Disney Is Doing The World A Favor By Not Allowing A ‘Doctor Who’ Spinoff Yet
When we look at the new opening episodes Doctor Who a spinoff Battle Between Land and Sea In the past few weeks, there have been a few novels that may be swimming under its covert surface. But now that the show has come to an end, we know for a fact: that power is dead and buried and only sinks deeper the longer it goes on.
The remaining three episodes of War In The Middleafter its premiere spent a lot of time playing up the political relationship between the revived Sea Devils -reborn as “Homo Aqua” -and humanity, wasting their time on the apparently vague, but still interesting, climate change messages that were at the core of that plot to focus on establishing the fast-paced relationship of Salat-Rawse (Ruclat-Raw) Tovey).
It was inspired to save the latter after the diplomatic mission in the area of Homo Aqua under the waves interrupted by two agents who detonated a bomb to kill the people present and the aquakind, despite the chemistry of Mbatha-Raw and Tovey, the love that turned out to be the first driving topic. War In The Middle comes out as Big Value Water Condition. Barclay’s obsession with Sawoti more than anything else hasn’t really been given time to develop, putting him on a quick 0-100 rise, but it’s Sawoti who suffers the biggest scandal in the process, who can no longer be portrayed as Barclay’s political equal and advocate for War In The MiddleThe most prominent ideas of the crisis of the climate, and instead turned into a moving model of “born good yesterday”, contextually and narratively taken out of the picture due to the central action of the program when Barclay has released him from UNIT’s imprisonment.
This surprising pivot in focus is a broad sign of War In The MiddleThe most important thing in the stories: the series cannot commit itself, from moment to moment, on all levels, to the concept of what it wants to be or say, making it completely groundless from both a thematic and narrative point of view in its wider context Doctor Who the whole place. In a way, this was a poison pill baked into the fairgrounds—more often than not, a Doctor Who The story about the Doctor’s absence at the end should have very little impact outside of that story, both because it questions what it takes for the Doctor to get involved in a particular problem and because it questions how much of a spinoff series can feel like “obligation”. Doctor WhoStatus quo going forward.
War In The Middle will never bring the vision of aqua and humanity to negotiate in a peaceful, harmonious way in their shared existence on earth, because it would avoid Doctor WhoThe depiction of the “real” Earth is a step beyond our reality. But instead of playing within that tight bound to tell a contained but still entertaining story, War In The Middle it tried to be big, but couldn’t quite deliver on that scale, abandoning anything that gave it weight as it lurched toward a muddy end.
Many times in the series, the two sides announce to each other that the war of the aliens is coming, that it has arrived, that it is over, but we never see that conflict, because Homo Aqua, after expressing the true concern about the role of humans in climate change, must first be done with unforgivable evil—which is done in the last tree of the terrible event. Homo Aqua summons, kidnaps, and eats all the dogs in the worlda situation that is raised within minutes and then not touched upon again—and then effectively removed as an ongoing concern, is caused by an ill-defined virus, called “Severance,” that ends up killing all but 10% of the aquakind immediately as it was introduced in the back half of the show’s final episode.
Homo Aqua’s genocide would be a surprisingly dark place to end the show, though War In The Middle he really doesn’t care. The elimination and recording of Homo Aqua is used and resolved in the back half of the final episode of the show, provided War In The Middle very little time for its human players to grapple with the moral costs of what’s being done (a few, awkwardly inserted briefs imply that the rest of Homo Aqua will get its comeuppance from the very people responsible for Severance’s deployment, but that’s about it). Instead, it continues to focus on Barclay and Salt, who was once rewarded for his association with what is now a subspecies by being slowly transformed into an aquakind/human hybrid, the only person allowed to live among the remains of Homo Aqua at the cost of leaving his human life behind.
This lack of care extends to all areas War In The Middlenarrative threads. The impact of Homo Aqua’s strong efforts to change humanity in action is diminishing as quickly as it is presented. The second episode is the climax when the salt throws all the garbage into the water, burying the whole world in garbage and seriously disrupting the foundation of society, but in the fifth episode, that matter has been cleaned up behind, it can’t be touched again. The series’ continued failure to investigate UNIT’s role as an organization that seems more than happy to arm the surveillance state only adds to the issues raised by series producer Pete McTighe in his year 2025. Doctor Who episode “Lucky Day,” which culminates not in self-interest, but in Kate Lethbridge-Stewart threatening a private therapist with the revelation of her husband’s infidelity (why it does Can UNIT achieve that kind of individual observation? The show doesn’t matter; it’s just cool hero spies) if he doesn’t let her continue to have a role in ongoing conversations, our hero wins, and by the end of the show, it’s agreeable enough that Kate just starts threatening a secret attack as a side joke.
That’s Kate War In The Middle it actually ends, in a really weird scene that is its trademark War In The Middlean abstract idea of tone or message. After witnessing Barclay and Salt living their new underwater life together, he meets a runner on the beach who just tosses his water bottle like trash next to him. Last pictures of War In The Middle-last pictures of Doctor WhoIt’s Disney time, the last shots of the franchise until this time next year—she gets increasingly angry as Kate pulls her gun on the runner, yelling repeatedly that she’s picking up the bottle as her finger inches closer to the trigger.
The whole thing immediately follows an extended, dialogue-free sequence of Barclay and Salt meeting set to Goldfrapp’s cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes,” so it would almost be funny if the show wasn’t trying to treat it as a serious, dark moment. It’s a strange final note for Kate’s character (for now, at least), introduced 13 years ago as a rank-and-file, future “science lead” from UNIT’s military past. But then again the actual last minutes of the show suddenly return to an idea that it had abandoned for most of its time, as if it finally remembered that it once longed to be a show that actually had a point to make, and that by talking about its death, the journey there meant something.
This is a symbolic note Doctor Who‘a bad year to go, marking the end of an era that had a lot of promise and potential when it started just two years ago until it was filled with an empty air that marred the series’ ability to commit to commenting and showing the world we live in through its sci-fi lens. It’s fitting, perhaps, that the less-than-stellar relationship between Disney and the BBC has resulted in much of the world not being able to legally see it. War In The Middle until next year, when it will almost certainly be dropped entirely with little fanfare: a show with no meaning, buried in the depths never to be thought of again.
Battle Between Land and Sea now streaming in its entirety in the UK on BBC iPlayer. The series will air on Disney+ internationally in 2026.
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