The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood
(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 22-29/5/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Ashley Way)
Rank: 174
'Oh I see how you do New Who, you select random bits from past episodes and turn them into new ones. So here's my submission for episode one next year, made up of all the most, ahh, memorable bits from past stories...The Myrka, The Ergon, Erato and The Kandy Man are out for a walk (it’s a really big road), swapping round which one of them is disguised as Mel to confuse the newly regenerated Doctor. Only they're interrupted by Professor Zaroff grappling with an over-sized octopus and Brian Kant in a skirt. 'Novink in ze vorld an shtop me now!' says Zaroff 'Except that' and he points to Kathleen Jenkins as Abigail, Kylie Minogue as Astrid and that annoying brat from 'The Rings Of Akhaten who start singing as a trio, making everyone clutch their ears and fall to the floor. The 15th Doctor then tries to run away with his new companions, something made difficult by the Myrka tripping over its feet, The Ergon laying an egg, Erato getting stuck in an underpass and the Kandy Man sticking to the pavement with chewing gum. In the background an alien wheely bin burps, menacingly. 'Stop Don't move!' says the Doctor suddenly, pointing to the floor tiles of doom, before finding himself on a cliff and dangling from a cliff by his umbrella... This is what fans want, right?’
The Silurians are
unquestionably one of the best alien species in all of Who and long overdue a
comeback. In Malcom Hulke’s expert hands, for my money the best writer that Dr Who
ever had, they don’t just have a claim to planet Earth they have a better claim
than we do: it’s just that they’ve been asleep for a few thousand years and
somebody forgot to set the alarm clock. They’re more than a little alarmed to
see so many overgrown monkeys walking around thinking they own the place and
are right to be angry about how their ‘pets’ re-act to them waking up. Their
self-titled debut in 1970 is a masterclass in scifi, with the twist that Humans
turn out to be the accidental invaders of Earth for a change, a story that says
so much about human arrogance and the need to play nicely with our neighbours
if either of us are going to survive. Recorded at a time of cold war escalation
and growing tension between two very different ways of life enjoyed by two
actually very similar people, it’s the kind of thing Dr Who was made for. The
only problem with the original story was the need to go so slowly (seven
episodes to eke out the budget) and that their creator killed them all off at
the end (because the Humans couldn’t play nicely) which meant that these
popular monsters never quite got the recognition or the amount of comebacks
they deserved. Apart from a botched attack on an underwater base in ‘Warriors
Of The Deep’, which took a sledgehammer to the same themes and which most fans
have agreed to forget so we can keep our sanity, so much of that story was
never explored the first time round. In short they were one monster race from
the ‘classic’ series I was dying to see brought back.
Timewise, too, their
revival is perfect. Eleven days before ‘The Hungry Earth’ went on air Britain
officially had its first Coalition government since World War Two, an uneasy
pact between bitter Conservative and Liberal enemies, who could find no common
ground except for the fact they both wanted to destroy Labour. It’s a similar
story: shaved apes with ideas above their station forced to work for power
against arrogant cold-blooded reptiles who were millennia out of date and still
walked around like they owned the place.
