Dr Who And The Silurians
(Season 7, Dr 3 with Liz and UNIT, 31/1/1970-14/3/1970, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Malcolm Hulke, director; Timothy Combe)
Rank: 37
'Silurian says...Die humans! Wait, no, don't point that weapon at me! Stop copying everything we do! Alright then, Silurian says let's talk about this...Hmm, not very talkative are you Humans? Still a bit suspicious. Well, Silurian says...I'm going to spy on you and see what you're up to. wait, no stop, you can't do that to us as well! Alright then Silurian says I'll take some prisoners...Ah, you weren't meant to copy that, interesting. Well then, Silurian says...let's release a space plague. ha, get out of that one! Wait, don't bow us up, I didn't say Silurian says...'
Fans always hold up the 4th Dr’s ‘do I have the right?’ speech when he’s there at the ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ and debating whether to blow his greatest enemies up or not as Dr Who being at its most ‘grown up’, but it’s not the first time the show asked the question or even necessarily the best. Five years earlier Dr Who spent an entire story debating that very question: At which point does repelling an invasion constitute a genocide? When does defence turn into offence? When does stopping someone from wiping out your family make it all alright to wipe out theirs? Especially when the invading race this time are, technically, the Humans? There are plenty of wars in Dr Who of course, but this is the one that feels closest to the real thing in so many ways: representatives of both worlds have convinced themselves that right is on their side and rather than evil conquering good it’s a war that escalates by way of misunderstandings and mistakes and people on both sides taking advantage of it, using it to further their career or get into power through what they learn of the opposition. What I love so much about this story though, is that it’s being waged by two different power blocks who don’t even get on with each other, as both Humans and Silurians bitch about whether they should be kind or cruel to those they see as interlopers, while The Doctor as a visiting alien sits on the outside as a third party trying to get them back to the negotiating table. While most Dr Who stories are naturally anti-war (with a few exceptions, like ‘The Dominators’ and the end of ‘The Daleks’) ‘The Silurians’ is perhaps the best example because it shows the impact on ordinary people/Silurians, casualties of war who for the most part don’t realise they are in the middle of one and most of whom don’t really care, trying to live their quiet everyday lives safe in their homes/caves, while letting their world leaders sort it out (or not). Like so many wars it’s a stalemate until one side comes out and does something utterly reckless (and it’s not really a spoiler which side it is, given that one race appears in all future stories set on Earth and the other only a handful of times since).Rather than punching the air in triumph, however, like so many other Who stories fighting monsters, you feel sad: it didn’t need to be like this. There should have been a better way to live in peace and harmony, but to do so would mean for humans to do better and the Silurians are no more responsible for this war than we are. There’s a lot going on under the surface you could say, only in this case with so much of the story spent underground, it’s literal.
It takes a special type
of writer to look at a formula like Dr Who of nasty aliens being defeated by brave
Humans and turn it on its head but then Malcolm Hulke was a very special writer
indeed, amongst the best the series ever had. Where others saw DW as an old
fashioned fight between good and evil, he saw it as a chance to start ethical
and moral debates about bigger issues. He came up with this story to prove
a point as much as anything else. Of all the writers still working on Dr Who
from the black and white days Hulke was the most critical of the show becoming
Earthbound in 1970, through a sentence of exile handed down by the BBC in
budget form. His complaint was that plots would be reduced to either ‘mass invasion’
and ‘mad professors’ – something not actually true given the rest of season
seven features ‘aliens controlling plastic on Earth’ ‘Earth astronauts who go
into space and come back ‘other’ due to a misunderstanding’ and ‘a parallel
Earth that’s almost like ours but not quite’, but it is the formula the series
sinks into later. Script editor Terrance Dicks, his best friend co-writer and
one time lodger who’d got him the job cheekily set him the challenge to come up
with a variation of his own and mentioned as a starting point that he’d always
wondered about doing caves in Dr Who. Hulke, always one for a challenge, invented
a new variation: a race that had been here already, just sleeping through
several million years because of a feared mass extinction that doesn’t happen
(there are hints in the story that it’s the Moon coming from outer space and
ending up in Earth’s orbit, which certainly would have affected life on Earth,
although it could just as easily be Mondas’ weird elliptical orbit in
historical times – see ‘The Tenth
Planet’). We’d had benign bordering on friendly alien races on Dr Who
before many times of course, from ‘Sensorites’ to ‘Rills’, but the Silurians
are something new: to them mankind are just the vermin that took over while
they were hibernating and, like anyone who’s been woken up by accident before
their alarm clock goes off, they are a bit ratty about it. Already you warm to
the Silurians after you learn this (how very Human!), but also you sympathise
with their horror as they wake up and learn that their annoying pet monkeys
have filled in the void and now have weapons to match their own. What’s a
Silurian to do? They were here first, which is the usual argument given in wars
and they have at least as much of a claim to Earth as we do. But equally it
wasn’t The Humans’ fault they mis-calculated. We have a claim to this world too.
