‘Doctor Who’s New Spinoff Missed One Great Trick With Its Casting

San Diego Comic-Con 2024 brought some exciting news for Doctor Who fans! A long-rumored show about UNIT fighting Sea Devils is finally coming to fruition.

It’s called The War Between the Land and the Sea, it’ll be five parts long, and it’ll star some familiar faces. Jemma Redgrave is back as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, the Chief Scientific Officer of UNIT and good friend of the Doctor, and Alexander Devrient will return as Colonel Ibrahim from the Doctor Who season 14 finale. They’ll be joined by Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Russell Tovey … and here’s the thing: When I first saw them on the cast list, my heart leapt, because both of them played Doctor Who characters who could do with some fleshing out.

Mbatha-Raw played Tish, the sister of Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) on season three of the 2005 revival. She was a driven young woman who lived through the terrible Year That Never Was, imprisoned by the Master along with her parents. And Tovey played Alonso Frame, a young man the Doctor met on a crashing space replica of the Titanic during the 2007 Christmas Special Voyage of the Damned. Later, he made a cameo as a love interest for Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), but nothing ever came of that.

I thought that The War Between the Land and the Sea would bring back Tish and Alonso and take advantage of their existing connections to the Whoniverse, but unfortunately, I was wrong. Mbatha-Raw and Tovey will both be playing new characters.

It’s a very common thing in the Whoniverse for actors to play a small role and then return later in a much bigger one (Peter Capaldi and Karen Gillan both did this!), but I confess to just the tiniest bit of disappointment—not least because having a sibling of Martha’s and a boyfriend of Jack’s on board could have opened the doors to so many callbacks. (I really want to know how the sorely missed Martha is doing now. Is she a member of the ex-companions club we saw in The Power of the Doctor?) There would also be built-in interesting backstories for both characters, and existing relationships with the Doctor, no matter how brief. But … no.

All the same, that minor disappointment isn’t enough to dent my excitement for The War Between the Land and the Sea. Kate Stewart is one of my favorite characters in the Whoniverse and I’m very glad she’s getting more of a chance to shine. And who knows who else might show up! It’s very possible the Doctor might, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Martha, myself.