The War Between the Land and the Sea might be a Doctor Who spin-off for Whovians and the Gallifrey-uninitiated alike, but it doesn’t make this storied world any easier to get your arms around for the first time.
‘There’s a lot of lore there. A lot of history,’ admits Francesca Corney, who plays Sergeant Hana in the new BBC miniseries. She tells Metro she had only seen a handful of greatest hits episodes, including Blink, before she was cast in the show. That likely precluded Russell Tovey’s prior role as Titanic midshipman Alonso Frame.
So was it Tovey’s top-drawer Christmas special that the spin-off was alluding to when his new character Barclay tells Hana he’s met the Doctor? Whovians had shared hopes on Reddit that the moment might pave the way for a jaw-dropping reveal: that Alonso and Barclay are one and the same.
‘I don’t know how much I can say,’ laughs Corney. ‘I’d say it’s probably a little Easter egg.
‘I’m not sure under what circumstances [Barclay and the Doctor] met. It could have been a nod to his previous character. It could mean they were in an elevator together at one point.
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‘I think that’s definitely up to our imaginations in how we view that.’
Whovian or not, the 33-year-old actor likely wasn’t the only one unfamiliar with the Sea Devils before the spin-off.
Well, that would be Homo Aqua to us now. They’re the fishfolk who have been left all the worse off by whoever’s harebrained idea it was to integrate plastic into every area of our lives. Creator Russell T Davies’ desire to let the fat cats and water companies have it through these scripts was something he touched on at the table read, Corney says.
This morality tale plays out in huge set pieces: the aquaman army emerges from the sea in a rocky bay, then face off with the world’s diplomats from a giant fishbowl. The sets were on a scale Corney had not yet experienced in her career.
‘In my mind, I was like, “It’s going to be huge green screens, you’re going to have to use your imagination to get in there.” But I was so amazed by the set builds.
‘They were just so grand and monumental and really, really incredible. It was not hard at all to assimilate into that world. It’s given me high expectations for future jobs.’
Even the Homo Aqua were, for the most part, rendered with practical effects. ‘What you see is how it is,’ she says, recalling how the cast had first been shown the visuals for Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Salt at the ‘very big deal’ table read.
‘I’ve done table reads before and they’re usually quite low-key. But this was huge, there were so many people there,’ Corney recalls.
‘We had a set behind us and they had this big projector. As we were going through the script, they had concept art flash up showing what they were going to look like.’
We’re two episodes in, with two more airing on BBC One tonight. There’s rampant speculation about a big character death (most of which is trending towards Jemma Redgrave’s Kate).
The rather futile question about whether that’s the case gets a big laugh. ‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ Corney says, at the end of the laugh. The unwieldy show title – no, she isn’t sure why either — certainly implies the H2O diplomacy goes south.
The War Between the Land and the Sea returns at 8:30pm on BBC One.
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