THE WAR BETWEEN THE LAND AND THE SEA. Yes, it’s a fucking shit title for a Doctor Who spin-off. No two ways about that. I prefer the title STUPID SEXY SEA DEVILS. At least, then, the audience has an idea what to expect. The problem with the
war of the title is…a complete lack of war in the show.
One character even tells us there wasn’t really a war. What do we get, instead? We get THE NEGOTIATIONS BETWEEN THE LAND AND THE SEA. Not as catchy, true, but you’d certainly grasp the idea from the title. I didn’t hate this spin-off. Just the really stupid bits of this spin-off.
Yes, we were handed a DOCTOR WHO BINGO opportunity from the start. Don’t knock back a vodka shot every single time a member of U.N.I.T. bites the dust. You’ll
lose your liver. Cross off a box at the mention of the main character, from the main show, who won’t be putting in a cameo here.
Scribble heartily over the NO TARDIS box. And cross off a box every single time the last of the Disney Money™ is splashed up on the small screen for no real reason. This show ran for five episodes. Four episodes, if you skip the padding. It takes a long time to descend to the depths. We
really didn’t need to share that journey.
THE WAR BETWEEN THE DISNEY CORPORATION AND THE BBC was quite a half-show. For every scene I enjoyed, inevitably, there lumbered into view a scene I wanted to axe.
And so it went, episode by episode, until the end. Will there be a sea-quel? No, thank fuck.
Where to begin? With THE SEA DEVILS. This was a story starring Jon Pertwee. Sea Devils live in the sea. Is that true? No. They hibernate. Waiting to be told it is
safe to emerge. The catastrophe that forced them to bunker down, well, that never happened. And the wake-up call never happened, either.
We get some shenanigans with the Doctor’s Time Lord foe, the Master. He’s running a criminal enterprise from inside a prison. Boo, hiss. The short version…we’ll return to the
short version shortly…the Master is in league with the Sea Devils, planning to revive loads of them as his aquatic army of doom. He’s only missing a volcano base and a white cat to complete his mission.
Revived Sea Devils don’t like what the beastly humans are doing. So the devilish creatures start menacing tubs, boats, and ships. Then they lurch ashore and get up to no good. And yet, they
have a point. I suspect only the meanest ones relish being called Sea Devils.
A catastrophe threatened to destroy the Sea Devils, before humans even evolved. The Sea Devils took a nap. When they woke, they found we’d come along and fucked shit up. We wrecked the planet.
Yes, DOCTOR WHO told eco-stories back in the day. This is not a new thing.
That story was, itself, a rehash of an earlier tale. Just with water creatures thrown in, instead of land-based ones. And so, the Sea Devils were established. Defeated, they disappeared from the show.
A one-off threat. Until they returned in WARRIORS OF THE DEEP. That’s the one with the underwater base and all those bright lights that make the monsters so mysterious and scary…
Oh, wait. No. Somehow that bright lighting doesn’t work for the production of this story. The shambling liability is the pantomime seahorse caught in bright lights. An unfinished costume gave
the poor operators the sense that they’d been huffing all the glue. And after you watch Ingrid Pitt’s martial arts display against the pantomime seahorse, you’ll wish you’d huffed all the glue yourself.
That was the last we saw of the Sea Devils. Until relatively recently, when LEGEND OF THE SEA DEVILS reared its rubbery head. Luckily, no one ever saw this travesty.
The Sea Devils of Penzance LEGEND OF THE SEA DEVILS had all the non-viewers non-scratching their non-existent heads in sheer befuddlement. I haven’t
seen that story, and neither have you. Got it. Right? Terrific. Just pretend we haven’t seen that one. I certainly don’t know what you are talking about. Piratical Sea Devil nonsense.
Let’s leave all those Sea Devil stories to the side…except for one. The first one. In anticipation of the release of this Disney spin-off, the BBC went back to the first story with a diver’s
knife and gutted the running-time like a fish. Ah, the short version. There was also some editing and fucking around with the audio, so that a Sea Devil could retro its way through a line about the war between the land and the sea.
Dialogue that never existed in the original. Just to plug the up-and-coming Disney collab, you understand. Even if no one understands. What do I think of that alteration? It was a load of bollocks.
Shouldn’t have been tampered with. It was, though. And I can’t do anything about that except gripe. Or reach for my unaltered physical media. I recommend that second option. That way, you get to see the pilot episode,
An Unearthly Child – currently unavailable on the BBC.
By sheer coincidence, I am writing about this fishy tale while listening to Polly Harvey working her way through Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. It’s preferable to watching Stupid Sexy Sea Devils again. And so, to the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils with their stupid
sexy non-war…
Five episodes seems a bit awkward for a spin-off. It feels contractually obliged and, therefore, contractually contrived. We are treated to loads of shots involving the last of the Disney cash. The
Sea Devils are back, folks, and they’re about as menacing as nothing in particular. There. I put the damning view in print.
What’s the plot? A Sea Devil is caught in a fishing net and. Oops. The Sea Devil is killed, and placed on display to make money out of internet clicks. Once upon a time, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce would’ve gotten involved. Then the United Nations objected to being dragged into fiction on the BBC. So it’s been the Unified Intelligence Taskforce ever since.
U.N.I.T. gets involved. And so does…
For the next bit we must visit the cinema of 1950-something. There’s a bloke in U.N.I.T. who arranges the taxis. And he is accidentally assigned to a Top Secret mission, investigating Stupid
Sexy Sea Devils. Sounds like a job for Sir Norman Wisdom. Deep in the heart of the 1950s, we have this accident-prone bloke, an underdog, who, with a bit of cinematic slapstick and a heart of gold, keeps informing Mr Grimsdale
that there’s a spot of bother. Only it is far more complicated than that. And…
I’m not saying the bloke who hires the taxis is based on Norman, from 1950-something. But it certainly fucking feels like it. A hapless bloke who stumbles into situations. He books the taxis.
Sounds about right, for this show. Barclay Pierre-Dupont. Bit of a mouthful. I’ll just shorten that to Norman for the purposes of this text.
So Norman ends up on Dragon Island. People who are fated to die here…die here. Remember. You don’t knock back any alcohol for those brave sacrifices. Norman shows a bit of respect to the
corpse of the Sea Devil, and that gets him on the radar of…surely the sonar of…the Sea Devils. Those Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. Turns out, they are very advanced for people who spent a long time slumbering under the
sea.
And these very clever Stupid Sexy Sea Devils want to arrange a peace, of sorts. There wasn’t a war. But we’ve been fucking with the planet’s ecology for ages, and the sanctimonious
Sea Devils want to tell us what to do on our own land. Things like…stop chucking your rubbish in our sea, you barely-evolved apes.
They do have a bit of a point there. Don’t overlook the subtext, though. Those Stupid Sexy Sea Devils went and put the sub in subtext. This spin-off show might feel like a diatribe against Thames Water. I suspect a hint of subtext went in that direction. Subtle. I’d list problems
at Thames Water, but I want to keep the page-count down.
This show about those Stupid Sexy Sea Devils may have it in for Thames Water. Anyway. Saving the planet is urgent. We must act now. Or else. So let’s speed this up a bit, shall we? Right. Except.
For some reason, when the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils want to meet the Evil Bastard Humans, it’s important to, er, build a massive fucking concrete pipe coming up out of the Thames.
This is a science fiction show, so we have to allow it on that outlandish basis. Otherwise, it would take fifteen years to obtain planning permission and another five years to build the pipe way over
budget. With a few leaks at the opening ceremony. It would be a lot quicker for a few Sea Devils to rise eerily from the Thames and hop on a speedboat to take them to a conference room with a shower built in at one end.
Also, despite the Disney money, this production still can’t do digital helicopters. I guess the Disney money didn’t stretch to hiring a real helicopter to fly along the river. My point
is…the show gives you an effective scene. Sea Devils rising from the depths at Dragon Island. And then you have a bit of bollocks to…tide…you over until the next effective scene.
As soon as you see the big pipe leading inside a building, and it opens on glass walls…you are waiting for the inevitable crack in the glass. It is built into the plot at that point. Spoiler:
yes, it really is built into the plot at that point. So, after a construction montage, we are ready to save the world by negotiating with fish.
The Stupid Sexy Sea Devils don’t like being called devilish. Even if they are from the sea. They might have been Sea Angels, but no. They are Homo Aqua. Queue the homo joke from Norman. I was waiting for conspiracist Alex Jones to do a cameo,
warning us that Sea Devils turned the water gay.
