TWBTLATS (1): Homo Aqua

The war starts off in a relatively low key fashion. A Sea Devil, as was, is accidentally caught in the nets of a Spanish fishing boat and the crew shoot it dead when it bursts out. UNIT find out about the corpse from social media, and so a team are flown in to the small island where it is being held. In command is General Austin Pierce (Colin McFarlane) who we first met in Torchwood: Children of Earth, and seconded to the mission is Barclay (Russell Tovey). He's there by mistake, having once covered for the person who should be there, for Barclay is just a lowly logistics assistant who books transport for UNIT.

The Sea Devils - now dubbed Homo Aqua, though it's acknowledged that this is itself a misnomer and they should really have a much more complex taxonomy - then show up in force. Pierce starts peace negotiations - but it turns out that they want this anyway.

Cue setting up a big glass tank at a Thames-side building in London to host the talks - shades of that Torchwood series again - and Barclay is invited, having been part of the initial contact team.

The talks will be supervised by Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) but conducted by a seasoned diplomat.

Having been seen to pay respect towards the dead Homo Aqua, the chief negotiator on their side, who goes by the name of Salt (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), insists that Barclay be the one they go through.

And that's the opening instalment in a nutshell. It's very much setting things up by introducing the key players and giving viewers some idea of just who these Homo Aqua are, for those that might be unaware of the Silurians and Sea Devils of Doctor Who.

The Doctor does get a mention - Barclay telling a colleague that he once saw them at "the Tower". (Whether this is the new Tony Stark-style tower or the older base under the Tower of London isn't specified).

We're introduced to Barclay's family, which comprises a teenage daughter and an ex-wife, neither of whom had any idea of what he really did for a living. It's therefore a big shock to them when they get  removed from their home at gunpoint as Kate initially believes that there may have been some prior collusion between Barclay and the amphibians. This isn't the cosy UNIT set-up we've been used to through the parent programme. They act like ICE agents and don't trust anyone. There's a harder edge to the characters, which include recent regulars Colonel Ibrahim (Alexander Devrient) and Shirley Bingham (Ruth Madeley).

The new Sea Devils are mostly of the turtle-beaked variety, who do not communicate in English. When their delegation arrives at the conference venue - swimming up a giant pipe from the river - we see that there is a second species, which is much more piscine. Salt seems to be one of a kind, having a more human-like form and features. It's said that they all have a pearl imbedded in their throat and this seems to act as a piece of technology - allowing them to have witnessed and recorded Barclay's private act of respect for instance. There is a lot of talk of their advanced technology, and we saw that they were able to transmit their demand for talks globally, but so far we have seen little of it. They live in, and / or travel in, large coral formations which are able to rise up from the sea in major world cities. We see one rise near the Statue of Liberty, and another in the Thames by Big Ben.

These, the first appearance of the creatures en masse off the Spanish island, and their arrival in the conference venue are the big spectacles of this opening instalment.

UNIT remain peripheral for now, so it's very much Tovey's episode and he comes across as a likeable everyman figure. Kate - under pressure from the PM and other political figures - doesn't trust him to be himself, however. When Salt insists they will only talk through him, UNIT insists that he still follow their script. As a viewer, we know that's not how it is going to go. Homo Aqua want to talk to, and through, an ordinary person - and that's the set up for the next episode...

There's an apparent nod to Chibnall's The Hungry Earth (which, of course, brought back the Silurians) when two members of the initial mission are killed - the ground liquifying and them being pulled under. This looks a little odd as we've clearly seen that the outbuilding in which the Homo Aqua corpse was being kept was well up from the beach on a rocky ledge. If they were able to get water to rise this far up, I'd love to know how they did it.

One other thing which wasn't terribly well set up was Barclay's response to these deaths. He mentions it only once as a reason for not trusting Homo Aqua, yet these feelings simply never re-materialise. I think more could have been made of his conflicting opinion of them. He is suddenly being asked to negotiate with beings who killed his friends.

It would have been nice to have included at least one representative of the classic Sea Devil design amongst their delegation as well.

As an introduction, it does everything it needs to do. A little spectacle, the beginnings of some political manoeuvrings, and a personable leading man. You'd certainly want to carry on watching...