I’m just surprised they didn’t have a TV debate in this story about
their rightful claim to Earth and the catchphrase ‘I agree with the pet monkey’
as a catchphrase to go alongside ‘I agree with Nick’ (Labour, of course, are
the Cybermen: they used to be Human once but sold their souls for survival. The
Greens are The Vervoids. And Nigel Farage and whatever party he happened to be
calling it back then is Davros pure and simple). The production team would have
known nothing about that election at the time of course but so it is with
creative endeavours: they would surely, have been smart and intuitive enough to
pick up on some of the air of defeat in the UK around 2010 when the credit
crunch was biting, our leaders were clueless and everyone seemed to be turning
on each other. It wasn’t quite the perfect cold war analogy of old, but it was
getting there. What we needed was a Doctor to sort this mess out. Instead we
got a Dr Who story about sorting our mess out ourselves. You could, if you so
wanted, see this as an ‘immigration’ story too, with the twist that the
late-comers coming over ‘ere, taking our jobs and building nuclear reactors and
hospitals and schools are the Humans. The fact that so much of this story is
set on a multicultural base in Wales, full of so many ethnic minority workers,
only adds to the sense of ‘outsiders’ (famously the Welsh consider you an
‘outsider’ if you moved to the country fifty years ago; as welcoming as they
were to the Who production team as a whole a lot of crew and cast commented on
this in the new series) as well as the sense that one day none of this will
seem ‘weird’ at all: Humanity integrated in the past so why not again? One day
the Welsh football team will be playing Silurians United at the football and
meeting up to celebrate holidays like St David’s Day and dance round the annual
‘The maypole of the Myrka’ and be the best of friends. You could even see this
as a begrudging ‘United Kingdom’ story: Wales and England were once bitter
enemies diametrically opposed and look at us now, working together against a
common threat! Honestly I wish there’d been even more of that in this story, as
that’s the whole point of the original after all (and a point we never fully get
to see thanks to the original’s shock ending) but at least it’s there.
On paper ‘Hungry Earth’
should have been perfect. It had the right aliens (an ‘underground’ cult amongst
Whovians if ever there was one, dying out for a revival) in the right kind of
story (which again was about the negotiations and compromises needed to make
the world a better place) on at the right time to give us exactly the right
emotions. And yet there’s something oddly…cold-blooded about this story that
means it never quite takes off. For some
reason Steven Moffat, who adored the Silurians as much as I do, decided not to
write this story himself and gave it to his pal Chris Chibnall. The writer was,
at this point, semi-retired from Who: the lifelong fan had got the Dr Who TV
story ‘42’ on air and had handed over the reigns of spin-off series ‘Torchwood’
back to its creator Russell T Davies having reached the natural end of the arc
of tales he wanted to tell. Chibnall already had half an eye on detective
series ‘Broadchurch’ (the one with a post-Who David Tennant and Arthur Darvill,
a pre-fame Jodie Whittaker and Prisoner Zero in Human form Olivia Coleman) and
was most surprised to get the call to write a two-part story. He was even more
surprised to get the one-word plot detail to develop in an e-mail from Steven:
‘Silurians!’ Urged to make his story reflect the original that he hadn’t seen
in years, Chibnall holed himself up with Hulke’s Target novelisation (for some
reason re-named ‘Dr Who and The Cave Monsters’, one of the very best in the
range) and set off to write a similar story.
That’s the trouble with ‘Hungry Earth/Cold-Blood’ though. It’s too similar (even though, weirdly, Hulke is the only writer of the ‘classic’ series not to get credit for a ‘monster’ they invented: Terry Nation gets the credit for the Daleks every time they’re used for instance, ditto Davis/Pedler for the Cybermen and Holmes for the Sontarons). So far revival Who had managed to avoid becoming what I’d most dreaded it would be, a remake of classic era stories that were already perfect but of their day with more money and less sense or heart. That is, after all, the entire plan for the 8th Doctor if the ‘TV Movie’ had been a hit in 1996: would you believe a note-for-note remake of ‘The Web Planet’ was in preparation as one of his first stories (because it was one of the highest viewed Who stories of all – even though most of the 13 odd million of people who saw it did so out of a state of pure befuddlement). So far comeback Who has been made by enough devout fans who know that the answer to making the old stories sing again wasn’t to simply do the same old arrangements all over again but to put the same notes in a new context, to mix the stories around and see how different Doctors re-act to similar threats. Chibnall, though, is too reverential and ends up telling almost exactly the same story never quite as well (no reflection on him, this week anyway: Davies or Moffat would have struggled to match Hulke at his most passionate and inspired). Once again the Humans wake up a city of Silurians by accident (a sub-set who overslept even compared to 1970: the story is filmed for their 40th anniversary but set in 2020, that story’s 50th anniversary), kill one of them by accident and have to work out how to make things up to their rivals and show that we can actually be trusted to work side by side with them, honest.