You might have missed the trailer campaign for this show. I’ll grant you that. It’s possible. The trailer campaign shows us…one of those Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. And the tale is framed
as a love story between a man and a fish. The main response to the trailer campaign was…
Sea Devils are sexy? When did that happen?
I guess it happened on the internet a long time ago, with fans writing fiction. The BBC took a while to catch up. See also Stupid Sexy Cybermen, Stupid Sexy Daleks, and Stupid Sexy TARDIS. Here’s the point. It was virtually impossible to avoid the news that Sea Devils were going
to be sexy in this spin-off show.
Maybe you missed the trailer campaign. If you watched the trailer, though, it made the arrival scene really fucking stupid. The Sea Devils are on the way up the pipe to talk to a bunch of very important
people…and Norman. He’s involved now, somehow. The security threat posed by fragile glass walls and a shitload of water…ah, fuck it, that doesn’t matter.
Everyone should be patched in via primitive video conferencing. Except…high-tech video, using the last of the Disney cash. The arrival scene plays out in a very coy fashion. Koi fashion? I hear
they’re wearing fishnets in Paris this season. This blundering sequence hides what the trailers showed us. It’s the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil. She’s here to negotiate with the worst humanity can offer. So she
rejects all that malarkey and wants to chat to the guy who books the taxis.
We must talk about U.N.I.T. In the original show, the outfit was run by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. He would gladly order a Sea Devil shot as soon as look at one. You can just see it, can’t
you? Chap with the gills, there. Five rounds rapid. In the revamped show, and in this spin-off, the outfit is run by his daughter Kate.
Uncharitable viewers hold to the notion that Kate doesn’t get any character development. She’s meant to be a force of nature acting as a barrier against the Doctor’s plans, whatever
those are. There’s no Doctor in the spin-off, so her conspiratorial organisation must act as a barrier against other conspiratorial organisations.
She gets plenty of character development here. You may not like any of that character development. That’s a separate issue. We end episode one with the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil elevating the taxi
guy to the position of ambassador in the peace negotiations. He goes all Norman Wisdom at that point. And, indeed, every point.
In episode two we discover the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil has an untranslatable title. But we can call her Salt. Idly, I wondered if the next Sea Devils in the line-up were Vinegar, Fish, and Chips. But no. Salt has every reason to be salty. At the end of the first episode she delivered her dead children to the humans, blaming the humans for pollution, death, destruction, and the inability
to create a cohesive TV show. For every scene that worked, there was an equal and opposite scene that failed.
There’s local resistance to the idea of Norman Wisdom as humanity’s representative. That played out a little too long. Could have been cut back so we could get on with whatever the story
was meant to be getting on with. Clearly, Salt is the only game in town, and she luuurves Norman. The internet casually wondered how he was going to fuck a fish. Not if.
How, where, and when.
Meanwhile, we have the world’s bastards putting together a biological weapon derived from samples taken from Salt’s dead babies. There’ll be a lot of obvious plotting kicking in,
with the subtlety of a whale landing on your breakfast table. Plot must hove into view, sailing from the horizon to the point of not-so-sudden revelation.
Norman is the spokesman. But he reads from a government script. Except…we know he’s going to deviate from that government script at every chance. Meanwhile, Kate escapes from conspiracies
for a little rest. She goes home to her age-gap romance with doomed Hot U.N.I.T. Dude. Spoiler: that was no spoiler. In STAR TREK he’d be the new guy in the landing party on a hostile world. Here, he’s brave toast. Brave, certainly. But definitely also toast.
Colonel Christofer Ibrahim is part of Kate’s character development. Luckily, Hot U.N.I.T. Dude gets a bit more character development himself. Unluckily, that develops into being doomed. I liked
this part of the show, letting Kate and Christofer be human against a chaotic background, as it deflected from some of the large lumbering blundering scenes we were subjected to at regular intervals.
Industry talks to government, and various military factions crawl out of the woodwork. There’s a plan to take down the amphibians before the amphibians have even gotten around to spelling out
their unreasonable demands. U.N.I.T. could be a part of this conspiracy if Kate sides with the Prime Minister.
Kate isn’t going to be evil at all at any point in this narrative. Right?
