[COLUMN] The War Between the Land and the Sea is a 1970s Doctor Who Adventure Written for Modern Audiences | by Darren Mooney

Note: Disney have yet to announce an international streaming date for The War Between the Land and the Sea, the five-episode Doctor Who spin-off. However, it aired in the United Kingdom in December and recently released on a really nice blu-ray collection, so it felt like an appropriate time to publish this piece on it. I had a pretty good time with it. I found it very charming and endearing as a love letter to the artistry of seventies Doctor Who. Note that this article does contain spoilers for the endings of various reptile-centric episodes of Doctor Who.

When promoting his relaunch of Doctor Who, showrunner Russell T. Davies was always careful to credit the writers who worked on the classic series. He singled out Robert Holmes, one of the most prolific writers of classic Doctor Who. “When the history of television drama comes to be written, Robert won't be remembered at all because he only wrote genre stuff,” Davies lamented. “And that, I reckon, is a real tragedy.”

In some ways, The War Between the Land and the Sea feels like Davies relitigating that quote. When Davies took over Doctor Who, he was one of the most promising writers working in British television, having created Queer as Folk and Second Coming. It was perhaps strange that such a respected writer would risk so much of his capital on reviving a frankly naff low-budget British television series that had been cancelled nearly two decades prior.

Modern Doctor Who writers like Davies and his successor Steven Moffat are well-regarded in the industry due to their work outside the franchise. Moffat co-created Sherlock and Doctor Who, and recently wrote Douglas is Cancelled. In the space between his two tenures as showrunner of Doctor Who, Davies wrote miniseries like A Very English Scandal, Years and Years and It’s a Sin. Classic Doctor Who writers like Robert Holmes never got the luxury of that prestige or platform.

Over the course of its history, Doctor Who has been reinvented countless times. Some of these eras are more popular than others, while some are more quietly influential. Davies’ relaunch of Doctor Who owed a lot to the tenure of actor Jon Pertwee, the show’s transition to color overseen by producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks. This influence is extremely apparent. Davies’ first episode “Rose” lifts a lot of its cues directly from “Spearhead from Space”, the first Pertwee story, down to the choice of monsters, the Autons.

Part of the magic of the reinvention by Lett and Dicks was the decision to strand the Doctor (Pertwee) on Earth and surround him with a human paramilitary force known as U.N.I.T., which was originally the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce but which evolved into the Unified Intelligence Taskforce. The Doctor tended to face alien invasions and science run amok, a remarkable reinvention of the show’s classic format starting with “Spearhead from Space”, written by Holmes.

However, the second story of that era – known varyingly as “Doctor Who and the Silurians”, “… and the Silurians” or just “The Silurians” – was also quite impactful. Cleverly inverting the alien invasion format, “The Silurians” revealed that Earth was home to a race of reptilian humanoids who evolved alongside the dinosaurs and who predate mankind. Naturally, this long-lost slumbering civilization awakens and finds itself thrown into conflict with the new inhabitants of the planet.

“The Silurians” proved a remarkably resilient science-fiction concept. It was followed a couple of seasons later by “The Sea Devils”, what is essentially a loose remake of “The Silurians” focusing on a race of aquatic reptiles who have been awakened. A decade or so later, “Warriors of the Deep” would embrace fannish lore-building and reveal that the Silurians and the Sea Devils were genetically related to one another, their destinies intertwined. It recently screened at the British Film Institute.

Even though these two species didn’t appear anywhere near as frequently as Doctor Who regulars like the Daleks, the Cybermen or even the Sontarans, they remained central to the franchise’s mythology. Chris Chibnall penned “The Hungry Earth”, a loose remake of “The Silurians” set in a British mining town. He would also revive the Sea Devils in “The Legend of the Sea Devils.” Steven Moffat created the recurring Victorian era Silurian detective Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh).

Still, it was interesting that Russell T. Davies would choose to make the Sea Devils the focus of the first proper spin-off from his second tenure as showrunner of Doctor Who, particularly considering how poorly “The Legend of the Sea Devils” had been received. Between that and “Warriors of the Deep”, the Sea Devils don’t have the strongest track record. Davies had spun an event miniseries out of Doctor Who before with Torchwood: Children of Earth, which is on the very short list of the best Doctor Who ever written, but a five-episode series about the Sea Devils was a strange choice.

However, watching the miniseries, Davies’ intentions become a little clearer. The War Between the Land and the Sea is not quite the mature and relentless tragedy that Children of Earth was, a strong contender for the most depressing piece of Doctor Who ever broadcast on television. Instead, The War Between the Land and the Sea is Davies’ very earnest love letter to those writers who worked on classic Doctor Who, an attempt to demonstrate their ideas could have worked – and could work today – as prime-time television drama.

