I probably remember reading Malcolm Hulke’s Target novelisation of
his own story, which was entitled “Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters” more than
I remember watching this story, and if I’m honest, I don’t even remember
reading that all that clearly. Back in those early days in the mid 70s Target
were a bit funny and fussy about titles. They insisted that the first new
novelisation they commissioned, “Spearhead from Space” was changed to “The
Auton Invasion” – they had this one changed, “The Colony in Space” became “The
Doomsday Weapon”, “The Moonbase” became “The Cybermen” and “Robot!” became “The Giant Robot”. Thankfully
they did learn to leave well enough alone as time went on.
I do remember that I enjoyed the prologue to the novelisation, a
little scene with the Silurian scientists observing the approach of the Moon,
and making the last preparations for their species’ hibernation, while feeling
sorry that their primate pets would be destroyed in the coming cataclysm. I
tend to remember this as a rather more thoughtful piece of work than its
companion piece, “The Sea Devils” – which I have to say that I remember a lot
better than this one. I just can’t help feeling that at 7 episodes it is bound
to drag at some point. Still, having said that, two of the best stories in the
previous season, in fact the whole Troughton era, were an 8 parter and a 10
parter, and so with hope in our hearts, let us go boldy forwards and see what
“The Silurians” can offer us.
After Watching
Let’s imagine a scenario, if we may. There is a weather forecast
that tells you that there is going to be the most terrible electric storm for
the last thousand years and it’s coming right your way in the next few hours.
You decide that the best thing you can do is to go down to wait it out on the
couch in the basement, batten down the hatches and pop a couple of sleeping
pills in your mouth. You sleep for rather longer than you expected, and when
you go back upstairs you find that the storm never happened, and your house has
been taken over by squatters. You’d be miffed and do your best to get rid of
them, wouldn’t you? Well, that, essentially, is what “The Silurians” is all
about. The surface of the Earth is the house, we, humanity, turn out to be the
squatters, and the erroneously named Silurians are the angry owners in the
basement.
Even though my memory of actually watching “The Silurians” is hazy
at best, and may be more about what I remember from the novelization, the
scenario at the start of episode 1 is awfully familiar. The Doctor is tinkering
with good old Bessie, when Liz Shaw
comes and tells him that they need to go to a research establishment. In this
case it’s Wenley Moor, where they’ve been having unexplained power losses when
they operate their Cyclotron. Cyclotrons, eh, nothing but trouble in my
experience. These power losses seem linked to some mysterious disappearances in
the nearby cave system, and UNIT has been sent in to investigate. The Doctor
eventually manages to give everyone else the slip, and goes down into the
caves, where he meets a dinosaur. I’ve heard it described as a T Rex – it
isn’t, although it’s definitely a carnivorous species, although I can’t say
which since the director quite wisely only gives us brief glimpses of it.
In the first three episodes, the Director quite wisely doesn’t let
us see very much of the Silurians themselves. This isn’t because they are badly
designed – although their feet are possibly the oddest since the Sensorites’ –
but because once you’ve revealed the monster in all its glory in a given story,
then you’re going to have to look for tension and fear from elsewhere, so it’s
worth delaying the reveal until the right moment. So throughout the first three
episodes we get an arm here, a claw there, a brief glimpse of face, a dark
silhouette, a brief flash of the whole thing, and lots of viewing things
through the wounded Silurian’s eyes. I did like what Malcolm Hulke did through
the early episodes, though, by deliberately setting up the Doctor as the voice
of reason. He’s the one who argues that there are 2 species in the cave. He’s
the one who presents the evidence that the intelligent species are going out of
their way to prevent attacks on humans, while all around you can see the UNIT
guys thinking – give me just one chance and I’ll blow the little green buggers
to kingdom come.
I watched episode 1 on the same Bank Holiday that I watched the
whole of Spearhead from Space. I deliberately rationed myself to just episodes
2 and 3 the next night. By midday of the 3rd day I was literally
champing at the bit to get home so that I could watch the next two
installments. So that has to be submitted as evidence that the pacing of the
story is spot on, which ain’t an easy thing to achieve for a 7 parter.