Now to the unreasonable demands. Salt wants a glass of water. From the Thames. So…Salt wants Thames water. Not Thames Water, the true villain of this story. Or maybe Salt wants Thames Water.
Salt doesn’t want water from the tap. Hell, Salt doesn’t want to drink the water. She wants to inflict Thames water on the humans. It’s subtle, this diatribe.
Then we cut to one of these pointless fucking scenes. It takes a bunch of soldiers, with guns, to fetch the water from the river. Now…the pipe that leads to the conference room…that pipe
emerges from the river Thames. So why not just dip into that? Too easy.
All it takes is a mad scientist in a white coat to dip a glass in. No. We must do this whole thing with soldiers and guns and shit. It pads the show out. The scene serves as an example of the padding
in this spin-off. Anyway, Norman Wisdom can’t drink water from the Thames. Humanity rejects Thames water, and Thames Water. Going by the subtext.
Humanity has to clean up. Obligingly, humanity sets targets for this. But those aren’t good enough for the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. So it’s time for the war to begin. We get a lot of negotiating.
I think if you pay a bunch of actors to be in a big room, you want to dwell on the location…even if the audience isn’t as keen.
Time to end the negotiations. It’s war…against…litter. The Stupid Sexy Sea Devils have the technology to filter all the plastic waste out of the oceans and return it to land.
I have many questions. For a start: if you are this powerful, why would you negotiate with the enemy? Just drop the litter on the land with no explanation. That would have been a great opening to the first episode.
It’s not just plastic, though. Sunken ships. Many questions. We run through a barrage of TV news images. There’s not a Nigel Farage clone in the sequence, but…spoiler. Here he is,
and that is no spoiler. After the global case of fly-tipping, it’s back to the negotiating chamber.
We find out that littering is war. But the real war started long ago. It’s okay. There’ll be a peace plan. Pollution. Just say NO. Borders. The Sea Devils will control the sea. All of
the sea. And they throw in a wild card here. The sky, too. Now they are Stupid Sexy Sky Devils. And they demand the hardest demand of all.
But first, the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil does that thing the Incredible Hulk does. HULK ANGRY. NO ONE BEAT HULK WHEN HULK ANGRY. HULK SMASH PUNY SEA DEVIL. PUNY OCEAN NOT FIGHT BACK. HULK WAVE GOODBYE.
When Salt grows angry, Salt grows saltier and turns into an angry guy. Now the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil is still a Stupid Sexy Sea Devil, but…the writing team threw away a chance to state that this change is caused by human pollution of the world’s oceans. Humans made the fish angry. Thames Water humans, specifically, I guess.
Where’s Alex Jones when you need him? Spoiler: you will never need him. Could the frogs turn Alex Jones gay? No more than they could make him less irritating.
Back to that final bleak demand. The demandiest of demands. Salt uses a pearl in the neck to alter TV screens. How the fuck is that done? This is waved away by a character who asks that question without
swearing. On the screens of the world we see the location of the next meeting. The big demand is that the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils meet the human delegation…under the sea.
There is Disney money tied up in this. Are we watching The Little Mermaid but in the DOCTOR WHO universe? And so to episode three. Padding. Now there’s an expedition to the bottom of the sea. These episodes are around 45 minutes. The first fifteen minutes? Devoted to putting
a team together and getting ready for a very long slow underwater taxi sequence.
We’re told the journey will take two hours and seventeen minutes. Spoiler. It feels longer. And that’s not counting the training montage. Spoiler. Norman Wisdom is on the team. Spoiler.
When you ask someone on the team what is in the box, the answer is always A BOMB.
Spoiler. That is not a spoiler. Obvious bomb is obvious. We need to know what the evil humans are doing in the meantime, so we cut to Downing Street where the Prime Minister is taking advice on all
the different methods of solving the fish problem.
Kate Lethbridge-Stewart is at the table as the voice of reason. Her Brigadier dad would have been taking advice from some rum chap in the Royal Navy on the guidance systems of the latest torpedoes.
Evil Foreign Woman in Uniform voices an opinion. Slap her…she’s French. Evil Foreign Man in Uniform also has an opinion. He’s American, and we expect him to become more evil as we go along. His default setting
is evil, and he’s working his way up to a higher level of purity. Then he’ll upgrade to Pure Evil+, with added menthol.