Of course, “The Silurians” and “The Sea Devils” were not written by Robert Holmes. They were written by another hugely important creative figure in the history of Doctor Who. Malcolm Hulke was a card-carrying member of the British Communist Party who reliably turned out (at least) one story in each of Pertwee’s five seasons, often involving some combination of political conspiracies and reptilian monsters. That is a pretty distinctive creative calling card.

Davies was quick to single out Hulke in interviews promoting the show. “Doctor Who has a rich history, and Malcolm Hulke was the writer who first dreamt up the concept of the Sea Devils – a race of creatures who lived on our planet long before us,” Davies explained of the show’s inspirations. “This show stands as a tribute to him and his idea, really.” There is something very endearing and very earnest in this, a clear desire to celebrate the show’s history that extends beyond fan service.

Indeed, Davies’ second tenure has seen a renewed engagement with the show’s past. Tales of the TARDIS provided a framework to air classic serials, introduced in-character by the actors who starred in them. Davies’ tenure has also seen the BBC produce and air truncated and colorized versions of classic serials like “The Daleks” and “The War Games” as a way to make the show’s history more accessible to younger audiences.

The War Between the Land and the Sea was paired with a similar re-edit of “The Sea Devils”, including new musical material from Mission: Impossible composer Lorne Balfe. Editor Benjamin Cook cut the six-episode serial from March 1972 into a tight ninety-minute adventure, employing modern techniques like cross-cutting and montage to accelerate the plot while retaining the core of the story. It’s proof that the bones of The Sea Devils still work in today’s television formats.

The War Between Land and Sea is very obviously and very directly a love letter to the Pertwee era of Doctor Who in general and to the work of Malcolm Hulke in particular. Most obviously, it is an entirely Earth-based story, largely focused on U.N.I.T. The miniseries’ third lead is Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), the daughter of the Third Doctor’s reliable U.N.I.T. counterpart Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney).

The show is avowedly and aggressively political. It is essentially a gigantic metaphor for the threat posed by climate change, literalized in the eponymous conflict between the oceans and the shore. The Sea Devils – now identified as “Homo Aqua” or “Aquakind” – have awoken again and discovered the damage that mankind has wrought in their absence. This leads to direct confrontation, as human beings and their newly awakened neighbors must attempt to find a way to peacefully coexist.

There are quite a few overt references to Hulke’s life and work tucked away in The War Between the Land and the Sea. There are the reptilian monsters. There is, naturally, a conspiracy among humanity involving Prime Minister Harry Shaw (Vincent Frank) concerning this threat. There is also a recurring suggestion that Aquakind are effectively 1950s science-fiction allegories for communism, an “interconnected” species that operate “like a hive mind.”

Working with co-writer Peter McTighe, Davies even makes a point to structure the five-episode miniseries so that it flows like a classic Pertwee era six- or seven-part serial. For example, the first episode is largely atmospheric build-up that introduces the threat and establishes the stakes. The fourth episode is largely a run-around adventure as the two ambassadors, Barclay Pierre-Dupont (Russell Tovey) and Salt (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), find themselves as fugitives on the lam together.

Davies even directly lifts the miniseries’ ending from “The Silurians.” In that classic serial, the Doctor tries desperately to negotiate a peace between human and reptile, only for U.N.I.T. to act unilaterally to wipe out the Silurians. It’s a bold and breathtaking ending for a family science-fiction show, as the Doctor is rendered helpless while his new allies commit genocide. It’s an ending that casts a long shadow over Davies’ Doctor Who, given Davies’ own tendency to have the Doctor commit genocide.

At the end of The War Between the Land and the Sea, the human conspirators release a virus that wiped out 90% of Aquakind. They use this as leverage to herd the survivors into what is effectively a deep sea reservation, a rather pointed echo of the way that indigenous populations have been treated by colonial powers. It’s a bleak and horrific ending, and The War Between the Land and the Sea is able to sit with it a bit longer than “The Silurians” could.

The combined impact of all this is a clear sense that Davies is effectively using The War Between the Land and the Sea to prove the point that he made about his predecessors all those years ago. The War Between the Land and the Sea is effectively a Malcolm Hulke Doctor Who story reconfigured as prime-time prestige television. It feels like an attempt to demonstrate that the kinds of stories that writers like Holmes and Hulke were writing were capable of being populist mainstream dramas.

After all, The War Between the Land and the Sea was a success on the BBC, at least. Benefitting from the lead-in of the voting results for Strictly Come Dancing, the first and third episodes attracted over two million viewers. These ratings were higher than any episode of the previous two seasons of Doctor Who, allowing for the Christmas specials, and was one of the biggest launches of any new drama on the BBC. It made quite the splash.

There is something quite appealing in this, in Davies using the platform of a new Doctor Who spin-off to effectively validate the work of those writers who came before him, to demonstrate that the formula and the structure employed by writers more than half-a-century ago can produce drama that deserves to occupy a prestigious prime-time slot. It’s a wonderful celebration of the show’s history that avoids wallowing in empty nostalgia.