The War Between The Land And The Sea episodes 3 & 4 by Pete McTighe (TV review).
Thank you for your patience. I split some lemonade over the laptop keyboard, mopped it up and rebooted, and the screen played up. For those who don’t know what to do, leave it turned off for an hour to dry and try again. Thankfully, the file containing this appraisal was saved by W11’s autosave feature. Homo aqua is innocent in this.
Episode 3: The Deep by Pete McTighe
‘I fought for the Land, and the Sea won!’ to paraphrase a certain song.
Another two episodes tonight, where presumably mankind’s woes can only get worse. Beware spoilers, and you should come back here later after you’ve seen the episodes. There is no explanation of how they could open the hatch from the inside.
One ship and three support craft, one bathysphere and six delegates. Keep an eye on the numbers.
Kate Lethbridge- Stewart attends an international meeting and is not happy about what she hears about attacking the sea folk. She’s also running on empty with not enough sleep in 3 days.
Resting at home, Kate is almost assassinated, and her newly announced but discreet boyfriend takes the bullet.
Below the waves, it wasn’t difficult to spot who was likely to attempt an assassination down there as well. You would have to ask how the bomb hadn’t been vetted.
This really is a slow episode. I’m allowing for gravitas and the time it takes to go 5 miles down in the Mariana Trench and to give some character time, but for a show that has been racing along so far, it feels awfully like padding.
Episode 4: The Witch Of The Waterfall by Pete McTighe
The bomb explosion at depths and all diplomats considered dead, except Salt rescues Pierre-Dupont by using her own abilities to stop him getting the bends. The war has begun, with each accusing the other of a touch of fake news. None of it is helped by the fact that the Homa Aqua are accused of killing the diplomats in the media. They are both picked up by the ship, and he reports to UNIT what happened, and Salt is imprisoned. Lethbridge-Stewart explains they are at war.
A new Homo aqua ambassador, Tide (actor Samuel Oatley), arrives at the Thames base, not happy that Salt has gone rogue and wants to punish her. Lethbridge-Stewart explains that even if she had Salt, she would not hand her over for punishment. Tide says if they cannot sort things out and stop polluting the seas then rust will be used to end mankind.
The ending is a total spoiler, so I won’t divulge it here.
There are a lot of undercurrents in this episode with quick retaliations against those human organisations that tried to go to war that blink and you would miss them. For a five-part story, little is really developed. It is odd that it was left to the military to sort out, as you would think members of the intelligence service with covert operations experience would have been better at dealing with it. Maybe they did.
Even so, considering this story is supposed to be about a war between the humans and aqua folk, it seems more distracted by Pierre-Dupont and Salt’s problems with a dose of love life than the bigger picture. Quite how it can be ended in a last episode based on what has been shown so far, I can only end on a speculation. For whatever reason, the aqua folk go back into hibernation, confident that mankind will self-destruct in a couple of decades.
GF Willmetts
15 December 2025