This is about opposition. Kate could infiltrate the meeting and learn more. All she learns to do here is put a huge target on herself. That’s not a spoiler. Obvious conspiracy is obvious. We
go back to the sphere that’s descending to the meeting, just as a reminder of how long it takes.
Then we’re with the Prime Minister, at a private gathering minus Kate. The warmongering American tells us that this is definitely a war. And we should be getting our war on. Never mind that
the bomb is already on its way. This part of the war is about removing obstacles and firing up the bioweapon that took half a minute to perfect from stolen samples.
I haven’t talked about the music. When first shown, the spin-off was roundly condemned for throwing loud music over every snippet of speech. Is it that bad? No. However, there is value in promoting
scenes with no music at all. Even for long stretches. Do we get that in this spin-off? We can dream.
Even the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils realise the descent is soaking up too much of this padded episode. They take matters into their own fishy hands and…slightly speed things up. This causes needless
panic. And more music. Wait a bit. The music does die away. But not for long.
Finally, we are under the sea. And the area is made breathable for the humans. Everyone can take off those diving helmets. Except the guy with the bomb. He keeps his on, for some curious reason. Salt
invites the delegation to talk, but first she manipulates the walls of this grotto so she can be alone with Norman Wisdom.
They could unite, to end the litter war. Because she luuurves him. And he doesn’t know what to think. Luckily, the plot intrudes and the other doomed members of the team arrive. There’s
a spooky gathering of Deep Ones Sea Devils out beyond Sea Devil Reef, and it’s all gone a bit H.P. Lovecraft H.P. Lovecraft.
But that’s not important right now. We need to go back to London to see Kate avoid assassination. Sadly, her Doomed U.N.I.T. Boyfriend doesn’t make it. He bravely sacrifices himself to
the magickiest magic bullet to kill a TV character since the last magic bullet that killed a TV character.
I’m looking at you, Buffy show. Spoiler: that magic bullet was a load of fucking bullshit as well.
Maybe he’ll make it. He doesn’t. Now we can return to the depths of this plot and the obvious bomb. Obvious bomb obviously explodes. Norman Wisdom is there to reduce the damage with a
last-second save. Luckily for him, there’s no magic bullet to take him out.
Although, the deliberate editing across two different scenes makes it look as though Norman Wisdom is going to push Kate Lethbridge-Stewart out of a second bullet’s path. I’d have turned
up for that science fiction twist. The dreaded and padded episode three spent a long time building up to an obvious bomb and a hashtag sadface sacrifice.
Oh well. On we go.
Five episodes. Seems a bit short. On the other hand. Could have been done in four, without padding episode three. Kate survives the next bullet in episode four. A lot of Deep Ones Sea Devils die. Norman Wisdom and Salt make it out and up and away. She uses some sort of magic wizard shield ability to keep Norman Wisdom alive.
I have questions. If she can move at mega-speed through the waves, why would Salt wait around for the humans to show up in the first place? A bunch of Stupid Sexy Sea Devils could ferry the humans
down to the meeting super-fast. But no. She gives him the kiss of life all the way to the surface. Don’t know how long that takes. It is a scene that passes quickly. On the other hand, maybe it takes twenty minutes of
kissing to reach safety. Who knows. Has she passed him the disease of being a fish-person? Is he cured of the disease of being human? That’s what we really want to understand.
Then we endure the announcement. Why, those Sea Devils were devils all along. How do we know? Salt confesses on TV. But wait. It’s a…
Deep.
Fake.
Fuck off. Just. No. Stop it. Really? Get lost. Leave TV land now and never show your face around here again. Fucking hell. Moving on from that. Salt becomes a Prisoner of War. The war that isn’t
actually happening. In the first round of the war, one fishy dude died. Salt lost her children. And in the second round of the war, people were killed by plastic from the sea. Kate’s guy. Then the conspiracy killed five
members of the Away Team. Is this a war? Are we simply not adding up off-screen deaths on both sides and pretending that’s a war?
What’s really important? Does anything tie back to the Prime Minister. That’s what’s important. No. Nothing ties to him. Except all the tendrils of the conspiracy. So a rich businessman
has to die next. Loose end. Let’s kill water company executives by making them drink their own contaminated water. Or you could send a killer on a bike to handle a doorstep assassination. That works.
