Posted in: BBC, Current News, Doctor Who, Review, TV | Tagged: doctor who, the war between the land and the sea

Doctor Who: The War Between Emo Melodrama and Dumb Plot Holes

The finale of Doctor Who spinoff The War Between The Land and The Sea ends with plot holes, an unconvincing love story, and sloppy writing.

And lo, the Doctor Who spinoff The War Between the Land and the Sea came to an end. Does it stick the landing? Well, it might have worked better if the writing had made any sense. The problem is that the entire series had an escalating number of plot holes, which made it increasingly nonsensical. The pacing was also off, so the big apocalyptic events that were supposed to drive the plot just came and went with little real impact, while the unconvincing love story took center stage to diminishing returns. Oh, and a grief-stricken Kate Lethbridge-Stewart is seriously losing but refuses to step down from her job, even hilariously and horribly blackmailing her therapist into not only giving her a clean bill of health but also upping her medication so she can see this crisis through.

The finale starts with Aquakind kidnapping and eating everyone's pet dog. This feels not disturbing as much as a bad joke. The fish people are now melting the polar ice caps, which threatens to drown the surface world. A sidelined Barclay (Russell Tovey) is heartbroken about Salt (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), while he feels changes to his body as he slowly transforms into a fish man. He keeps sneaking out every night from his security detail to go to the beach, trying to reach Salt telepathically to no avail. Meanwhile, Kate and U.N.I.T. are trying to figure out what the Openly Gloating Evil Three (the UK Prime Minister, the US General, and the French General) are plotting to get an edge over the Aquakind and end the war. The Openly Gloating Evil Three's plan turns out to involve using Barclay to deliver the type of victory that's a genocidal act of imperialism reminiscent of what the US Government did to the Native Americans in a blaringly obvious analogy. All of these plot points sound perfectly solid, but the execution was so arbitrary that it deflated any real dramatic impact from the story like air out of a balloon.

Doctor Who: The Plotholes Between The Land and The Sea

The first two episodes of The War Between the Land and the Sea set up a premise that was intense and urgent in ways fans wish Doctor Who could be. After that, cracks began to show at nearly every turn: Why didn't the Aquakind have technology that checked for weapons the diplomatic party might have brought? Why doesn't Kate have bodyguards or at least reinforced bulletproof glass in her apartment? Why does the British government COBRA meeting (the UK's security defense briefing) have only three obviously evil people who AREN'T EVEN PART OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT?! It's an evil US general, an evil French general, and an evil millionaire businessman who donated to the Prime Minister's party, but where are the British generals, the heads of the intelligence services, the Home Secretary, the Defense Secretary, and the experts? That was where the show lost me. Everything dramatic that happened seemed to happen too quickly and easily in that "because I say so" manner of lazy screenwriting. Too much of the writing was vague when screenwriting requires precision and specificity.

The entire series teetered on the biggest plot hole of all, as deep as the Mariana Trench: The Aquakind had technology far in advance of the humans. If human pollution had been killing them and their children daily, why do the Aquakind want to even bother to negotiate when they could just wipe out the human race in just a few days? They could have just killed all the humans without announcing any need to talk and gotten on with their lives.

Dumping all the plastic waste in the sea back on the surface world is an environmental disaster that's already world-ending. The global economy would have died right there, rather than the government characters fretting that agreeing to Aquakind's terms would take too long and destroy the economy when it's already been destroyed. Yet there's no mention or depiction of the plastic waste after the second episode. If the Aquakind are already so powerful, nothing they did made any sense. Why would they expect the humans to behave better when it's clear they never will? Then, suddenly, in the finale, the Evil Three can just suddenly wipe out the Aquakind at the drop of a hat? Just because the script says so? It's cheap, lazy, inauthentic, and unearned. It's like the plot was an afterthought to character scenes where the main characters sell the emotional moments, moments founded on a shaky foundation, barely redeemed by great acting.

A Rushed, Unconvincing Love Story Overshadows The Whole Finale

If you're rooting for fish fuckers, you might be happy. Sure, it took the genocide of virtually an entire species, but the lovers are together at the end. This seems to be Russell T. Davies' fanfic remake of Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, albeit with some half-baked political elements. Yay? Russell Tovey and Gugu Mbatha-Raw have great chemistry and act their hearts out to sell the love story between Barclay and Salt. They're so good they could have chemistry with furniture, but the flawed pacing of the series made the romance feel rushed and almost gratuitous, like it's there because the genre demands it be there. The problem is that the final script placed it above everything else. The Big Guys won off-screen without the heroes being completely aware of their evil plot. The heroes ultimately did nothing to stop the bad guys or save the day. Just because the script says so.

Could This be Why Disney+ Hasn't Announced a Streaming Date?

Are all the above storytelling problems the real reason Disney+ hasn't announced a date for global streaming? Could the Disney executives have watched all five episodes and went, "WTF?" It's ironic that James Cameron's Avatar: Ash and Fire opened this same weekend as The War Between the Land and the Sea. It conveys a very similar environmentalist message more successfully than the Doctor Who spinoff does. And don't get your hopes up about the end credits scene that Davies has been hyping up. It doesn't move the needle on the future of Doctor Who at all. It's already been turned into a jokey meme by the internet as of Monday morning.

The War Between the Land and the Sea is only available on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK, exclusively for BBC licence fee holders. Disney has not yet announced a streaming date for the rest of the world.

The War Between The Land and The Sea

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Review by Adi Tantimedh

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6/10

Rarely has an entire TV series gone downhill this quickly after a good pilot episode and setup full of potential. The show has beeb filled with an escalating series of plot holes with the finale feeling flat with occasionally bursts of unearned emotional payoffs due to sloppy pacing and "because we say so" writing, with the rushed and unconvincing love story taking up too much space in the finale, overshadowing the genocide that was supposed to be the tragic dramatic payoff.

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