Something goes weird partway through
though: if you’re an old-timer then you know without anyone saying so that The
Silurians are a noble and respectable race working out of self defence. In this
story, too, they have reasons to be angry and belligerent given the way a bunch
of frightened Humans react to them (shooting Silurian Alaya in ‘Cold Blood’, a
clever title for the episode that makes the Humans crueller and the Silurians
kinder). Ask one of the younger fans who first knew The Silurians from this episode
though and that message seems to have got a bit lost in the wash. They don’t
remember The Silurians’ noble side: they remember them boasting about being
able to pick off Humanity easily and the new whip-lash tongue that comes out of
their head and stings us to death. They’re suddenly behaving like a warrior
race, like every other Dr Who monster who ever had a bone to pick with Humans
and while they have a better reason for it than most that’s not what The
Silurians were created for. It’s a waste, quite honestly. I mean, in a battle
I’m not going to hide behind a Silurian, armour or not, when there are Daleks
and Cybermen around. A monster I’d trust to talk me out of a tricky spot
though? Clearly that’s a Silurian. Moffat, though outwardly as enthusiastic and
supportive of this script as I’ve ever seen him (there are sweet interviews
where he talks about getting Chibnall’s scripts through as e-mails a few scenes
at a time and calling out to his young sons trying to go to sleep because they
were all desperate to know what happened next) seems to have realised this and
written in Madame Vastra soon after, as if to show how Silurians should be
handled (as lovers, not fighters: as much as old-fashioned fans moaned about it
for being ‘woke’ I like to think Hulke would have regarded the Silurian-Human
Vastra-Jenny love affair as a natural spin-off from his original scripts about
collaboration and mutual respect).
That said it’s not
terrible. Chibnall at least understands why the Silurians work and handles them
respectfully – more respectfully than ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ anyway. They’re
viewed here not like Hulke’s Russian armies, with a very different but equal
way of viewing the world, but as tit-for-tat terrorists. The Humans break their
boundaries without knowing: they do the same. The Humans take one of their kind
– they’ll do the same. They never quite come out and declare open warfare. Best
of all it casts the Doctor in the role he should always be in, as an
intermediary who is above such petty things as control of the Earth and who can
see things from both sides: The Silurians (a script that uses Hulke’s own joke
from ‘The Sea Devils’ that his research got the epoch wrong and they were more
likely to be ‘Eocenes’, before letters from archaeologists told him that wasn’t
right either, the Doctor settling for ‘Earth..lians’) have a decent claim, but
then so does Humanity. I mean they left a vacuum when they went to sleep and it
wasn’t ‘our’ fault their alarm system misunderstood the formation of the Moon
and saw it as a comet. Matt Smith has never been more Jon Pertwee-like, a
firefighter running around trying to put out tiny fires that keep springing up
everywhere and tearing his hair out over the antics of both sides. He’s spent a
lot of this regeneration learning to become more ‘Human’ after the 10th
Doctor got a bit too carried away with his own self-importance and
differentness and it’s good to be reminded that the Doctor is, first and
foremost, an alien. ‘Earth/Blood’ is a story that still does all the things Dr Who
does well: where American scifi is all too often about ridding the Earth of
alien scum this one has a softer, gentler approach and asks important questions
about who really gets to control the land we live on.