Norman Wisdom stages a jailbreak with Salt and they swim off along the Thames. Things pick up, as a new representative emerges from the stupid concrete pipe leading to the conference room. This Stupid
Sexy Sea Devil is called Tide. I expected his henchman to be named Pods. Together they could pull a quick getaway in a CGI froth of soap bubbles. But no.
It was not to be.
Kate now represents humanity. She reads from a government script. Then she ditches the script. There are several sections of this spin-off show’s script that could have done with a dunking in
the Thames. Tide brings up the name Aquakind. Could be a brand of washing-up liquid that’s soft on your skin.
Salt committed a crime. She saved a human. So she must report in, for punishment. That punishment is incredibly important. Stick a harpoon in that. We’ll return to the point. What is going on
in this scene? These are protracted negotiations about Salt. Wait. Are they referencing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks? I don’t think the script is sharp enough to throw that in there.
Doesn’t matter. Tide reveals a new weapon. The ability to create instant rust. I have many questions. If you hate human debris on the ocean floor, and that debris is metal, you could have insta-rusted
it down at any time. Why start with litter as a weapon when you could just go to the use of rust? Hell, why use rust, when you could…ah, but I am jumping ahead of the plot. Stick a double harpoon in this reference. We’ll
come back here for the end.
What kind of war is this? We’ve given you back all your rubbish. So we can’t threaten you with that again. We’ll threaten your metal. Including all the metal we dumped on your land.
So many questions. We’re anti-pollution, but we’re going to generate a fuck-tonne of rust. Rusty metal flakes, blown out to sea. Or in the sea, if we raise the level of the sea. Taking all the litter back from
London when London submerges. Er…
Never mind all that. The conspiracy rattles on. That instant bioweapon has a target: Salt. Norman Wisdom and Salt hide out in an abandoned building. First thing you do? Smash windows, as glass is fucking
strange to a fish. Did she just…smash the glass in the fish tank? Is that what this is?
Stupid Sexy Sea Devil starts talking sexy and has to be told by Norman Wisdom to calm down the sexy talk. This is just in case he develops feelings for fish. We all have feelings for fish –
mostly concerning cod in batter with plenty of salt and vinegar on the accompanying chips. Yum yum. Tasty. I guess, with a fish invasion, we shouldn’t go broadcasting that info.
Taste itself comes up from the deep in this scene. Norman Wisdom has a pain in the neck. Is he now slowly growing gills, and transforming into a Stupid Sexy Sea Devil? That is not a spoiler. It lands
with all the subtlety of a blue whale hitting your breakfast table.
Time for a campfire romance. Wouldn’t she shrivel up next to a fire? Salt explains her punishment for helping a human. She’d have to swim alone. This is important to the plot. In ways
I cannot fathom, the script dwells on this Little Mermaid theme. Salt was always going to find her way to Norman Wisdom.
And then they kiss.
After which, Salt admires his erection. No, really. I’m not making that bit up. We leave them to it while Kate wanders the night, contemplating loss. Back to the lovers. She realises he tastes
of salt, and he can’t bring himself to say she tastes of fish. The conversation turns to Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. Stupid Sexy Sea Devil opinion is that Kate is a good soul.
That isn’t going to fly. Kate’s character development, after the trauma, is to be a bad soul. Our runaways need a plan. And that plan is to escape to North Wales. We don’t get into
the detail of that, as it is bollocks. There’s a vast conspiracy going on. But Norman Wisdom reasons, with a complete lack of wisdom, that if he can just contact his family then he could arrange transport.
U.N.I.T. is listening in. And the Evil American Soldier is listening in to U.N.I.T. Meet you all on the bridge for tea and biscuits. It doesn’t go that well.
Salt already explained that her people could find her if she went into the water. To be found is to be punished. Punished to swim the ocean alone.
At the inevitable stand-off, good soul Kate decides there’ll be a whole lotta shootin’ going on if the American starts his shit. Salt dives off the bridge into a cliffhanger ending. This
means her people must find her and exile her. But we have an episode to go. And somehow, we need to squeeze biological warfare into the mix.
Let’s finish this. Time for really funny horror. Stupid Sexy Sea Devils emerge from the deep. They play seashell horns and summon dogs to the nets. And then they eat those dogs. More negotiating
back in the conference room. Sea Devils can’t eat dogs. Don’t eat pets. Well, humans can’t eat fish. Don’t eat our relatives. But fish also eat fish, and that whole thing falls apart.