I think about ‘The
Silurians’ a lot whenever the ugly question of war raises its head in the real
world, including the current one being waged between Israel and Palestine on
the other, for while most Dr Who alien mass invasions are clear-cut, this one very
much isn’t. Both sides can say honestly that they have right on their side but
it doesn’t give them enough right to commit genocide either. There are no true
out and out villains in this script, for possibly the first time since The
Tardis went wrong in ‘The Edge Of Destruction’.
You at least understand even if you don’t agree with each of these characters
in turn. The Silurians are discovered by Dr Quinn, played with a sly knowing by
Fulton Mackay a couple of years before his breakthrough in ‘Porridge’: he can
learn so much from these beings, use their scientific knowledge to make himself
rich! He doesn’t mean any harm, he just wants to capture one and talk to it,
honest! Then there’s Major Baker who’s
been trained his whole life to keep his country safe from invading foes. It
doesn’t make an iota of difference to him that they’ve come from caves rather
than overseas: if they pointed a gun (well, a third eye) at us then they’re
fair game the way any Human would be – it doesn’t matter that they see war a
little differently (while the certain
promotion he’d get would be a factor too in the army’s hierarchical system!) Most
interesting of all, perhaps, is how this story changes how we see the regulars:
so far in their three stories together The Brigadier has been a staunch ally of
The Doctor, believing him automatically from the time of their first meeting in
‘The Web Of Fear’ and working together to
protect The Earth. But now, where The Doctor sees a race with an equal claim
and a chance for peace, he just can’t take that risk after seeing how powerful
The Silurians are. Liz though is intelligent and open-minded enough to see the
bigger picture and sides with The Doctor. Hulke very cleverly holds a mirror up
to them with the three Silurians who actually talk in this story: the ‘old’
Silurian (‘Okdel’ in Hulke’s novelisation of this story, one of the best out
there) is clearly The Doctor, believing in peace. The ‘young’ Silurian (‘Morka’
in the novel) is clearly The Brigadier, out for war. And the scientist (‘K’to
in the novel) is kinda like Liz. It’s very deliberate: though The Silurians get
comparatively little screentime (you don’t even see one properly until the end
of episode three) you feel as if you know them well because you’ve seen exactly
the same arguments on the ‘Human’ side. Hulke also knows that it’s harder to
mindlessly blow something up when you get to know it so by having the Silurians
like the people we know and live and sympathise with it’s harder for us to want
to end this story the normal ‘Dr Who’ way. Only the great irony is that only us
(and The Doctor) ever get to see both sides’ point view: everyone else is
coming from a place of ignorance and arrogance. If everyone got round the
negotiating table and properly understood each other things would be so much
better, with The Doctor’s plans of offering up the parts of the Earth
uninhabitable to mammals a sensible, workable compromise that no one will
accept. No wonder The Doctor’s hair goes from being semi-coloured to
permanently white after this story: this is a story with so much prejudice on
both sides that even he can’t make everyone see sense.
For most of all you feel
for The Doctor. A lot (all?) of the rest of the 3rd Doctor era stories have the
timelord come up against an immovable foe who won’t listen to him (both sides
talk about free speech but both lock him up for trying it), but this story is
unique in having two sides that won’t listen, the Doctor caught between them
both and never seeming more like a lone alien outsider than here, with a higher
perspective than anyone but unable to get anyone to listen to him. This is all
new territory: we’ve sort of seen the first two Doctors get involved in
skirmishes before, but they tended to be him solving problems that make one
side look bad (‘The Ark’) or helping the
clearcut goodies when the clearcut baddies lock him and his friends up (‘Galaxy 4’).