There are certain bits,
too, that are pure Chibnall that Hulke would never have considered which at
least adds a few extra things the original story didn’t do and which seem ever
more obvious re-watching this story after he was showrunner. This is isn’t just
a bunch of random workers who are in trouble, the way they were in 1970, but a
family. We follow Elliott a lot this story: sometimes he’s the bravest one in
the room, better able to adjust to the old newcomers than his parents or
grandparents. Sometimes he’s more scared, without the experience of having to
negotiate and hold his own with respect the way adults learn to do. And
sometimes he’s just a pain, running off home to get his headphones when
everyone’s in great danger (I mean, I’m never without my headphones and even I
wouldn’t run home to get them with shouty shooty reptiles on the loose: the
Doctor is many great things but he’s a truly hopeless babysitter as it turns
out). Just for added ‘aww’ value Elliott has a learning difficulty randomly
added in, with Chibnall seeming to know just as little about dyslexia as he
does about dyspraxia when Ryan turns up (seriously there’s nothing Elliott does
in this story that needs this piece of information, it’s not like the fate of
the universe rests on him reading the Silurians a bedtime story; one of
Chibnall’s worst aspects as a writer is throwing in details like this because
he thinks it makes characters more ‘real’, then ignoring any impact such
details have on how real people would react to the world because of them). Chibnall’s
worst trait as a writer all round, in fact, is creating characters who never
feel quite real but are just there to serve the plot and get in trouble and
here, even more than usual, you get the impression that Chibnall just doesn’t
understand people: to Davies everyone is different and frequently beautiful
(unless they’ve been turned bad in which case they’re beautifully ugly); to
Moffat people are a puzzle and a conundrum he can never quite work out; for
Hulke they’re a bunch of kids (even the adults) trying to cope with ideas their
brains are too small to handle. For Chibnall, though, people are a block of
people who all tend to think alike. The Humans all move as one in this story
(even Rory for the most part): they try to do the right thing, they feel
threatened, then they react, together. Nobody tries to argue anyone out of
anything the way even the Silurians did in the original. In this story The
Silurians, too, are of one (even their scientist Eldane, the most ‘Human’ one
of the lot, isn’t really that different to the rest). Humans go one way, the
Silurians the other and they meet in the middle, head on, the way their two
drills nearly do in the story’s best scene (when the Doctor gets the Humans to
cut their drilling and yet you can still hear it because someone else has woken
up…)
Ah yes, the drilling.
Chibnall does shake up the plot of ‘The Silurians’ around, but mostly by
borrowing from another two Who classics: the intense digging of ‘Inferno’ and
the nightmarish idea of bodies being pulled from underground seen in ‘Frontios’
(if nothing else Chibnall has impeccable taste: all three of stories are
amongst my all-time favourites).
Officially Chibnall was inspired for the drilling sequences after
reading up about the ‘Kola Superdeep Borehole’, a project from 1970 that also
inspired ‘Inferno’, when the Russians drilled deeper into the crust of The
Earth than anyone had ever gone before (12 kilometres) after a quarter century
of near constant drilling. The project was only abandoned indefinitely in 2008,
around the time when Chibnall would have been working out his story breakdown.
Why did the Russians do it? Because they could for one thing and scientific
curiosity on the other. One of their big discoveries was that water existed a
lot lower down in the ground than anyone had ever realised, almost as if an
underground civilisation were using it. Perfect for a Dr Who story of course,
not least a Dr Who story partly based on a Silurian ‘young scientist’ whose
really a young Russian looking to spread knowledge around; you sense that had
the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks production team been around in the era of
‘series arcs’ they’d have somehow incorporated the Silurians and Inferno
stories as part of a conglomerate whole caused by the same thing (with the
Primords the Silurians’ pets). I’m convinced there’s another influence though
fracking. Officially fracking started in Britain in 1965 (around the time of ‘The Crusade’, err in a manner of
speaking) but it was a big part of the Conservative manifesto: all those fossil
fuels just waiting under the ground ready to be broken up, what could possibly
go wrong? A lot as it happens: Britain is, generally speaking, about the most
earthquake-free country of all thanks to being slap back in the middle of the
European tectonic plate. Well not anymore: self-induced minor quakes were
everywhere and even though the companies behind them were obliged to wait
twenty-four hours every time the shaking reached 2 on the richter scale this
just meant you had to pick your wheely bins up several days in a row instead of
just one. It seemed like a Dr Who story in waiting, about mankind’s greed
tapping into natural resources we knew nothing about. Of course it ended up in
the series (although I don’t think any of fracking’s biggest critics in real
life considered that it would wake up a bunch of sleeping reptiles). For the most part the idea works well in the
story: its not as tense or as well-portrayed as in ‘Inferno’ but then there’s
less room for that plotline and the idea of ‘accidentally’ encroaching on a
boundary we didn’t know was there (by drilling down, rather than invading from
side to side) is a good hook for a story. I’m less sure about the bits nicked
from ‘Frontios’: there’s nothing in the original Silurian story that points to
them having this sort of technology and it’s all a bit clumsily done, with poor
Karen Gillan getting the short straw standing on boxes and being lowered
gradually through soil dug into the raised set. For all the extra money of 21st
century Who this part somehow looks sillier than it did in 1983.
