TV Review The War Between The Land And The Sea Episode 5 December 2026 The End Of The War
- arthurpeterchappell
- Dec 22, 2025
- 3 min read
Spoilers
The preceding two parter jumped the shark - the finale jumped down its throat and out through it’s bum. Much unexplained and the remainder made no sense. We never saw the Big Fish do anything.
Barclay & Salt get very little time together. Kate wanders round sad, makes empty threats to the conspirators and threatens to shoot a guy for littering. Earlier in the episode she quite coldly blackmails her therapist into prescribing her stronger anti-depressants than she is entitled too which is dangerous and corrupt. She wants to stay in work but does nothing there anyway.
The central plot is that the Severance Conspirators release a virus that slaughters 90% of the Sea Devils and the survivors surrender, even though they still have the upper hand and potential to wipe us all out on the spot.
Though giving us five years to get our act together the sea devils steal/eat all the dogs (at least those by the coast. It’s a long way to go in response to a whistled summons for a pooch from Oldham). The melting of the ice caps, the rust, and other threats should still be possible to inflict even by the last 10% of the sea devils and given what we did to them we deserve it. Instead, they agree to be relocated to some set deep trench reservation (like Native Americans suffered?), even though Salt still shows they will kill the conspirators and the PM with water at some point (we see them imagining their fates or a flash forward to it happening).
Much hinges on Barclay thinking he is clever in sneaking out to yell Salt's name in the surf every night. That they let him do it and finally let her hear him after they perform some sort of complex mission impossible operation on him. What I thought retrospectively was that they make him the carrier/transmitter for the Severance virus – infecting Salt with the kiss and embrace, but it is never revealed to him or the viewers either. Also, Salt is a/. Alienated from the sea devils for going rogue from her love of Barclay and supposedly going to be killed if her own kind catch her – so she daren’t even go in the water only to then go in the sea for a long swim about to escape us. So she shouldn't even get near enough to them to infect any of them. B/. After the massacre she again becomes the main spokesperson for the sea devils in revealing their surrender plan. Presumably Tide was killed off-screen by the virus but why would the surviving sea devils trust Salt to take the job on again? C/. Salt herself conveniently survives the virus that most likely triggered through her.
How did the survivors survive? A/. They never caught the virus. B/. They caught it but somehow came through it alive. If the latter, they seem immune to it and may only fear more chemical warfare including fresh strains of the same virus, but they still have tech and powers to kill all land life pretty quickly. Why don't they do that instead of ending the war )that never really got past being a cold war).
We do not see this Reservation trench. I was unsure if it is an inland flooded deep shaft or a located stretch of ocean somewhere. All we see is Salt give Barclay gills and them swim off into the depths of the open sea with Kate looking on approvingly before becoming a Womble with a handgun.
The Strength of the Severance plot rendered much we saw irrelevant. Barclay – Salt's love affair didn’t stop it and might even have given the conspirators the means to do what they did, and why even bother assassinating their own ambassadors at the undersea summit if they already planned to kill the effective protesters? That even seems to be the closing message of this – Make too strong a case for why we need to fix the planet and we’ll kill you.
Arthur Chappell
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