According to a bonus feature on the Blu-ray for The War Between the Land and the Sea titled Interview with the Writers, writer and producer Russell T Davies originally had a different plan for how the series would end.

In the interview, Davies explains to co-writer Pete McTighe that the scene at the end with UNIT (Unified Intelligence Taskforce) chief Kate Stewart (Jemma Regrave) pulling a gun on a jogger thoughtlessly tossing a plastic bottle on a beach was originally meant to feature lead character Barclay Pierre-Dupont (Russell Tovey) brandishing the weapon at a jogger.

“That was originally going to be Barclay. That was going to be the ending.”

“It was a very, very bleak ending where… No-one’s there forcing us to put happy endings on things, but this is a dark ending. They’re [Aquakind] all slaughtered. They’re all put onto a reservation and hunted and we [Humankind] win.”

“When I pitched this, it was going to be Barclay on that hill that overlooks London, stopping a jogger and pointing a gun at him.”

“Had we cast [Tovey]?,” Davies asked MicTighe. “No, probably not. We had scripts ready in advance. But the more we loved Barclay, we started going, ‘That’s a tough ending, isn’t it?’ It’s like, ‘Wow.’ And then I began to think of the Accord thing.”

The reference to Accord is when Barclay’s body is modified so that he can live and breathe underwater in a happy reunion with his amphibian lover Salt (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). This choice of ending awkwardly, and too closely, imitates the ending of the acclaimed motion picture The Shape of Water.

“But dropping that scene would have been terrible,” Davies continued, referring to the scene with the gun. “So then it became Kate’s, which was perfect. He [Barclay] gets the happy ending and she [Kate] gets the rest of the world on her shoulders.”

In The War Between the Land and the Sea, an engineered virus codenamed Severance literally decimates Aquakind.

Assuming the original ending included the death of Salt along with most of Aquakind, it would indeed have been very bleak ending for Barclay.

However, one could argue that the bleakest development at the end of the series, illustrated by the thoughtless jogger, is that Humankind’s encounter with Aquakind didn’t alter their attitude toward the damage they continue to wreak upon the environment and other species.

Not only would Barclay’s rage at thoughtless human feel justified but there could be other people who feel the same rage at the government and business leaders who conspired to cause the Aquakind genocide.

Recent history has proven that it’s neither outside the human experience to sound the alarm on environmental damage nor to hold protests advocating for people languishing and displaced in conflicts in other parts of the world. The series could have depicted Barclay’s child Kirby and those of her generation rising up and demanding change.

A movement toward change would have added a hopeful note which would mitigate the tragic end to Barclay and Salt’s romance which was implied in Davies’ description of the original ending.

The War Between the Land and the Sea DVD, Blu-ray and Steelbook is now available to order in the UK in the Region B format.