That might be more,
though, because 1) it happens to Amy (a companion we know can survive anything
and everything: seriously, she’s indestructible, even in situations that kill
other people) and 2) because we don’t care about the other characters this
happens to – indeed you don’t really are about anyone much in this story.
That’s the real downside of Chibnall’s writing: you’re more likely to cheer
when one of his walking caricatures snuffs it rather than getting emotional,
the way you do in any of the three stories Chibnall pilfered from. Meera Syal,
fine actress and genuine Whovian, would be perfect casting for most roles but
she seems ever so out of place in charge of drills (mis-casting is another
hallmark of the Chibnall years to come). She’s an actress who excels at
subtlety, of bringing ton life characters with layers, but there are no layers
here to get her teeth into: as much as Chibnall makes Nasreen a ‘substitute companion’
with Amy gone and Rory off doing Rory things, it never feels as if we really
get to know her and her driving force (‘what have they done to my child?’) only
tells us that she’s a mother and saving her son because that’s what mothers do
in Chibnall scripts: there’s no sense that she’s cared for him, of their shared
bond, that she’s worrying about what he must be going through. There’s no
anger, no worry, no fear even, just mild acceptance that never rings true. The
other Humans are worse. One of them needs to crack and shoot Alaya but Chibnall
tries so far to make all of them ordinary people (even Rory) to make us feel
that it could be any of us pushed too far and pulling the final trigger on an
unknown taunting enemy that the moment falls flat. Ambrose does it because the
Silurian hurt her colleague Tony, but they don’t act like people who’ve ever
met before across this story. Had they made it Rory, panicked and put in charge
with keeping the base safe (and killed him off later not by a random act but through
‘karma’) it would have made more sense because at least we ‘know’ him.
The Silurians are no
better. The joy of Hulke’s original script was that he didn’t just create a
monster race but a group of individuals who were more different than the
(mostly UNIT and army based) Humans were. Some argued for peace, some argued
for war, some just wanted to go back to bed and sleep in but they felt like an
entire society that clashed and negotiated and
sulked the way Humans did. Chibnall seems to have missed that part in
the book. Weirdly enough, while we see a
lot more of them (thanks to non-speaking extras) there are far less talking
parts. Two of them are even played by the same actress Neve McIntosh (and
neither of them her later character Madame Vastra) using the same mask. She’s clearly
the same actress from pure body language, no matter how much she change her
voice and make Alaya more warrior-like than Restac. The production team clearly
could create more masks for the extras (even with most of them ‘war masks’) so
why start saving the budget here? The whole point of this re-make was to do
things the original never could. It
could be that Chibnall was making a comment about ‘outsiders’ and how to the
prejudiced people from another race all look alike even when they act
differently – but if so the point was a bit mangled. I mean, I know this story
really well and the Silurians still look alike. And it’s not like The Sontarons
where they’re all clones: Eldane couldn’t look more different to Alaya or
Restac (he is, after all, played by the
brilliant Stephen Moore, the original ‘Marvin The Paranoid Android’ from the
‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ radio series whose, erm, the least svelte
Silurian we’ve ever seen in the series). Yet change their lines around and I
doubt anyone would notice. In this story we have a full Silurian city (in
deliberate contrast to a typical Welsh Village, ‘Cwymtaff’, Welsh for a ‘Human
Hamlet’ and a river that runs nearby in the Brecon Beacons) to better compare
the idea of ‘community in both places – a lot of the drama comes from people
trying to protect their own from ‘interlopers’. There are some nice details,