Only ‘The Sensorites’ comes close to this (a more pioneering story than
it’s ever given credit for) yet even there the aliens of the week assume The
Doctor and Susan are ‘Human’ and lump them in with the visitors from Earth. The
Doctor makes it clear to both sides in this story that he sees things
differently to both of them. He’s the referee the Earth needs, even when both
sides don’t see it and is making a lot of headway before The Brigadier gets in
the way. More than usual in this era, this is The Doctor’s story rather than a
UNIT story. Interesting, then, that this of all stories should bear the Doctor’s
name actually in the title. By accident though: all BBC paperwork had the
titles ‘Dr Who and the…’ in this era because that’s what the series was called,
though leaving the name of this one intact seems to have been a rare mistake by
Tim Combe, a director who hadn’t realised the Dr Who formula and a production
team that weren’t yet experienced enough to contradict it – though I’m amazed
Terrance Dicks, who’d been at least involved in the show for six months by now,
or Barry Lets who’d directed ‘The Enemy Of The
World’ didn’t spot it when the captions were being made; by rights of
course it’s ‘UNIT v The Silurians’ with the Dr the only person not taking sides.
The Earth was crying out
for a Doctor figure for real in 1970. ‘The Silurians’ is also the perhaps the
most blatant of all the ‘cold war’ stories in Dr Who’s arsenal, at least
written at a time when the cold war was ongoing (see, erm, ‘Cold War’ for an even more blatant version,
with Ice Warriors standing in for Russians). We’re in a time when the world
could blow up at any time, on a whim of the Russian or American presidents,
because the other side looked at them funny. Most 19602-1980s Dr Who is written
in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, asking ‘why can’t we just get along?’
but usually what happens is that the series will side with the Human, who are
only defending against an aggressor with superior firepower in a war that’s
‘not fair’. Not here: this is a stalemate between more or less equal forces and
even though the young Silurian is monstrous in many ways his acts of aggression
are no different to ‘ours’. When The Doctor comments on how in a stalemate ‘someone
will have to make a move’ and it will be catastrophic for both sides, that’s
what he’s really talking about. The plot twists, of Humans kidnapping Silurians
and Silurians releasing a deadly plague in retaliation, are both things each
sides prepared for, convinced that the other side were monstrous enough to
actually do it. Just to rub in that this is a cold war analogy the incredible
Hulke has the Silurians become reptiles, cold-blooded. This automatically makes
them ‘other’ but also makes them more like the Russians, who live in a colder
climate and are - so the propaganda has it – more scheming and cunning,
manipulative in a ‘snake’ like way with military equipment they hide away and a
society that are mostly kept ‘in the dark’ (well, they do live in caves). The
Humans are the Americans, hot-headed and impulsive, bordering on reckless, who
love showing off their guns and using them at the first opportunity. Neither
way is worse than the other, just different.
That was a brave statement to make
indeed in 1970 and one that only a few writers would have even considered – but
then Hulke was a card-carrying communist who had a different perception to
most. Some fans and writers get the wrong end of the stick here and assume that
makes Hulke automatically on the side of the Silurians but that’s not true.
It’s worth reminding everyone what people like Hulke and a few others knew at
the time: Russia under Stalin and all the people who came afterwards was not a
true communist state but a dictatorship: communism, the idea of sharing
resources and living together equally, with no one group having power over another,
died out with its founder Lenin. Hulke is very much neutral, using The Doctor
as his mouthpiece to show why there ought to be a ‘better way’ of living
together.
One of the best things
about ‘Silurians’ is the pacing: it starts off slowly, through small misunderstandings
and little clues (such as the globe in Quinn’s office, with all of Earth’s
landmasses together the way they used to be billions of years ago), but keeps
growing out of control, just like the cold war, with no one around to stop it.
The first half is espionage and kidnappings, of trying to work out who these
shady other beings are, with Dr Quinn heating up his house to keep one safe;
The Doctor knows he has a Silurian hostage but can’t do anything about it or
that would be war too. By the time the Silurians unleash their own
laboratory-made space-plague to kill us off in retaliation there’s no going
back (side note: this really wasn’t the best story to be watching as my first
choice of escapism in 2020’s covid lockdown!
