Two episodes in, The War Between The Land and the Sea feels so much more coherent than a recent Russell T Davies era episode of Doctor Who. That’s because things are allowed to develop, to breathe. I enjoyed the heck out of this. As much as I like Doctor Who (even the so-called “RTD2” era); I loved this, because it didn’t have all the usual Who trappings bogging down proceedings.
My main takeaway is that this has a tone and a feel that we wouldn’t get with Doctor Who. It feels almost “Classic Who” in that things are allowed to develop. I could easily see some scenes with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) being done by the Brigadier with the Third Doctor. I loved the “every man” angle of Barclay (Russell Tovey). The jokes about “gay water”, multiple wheelchair-using UNIT members, the fairly up-front “humans are bad about saving their own planet” stuff… I loved how this all came together. I really think this has vibes of a Malcolm Hulke-penned script (Hulke being the person who wrote The Sea Devils back in 1972). Most of this episode would have made him proud.
A few notes about Plastic Apocalypse:
1. I really loved seeing Kate not in control — her almost panic at not knowing who Barclay is and then later when she can’t control what he’s saying.
2. The deposed ambassador from Episode 1 really reminds me of Stephen Fry.
3. Finally got to see Kate Stewart and Col Sexy (aka Colonel Ibrahim, played by Alexander Devrient) outside of UNIT, which was something I wanted to see for ages – glad they spent some time with that.
4. I adored the re-design of the Sea Devils (yeah, I said it). Great mix of old with something new, and especially what they did with Salt (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).
5. It’s interesting that the Covid-19 pandemic was used as a plot point as a disruptor of economy.
6. The Mycelium network is name-checked – a Star Trek Discovery reference? Probably not, but Trek might’ve inspired it, considering that’s how the Discovery gets around space.
Overall, given this is episode 2 of 5, it’s still not got a tonne of meat – the bulk of the time is spent with Russell Tovey’s character and there’s a lot of talking. Which is fine; he did a great job, but the real meat of the story is probably happening in the future.
I did adore the scene with ‘Homo Aqua’ throwing back all the plastic and trash we threw into the ocean. I know we saw it in the trailer, but it was more chaotic in the episode: I knew nearly all the plastic was CGI, but man, I enjoyed the hell of the way this episode ended. It makes me wish I could see episodes 3 to 5 now. I look forward to them greatly.
The only real negative thing I can think of would be that we knew the name of the episode beforehand, and saw the plastic rainstorm in trailers. You know that was coming at some point, so from a purely dramatic standpoint, it wasn’t as good as it could have been if it was a complete surprise. But it was well executed, nonetheless.
Questions going forward:
1. Will they follow up on the pearl in the neck thing from episode 1? They didn’t here: I wonder if they will over the last three episodes.
2. They spent time in both the first and second episodes showing how the seals and the tunnel bringing water into the building are executed with gates and all that. I have to imagine that will fail in one of the future episodes and cause problems…
