There’s a particular kind of British television that believes the act of caring about something—really, visibly caring—exempts it from the requirement to be any good. “The War Between the Land and the Sea,” the new Doctor Who spin-off from Russell T Davies, is practically suffocating under the weight of its own earnestness. The premise is there: humanity has polluted the oceans to such a degree that Earth’s original aquatic inhabitants, creatures we once called the Sea Devils, have risen from the depths to demand we stop treating their home as a garbage dump. In one scene, trash literally rains from the sky—plastic bags, anchors, and in a moment of sublime absurdity, what appears to be the Titanic—as if the writers feared we might miss the point. We don’t miss the point. The point is bludgeoning us about the head with a recycled water bottle.
Russell Tovey stars as Barclay, an ordinary man inexplicably chosen by the sea creatures to serve as humanity’s ambassador in negotiations that could determine whether we go to war with beings who control seventy percent of the planet’s surface. Tovey is an actor of considerable charm, and he brings a wounded vulnerability to the role that almost works. There’s something appealingly hapless about him, a quality of being perpetually in over his head that the show exploits without ever quite justifying. Why would ancient, sophisticated beings who’ve watched humanity befoul their world for centuries choose this particular weepy Englishman as their interlocutor? The answer seems to be that the plot needed him there, and Davies trusts that Tovey’s puppy-dog eyes will carry us past the logical chasms.
The show operates on two registers simultaneously, neither of which it commits to fully. On one hand, it wants the diplomatic tension of grown-up science fiction, the kind of species-level negotiations you might find in a thoughtful space opera. The sea creatures—now called “homo aqua” in a taxonomic flourish that would make any biologist wince, given they’re clearly meant to be reptilian—make demands that are, on their face, completely unreasonable. They want all the oceans, all the waterways, and the airspace above them. They want, in essence, to render human civilization impossible. There’s potential drama in this, the tragedy of two species who cannot find middle ground because the middle ground has been polluted beyond recognition. But the show is too busy lecturing to explore it.
And here we arrive at the fundamental problem: “The War Between the Land and the Sea” doesn’t trust its audience for a moment. Every scene comes pre-annotated with meaning. The musical score, that inescapable symphonic presence, refuses to let a single beat pass without instructing us exactly how to feel. It’s there when characters are talking. It’s there when they’re silent. It’s there during what should be moments of quiet revelation, swelling with such insistent drama that you half expect someone to announce that nuclear warheads are falling when they manifestly are not. I found myself longing for the show to simply shut up for thirty consecutive seconds, to let dialogue breathe, to trust that Russell Tovey’s face might convey emotion without orchestral underlining.
The production values are, admittedly, impressive—Disney money has its uses. The underwater sets and creature designs suggest genuine ambition, and there are shots that achieve a kind of alien grandeur. The visual effects department has clearly worked hard, though the CGI on the more piscine creatures occasionally wobbles into the uncanny valley. But spectacle without narrative purpose is merely expensive wallpaper. The show looks like it cost a fortune, and somehow that makes its storytelling deficiencies more glaring, not less. If you can afford practical effects this elaborate, surely you can afford a script doctor to ask why the American news reporters sound like they learned their accents from a British person doing an impression of a bad American film.
There’s also the matter of what the show seems to think it’s saying versus what it’s actually saying. The environmental message is urgent and real—our oceans are in genuine crisis, choked with plastic, warming, dying. But the show’s approach to this reality is so heavy-handed that it risks inoculating viewers against the very concerns it raises. When you’re being hectored by a fish person about your carbon footprint while the Titanic descends from the heavens, the instinct is not reflection but resistance. Good political art works through implication, through feeling, through the slow accumulation of emotional truth. “The War Between the Land and the Sea” works through PowerPoint slides with aquatic themes.
Jemma Redgrave returns as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, head of UNIT, and she brings the necessary authority to her scenes. Her subplot with a younger romantic partner has drawn sneers from certain quarters, though it strikes me as one of the show’s more human touches—a brief acknowledgment that people have lives beyond alien invasions. Gugu Mbatha-Raw appears as a sea creature ambassador, and she manages something close to grace in a role that requires her to toggle between ethereal dignity and sudden rage. The moment when her character shifts gender presentation upon becoming angry is either a bold piece of alien worldbuilding or a choice that the show hasn’t thought through carefully enough; I genuinely cannot tell which.
The plot itself, what there is of it, feels borrowed from several sources without improving upon any of them. The basic premise—ancient aquatic race wages war on polluting surface-dwellers—has been the stuff of comic books for decades. Aquaman got there. The Sub-Mariner got there first. What’s new here is supposed to be the specifically British UNIT framing and the Doctor Who mythology, but these elements feel like brand extensions rather than creative necessities. You could remove every reference to the Whoniverse and the story would function identically, which suggests the spin-off is less about expanding a creative vision than capitalizing on an existing audience.
Two episodes in, I find myself in an uncomfortable position: interested enough to continue, yet not entertained enough to recommend the experience. The show is not without defenders, and they’re not wrong that some of the criticism has come from predictable directions. But pointing to the existence of bad-faith attacks doesn’t make the good-faith problems disappear. “The War Between the Land and the Sea” remains, for all its budgetary confidence, a B-grade production with A-grade pretensions—the kind of show that mistakes volume for vision and sincerity for craft.
The trash may fall from the sky, but it’s the show itself that can’t quite stay afloat.