Whoops...Totally forgot about that sub-plot at the time). It’s done really well: other Who space plagues can be invisible (‘The Ark’ is just people sneezing – that settles it, Hulke must have watched this story), silly (‘The Invisible Enemy’ and it’s life size prawn-like viruses), confusing (‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’) or borderline terrifying (‘The Seeds Of Doom’). ‘Silurians’ is the best use of illness as a threat though, along with ‘The Moonbase’: both seem real, with people reacting the way people ‘normally’ would, just as disturbing and arguably more realistic than Terry Nation’s similar go at the end of the decade in his series ‘The Survivors’. Masters spreads it not by malice but accident, travelling cross country to spread it to lots of areas until soon it’s all round the world. There’s panic, disinformation, bribery, panic as people start dropping like flies and you wonder who might be next (new producer Barry Letts was so taken with this idea that he was disappointed at the way the extras underplayed it, so one of his first big interventions in the role was to cheekily claim an ‘error’ on the processing insurance and get base costs to film it again, with the production crew standing in: that’s Letts, Dicks, director Combe and production secretary Sandra Bernholz in cameo roles as passengers at London’s Marylebone Station (shot early on a Sunday before they opened). That’s Trevor Ray, Dicks’ assistant script editor, actually getting a line as the ticket collector who collapses, with everyone around at the time who wanted to be in it too (there’s a longstanding rumour that Diana Rigg, hearing about this plan in the BBC canteen, joined in too but if so I’ve never seen her). You also see the way it affects the humans, turning them mad, with masters physically attacking The Brigadier in the supposed safety of UNIT HQ, a really quite brutal scene for Saturday teatime television. This isn’t people coughing and falling over – this is something that’s a real threat. The attemtion to detail is superb, including The Doctor’s microscopic lenses (one of the chief differences between reptiles and mammals is the amount of white blood cells: the plague makes humans more like ‘them’ with white blood cells every two hundred rather than every thousand, something that’s deadly to ‘us’).
The Silurians, aware that
Humans lack their radiation-friendly skin, also plan to destroy the radiation
belt that filters the sunlight from the skies. This part of the story gets a
bit lost in everything else happening but it’s a powerful one: Combe, one of my
favourite directors (and involved with the show as a production assistant since
‘The Keys Of Marinus’, stepping in to cover for ‘The Reign Of Terror’ when the director fell
ill), does so much this story to shoot things from a Silurian point of view
when we’re outdoors, so we get lots of point of view shots of coming out of
darkness into the sun, that looks moiré ‘threatening’ than usual, especially
tinted a Silurian third-eye red and seen through tilted camera angles. The
Earth looks strange and the Humans oddly fragile throughout this story, really
adding to the atmosphere. It’s all wonderfully claustrophobic too, with both
sides ‘trapped’ and The Doctor too, with no other planet to travel to (even The
Tardis isn’t mentioned, for the first time ever if you discount ‘Mission To The Unknown’ which The Doctor wasn’t
in).
Of course UNIT retaliate
by going in all guns blazing its one of the tensest conclusions of any Dr Who story.
The one problem with that view is that having Silurians living amongst Humans
would change the series forever: every future story in this Earthbound period
would have to have people in Silurian costumes waving hello to be realistic and
the production team were trying to save money, not spend it. So it was Terrance
Dicks who changed the ending, turning it from a utopia into victory for The
Humans. Hulke was, reportedly, appalled even though he understood why and it
was Barry Letts who became ‘The Doctor’ negotiating a third way between them:
the ending stood but he also handed the story back to Hulke to write one last
great epic speech from a disillusioned Doctor horrified at what The Brigadier
has done. This is a rare story he’s ‘lost’ to all intents and purposes, for all
his hard work as a third party negotiator, though luckily for Earth it’s the
one story when humans were in the ‘wrong’. Yet equally you can’t fully blame the
Brigadier, who’s under orders to keep humanity safe whatever the cost and is pushed
from his usual benign uncle role into something darker in this story, fighting
everyone up to and including the Dr as the responsibility for keeping mankind
safe destruction falls on his shoulders. He can’t afford to be nice and moral,
not when everyone he knows is about to die – but of course that’s exactly what
the younger Silurian has been saying too. The Doctor is his scientific advisor,
not his boss – and yet deep down you sense that he knows The Doctor is right.
It’s one of the all-time great scenes in Dr Who: Jon Pertwee seethes
brilliantly, filled with real anger for the first time this regeneration while
The Brigadier tries to stand up to him but is also a little like a guilty child
who knows he’s done wrong. Far from being the anticlimax it would be in other
tales (after all, Dr Who was never going to kill humans off so its not exactly
a surprise who ‘wins’) the ending is the best bit, not a tick boxes and pull
levers type dues et machine ending but an inevitable result of what’s gone
before it. It’s a gut punch to a Doctor who has to question anew just who he’s
sharing his exile with. It looks as if it’s changed their friendship forever,
though future writers thaw it out again to different degrees (this might have
been deliberate: another issue Hulke had with ‘Earthbound’ stories was the way a
peace-loving being like The Doctor would have sided with a military
organisation rather than a hippie commune, even if it is made up of old
friends). It’s a great explosion too, one of the best in ‘classic’ Who and so
strong that it set the nearby grass alight by accident (leading to the first
time the fire brigade is called out at filming – it won’t be the last).
