By Jessica Holmes

Welcome back to our Doctor Who coverage, where today we’re wrapping up the latest serial: “Doctor Who And The Silurians”. With lives lost on the Silurian and human sides, will the Doctor be able to persuade those left behind to see sense?

In Case You Missed It

I’ll begin with a correction from last time: the bloke the Silurians captured, Major Baker (Norman Jones), isn’t from UNIT, he’s head of site security at the research centre. I got my notes mixed up.

Anyway, we’re halfway through the serial when we finally meet our cast of Silurians. There’s… Um. A small problem. None of them have names and I’m bad enough at telling human people apart. So there’s the shorter older-sounding one who is the leader (Dave Carter), and the taller younger-sounding one who needs anger management training (Nigel Johns). We’ll call them the Elder and Younger for the sake of clarity. There’s also a Scientist but he’s only important in one scene.

The Younger Silurian attacks the Doctor, claiming to have already seen soldiers down in the caves and killed them. The Elder stops him, urging restraint. Fortunately it turns out that the UNIT men, including the Brigadier, aren’t dead but trapped. Less fortunately, their air is running out.

Despite Major Baker’s protests, the Doctor insists on trying to have a dialogue with the Silurians. He manages to persuade the Elder to let him out of the cage, and from there they get on quite well, with the Elder bestowing a pile of useful exposition on him. He explains that the Silurians used to live on the surface, but have been in hibernation ever since they saw a cataclysm approaching millions of years ago. What they didn’t realise was that this cataclysm was actually the Moon coming into orbit. By the time that became clear, their hibernation units had developed a fault and they couldn’t wake up without an outside power source.

So they had a very long wait while humanity crawled out of the mud and started banging rocks together. Now that they have access to the power from the nuclear reactor, they can wake everyone up and reclaim the Earth.

Given there’s already people living there, the Doctor urges the Silurians not to do that, instead offering to broker a deal with humanity where humans and Silurians might share the planet. Sharing? What a novel idea!

The Elder is listening, but unsure. There’s already been bloodshed, after all. Will the humans even agree to talk? The Doctor can only try, certain that all-out war would be catastrophic for the Silurians. Agreeing, the Elder releases the trapped UNIT troops.

However, a catastrophe is brewing. Mistrustful of the humans, the Younger Silurian urges the Scientist to join him in a coup. Together, they concoct a plan that will allow the Silurians to have the planet to themselves without having to risk going to war. They have a biological weapon in the form of a bacterium engineered eons ago as a form of pest control against humanity’s ancestors.

Don’t think too hard about the mangled pre-history. It will only give you a headache.

The traitor Silurians dump a disease-riddled Major Baker back into the caves and leave him to wander back to the research centre. Learning of their plan too late to stop them, the Elder Silurian gives the Doctor a sample of the bacterium to take back to the lab in the hopes that he’ll be able to discover a cure before it’s too late.

The traitors reward him for this act of compassion by killing him.

What follows is a masterclass on ‘How Not To Handle An Unknown Biological Contagion’. Against the Doctor’s instructions, Baker takes an ambulance ride to the local hospital. He’s dead by the time he gets there, and only the first of many. What’s worse, while the Doctor was trying to chase Baker down at the hospital, the man from the Ministry, Masters (Geoffrey Palmer), picks now as the best time to go back to London. Via train.

Somewhere, an epidemiologist is crying.

The disease bumps off Dr. Lawrence, Masters, and a few dozen Londoners by the time the Doctor manages to find a cocktail of drugs that will kill it. But the day’s not saved yet. The Silurians have another plan.

Unfortunately this one is stupid and will make physicists cry.

 

The Silurians are going to destroy the Van Allen belt. Okay. And?

Well, their idea is that without the Van Allen belt (or belts if we’re going to be pedantic. Which we are. It’s my raison d’être.) the sun’s rays would make Earth too hot for mammals, but reptiles like the Silurians would be fine.

Setting aside for a moment the total ecological collapse that would happen which would have knock-on effects for all life on Earth, that’s just not how the Van Allen belts work. Think of the Earth’s magnetic field as a fly trap but for charged solar particles. The Van Allen belts are a pile of flies. Not the safest place to traverse, but not a shield either. Get rid of the magnetic field on the other hand and then we’re in trouble from ionising radiation. But last time I checked, reptiles weren’t immune to cancer or radiation sickness.

I don’t know, I found the plague more compelling. That bit was more tense with a greater sense of mounting dread. This plot thread gets resolved a lot faster and it’s just not as interesting to me.

This attempt at eradicating humanity goes even more poorly for the Silurians, as the Doctor double-crosses them the first chance he gets, overloading the nuclear reactor and sending them scurrying back to their hibernation pods in fear of an impending explosion. The Younger Silurian even shows altruism for the first time in his life, volunteering to stay behind to die so that he can operate the hibernation mechanism.

The reactor isn’t actually about to explode, but they didn’t need to know that.

All’s well that ends well, it seems. The Doctor gets the reactor shut down, the Silurians are having a kip (well, except for the Younger Silurian, but the Brig takes care of him), and the Doctor’s hopeful that if he wakes them gradually he’ll be able to have some much more productive conversations.

Wouldn’t it be nice if that’s where the story ended?

Unfortunately the Brigadier has other ideas.

Waiting for the Doctor and Liz to leave the research centre, the Brigadier orders his men to place charges at the entrances to the Silurian base. When the charges go off, the Doctor can only watch in horror as he realises what the Brigadier has done. Liz assumes he must have had orders, but the Doctor is (rightly) no less disgusted. Orders or no orders, the Silurians were a race of intelligent beings, a people, a culture. There was hope for reconciliation with them, and the Brigadier snatched it away in the blink of an eye. You can’t reconcile with the dead.

Green-And-Grey Morality

I love stories with messy morality. Doctor Who isn’t usually all that messy, but this serial does a great job of shaking things up a bit. Malcolm Hulke might have a wobbly grasp on physics but he gets how people tick. Very few characters come across as morally unimpeachable in this serial. Most commit actions that are at best selfish and short-sighted, and at worst morally reprehensible. That’s not to say that most of the characters in this are evil. Far from it.

It would have been easy to cast one side or the other as straightforward villains, but really they’re all just people. Silurians suffer from the same fatal flaw as humanity: thinking of everything as ‘Us’ vs ‘Them'. For ‘Us’ to win, ‘They’ have to lose. Everything done to protect ‘Us’ is not only justifiable but imperative, or else ‘They’ might do it to ‘Us’, like the barbarians they are.

What I see is a bunch of people—human or otherwise—who are neither 'