Wherefore Doctor Who? After months of speculation, the series bowed out spectacularly in June, when Ncuti Gatwa’s Fourteenth Doctor regenerated into Billie Piper.
Yes, you read that right. Now, unsurprisingly, the show is on hiatus (I assume Billie Piper did not want to return for a Christmas special), which means our annual dose of Who comes from this wordily titled spinoff.
Penned, once again, by Russell T. Davies, The War Between the Land and the Sea takes us away from high-octane chase sequences and Daleks in favour of, um, diplomacy.
After millennia spent believing themselves the superior lifeforms on the planet, the human race is in for a rude awakening. The Sea Devils (diplomatically renamed Homo Aqua following their 1972 debut in the ninth season of Dr Who), dormant under the Earth’s surface for millions of years, are stirring from their slumber. Now they’re awake, though, they would actually quite like it back, thanks.
As humanity scrambles to respond, our point person for all this chaos is Barclay (Russell Tovey, who has the panicked squeaky voice nailed down at this point). He’s a lowly UNIT (Unified Intelligence Taskforce) grunt who accidentally got listed as the stand-in for a high-ranking alien expert.
When that expert is out of commission, it’s Barclay who gets called up to serve when a group of Spanish fishermen shoot a Sea Devil dead. Despite his increasingly shrill protestations that he shouldn’t be there, he soon finds himself on a plane to Spain, and in way over his head.
One thing leads to another, and soon enough he’s serving as part of the human delegation when diplomatic talks with Homo Aqua commence. It’s all rather convoluted, to be honest, and some of the plot developments have a faint whiff of eye-roll to them, but Tovey commits to it utterly, and his air of comedic desperation is enough to see things through.
For better or worse, this is an extremely Russell T. Davies-esque show. There’s an everyman called upon to save the day (see: Barclay failing his way up the chain of command); there are touches of wry humour and observation.
There’s a slab-load of preaching, this time about how humanity is destroying the planet and polluting the seas (fair enough; we are). And there’s a not-so-veiled critique of the ineffectiveness of authority figures and (gasp) businessmen – many of whom are here reduced to cartoon baddies. After a while, you begin to wish that the Doctor would swoop back in and set things right.
Providing the foil for Barclay is Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who is slathered in prosthetics, Avatar-style, to play Salt, the de-facto monarch of the Sea Devils, who can nevertheless speak perfect English.
She’s a commanding presence – as is Jemma Redgrave, who returns to play the UNIT commander Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. And as the two women clash during the increasingly fraught negotiations, Barclay finds himself essentially caught in the middle.
Make no mistake: this isn’t a kid’s show. It feels like Davies is trying to do something more adult here, teasing out themes Who likes to touch on, but transporting them to a setting where he can explore them properly.
There’s not much action; what there is instead is a lot of weighty grappling with the notions of stewardship, responsibility and power. Much of the show’s first two episodes, which I was given to watch, takes place in a courtroom-style debating chamber, where the two races attempt to engage in talks.
Whether it will move past the po-faced diplomacy and into something a bit more exciting remains to be seen. But it’s a thoughtful watch, and pleasingly different to Who itself. Spare a thought for the actors wearing all those prosthetics, though.
Streaming now on BBC One and iPlayer