The main cast are on top
form: Jon Pertwee’s Doctor was delirious for much of ‘Spearhead’ but as soon as
this story starts he simply is the Doctor: dashing, brave, heroic,
simultaneously more assertive than his predecessors and yet more vulnerable,
admitting to Liz that he’s losing confidence for the first time ‘across thousands
of years’ (can you imagine anyone getting the better of Hartnell or Troughton
in the final act of a story? No and yet you can with Pertwee who straddles that
fine line brilliantly here). He’s happiest when driving in Bessie, away from
everyone else – his new car and home from home for much of the serial (she’s a
modified Ford Popular if you’re wondering, with a glenytura shell over the top.
The number-plate ‘Who1’ was already owned so the car only had those number-plates
on private roads. It might just be a ‘coincidence’ in the Dr Who world or might
be a third example of ‘Who’ being the Doctor’s ‘name’ following ‘The War Machines’ and possibly ‘The Highlanders’). Nicholas
Courtney is never better, caught between aliens under some rock and a hard
timelord, his usual character strengths of reliability and steadfastness now
making him a stubborn immovable object in a plot that’s all about change and
adapting to your environment (more, much more of this in ‘Inferno’ two stories later). It’s a
real peak for Caroline John too, who shines with a script that gives her something
to do beyond be haughty and a peril monkey. Liz gets to be a proper scientist,
coming to similar conclusions to the Doctor but independently, stuck in the
difficult decision of having to go behind her boss’ back (and unlike the Doctor,
whose slumming it in the hope of something better soon, she needs her job to
live off and she’s spent a lifetime trying to get this career going – she’s not
just going to throw it all away when her new colleague tells her to, even
though by the end she sees the bigger picture that her degree doesn’t matter at
all in an escalating war). It’s her discoveries as much as the Doctor’s which
leads to a cure for the Silurian’s deadly bacteria (the World Health
Organisation seriously need a Liz Shaw to sort covid out pronto: it’s still out
there, folks). The supporting cast are great too and it’s no surprise to see so
many actors who at the time were newbies go on to bigger things in the decade
following this story, albeit in very different characters: Fulton Mackay played
his ‘Porridge’ prison warden with a twinkle behind his frosty exterior (much
like the Brig in fact) but here Dr Quinn’s the closest we get to a villain the
whole story, selling out his species the first chance he gets. Paul Darrow is
the closest we get to a straightforward hero too, a loyal soldier prepared to
lay down his life at a moment’s notice a million miles away from anti-hero Avon
in ‘Blake’s 7’. Geoffrey Palmer plays civil servant Masters like a younger,
cold-blooded reptilian version of Lionel in ‘As Time Goes By’, only instead of
being given the runaround by Judi Dench it’s a ‘Will he? Won’t he?’ race
tracking him down across Britain as he inadvertently spreads the plague. And
then there’s Peter Miles, later the clinical ruthless Goerring to Davros’
Hitler, whose really quite sweet here.
Then there’s the filming:
Letts’ other big influence was the for CSO (Colour Separation Overlay, the
era’s CGI or ‘greenscreen’ with one colour taken out by computer and replaced
by a model or an actor on another set; for most series it was blue but Dr Who
used a different colour because using blue made the Tardis disappear every time
they used it – hence the in-joke of how many blue aliens suddenly appear in the
revived series’ ‘End Of The World’ now that
technology has moved on by 2005) and while you’ll get mighty sick of it by the
time more digital effects finally kick in for the late 1980s for now CSO is a
revelation: it feels as if we get more sets than we ever used to at a fraction
of the cost and they line up nicely with the real location shots in Surrey’s
Hankley Common. That’s just as well because there are places where The
Silurians falls apart and quite literally in the case of some of the sets. This
story was hit by a scenery strike: as part of his deal to have Dr Who taken
more seriously Letts had struck up a negotiation (see how that word keeps cropping
up in this review?) with the BBC whereby they had access to bigger studios. The
designer Barry Newbury was duly told he could make sets to new bigger
dimensions. Only nobody thought to tell the propmen who were still on the same paltry
pay. They baulked at having to move the heavier sets and were only pacified,
towards the end of this story, by the agreement that studio sets would now be
filmed two a fortnight rather than one a week (what difference does that make?
