negotiations and political shuffling, occasionally War Between feels like it has to (with an almost sense of embarrassment, even despite prominently featuring people in elaborate visual effects makeup as sentient fish people) remind you that it is a Doctor Who spinoff, if not by namedropping elements from the parent show—although the show does screech to a halt to mention the Doctor briefly in both episodes—then with awkwardly inserted gags and moments of levity that never really land.
It doesn’t help that War Between is following in the footsteps of other Doctor Who stories that have envisioned moments of crisis without the Doctor to save us—both within the show itself with stories like “Turn Left” and, more pointedly in comparison to War Between, Torchwood: Children of Earth, which executes this similar premise with a far graver and more compelling tone—leading to a tonal whiplash that, combined with the slow pacing, begins to give you a sinking feeling that War Between is already running out of gas, not knowing how to capitalize on the potential of its incredible core idea.
That strange feeling of needing to be reminded that this both is and isn’t Doctor Who also applies to War Between‘s lens outside of the climate crisis messaging: the Doctor Who elements it’s playing with. Both of these issues are wrapped up in the other major factor in the series, its leverage of UNIT as the main connecting point between the politicians of the world, Barclay, Homo Aqua, and even Doctor Who itself.
For all the lack of subtlety the series champions in communicating its thoughts on the climate crisis, War Between is so far distinctly not interested in examining UNIT as a purportedly independent tool of state power with a critical eye. The series is co-written by Pete McTighe, who wrote “Lucky Day” for this year’s season of Doctor Who, and War Between continues that story’s limited critique of UNIT, and if anything, backs even further away from its limited bite: in War Between there are a few aspersions to the organization not having friends in other nations or upper echelons of society, but generally UNIT is treated as the Cool Good Guys up against the Actual Baddies (scheming businessmen and politicians), even when they’re leveraging an advanced surveillance network to immediately obliterate Barclay’s private life when he’s thrust into the spotlight or when they’re sending armed soldiers to detain his family. Sure, there’s not a chintzy-looking robot suit sitting in the corner of Kate’s team meetings, so everything has a more grounded air to it, but War Between‘s failure to interrogate UNIT with the same self-seriousness it treats its climate messaging feels compromised, and not even in an interesting way.
That’s further compounded by the fact that, so far at least, the show is unwilling to use UNIT and its history with Homo Aqua to create interesting drama. As much as the show wants to clunkily namedrop the Doctor once an episode, War Between seems decidedly uninterested in Kate Lethbridge-Stewart as anything other than a woman standing behind a monitor or a disapproving voice in Barclay’s earpiece, not touching upon her father’s past with the Sea Devils and the Silurians or humanity’s checkered past with going behind the Doctor’s back to push back Earth’s former dominant societies back beneath the waves.
That feels like an easy way for War Between to have its cake and eat it when it comes to both its desire for a more serious tone and a relationship to its parent show, but instead its opening episodes occupy this awkward halfway point where they can’t quite be Doctor Who, and yet also don’t quite want to be, leaving the series to gesture at potential rather than really engage with it on a meaningful level. There’s still time for War Between to dig deeper in its remaining episodes, but so far, for all the gestures at life beneath the waters, it’s all feeling a bit surface level.
The War Between the Land and the Sea is airing weekly throughout December in the UK on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. The series will stream on Disney+ internationally some time in 2026.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Read the full article here
