So the Doctor Who spinoff, reimagining the Sea Devils as Homo Aqua 🧜🏼♂️, has finally hit our screens. Hurrah!
What did I think?
First the positives…
It’s good to have the Doctor Who world back on BBC One and on a Sunday night slot too 📺. I love it when we have sci-fi shows on prime time telly. And I especially like it when those sci-fi shows are set in London ❤️
The show looks good - they’ve obviously spent a lot of (Disney) money on it - and the production values are high🌟
There are some funny one liners 😆
It’s well acted. And Russell Tovey is very easy on the eye. 😉
And now some things I think that aren’t quite so good…
The plot, and much of the script, could have been written by AI 🤖. Russell T Davis seemed to be sticking to his ‘policy of no surprises’. There are some dodgy character names, zero plot subtlety, and the usual dubious approach to female roles.
However noble the message, and as catastrophic as the pollution of the seas is, sophisticated TV audiences require a more interesting - either dramatic and twisty or nuanced and layered message. This was by the numbers. Humans are the bad guys, we get it 👿
You know with the way it’s gonna run. The politicians / invested interests behind Homo Aqua and Homo Sapiens will want to go to war and Salt 🧜♀️ and Barclay🙍♂️will go on the run and have to work together to bring about peace in a dramatic fashion in the final episode💥. Yawn. 🥱
Granted we are only two episodes in, but I would’ve expected our fishy adversaries to have been playing a slightly most strategic game. Rather than just swimming ashore and shaking a spear, why not have them committing some major acts of sabotage on the main polluters or indeed the general population? 🧨They are eco-warriors, right? 💣 Try wiping out a few million people who are causing the pollution. Yes, basically I want some more jeopardy💥. More death. It’s a war, right? 💀
So let’s have some three dimensional characters. Let’s have some traitors! Let’s have some drownings! If you’re gonna drop RMS Titanic and 1 billion tons of plastic on peoples heads why don’t you show some people dying? ⚰️
I get that the dilemma RTD has - if you’ve got an ‘alien’ species who is sort of on the right side of history, you can’t then make them into “baddies”. Otherwise people will not buy to their eco-message . But that’s a problem with your story dear Russell, your plotting. 📒
Still, it is early days. Perhaps the next episodes will reveal cunning twists rather than another sermon with splashy lighting. I live in hope 🤞.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
That said, any show that can get GBNews to spout the following gets my vote! 🗳️
“BBC sparks 'WOKE' fury as new Doctor Who spin-off branded 'self-righteous box-ticking fest' by furious viewers: 'Force-fed virtue signalling!'”
Oh GBNews you uniformed dipshits. Doctor Who is and always has been woke. And proudly so. If you're bitching about you have never watched it! 😆
🐟🐠🐡🌊🐬🐳🐙🧜🧜♀️🧜🏼♂️🪸🦈🦀🐚🐋🦞🍤🦪
@bbc @russelltdavies63 @russelltovey #DoctorWho #TheWarBetweenLandAndSea #HomoAqua #TeamSalt #TeamBarclay