Well it means that as Dr Who was in production ‘longer’ at a time they could
leave the sets up for two episodes instead of taking them down after one). This
wasn’t the only problem: Newbury knew the BBC would struggle to make the
fibreglass cave sets he needed so contracted an outside company, who did things
on the cheap by putting fibreglass over sacking, thinking they were needed as
set-dressing rather than the walls of the Silurians caves. Many a take was lost
when the floppy walls of the cave slid down from where they’d been stapled,
leading to a rising of tension in the studio (which, though bad for cast and
crew, is good for us: so much of this story is people arguing with each other
and trying not to lose their temper, with an edge few other stories have). Even
so, some of the look of this story is atrocious: sort-of sequel ‘The Sea Devils’
is one of the best looking Dr Who stories of all (albeit without the depth of
this story’s themes) and makes this one look like amateur hour at times. The ‘guard
dinosaur’ in the caves, nicknamed ‘Bertram
The friendly Monster’ right down to Hulke’s last script draft when he’d seen
it, is particularly poor, at least as bad as the ones in ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ (which Hulke
wrote too later, so really he should have known better).
The Silurians themselves
are a brilliant creation on paper that come out a little bit wonky on screen. The
pvc suits are exactly what people think of when they talk about Dr Who aliens
being men in suits, while the masks mean we don’t get the sense of the actors
behind the way we do with some other aliens. Though the ‘third eye’ as a
communication tool/weapon (a suggestion by the director) is a great idea that makes
them a threat even when cornered and evades the need for actual weapons, it does
sometimes look a bit silly flashing in red every time they speak (the poor
actors inside the costumes were working the with their tongue, with the rest of
the Silurian head sitting on top of theirs).
They’re a rather boring shade of brown too, the closest we get to beige monsters until the equally colourful Sil (‘Vengeance On Varos’). Yet as a race The Silurians make you forget all of that and stop being men in suits and become ‘real people’ very quickly. They’re the first reptile race seen on DW (a plausible evolutionary alternative to ape-like bipedal mammal aliens) and are one of the more capable alien races, with a technology mankind can only dream of. They might have gone underground but that doesn’t mean their motives aren’t above station. They’re actually quite a warm hearted species (despite being cold blooded): they take the time to listen to the Humans, but still look on them with the sort of benign ‘aww, bless – that’s nice dear, now put your toys away, the grown-ups are here’ sufferance a 1st world civilisation looks down on a 3rd world one, as a younger species who haven’t earned the right to be equals yet and who can’t be trusted with bigger decisions (despite that earlier analogy The Silurians are also America every time another country develops the capacity for nuclear bombs). Hulke manages to make them seem like true individuals in this story, a civilisation of conflicting views all muddling along and trying to do the right thing as they see it, rather than just a group of shooty monsters. By contrast he has a very low opinion of the Humans, who – companion Liz aside - can’t understand what the Doctor is complaining about at all. I mean, those reptiles coming over here, pointing weapons at us, doing our jobs, offering us their technology, what did they ever do for us?! But then the Humans are doing exactly the same to their elders (Hulke also paints this story as an Oedipus coming of age tale, of the child having to defeat the father to take power. There’s a lot of ‘Planet Of The Apes’ about this story too – with the Humans as the apes! As the film came out in 1968 it’s not impossible Hulke would have watched it around the time of being asked to submit ideas for the 1970 season. Then again he might just have remembered that under-rated 1st Doctor story ‘The Ark’, a very similar tale of oppressors and victims switching round, though that story has them switching power in different eras rather than fighting at the same time).