I watched episodes 4 and 5 in one sitting,
and pressed on for episode 6. In fact I was tempted to go for the finish and
watch episode 7 the same evening to finish it off, but it was probably the
wisest option to leave it. Right, then, so it turns out that against the
Doctor’s express advice, UNIT are going for their default stance of if it
doesn’t move, paint it, and if it does move then kill it. It was interesting to
see Geoffrey ‘cock up on the catering front’ Palmer playing his first Doctor
Who role as Masters, a sort of man from the ministry chap. Actually now might
be a good time for our traditional bout of guest star spotting. At the end of
episode three the Doctor finds Professor Quinn dead. He’s been keeping the
wounded Silurian who got out to the surface as captive, and that was only ever
going to have one outcome. Professor Quinn was played by a pre-Porridge Fulton
Mackay. Now, okay, he will always be Chief Prison Officer Mackay to many of my
generation, but he makes pretty good fist of Quinn. Quinn, you see, did
actually discover the Silurians during a jolly potholing expedition, and
recognizing that their technology is superior to our own, has been helping them
in return for them sharing their secrets. They have been rather slow to keep
their end of the bargain, hence Quinn keeping the wounded one as a bargaining
chip. I found that Fulton Mackay did very well at convincing me that Quinn
wasn’t actually evil as such, but selfish and misguided and greedy.
The there’s Dr. Lawrence, played by Paul Miles. Paul Miles’ most
celebrated part in the show was in “Genesis of the Daleks” where he played
Davros’ quasi nazi henchman, to perfection. Dr. Lawrence shares some of the
same characteristics, but there are subtle differences. Lawrence is blinded to
everything that is going on because, if he allows the cyclotron to be switched
off, then his own reputation will suffer. Even when Masters tells him that his
actions will be praised, and he will have no loss of face, he is not mollified
at all. He is thoroughly unlikeable, and yet at the same time there is
something very human about him.
In episodes 4, 5 and 6 we finally started to get to know the
Silurians, and at least two of them do turn out to be individuals. There’s the
older, shorter, more chunky one who is the leader, then the taller, excitable
one who wants to be leader. Once the Doctor goes to their lair and tells them
of the imminent UNIT attack, then they find a phial of the virus that they used
to use when their crops were being stolen by primates in the past. Now, okay,
we do have some time issues here, folks. Firstly, the name Silurians. I’m not
going to dwell on this because other people have explained this very well in
the past, but basically the Silurian Period was far too long before the age of reptiles.
Secondly, the figure of 200 million years is bandied about. That’s about 200
million years after the Silurian period, and within the Jurassic. Okay, that’s
the Jurassic, in the middle of the Age of Dinosaurs – so far so good. Only
dinosaurs and primates were never contemporary, according to the fossil record,
which is the best record that we have. Even when the Doctor backtracks in “The
Sea Devils” and starts calling them Eocenes, the Eocene was still too early for
primates. Well, anyway, it doesn’t really matter. This is a story, for heaven’s
sake.
Going back to the individual Silurians, it’s a good thing that we do
see the two individuals, and that the old Silurian does give the Doctor the
virus so that he has the chance to search for the antidote. It proves that, as
with people, there are good and bad, and that it’s wrong to condemn a whole
species, as both the brigadier seems to want to do, and the young Silurian.
It’s a very subtle anti-racist message which sits quite well after the rather
blithe way that the second Doctor had to wipe out hordes of aliens so much of
the time.
The scenes of people starting to drop with the virus are very 70’s,
and none the worse for it. Terry Nation’s “Survivors” was only 4 or 5 years
away. It’s something of a sign of the times that it is the superheroic Doctor
who finds the antidote – which the Silurians have never developed for
themselves – rather than a chance accidental discovery saving the day – a la
The Seeds of Death. Is there nothing that this, er, man, cannot do?
