The Cutprice Guignol

After last week’s slightly soggy opening, we’re taking a dip under the water to catch up on the War Between the Land and the Sea – and, unfortunately, it doesn’t look like things are going to be any better down where it’s wetter, take it from me.

We pick up where we left off last week as Barclay descends into the water to meet with the Sea Devils on their own turf – uh, seabed – after they dumped a few generations’ worth of pollution on to the mainland to level the playing field after years of damage caused by the human race. Of course, it takes us a while to actually get down there, as we have to contend with a good chunk of this first episode revolving around the training and planning to get Barclay (Russel Tovey) and the various delegates on to Sea Devil soil in the first place; it’s not that it’s terribly done or anything, but with just five episodes in this miniseries, I’m not sure we needed all that footage of Russel Tovey clambering in and out of a pool, you know what I mean?

No, I’d have much rather had it focus on the relationship between Barclay and Salt (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), as their relationship develops from professional to, uh…something else, I guess? I’ve banged on about bad romance writing in mainstream media before, but God, Peter McTighe’s work here really has to be down there with some of the worst I’ve ever seen – Tovey and Mbatha-Raw are not completely devoid of chemistry (unlike another couple in this show, but we’ll get there), but the ridiculously overwrought dialogue lurches straight from niceties to post-coital (?) fireside cuddling and cum jokes with barely anything in between. What connects and draws them to each other is, at times, poorly-defined, and at others, so blatantly spelled out as to feel patronizing. The few moments that actually might have worked – such as the scene they share alone together in the Sea Devils’ home base – are hampered by weird direction, the camera peeping obnoxiously around corners like it’s sex, lies, and fucking videotape. Their first “kiss” follows exactly the same beats as the one between Jenny and Vastra in Deep Breath, except devoid of even the slight drama that episode leant to it. Similarly, a scene between Barclay and his family before he enters the water should have let the performances breathe, but instead stomps all over them with honking great music cues that leave no room for doubt about exactly what kind of emotion we’re meant to be having.

Much as I quite like Tovey’s performance here, I don’t know a huge amount about Barclay, and it’s hard to get that invested in any of his choices here when I don’t see the personal stakes in him pursuing them. I would have loved to see a stronger throughline in Barclay’s character from top to bottom; his speech to the Sea Devils in last week’s episode along with his relationship with his child is clearly meant to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, but his driving purpose is still somewhat lacking, particularly for a main character. Saving Salt should have hit as a moment of real growth for his character, going against his own allies to rescue her, but instead, it feels like a another box to tick on the romance tropes chart pinned up on the communal writer’s room whiteboard. It’s all so obviously script-mandated; they’re together because that’s what the plot calls for, and convincingly building that relationship it is secondary to having them paw at each other’s necks through a pair of gardening gloves, you know?

Mbatha-Raw is struggling against the dual tides (heh) of bad writing and an extremely mannered performance – I’ve seen her in enough other roles to know that this level of acting-for-the-back-of-the-room stiltedness isn’t her normal style, but it’s tough to watch here (apart from the few moments we get to see of her playing at being a proper monster to a terrified bystander; I actually found that really charming, even if her human teeth should clearly have been prothetized into something a bit scarier). There’s the crumb of a decent romance story here, if only because I believe Tovey and Mbatha-Raw are both too good in their own right for it to entirely flop, but the show would have benefited from chopping the romance angle altogether if they were going to half-arse it so entirely.

Which brings me to Kate (Jenna Redgrave) and Christofer (Alexander Devrient). I can’t think of the last time I breathed such a sigh of relief when I saw a character kick the proverbial, but watching Christofer throw himself in front of a bullet to save Kate only to die in the process felt like a weight of my shoulders, let me tell you. Their romance has been so stinkingly, obviously awful from day one, the surgically-excised chemistry downright brutal to witness between two otherwise-decent actors, and it just doesn’t matter how brilliant Redgrave is in the scenes following his death – I’m too glad to see him go to care. They don’t even give him a good sign-off, with his last moments spent badgering Kate about why they don’t spend more time together while she’s, you know, actively in the middle of brokering a peace deal between humanity and a species of all-powerful water beings. It’s such a stupid conflict for two people in their position to be having, clearly tossed in to give them some tragic tension in their final scene for Kate to handwring over later. He truly might be one of my all-time least-favourite Who characters ever, and it’s not even because I think the performance or writing is particularly bad, but because the execution has been so bafflingly, obviously off from the start that I can hardly fathom why they kept him around for this long.

The rest of this two-parter stumbles along at an awkward pace, the second episode, The Witch of the Waterfall, struggling particularly hard to settle on a decent amount of forward momentum. Tide, our newly-introduced Sea Devil antagonist, delivers a hard zero on the impact front, standing in the Room of Bore to deliver a monologue on rust when he could just be boiling people from the inside out or something exciting like that. The machinations from the prime minister Harry Shaw (Vincent Franklin, doing a genuinely great job amongst all the madness) are moderately interesting, but I really don’t think, in a show about humanoid monsters from the sea, that I should be most looking forward to round tables in Number 10, you know?

It’s hard to believe The War Between the Land and the Sea is going to be over next week – not because there are just so many juicy plot threads to wrap up, but because it feels like it’s hardly even gotten started. Flat romance, unconvincing characters, and dodgy direction are leaving this series waterlogged beyond all rescue, but hey, I’ll still be tuning in next week to cover the finale, so check back in soon if you’d like to join me for that! In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you’re making of the series so far, and whether you think I’m entirely wrong in dunking on it so hard – drop me a comment below!

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(header image via Radio Times)