Are UNIT the Baddies in New Doctor Who Spinoff?

Doctor Who will tap into its environmentalist history in the new five-part BBC One/Disney+ spinoff announced by showrunner Russell T Davies at SDCC 2024. The long-rumoured Sea Devils show will concern “a race that lives beneath the oceans,” who awaken to see their underwater home in a perilous state due to humanity’s actions. 

“We have wrecked the place,” explained Davies at last Friday’s Hall H Doctor Who panel, “and it is war.”

Fighting that war “on an epic scale” will be UNIT, headed up in its current incarnation by Kate Lethbridge Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) and her secret honey/Squad Five colonel Christopher Ibrahim (Alexander Devrient). They’ll be joined by two as-yet-unknown lead characters played by Russell Tovey and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, alongside others yet to be announced. 

The Sea Devils (not their scientific name, but that of the serial in which they first appeared in 1972, as coined by a traumatised sailor in the story) are relatives of Doctor Who’s Silurians – another advanced reptilian Earth race that predates humanity and who consider themselves to be rightful custodians of the planet – and have been hibernating beneath the oceans. In The War Between the Land and the Sea, it sounds like they’ll be doling out retribution on behalf of the human-beset planet.

Which poses the question: doesn’t that make them the good guys? 

Granted, the Sea Devil army are just that, and their technological advancements (could) make them a formidable foe of humanity, but this new spinoff scenario appears to be setting them up as defenders of the Earth – and isn’t that supposed to be UNIT’s job?

Let’s think about that. UNIT isn’t exactly a resource-light operation. Helicopters, tanks, fuel-guzzling SUVs, all those hi-tech computers and laser weapons… what do you think the carbon footprint is of that snazzy central-London HQ? You don’t see nepo baby Kate Lethbridge-Stewart responding to global threats Greta Thunberg-style on a solar-powered yacht. She flies in on a chopper. Does UNIT even have a work environment policy? Does the canteen separate its recyclable waste?

(Cut to Col. Ibrahim sitting in a trench in episode three of five, bullets flying overhead, a furrow on his brow as the realisation gradually dawns and prompts him to ask, That Mitchell and Webb Look-style, “Are we the baddies?”.)

Kate’s father, former UNIT commander Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, wasn’t exactly a tree-hugger, come to think of it. In 1974 Doctor Who “Invasion of the Dinosaurs”, the Brigadier described an environmentalist MP who wanted to save the planet from eco-collapse as “mad”. In that instance, the Brig had a point, considering that said MP and his green pals were trying to save Earth by transporting dinosaurs through time and releasing them onto the streets. When the Third Doctor commended the mad MP in that story for at least realising the danger of environmental collapse that planet Earth was in due to humanity’s polluting ways, the Brigadier confidently declared, “It’ll never happen, Doctor.” Well, it looks like the Sea Devils would say different.

Doctor Who stories have dealt in environmental themes as far back as 1964’s “Planet of Giants”, which saw an unscrupulous entrepreneur try to profit from a dangerous pesticide that was wiping out insect life. 1967’s “The Ice Warriors” envisaged a future Earth ravaged by human-induced climate catastrophe. 1971’s “Colony in Space” tackled resource-draining mining operations, among other things, while 1973’s “The Green Death” famously put a sci-fi face (do sludge and maggots have a face?) on a toxic by-product of chemical refinement. 

Through “Seeds of Doom” to “Robot” to nu-Who’s “The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky”, “Gridlock”, “The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood”, “The Forest of the Night”, “Orphan 55” and more, human-made environmental destruction has regularly been a feature of Doctor Who stories. 

The War Between the Land and the Sea, written by Russell T Davies with Pete McTighe, and directed by “73 Yards” and “Dot and Bubble”‘s Dylan Holmes Williams, will form part of that long tradition, and with climate catastrophe now a more urgent threat than ever, perhaps making making the undersea menace the real champions of Earth and UNIT the polluting bad guys, Doctor Who could tell its strongest environmental story yet.

Filming is due to begin on The War Between the Land and the Sea in August 2024.