The War Between the Land and the Sea ★☆☆☆☆

There should not be a third definite article in the title of this show. Started off better than I expected and a bit less dour and self-serious than I thought it might be but it still feels very out of place when anyone mentions the Doctor or reminds us that it’s a Doctor Who spinoff. Still, after a surprisingly good second episode the third was disappointing. The show rallied a bit in the fourth, and then utterly shat the bed in the finale. None of that made any sense.

UNIT is also just such a problem for Doctor Who. They ping pong back and forth between the funny science sidekick brigade and the sinister shadow government and positioned as largely protagonists here they can’t really be either and when you try to just make them normal (no Avengers tower or quirky robot analyst here) they are boring as hell. The dual roles also mean that everyone introduced as a scientist ends up morphing into a military leader. Kate was originally introduced as chief scientific officer, not commander-in-chief, and as soon as she steps away for a moment in this Shirley is suddenly in charge. Even Osgood got a version of this. Malcolm Taylor from Planet of the Dead is probably leading death squads offscreen somewhere.

In fairness to the show it is an incredible achievement that they managed to come up with a worse name than sea devils and worse “scientific” names than Homo reptilia.