And now we turn to that good soul, Kate. She’s under assessment, to see if she can continue in her job after the trauma of loss. No. She’s done. Here’s her character development.
She kept tabs on her assessor. And if her assessor doesn’t play ball, Kate plays rough with other people’s lives. Keep her on the job and double the strength of the pills, or else.
She keeps her job.
Norman Wisdom is turning into a fish-man. Salt is gone. Kate’s lost the plot. But the biological conspiracy glides into port around now. So it’s time for the Sea Devils to…melt the
ice. That should have been the opening gambit. Okay. That, or eating the dogs.
If the Sea Devils raise the sea levels, what then? It’s the end. And that would be a bad thing for humans. Luckily, some evil bastards concocted a biological weapon of fish destruction. Yay!
Humans for the win. Tide puts in an appearance to give the humans five years of melting ice before the end. Oh, and it was never a war. Then why put that in the title of this show?
Back to the conspiracy. Norman Wisdom is kept secure, for scientific analysis. He cuts a deal with a guard to let him free for the night so he can race to the coast, shove his head in the sea, and
yell…
“Mr Grimsdale! The Sea Devils. Mr Grimsdaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaale!”
Nothing. Salt does not answer the call. First. What the fuck is her hearing like if she can hear a shout under water from, potentially, half a world away? Second. There’s a reason for a lack
of answer. The beastly French Baddie is blocking sonic signals or some bullshit. Frankly, at that point, I would only have cared if she’d offered viewers an éclair. Not other characters in the show. Viewers.
The fix is in. Switch off the Sonic Sea Baffles for one night and let Norman Wisdom put a call through to his aquatic girlfriend. But before we even get into that, Norman passes out on the bed and
he has the bioweapon planted in him. The next time he races off in the night, he’s a walking bomb. There’s a handy limit on the weapon. It isn’t 100% perfect. Norman is turning into a fish-man, so he could
be killed by the weapon. Never mind all that nonsense.
On the beach he reunites with his lost love. She can save the day. There’s a last-gasp fragment of knowledge. She pretty much tells Norman Wisdom to ask for parley, in the piratical sense, and
the Sea Devils will be forced to listen. It’s a chance. A glint of hope. But he’s love-bombing her. One passionate kiss and it’s Ebola: for Sea Devils. Seabola.
Remember sticking a harpoon in that idea of punishment. Salt is forced to swim alone. In exile. Well how the fuck does she contaminate her entire species, then? Do they all share the same bathwater
at a very crowded inlet? How virulent is this bio-explosion? The job is done. Both sides meet on the beach. And both sides pass something across the divide.
The magic word, accord, will never reach the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. For they be deaded. Or…90% of them, anyway. Hooray. The monsters are no threat. And the
bad guys won. We are, sadly, treated to a fantasy sequence which involves the Prime Minister in a shower. Could have done without that. Though the fantasy moment with the conniving French and American villains trapped inside
a flooded car…that’s more effective.
Finally, inevitably, the glass walls crack. The negotiating chamber floods. What a shock. All that’s left is for humanity to pick up the pieces. Salt and Norman Wisdom swim off together when
he realises he’s turning into a fish-man. Two harpoons to end on, remember? Why use rust, when you can…
If Salt has the ability to transform Norman Wisdom into a fish-man, then why start a very public war at all? Why litter? Stupid Sexy Sea Devils rise from the waves at night, and call out with their
siren shells. They lure fishermen into the depths, and make Sea Devils out of them. That would have been far more atmospheric, and conspiratorial.
Why hunt our dogs? Are cats too hard to hunt? Fish hunting cats would have been funnier. So why would you dump litter, or make things rust, when you can convert all the humans into fish-people? Why
litter? Hmmm…
Litter. The point we end on is a scene featuring Kate on the beach. A man drops litter. She tells him to pick it up. He refuses. She pulls a gun on him and tells him to pick it up. The only way we,
as a species, will be truly ecological, is if someone holds a gun to our heads, it seems.
That’s not the point to end on. The real point is, after she put pressure on her assessor, Kate would definitely pull the trigger and shoot a litterbug dead when we fade to black. And that’s
the show we turned up for. Not the half-show we got.
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