Other detractors say that
‘The Silurians’ is a bit talky, but that’s an aspect I like: this story is all
about the need to communicate with people you don’t necessarily agree with and that
if everyone had come to a negotiating table and just talked their problems
through at the start and agreed to some sort of compromise instead of pointing
weapons at each other everyone would have been happy (‘The Zygon Invasion/Inversion’,
the highlight of the 12th Dr era, owes a lot to Malcolm Hulke and this story –
far more so than actual Silurian revival ‘The
Hungry Earth/Cold Blood’, which re-creates this story’s plot almost to the
letter but rather misses the point of it). There was a worrying trend
towards season six of Dr Who siding with war (The
Dominators’ most obviously, but ‘The
Invasion’ and ‘The Seeds Of Death’ too
pat the military on the back for seeing off the monsters); it’s good to have
The Doctor back on the side of peace, where he’ll stay (until the late McCoy
eras anyway). That sense of talking also makes this amongst the most Quatermassy
of stories, along with the references to a prehistoric race’ with technology
equal or better than our own, a space plague and ‘something deadly under the
ground’ (a lot of Dr Who in general but especially the exiled Earthbound years
have their roots in Quatermass). There’s none of the clumsy exposition lesser
writers come up with: you learn everything at the speed you’re meant to, bit by
bit. The Silurians have gained a whole
new popularity since being re-used in new Who (not least since Madame Vastra
became a close friend of the 11th and 12th Drs) and the modern versions look
much better, with a more obviously reptilian sculpted face that isn’t just a
rubber mask. However, even with that, The Silurians will never again be quite
as brilliantly three-dimensional as they are here, a race closer to humanity
than any other we see except perhaps The Cybermen (from Earth’s twin planet),
with all of our variety, faults, conflicted feelings and desperate need to
survive at all costs. Amazingly so really given that we only ever see six of
them and only ever get to know three – they still feel as if we’ve viewing an
entire race at least as well drawn as the humans. We’re a long way from the
traditional Dr Who formulas. Though ‘Spearhead
From Space’ is the first Dr Who story transmitted in colour, it’s this
second one that has most moved on from the black-and-white thinking of the past
to a view of the world that’s more, well, muddy brown. There’s a lot of brown
in this story from the Silurians on down, which is maybe the biggest issue
holding it back: all that trouble to get colour film cameras and it’s the one
story of season seven that still feels as if it’s being shot in a sort of
monochrome, especially once we reach the Silurian caves – you begin to wonder
if they can even see other colours and whether humans seem to disappear every
time they wear bright hues (it doesn’t help that some of these episodes are ‘colourised’
black-and-white rather than true colour though unlike the revelation of other
stories they do this to – like ‘The Daemons’
and ‘The Mind Of Evil’ which are so much
better in colour – it doesn’t make all that much difference to this story). The
result is a story that’s big and bold and brave and clever, one that’s maybe a
bit too long for its own good (the space plague is obviously there as a
sub-plot to eke the time out and is solved rather too quickly) but one that
also has the time to not only ask the heavy questions but spend some time
trying to find plausible answers too. It’s a clever true plea for peace from a
writer who can see both sides to any conflict and sees every side as the losers
in a war and made at a time of cold war, which had no apparent answers, it
feels like a heartfelt plea to find another way out, something that will be
timeless as long as wars are fought even if the cold war is over (it’s worth
remembering that most of the cast and crew making this did national service, in
the certainty that there would be another war one day. Hulke hated his. Only
Caroline John is too young to have done it out of the main players in front of and
behind the cameras). So tense and gripping is this story and so invested are
you that you feel as shattered as the Dr that things couldn’t be worked out
humanely (Siluriany?) - and that’s great art right there. One of Dr Who’s most
involving gripping stories, only a cold-blooded reptile could come away from ‘The
Silurians’ without feeling moved. Much copied but never bettered, Malcolm Hulke
was my favourite ‘regular’ Who writer for all sorts of reasons and even if some
things get messed up on screen all of those reasons are spelled out in this
exceptional script, one of the best and certainly most intelligent this most
intelligent of scifi series ever had.
POSITIVES + In stark
contrast to what I’ll say in the ‘Sea Devils’
sequel...this particular weird musical score really works. Where ‘The Sea
Devils’ is all random bloops and bleeps playing even when we’re following The
Master or UNIT, here Carey Blyton (writer Enid’s nephew, no really) splits his
score in two, so that when the humans are on screen it plays out like a normal
orchestral score (albeit a bigger one than most Dr Who budgets ever stretched to before) and when the
Silurians are on screen, well...They are technically all instruments of human
invention but I can guarantee they’ve never been combined quite like this
before: recorders from the Medieval period, a Contrabass Clarinet (the really
really deep one that isn’t often used) and a Krumhorn (a Renaissance era
instrument that vibrates with a particular kind of buzz). It sounds like nothing
ever heard on Earth before, well...not in mankind’s lifetime at least. Sensibly
too most of the musicians are woodwind players – sensible because so much of
this story (particular the cliffhangers) revolves around breath; the two sides
spend a lot of this story trying to overhear the others’ voices and either
trying to stay still while breathing heavily or running around panicking while
breathing even heavier than that. In this story the music combines with the
feel of ‘breathing’ from both sides, making the event feel ‘real’ and visceral
compared to most scores. As brilliant as regular composer Dudley Simpson is
(and he is: I could easily have mentioned him in the ‘plus’ section for every
score, but that would have become monotonous), I wish they’d given Carey more
than just three DW scores to do (though neither ‘Death To The Daleks’ nor
‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ live up to this one). They’re also instruments from
as far back in time as mankind goes, which of course means they’re the closest in time to when the
Silurians lived (whenever that might be: Hulke chose the name because it
sounded good, but realised after it was pointed out to him that no life could
have grown on Earth at the time, even reptilian; luckily it’s the name a Human
gives them so The Doctor points out in ‘The Sea Devils’ that it’s wrong and
they should be Eocenes, only that’s wrong too. By rights they’re ‘Late
Jurassicists’ if they’re hanging round with dinosaurs, but that sounds wrong
somehow).