such as Nasreem running the local ‘wheels on meals’ and naturally wanting to
help others. The location filming itself is lovely: most of it is in the mining
town of Llanwynno, with some scenes shot in the Bedwellty pits in Tredegar(that
were closed in 1935) and the giant ‘The Temple Of Peace’ Hall in Cardiff already
seen in so many of the comeback Who stories. It’s treated a lot better than the
one in ‘The Green Death’, that’s
for sure. However, despite the expense of building a whole city (and even
giving it an orange ‘glow’ from the ground to suggest an alien form of
technology powering it all) we nerve fully see it and it feels as if ultimately
we see less of the Silurians than we did in 1970. They’re not that scary, not
that powerful (at least not compared to their first appearance) and yet not
that friendly and wise compared to ‘us’ either, falling between two stools (as
a reptile used to being on the ground all day surely would). None of them
feel…I nearly said ‘Human’ then but ‘real’ would be a better word in this
context. One thing I do like is the names though: as much as I suspect Malcolm
Hulke would have grumped about this episode nicking all his best bits and doing
them clumsily before adding bits that missed the point I reckon he’d have been
tickled to be remembered as ‘Malohkeh’, the grumpy cynical one with a heart of
gold who expects the worst short-term but reckons long-term everyone is capable
of true lasting peace. ‘Restac’, too, is a less obvious compact version of script
editor Terrance Dicks’ names: always there front and centre to solve a crisis
and keep things on the straight and narrow, that’s a pretty fair tribute too.
‘Alaya’ though doesn’t seem to be related to anyone (surely as a young buck
desperate to make their mark and start a war they don’t know how to finish she
should be ‘Terrnation’? And instead of ‘Eldane’ surely the elder Silurian
everyone secretly looks up to in order to hold their world together should be
called ‘Barrletts’?!)
The Silurian masks, too,
are middling: they’re a lot better than the revived Cyberman but nowhere near
as good as the new-look ‘Ice Warriors’. You can see why the costume department
took every decision they made: these Silurians look a lot less like humans in
rubber suits and have a far more streamlined Reptilian look about them, while
the tongue is a worthy addition to the original. They move more like reptiles
would, in sudden leaps forward, their ‘war masks’ (very like the Sycoraxes) are
a nice budget-saving touch and best of all you can see the actors’ eyes when they
talk. There’s no reason at all to get rid of so many things that made the
originals unique though: there’s no third eye, that very useful gadget that
opened doors and hypnotised people and basically acted as a built-in sonic
screwdriver that proved the Silurians’ true technological power (dropped
because it was too ‘similar’ to Davros, which is just silly: it’s not like any
youngster was ever going to confuse two such very different monsters and
besides Davros hadn’t been in the show for four years at this point with no
immediate plans to bring him back). The voices, too, are just the actors’ own,
without the distinctive ‘wobble’ of the originals. They clearly couldn’t have
gotten away with simply re-using the technology of the day again, given how far
advanced TV has become in the forty years since, but surely there had to be
something that did the equivalent effect but better? It feels as if nobody was
quite sure what to do in post-production so they just left it as it was. If the
main reason to do a modern take on ‘The Silurians’ was simply to do the same sort
of thing with a bigger budget and more money then they largely failed on that
score.
Worse yet, there’s none
of the rich barbed dialogue Hulke was known for (although there is one great line,
where the Doctor complains that he was ‘sonnicing and entering’ rather than ‘breaking
and entering’). There are no great impassioned speeches, no twin worlds locked
in a stalemate and ultimately no sense that The Silurians are anything special.
