remaining three episodes of war betweenFollowing its premiere the revived Sea Devils spent a lot of time playing up the political relationship between the Sea Devils – reborn as “Homo Aqua” – and humanity, spending its time clearly wasting the vague, yet interesting, climate change message that was at the core of that plot in order to focus on establishing the burgeoning romantic relationship between Salt (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Barclay (Russell Tovey).
Despite Mbatha-Raw and Tovey’s chemistry, after a diplomatic mission beneath the waves in the territory of Homo Aqua is interrupted by a double agent leaving a bomb to kill human and aquakind attendees alike, romance is what suddenly becomes the primary driving theme, with the former saving the latter. war between comes across as a great value shape of waterBarkley’s fascination with Salt above anything else is never really given any time to develop, leading him to go 0-100 in no time, but it is Salt who suffers the most humiliation in the process, no longer presented as Barkley’s political counterpart and advocate, war betweenThe most radical notions of the climate crisis, and instead flattened into a walking embodiment of the “born sexy tomorrow” trope, are thematically and narratively thrown out of the picture for most of the show’s middle act after Barclay rescues her from Unit custody.
This jarring pivot in focus is largely symbolic war betweenThe worst of the issues: The series simply can’t, moment to moment, on every level, commit to an idea of what it wants to be or say, which makes it completely unimportant from both a thematic standpoint and a narratively logical standpoint. am a doctor Universe. In some ways, it was a poison pill cooked up on the show’s own premises – more often than not, a am a doctor The story about the Doctor’s absence ultimately has little impact outside of that particular story, both because it raises the question of what it takes for the Doctor to involve himself in a given crisis and because it raises the question of how “mandatory” a spinoff series might feel. am a doctorThe status quo is moving forward.
war between The idea of water and mankind negotiating a harmonious, symbiotic approach to their shared existence on Earth could never be accomplished, because it would fall apart. am a doctorThe depiction of the “real” Earth is a step beyond our own reality. But instead of playing within that tight constraint to tell a contained but still interesting story, war between Tried to move on to a larger scale, but was unable to perform on that scale satisfactorily, abandoning anything that gave him weight as he staggered towards a tangled end.
Several times in the series, both sides announce to each other that the titular war is coming, that it’s here, that it’s over, but we don’t actually get to see that conflict, because Homo Aqua, after raising uncomfortably true concerns about humanity’s role in climate change, is the first to be rendered unforgivably villainous – which is done in the final episode’s bizarre opening sequence in which Homo Aqua retaliates by summoning, capturing, and eating. Has been shown. every dog on the planetA scenario that plays out within a matter of minutes and is never touched upon again – and then effectively ceases to be an ongoing concern, doing so through an ill-explained engineered virus called “Severance”, which ultimately kills off all but 10% of the aquatic creatures shortly after being introduced in the tail end of the show’s final episode.
The apparent genocide of Homo Aqua by humanity would be a fascinatingly bleak point to end the show, but war between Don’t really care. The destruction and surrender of Homo Aqua is enacted and resolved in the back half of the show’s final episode, leading to war between Its human players get very little time to grapple with the moral value it carries (a few brief, awkwardly inserted flashforwards imply that the remains of Homo Aqua will find their way to the direct individuals responsible for the deployment of the Severance, but that’s about it). Instead, it continues to focus on Barclay and Salt, now rewarded for their collaboration with a minority species who have been slowly transformed into aquatic creature/human hybrids, the only ones allowed to live among the remains of Homo aqua at the cost of leaving their human lives behind.
This lack of care is widespread war betweenStory thread of. Homo Aqua’s radical efforts to convert humanity into action have little effect as soon as they begin. Episode two climaxes with Salt dumping every piece of trash in the water onto the land, effectively burying the planet in trash and severely disrupting the logical underpinnings of society, but by episode five, that issue has been wiped into the background, never to be touched upon again. The series’ continued failure to question UNIT’s role as an organization that is gleefully obsessed with weaponizing a surveillance state only amplifies the issues raised by series co-creator Pete McTee in his 2025. am a doctor The episode “Lucky Day”, climaxes not with self-reckoning, but with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart threatening to expose her husband’s infidelity to her personal physician (why). does Does the unit have access to that type of personal monitoring? The show doesn’t care; It’s just good hero detective stuff) If she doesn’t let him play a role in the ongoing conversation, it’s our hero’s victory, and by the end of the show, it’s so consistent that Kate starts threatening serious invasion of privacy as a joke.
this is kate war between In fact, ends with a bizarre and symbolic scene war betweenAn incomprehensible idea of tone or message. After sending Barclay and Salt off to live a new life together under water, she meets a runner on the beach who carelessly tosses her water bottle as trash. final shot of war between– final shot of am a doctorIn the Disney era, by this time the following year – in the final shots of the franchise – an increasingly angry and frantic Kate has pulled her gun on the runner, repeatedly yelling for him to pick up the bottle as his finger gets closer to the trigger.
Tonally it immediately follows an extended, dialogue-less sequence of Barclay and Salt reuniting set to a Goldfrapp cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes,” so it would almost be funny if the show weren’t suddenly trying to present it as a serious, dark moment. It’s a strange ending comment on the character of Kate (for now, at least), who was introduced 13 years ago as a level-headed, “science-led” future moving away from UNIT’s militarized past. But it’s also the show’s literal final minutes suddenly returning to an idea it had largely abandoned for most of its runtime, as if it finally remembered that it once yearned to be a show that actually had a point, and by addressing it in its dying gasps, the journey to get there meant something.
This is a symbolic note am a doctorA terrible year to go, marking the end of an era that had so much promise and potential when it began just two years earlier and mired in an aimless malaise that messed up the series’ ability to truly commit to commentary and reflection of the world we live in through its sci-fi lens. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the less-than-amicable breakup between Disney and the BBC has resulted in much of the world not being able to watch legally. war between Until some vague point next year, when it will be removed altogether without fanfare: a show with nothing to say, buried so deep that it will never be thought of again.
war between land and sea It is now streaming in its entirety on BBC iPlayer in the UK. The series will stream on Disney+ internationally sometime in 2026.
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