TV Review The War Between The Land And The Sea Episodes 3 And 4 December 2026

Doctor Who TARDIS - FAB Cafe, Manchester

Spoilers

After quite a strong thought provoking epic scaled opening pair of episodes, the Doctor Who Spin Off has rapidly gone off the deep end for the third and fourth parts of the five part series.

I was already thinking that the bromance between Barclay & Salt was going to get more overtly romantic as they went for a ‘The Sound Of Water/Splash’ relationship of man and amphibious reptile in love twist, though I thought that would come to the boil at the end rather than midway through the series. It now changes the dynamic and focus of everything.

Even as the ambassador microsub/bathysphere is making its Cameron-esque Abyss descent, the plot was starting to move along cliched obvious lines. As soon as the chap on board proudly, freely presented his ‘globe’ gift to the others to see my first thought was ‘bomb’. I expected him to leave it with the sea devils as negotiations ended rather than being a suicide bomber though. Why was his ‘gift ’not checked by UNIT security? He wasn’t even hiding the box. It would also have added extra weight and clutter to the already cramped submersible. Even after the detonation when UNIT check up on him, they only then find (in plain sight on computer files) his nothing more to lose cancer and dodgy political connections. The time to find this stuff out is during recruitment and hiring and after every activity. Not after someone goes off the rails.

Once in the Sea Devil membrane chambers, Salt draws Barclay away from the others and immediately reveals her affection to him pretty much out of nowhere. Not only does that fail to raise questions for Barclay’s colleagues who just finally turn a corner and catch up, we see nothing from the sea devils on how they feel about Salt starting to let her feelings affect her judgement or their agenda’d mission at hand. Sad to see them kill off General Pierce, one of the best performances of the series. He was great in Torchwood too.

Doctor Who TARDIS - Manchester Town Hall

As the bomb is triggered, Barclay saves the sea devils though the flood kills all the humans except Barclay, saved by Salt’s love, and a bends free instant ascent to the surface from a trench even deeper than the Mariana.

The political shenagins only hinted at in the previous episodes now erupt into the open with the greedy capitalists coming out openly to the viewers as flat-out panto villains. It is quite a shock when their attempt to assassinate Kate Stewart ends up killing her action man – eagle eyed enough to see laser sighting markers boyfriend on her – I did like that her UNIT allies knew about the relationship but didn’t care. Kate then not only doesn’t get forced to take recovery leave but gets left free to wander around outside with no security protection whatsoever in case the killers decide to have another go.

Given that the title promises war, the sea devils actually take the assassination terrorism attack on them quite stoicly, replacing Salt with a more hardline negotiator, though he gives us five years to get our act together before he rusts us out when Salt never backed down from sort the pollution out immediately. Why they don’t now just immediately rust us out and have done with it is unclear. How many ‘one last chance’ threats are we going to get? Still no action from ‘Big Fish’. It seems to be entirely an ornamental accessory.

We are shown that Salt is set up with a fake news conspiracy (even though her eloping with the dry thing is grounds enough for her own people to ostracize her. Their hive mentality tandem breathing stuff seems to have gone out the window here. We don’t get to see any sea devils negotiating/making any decisions on how to handle her. We only have Salt’s word that the Sea Devils will want to kill her now.

Barclay & Salt are now in a full on Montague-Capulet struggle, caught between the Devils and the deep blue... Barclay’s family don’t yet seem to have twigged that he seems to be on the brink of dumping them for a mermaid.

Kate’s stand off on the bridge, turning army and UNIT troops to a War Between The Land & The Land footing was pretty tense.

The trouble is that the personal one to one love affair now seriously overshadows the global crisis scenario of the opening episodes. The single remaining episode now has to end the war that never really fully started, have Kate close down the civil war in her own military, bring down the Severance conspirators and PM, establish where we go from here in literally cleaning up the planet, and RTD shows if he decided if Barclay & Salt swim off happily ever after or part ways. It’s a lot to pack in.

Photos taken by myself.

Arthur Chappell