Back in 1970 you were rooting for them to win and it was a colossal shock when
(spoilers) the Brigadier gave in to his basest instincts and blew such an
intelligent passionate race up. This story is just a tit-for-tat
you-shot-me-so-I’ll-shoot-you skirmish that never gets properly resolved. You’re
not invested in this fight and even the near-future setting (ten years ahead of
broadcast, roughly the same amount ahead as ‘The Silurians’) can’t make you
feel any added incentive for everyone to get it together. The ending is poor:
basically the Doctor does what his 3rd regeneration self would never
have done and sends the Silurians back to sleep again, albeit only for a little
bit till the Humans are more ready to negotiate. Notably the series has never
ever mentioned this truce again, even though you’d have thought a world of
Silurian-Human alliance in all stories set after 2020 would change a lot
(clearly it’s something to do with that series-long crack in the wall arc
re-setting timelines again. Which makes this story feel even more pointless, it
has to be said). The story is oddly plotted too: you’d have thought that having
100 minutes to tell essentially the same story as the old one at 175 would have
made for a tighter, tauter, more action paced thriller, but it doesn’t. The
story largely goes to sleep once the right people are in the right places and
stalls at the point where Amy and Mo are captured by the Silurians, Alaya is
captured by Rory and the other Humans and the Doctor and Nasreem are in transit
flitting between the two. For all its
problems stretching the original plot out to seven episodes, complete with
detour into that old scifi standby a plague for the second half, ‘The Silurians’
is a lot more gripping, a lot more…modern in approach than this sweet shambles.
It is sweet, though. This
story tries a little too hard to be reverential to a story the author clearly
admires and while it trips up over its own reptilian tail sometimes trying to
be worthy of the old tale without repeating every single plot point it does, at
least, feel like a story that couldn’t have been told with any other monster.
In an era when alien races were becoming interchangeable this is a breakthrough
in itself. At the time, with a new
showrunner in charge, it felt as if we were going to get a run of these ‘pure’
re-makes of old stories: mercifully ‘Hungry Earth’ is still the closest to one
we’ve had so far. As a result it was never going to score highly in the
originality stakes and chucking in bits from other classic stories doesn’t exactly
help this one stand on its own two webby feet. And yet it’s a pertinent one for
the times, updated from a cold war parable to becoming a more ageless tale of
two very different cultures wary of each other and the importance of
negotiation and compromise even against your polar opposite. Coming to this
story now it feels as if we’ve had that aspect told better too (see ‘The Zygon Invasion/Inversion’
for the best of many attempts in the modern series) but it at least felt like
the sort of story Dr Who should have been telling. And the things that made the
original so powerful are still sort-of there. Interestingly a lot of people who
love the original hate this story, while a lot of people who don’t for that one
or came to it afterwards love it; me I’m in the middle. There are parts that
work as well as the original and parts that miss by miles. A lot of the original
ideas are in there, but the bigger budget doesn’t always help them (not least
because they still cut so many corners: at least in 1970 they could afford
cave-dinosaurs, even poor ones, but a whole sub-plot about armosaurs got
dropped from the first draft of this re-make).
Chibnall ‘gets’ the 11th Doctor better than he ever got the 13th (although you do have to wonder how many of his lines this week are Moffat additions) and he gets all the best lines, acting as an overgrown child who just wants to play but keeps getting sucked into matters of responsibility because there’s no one else to do what needs doing (the way this Doctor should always have been played). Good as Matt Smith is at the comedy though he can’t do authoritarian and outraged the way Pertwee could (similarly Rory is no Liz Shaw; weirdly he gets most of the jeopardy storylines this week while Amy gets sucked underground and taken away from the action early on). The beginning is nicely action packed but the story loses its way in the middle and the ending of ‘gee they went back to sleep’ is no match for ‘fancy blowing them all up!’ Had the original never existed (or even had it been wiped from the archives) then this would be a great story with an intriguing new race and some fascinating ideas: with it ‘Hungry Earth’ feels kind of pointless, like those Hollywood sequels made to remind people how great the originals were and get to spend some extra time with old friends with nothing really new to say, some new effects but none of the heart or bite of the original (it’s ‘101 Dalmations II’ only with half a dozen Silurians instead). A worthy way of re-introducing one of Dr Who’s best monsters to a new audience, then, that largely does the Silurians justice (at any rate more justice than they ever got in ‘Warriors Of The Deep’, misunderstood and undervalued as that deadline-crashing story is), but nowhere near as imaginative, bold or powerful as the original, a sort of reptilian copy of one that used to be warm-blooded and mammalian. Middling in other words.
