Dr Who And The Silurians: Ranking - 37

 

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 quite rightly hold up the 4^th 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 the show being ‘grown up’, but its not the first time the show asked the question or even the best. Five years earlier DW spent an entire story debating that very question: at which point does repelling an invasion constitute a genocide? At which point does defence turn into offence? At what point 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? I think about ‘The Silurian’s a lot whenever the ugly question of war raises its head, including the current one between Israel and Palestine. There are plenty of wars in DW of course, but this is the one that feels closest to the real thing I many ways: representatives of both worlds have convinced themselves that right is on their side and the tension escalates by way of misunderstandings and mistakes, but only one of them can win – on behalf of ‘ordinary people/Silurians’ who mostly don’t know that a war is going on at all until its too late 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). Of all the writers still working on DW from the black and white days Malcolm Hulke was the most critical of the show becoming Earthbound in 1970 through a sentence of exile handed down by the BBC in timelord form. His complaint was that plots would be reduced to ‘mass invasion’ and ‘mad professors’, until he invented a new variation: a race that had been here already, just sleeping. Hulke is one of the greatest and deepest writers DW 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. 

There are no villains in this script, only victims, as everyone fights for the survival of their own kind – there’s a lot going on under the surface you could say, only in this case its literal. Though ‘Spearhead From Space’ is the first DW story transmitted in colour, its this second one that 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 its the one story of season seven that still feels as if its 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). We’d had benign bordering on friendly alien races on DW 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 whose been woken up by accident before their alarm clock goes off, they are a bit ratty about it. Similarly you can’t really blame the Brigadier, whose 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 what the Silurian leader is saying too. After all, the Dr is a scientific advisor paid for by him: he’s an advisor whose advice doesn’t have to be followed and Whitehall are breathing down the Brigadier’s neck wondering why he’s one of those pesky liberals and why he hasn’t just blown this alien threat up already. The Silurians are a brilliant creation. They’re the first reptile race seenon DW (a plausible 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, to escape the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs (which turned out to be, ahem, the Dr’s fault after all anyway via the Cybermen) 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 3^rd 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 (The Silurians are 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 Dr 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?! Only the Dr believes in a peace deal and envisions a future where everyone can get along. And for once (spoiler alert) he loses big time, creating a rift between him and the Brig that takes several stories to shift. A lot (all?) of the rest of the 3^rd Dr era have the Dr come up against an immovable foe who won’t listen to him but this story is unique in having two sides that won’t listen, the Dr caught between them both and never seeming more like a lone alien outsider than here, ith a higher perspective than anyone. 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. Interesting, then, that this of all stories should bear the Dr’s name actually in the title (by accident: 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 DW formula and a production team that hadn’t officially taken over yet to contradict it; by rights of course its ‘UNIT and The Silurians’ with the Dr the only person not taking sides). And try as he may even the Dr can’t stop the increasing escalation, as things get more and more out of control and both sides talk about free speech but want to lock him up. By the time the Silurians unleash their own laboratory-made space-plague to kill us off (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) and UNIT retaliate by going in all guns blazing its one of the tensest conclusions of any DW story. The finale isn’t the anticlimax it would be in other tales (after all, DW was never going to kill humans off so its not exactly a surprise who ‘wins’) but a gut punch to a Dr who has to question anew just who he’s sharing his exile with. Yes its a bit talky at times as its detractors point out (and as many seven parters are) but talking is the whole point of this story, 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 ‘Cold Blood’, which re-creates this story’s plot almost to the letter but rather misses the point of it). 

The main cast are on top form: Jon Pertwee’s Dr was out of it 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 more vulnerable (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). 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 except be haughty and bitchy. Liz gets to be a proper scientist, coming to similar conclusions to the Dr but independently, stuck in the difficult decision of having to go behind her boss’ back (and unlike the Dr, 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 Dr’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). The supporting cast are great too and its no surprise to see so many 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 its a ‘Will he? Won’t he?’ race tracking him down 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: this is the first time DW went in for CSO (Colour Separation Overlay, the era’s CGI or ‘greenscreen’; for most series it was blue but DW 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. Really, though, its the aliens standing in front of them that come to life the most. 

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 11^th and 12^th 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 four of them – they still feel as if we’ve viewing an entire race at least as well drawn as the humans. 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. By the end you feel as shattered as the Dr that things couldn’t be worked out humanely (Siluriany?) with one of the biggest emotional endings of all DW, as emotional a rollercoaster ride as any. One of DW’s most involving gripping stories, only a cold-blooded reptile could come away from this story without feeling moved.

+ 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 DW 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).

- The Silurians have a third eye that lights up and which is kind of their equivalent of the sonic screwdriver, with an ability to do all sorts of amazing technological feats. Only to use it they have to wobble their head from side to side, which just looks as if they’re having a stroke and does tend to ruin the tension rather (the masks must have been strong not to come off!) The result is a race that’s credible in almost every way – the voice (Peter Halliday sounding suitably reptilian), the costume, the dialogue – that then reminds you its just an actor in a suit every time it attacks someone. ‘Technological advanced’ my foot, you could have at least evolved a big shiny button or something guys!