{"id":197725,"date":"2025-12-22T08:13:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T08:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/197725\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T08:13:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T08:13:08","slug":"doctor-who-just-turned-one-30-year-old-classic-character-into-a-villain-in-the-best-possible-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/197725\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctor Who Just Turned One 30-Year-Old Classic Character Into a Villain (In the Best Possible Way)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Doctor Who<\/a>\u2018s new spinoff, The War Between the Land and the Sea<\/a>, has come to a shocking conclusion. When Russell T. Davies returned as showrunner of Doctor Who, now with the backing of Disney+ money, hopes were high. The Disney+ era is over now, though, because the partnership between the BBC and Disney has come to an end. This latest spinoff, The War Between the Land and the Sea, is the last installment \u2013 and it\u2019s been the best Doctor Who we\u2019ve seen in years<\/a>. <\/p>\n

At first glance, The War Between the Land and the Sea is a cosmic Romeo and Juliet tale in which the human race and Homo Aqua \u2013 the sentient race who evolved on Earth long before humanity \u2013 collide in spectacular fashion. Human pollution is devastating Homo Aqua\u2019s environment, and humanity\u2019s predecessors emerge from the seas to force diplomatic talks. But, it turns out, there\u2019s a sense in which this show isn\u2019t really about the ambassadors (Russell Tovey\u2019s Barclay Pierre-Dupont and Gugu Mbatha-Raw\u2019s \u201cSalt\u201d) at all; it\u2019s about the breaking of a classic 30-year-old character, setting them up as a villain.<\/p>\n

The War Between the Land and the Sea is All About Kate Lethbridge-Stewart<\/p>\n

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Played by Nicholas Courtney, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart was an ally of the Doctor\u2019s who appeared from the Patrick Troughton era through to the show\u2019s cancellation in 1989. A direct-to-video spinoff, \u201cDowntime,\u201d revealed the Brigadier had a daughter named Kate; the character became part of the main show in 2012, now played by Jemma Redgrave. She\u2019d stepped up as the Brigadier\u2019s successor, taking charge of an organization named UNIT who work to protect the human race from extraterrestrial threats. Though Kate is often stood on the sidelines in The War Between the Land and the Sea, this is really her story.<\/p>\n

The War Between the Land and the Sea shows UNIT as a formidable force, one that operates outside the normal constraints of human law. Although civilians are required to act as overseers of UNIT missions, the organization no longer reports to any prime minister or president, and they expect to be able to overrule democratically elected leaders in any crisis situation. It\u2019s a remarkable shift, because the original UNIT was the \u201cUnited Nations Intelligence Taskforce,\u201d reporting to the UN, whereas this \u201cUnified Intelligence Taskforce\u201d sits outside geopolitics.<\/p>\n

This naturally means there\u2019s a tension between UNIT on the one hand, and elected officials and corporate interests on the other. These come to a head in The War Between the Land and the Sea, with an attempted assassination of Kate that instead results in the death of her lover, Christofer Ibrahim. Matters only escalate in the finale, because political and corporate interests are working behind UNIT\u2019s backs to find a deadly solution to the Homo Aqua crisis: an act of genocide through a virus engineered to leave only one in ten of them alive.<\/p>\n

Kate Loses Hope in the Human Race<\/p>\n

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In truth, neither the human race nor Homo Aqua approached the negotiations with good intent. Homo Aqua considered them simply a way of keeping humans busy while they melted the ice caps, flooding the Earth and releasing the carbon dioxide trapped within them, making the planet uninhabitable for us. Humanity\u2019s approach, though, is so much more brutal and efficient; an engineered virus, with an offer for the survivors to live in a protected ocean trench, while human corporations daydream of acquiring Sea Devil technology. The bioweapon is called \u201cSeverance,\u201d and it breaks Kate\u2019s hope in the human race.<\/p>\n

Doctor Who\u2018s spinoff<\/a> is all the more tragic because the Homo Aqua ambassador, Salt, had just offered another alternative: Accord, an ancient treaty whose mere invocation would have demanded a union between the two races. Barclay and Salt become a symbol of what Accord would have been, as she initiates a genetic transformation in her lover, turning him into an amphibian who can live underwater and enjoy his life with her. Kate watches the two swim into the distance, witnessing the joyful future that humanity has rejected.<\/p>\n

Kate\u2019s breaking ends in a shocking post-credits scene that simply can\u2019t be reversed. Walking down the beach after seeing Salt and Barclay swim away, she sees a jogger drop a plastic bottle on the sand. The contrast between the two visions of humanity is so jarring, so shocking, and Kate draws her gun on the jogger while yelling at him to pick up his litter. Kate\u2019s motives are clear, but it\u2019s certainly one of the most bizarre scenes in Doctor Who history, as she repeatedly tells the jogger to \u201cpick it up\u201d before the screen fades to black.<\/p>\n

Kate Lethbridge-Stewart Shows the Doctor\u2019s Hypocrisy<\/p>\n

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In an earlier scene, UNIT staff reflect on the sad truth that all this happened while the Doctor was away \u2013 when they could have really used his help. According to them, the Doctor once said that he is simply the one who saves humanity, not the one who shapes them, which they see as an explanation of his absence on this grim day. Kate\u2019s example proves he is wrong, because she\u2019s trying to be the Doctor in his absence. She\u2019s trying to be the one who stands apart from her race, unaccountable and disinterested in politics, enforcing her will on the great tides of events.<\/p>\n

No human being can do this. The Doctor stands apart from the human race precisely because he is not human, and he meddles out of compassion. There have been many times when he too saw the dark side of humanity \u2013 including in Kate\u2019s own father, who often pursued military solutions against races like Homo Aqua. But the Doctor remembers the good with the bad, giving him a wider perspective that helps him stay grounded when he would otherwise despair. Lacking this perspective, Kate has broken.<\/p>\n

There is no accountability for Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. The War Between the Land and the Sea includes a scene in which she speaks with her counselor, only to blackmail her when she is told she is unfit for duty. Standing before the prime minister of Great Britain, Kate first offers him help if he\u2019s out of his depth, before warning him she will still be here when his career is over, and there will be a \u201creckoning\u201d with her. It\u2019s absurdly grandiose, as ridiculous as anything the Doctor himself said when he succumbed to his arrogance in the \u201cTime Lord Victorious<\/a>\u201d era.<\/p>\n

The War Between the Land and the Sea hasn\u2019t been perfect, and the post-credits scene is certainly surreal. But it has still been one of the best Doctor Who stories in years, in that it has become an exploration of what it really looks like when a human being tries to imitate the Doctor a little too much. Now, it\u2019s surely set the show up for an epic return in the 2026 Christmas Special, when Russell T. Davies will wrap up the story he\u2019s been telling for the last few years \u2013 albeit now without a Disney budget.<\/p>\n

What do you think of this new game? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the\u00a0ComicBook Forum<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Doctor Who\u2018s new spinoff, The War Between the Land and the Sea, has come to a shocking conclusion.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197726,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[53912,146,85,46,53235,76712,411],"class_list":["post-197725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-doctor-who-tv-show","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-regular-feature","tag-the-war-between-the-land-and-the-sea","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}