"I suspect that's how history is made. One great big chain of mistakes."
IN THIS ONE... A new breed of Sea Devils reveals itself to the entire world.
REVIEW: After Russel T Davies's failure with Disney+ Who, the package's UNIT mini-series is to be buried, but could it turn out to be RTD's new "Children of Earth"? The similarities are definitely there. A worldwide problem. An "airlock" meeting with the aliens (though, in this case, Homo Aqua are Terran). General PIerce. But there's also something very samey about contemporary-set Silurian/Eocene/Sea Devil stories, so there are tips of the fins to The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood (and therefore past stories like Doctor Who and the Silurians, The Sea Devils, and Warriors of the Deep) - a diplomatic meeting with a civilian observer, sudden quicksand - and of course, that old RTD standard, the international news montage (Trinity Wells even gets to go on location). I think these BIG stories tend to break the world (someone is soon going to reboot the Whoniverse's last 25 years with Earth, I can just feel it), but there's no denying it makes for engaging telly and given Children of Earth's grand reputation, the similarities promise something special.
What works here is Barclay Pierre-Dupont (Russell Tovey) as a very normal guy - divorced and getting his non-binary teenager on the weekends, a simple clerk at UNIT - who gets in way over his head. This is what makes this Doctor Who as opposed to any other franchise, despite the lack of a Time Lord (Barclay met him in passing once, so RTD can do his "he's wonderful" riff regardless, sigh). He wasn't supposed to be there. A clerical error (ironically) tagged him as the proper civilian witness's replacement, and he doesn't have the clearance for any of this. As a normal person, he shows some empathy for the dead Homo Aqua found at the top of the episode, and is noticed. He's later requested as the Land's ambassador in the voice-cracking cliffhanger (Tovey's bread and butter, right there). In other words, he's the COMPANION figure, and fulfilling the same purpose for the UNIT crew.
Now, on that score, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart shows up around minute 30, stage-managing the summit between the marine reptiles and humanity, with her secret boyfriend (seem tense, maybe not anymore) Colonel Ibrahim, and the character find of the D+ era, scientific adviser Shirley Bingham (no child labor in the role, thankfully). The Vlinx is nowhere to be seen and I'm very happy, but my backwards-looking frown is even more pronounced about its inclusion in past episodes. It was a major irritant to me in the last two Doctor Who seasons, and if it's not even part of the UNIT show, what was even the point? But onward...
Obviously, the plot is all about the Sea Devils, or a new kind of Sea Devil, or really, three new kinds of Sea Devils, and none of them look like the big turtle men from the original series. I've long accepted that there was a great diversity in Earth's Eocene species, and was ready to accept "Homo Aqua" as the Sea Devils of the Mediterranean. When they suddenly show up all over the world, I reserved judgment. When the summit included THREE species, I thought we'd see the classic version - after all, we saw them as recently as the Jodie specials - but no. Perhaps RTD (or Disney) thinks they're too silly and replaced them with (oh not silly at all!) "big fish". And while people joked about "Sexy Sea Devils", there's only one humanish representative (a leader played by Martha Jones's own sister, Gugu Mbatha-Raw), where the NuSilurians were all like that. We'll see how it plays out, but of course, making her humanish may signal a love story for our single boy Barclay. Where's the Myrka, you cowards?! And if the marine Eocene can broker a peace with humanity, why aren't the Silurians also invited? I guess it's harder to negotiate land concessions since we're land animals, too. But despite the set-up here, peace doesn't seem like it'll be easy to achieve. The pollution issue is going to be a problem - as with every comic book war with Atlantis - and besides, the series isn't called The Friendship Between the Land and the Sea...
REWATCHABILITY: Medium-High - A solid opener, introducing a sympathetic lead and avoiding the worst of the modern UNIT crew.
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