Smith Rewatch: The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood

As an adult fan of Doctor Who, I’ve never really engaged with non-TV spin-off media. I’m not into Big Finish audio dramas and even things like restored lost episodes of the classic series don’t really interest me. As a kid though…the Target novelisations of Doctor Who were things I just gobbled up. At the time that was really the only way to engage with the show’s history and stories like The Web Planet were great when the special effects and costumes were just stuff in your head. I don’t know how many books by Terrance Dicks I must have read but there is a good chance I’ve read more books by him than any other author.

However, it was a book by Malcolm Hulke that really sealed the deal as a lifelong Doctor Who fan. Entitled Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters it was an adaptation of Hulke’s own scripts for The Silurians. For a kid who loved dinosaurs (and who doesn’t) and Doctor Who it was an incredible story. What if intelligent life had evolved during the age of the dinosaurs? The idea wasn’t original to Hulke but the Silurians are the type-example of the idea to the extent that the question as a scientific thought experiment has been coined as “The Silurian Hypothesis” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis ) as a way of speculating about what geological evidence an industrial society would leave behind.

The story is so good because it pitches humanity against “monsters” who are not monsters and who aren’t aliens and didn’t set out to be in conflict but just want their planet back. After hiding deep underground because of the arrival of the Moon (OK that’s not where the moon comes from, also the moon is an egg and also it was Adric in a cyberman ship that killed the dinosaurs, just go along with it) the Silurians have been hibernating while the Earth healed. When they wake up the planet is infested with talking apes and they aren’t happy. Chunks of the book are presented from the Silurian perspective making it easy to love them and also they are dinosaurs and also the human military are a bunch of shits (even the Brigadier).

It all ends very badly. The Doctor is trying to broker peace but UNIT blows the SIlurians up. The good guys pick genocide (except The Doctor). It isn’t a cheery end but it feels like a kind of harsh life lesson about actual good (in this case The Doctor) and the apparent “good” (UNIT et al) who will rationalise evil in the name of a supposed greater good.

The Silurians were an iconic “monster” but didn’t really have a second act, although their cousins The Sea Devils did. The problem with the SIlurians is that there appears to be only one story to tell them about it. I’ve avoided quoting El Sandifer’s epic Tardis Eruditorum posts in these posts because I was aiming for more superficial impressions but she makes a very good point (as always) about the plot in the original Silurian appearance versus their 2010 return:

“There’s a bitter irony to all of this. In 1970 it was conceivable that the Silurians could actually serve as something other than antagonists, except for the fact that the show wasn’t capable of doing anything with them besides have them be men in generic monster suits. In 2010, on the other hand, the Silurians aren’t really capable of serving as anything other than glorified monsters, even though the show finally has the technical capabilities to do what Malcolm Hulke was trying to do in 1970. Instead the show ends up taking the predictable route, carefully making sure the breakdown of the peace process is ultimately the Silurians’ fault, albeit after some considerable human provocation on the part of Ambrose, and putting all the toys back in the box.”

https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/intelligent-alien-beings-the-hungry-earth-cold-blood

The Pertwee era was a reboot of the premise of the show, and the Silurian episode was very early in the UNIT era. It was conceivable that the show could have Silurians as recurring allies of UNIT hanging out in tunnels under England. The updated Who couldn’t quite do the same thing (although, as we see later, it finds a way to have a Silurian recurring character).

So we get a pretty good two-parter that has a very tense set up and, well a bit of a messy end. It avoids the genocidal resolution of the original and settles for the SIlurians choosing (not all willingly) to hibernate for centuries more while humanity gets it shit together.

Wait, a Doctor Who story that starts with lots of brilliant ideas and interesting set-up and meaty ethical conundrums that sort of fizzles out thematically near the end? Who wrote this two-parter? Oh…Chris Chibnall…

I’m being mean. Overall this is a solid story and it is hard to imagine any other writer finding a better way out of the corner the plot paints itself into. The messy end is complicated not by Chibnall but by Moffat who needs to work in the Crack and (in an apparent cynical move to remove the third wheel) not just kill Rory but remove him from history.

Another big plus for this two-parter is a tremendous supporting cast, in particular Meera Syal and Robert Pugh on the human side. More notably for the show as a whole, Neve McIntosh plays the militaristic Silurian Alaya but she’ll return in the same make-up next season as the very different Silurian Madame Vastra.

In short, this story is great because it has Silurians in it and I love Silurians and they should be in Doctor Who more often, just doing stuff and being speciesist about mammals.