I want to make a point about Caroline John’s Liz Shaw now. It’s
always a hazard with a companion/assistant that at some point, especially in a
longer story, they’re going to fade out of it for a while. That’s true of Liz
at some points in this, but not detrimentally so, and there’s one really
interesting scene where the Brig orders her to come with him – presumably to
file some papers and make us a cuppa tea love – and she refuses point blank,
quite rightly pointing out that she is a scientist and has more important
things to do. At which point the Brig gets all military on her and reminds her
that she is a UNIT employee, and it takes the Doctor to persuade her to run
along now. When Jo Grant comes along they won’t have to ask her, she’ll be offering.
Which is a retrograde step. Well, it’s interesting seeing how the mechanics of
only having the one travelling companion works for the show. The Doctor
travelled with just Steven in “The Massacre”, and Jamie in “The Evil of the
Daleks” – Victoria doesn’t interact that much with them until the very end of
the story. But from here on in it’s just one companion all the way, until “The
Ark In Space” through “Revenge of the Cybermen”, and then all the way until
“State of Decay”.
Right, the ending. . One thing I’ve noticed, especially as the
Troughton era developed, is that endings can often be problematical for Doctor
Who. In this story, therefore, we actually need two endings in order to create
a successful final episode. The first sees the Doctor forced to operate the
Cyclotron. This will not only power up a Silurian doohickey which will destroy
all the human beings– I think – it will also power the hibernation units to
allow them to have a kip until it is safe to emerge again, when all of those
nasty humans – and pretty much everything else has gone. Ok, got that. What I
don’t get is this. The Silurians are supposed to be far more technologically
advanced than humans, and yet they need to force the Doctor to work out how to
operate this piece of human technology. Why can’t they do it for themselves?
This means they are effectively putting themselves in his hands, as he then has
the opportunity for a timely piece of sabotage, by overloading the machine. Oh
well, it’s not the most ingenious solution we’ve ever seen, but it’s probably
not the worst either.
The Doctor then goes on to reveal that he has actually had to
sabotage the Cyclotron, and wasn’t bluffing when he said that he couldn’t stop
it, until realizing that he can reverse the polarity of something or other – (
I didn’t quite catch whether this one was the neutron flow or not – I’m sure
I’ve read that despite popular impressions to the contrary, he only ever
reversed the polarity of the neutron flow twice, and one of those was in The
Five Doctors as a little in-joke to fandom.)
Ok, that’s the first ending. Now, in many ways far more
significantly, comes the second ending. After the Doctor has hot-wired the
Cyclotron (well, that’s what it looked like he was doing) The Brigadier makes
arrangements to cordon off the area. The Doctor decides that the plan must be
to revive Silurians one by one, talk with them, and keep on doing it until they
listen to reason about sharing the planet. His point being that the Silurians
are far more advanced than humans scientifically (even if they don’t know how
to operate a cyclotron), and Humanity can benefit hugely from Silurian
technology. The Brig doesn’t voice any opposition to this plan, and cheerfully
waves the Doctor on his way back to UNIT HQ. – Now, you’re not going to do
anything naughty while I’m away, like blowing the hell out of the Silurians,
are you Brigadier? – Ok – the Doctor doesn’t actually say these words, but
that’s pretty much the sense behind what he does say. So, he’s off and away
with Liz by his side when Bessie breaks down a couple of miles away – he just
fixes her, and what happens? Boom. The Brig blows up the caves. It’s an
important happening in the series, I think, and one which is going to
underscore a lot of the tension in the Doctor’s relationship with UNIT in
general and the Brigadier in particular. I personally think it was the
inspiration for the denouement of “The Christmas Invasion”, David Tennant’s
first story.
For the most part this was a remarkably successful 7 parter. As a
monster design, well, the Silurians were by no means the worst we’ve seen, and
actually what with the work of John Friedlander and the costume department this
aspect of the show is only going to get better for a while. As a story it
leaves you asking questions about who the real villains are, and who are the
heroes, if any. That’s a great testament to the level of maturity the viewers
are being credited with during this seventh season.
What Have We Learned?
Much of what Darwin told
us was wrong
The Brigadier is quite
comfortable with Genocide
No comments:
Post a Comment