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Warriors Of The Deep’
(1983), the TV sequel, seemed a terrible place to leave such an interesting
race so it’s no surprise that there are a lot of spin-offs featuring The
Silurians to give them a more interesting finale. The reptilians were one of
the first classic Dr Who ‘monsters’ to make an appearance in ‘The New
Adventures’ books, starting with Jim Mortimore’s ‘Blood Heat’ (1993). Featuring
a fetching cover illustration of a Silurian riding its pet dinosaur, this is to
date the only story that looks at what the Silurian empire would have looked
like on Earth in their proper era the Jurassic period and it’s wonderfully
imaginative, free as it is of all the trappings of a TV budget. It’s one of the
best New Adventures in the range in fact, with an inventive plot that sees the
Tardis forced into an emergency landing when an error means companion Benny is
flung into the space-time vortex and winds up in the Earth’s past. The story
then re-tells ‘The Silurians’ from the ‘opposite’ point of view, with a colony
of UNIT soldiers (and a very grumpy Brigadier!) sent back in time and trying to
survive as jumpy lone soldiers in the Silurian domain for a change. On the one
hand it’s all great fun as the 7th Doctor, Ace and a recovered Benny
make new friends and run around on dinosaurs (the Jurassic equivalent of
horses). Be warned though as in other places this schizophrenic novel is quite
a tough read in places, with Mortimore taking the ‘adult’ness of the ‘New
Adventures’ to mean not the usual sex and violence but some really harrowing
images of old friends in pain: The Brig all but goes mad from the strain of
trying to hold his men together, a guesting Jo Grant goes full-on insane from
the effects of a radiation leak before dying from an injection that was meant
to help her recover her memories (!) and Liz is mourning the death of her
husband in an accident. We then get the most almighty twist that the 3rd
Doctor himself is dead (mega huge spoiler alarm: the accident made the Tardis
fall into a parallel dimension and this is the parallel world UNIT team from ‘Inferno’,
which helps explain why the Brig is just a meanie in this story – at one point
Liz compares him to Hitler. Other mega huge spoiler: we’re not in the time
period we think we’re in as ‘The Silurians’ story never happened with The
Doctor dead and they ‘won’). It’s worth persevering though, however uneven and
best of all The Silurians feel like characters again rather than a generic
monster race, with their civilisation compellingly handled. Gripping, well
written and unusual.
‘Blood Tide’ (2001) is Big Finish’s go at a sequel,
with The Silurians one of the first returning monsters in their main range too
(this is number #22). It’s a 6th Doctor and Evelyn story set back in
the Silurians’ own time (the actual one this time) and it’s a very powerful
ecological plea. The Silurians’ technology is such that they’ve reached a point
a mere few decades ahead of our own and The Earth is dying, hammered by the
acid rain that’s a by-product of their civilisation. The difference is that The
Silurians have perfected the art of cryogenically freezing themselves and the
story follows them as they head underground, little knowing that the ape pets
their scientists have been experimenting on and encouraging to speak (with
shades of ‘Planet Of the Apes’) are going to evolve and take over the planet
while they’re asleep. The Tardis, meanwhile, has landed in the Galapagos islands
in 1835 where Sixie is overjoyed to meet Charles Darwin (and offer him a few
pointers, naturally). Something’s not quite right though: the locals warn the
expedition not to go near the island caves because of ‘monsters’. Of course The
Doctor has to find out for himself and ends up being taken prisoner by a bunch
of Silurians who’s alarm clock went off too early. Just as in their first
appearance on TV The Doctor tries to act as a go between for the two species,
something made more complicated by the fact that Dr 6 is far less of a natural
diplomat than Dr 3! There’s a big exciting finale with a submarine and a Myrka
(which works much much much better on audio than as a pantomime horse on TV)
and a civil war between the Silurians who want peace and those who want to wipe
the Humans out. Needless to say The Doctor helps one side over the other and
helps the survivors go back to sleep. Not up with the absolute best in the
range maybe and not up to the other two sequels in this list, but still
blooming good – especially once you’ve got through the first hour of scene
setting and all the pieces are in place for the big ending.
Previous ‘Spearhead From Space’ next ’The Ambassadors Of Death’
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