POSITIVES + At last, we
got Stephen Moore in Dr Who and in a mask too, playing the elder, nobler Silurian.
Moore is a brilliant actor, one of the best that was ever in the series. He
shines in a part that’s, well, not as good as it could be. Every Who fan surely
knows how good he was as Marvin in the radio and TV ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide’ series, but not enough
know about his performance in the glorious spin-off singles that even saw him
performing on ‘Top Of The Pops’. If you haven’t heard them ‘Marvin’ ‘Marvin I Love You’ ‘Metal Man’ or ‘Reasons
To be Miserable’ yet then you’re in for a real deadpanned treat that beat any
of the Who-related music crossovers (the likes of ‘Doctor In Distress’ ‘Whose
Doctor Who?’ ‘I Want To Spend My Xmas With A Dalek’ and ‘Doctorin’ The Tardis’)
hands down.
NEGATIVES - Rory’s dead!
In retrospect Moffat should have kept at least a couple of the Rory demises
back, given how much he’s going to over use this trope by the end of next
season and this one is the easiest to go, given that it happens right at the
end of the episode when the already-defeated Silurians shoot him. There seems
no rhyme or reason for it here in a story that gave Rory too little to do as it
was; had they done it as part of the main plot saving Amy (and thus proving to
the Silurians that Humans were capable of kindness and selflessness) then it
would have been a strong driving part of the narrative but here, after
everything has been sown up, it just feels as if everyone went ‘whoops, we
finished five minutes too early, what else can we do?’ They didn’t of course:
it was always planned that Rory should skip the next few stories and only come
back for the finale, but as such you’d think it would be better integrated into
the story. It’s a terrible ‘death’ too (at least for the month or so it seemed
Rory was properly dead): the worst thing in Dr Who isn’t to die but to die
unloved and un-mourned, unremembered so that nothing you ever did counted for
anything. Seeing Amy forget Rory immediately is heartbreaking – but not always
in a good way. Just look at the clumsy plot-writing device of having Amy see
her future self, never fully explained in the script: first with Rory and then
alone. What’s more most of the references to Amy’s feelings for Rory were cut
so this aspect hits less than it would in almost any other story (for the
record it’s in the first scene where she sees her ‘future’ self and walks with
the Doctor while Rory ‘dawdles’, saying that he was always a dawdler and her
shock that she is still with him in ten years’ time, asking the Doctor for
advice as ‘it’s a bit difficult to control your nerves the night before your
wedding – especially when it goes on for months’. The Doctor replies that he
hasn’t got a clue about that, given that he was voted ‘most bewildering intergalactic
bachelor’ 503 years in a row, but that he knows Rory is a good man and
a good fit for her. At the time
we genuine thought that was it for one of DW’s more likeable characters and his
return felt like a bit of a cheat to be honest, an early sign of the emotional
manipulation Moffat is going to put us through as showrunner.
BEST QUOTE:
‘You’re 300 million years out of your comfort zone’.
PREQUEL/SEQUEL:
In case you somehow missed the points made in this review, ‘The Silurians’ told
much the same story forty years earlier but with a different group of
‘Earth-liens’.
Previous ‘Amy’s
Choice’ next ‘Vincent and The Doctor’
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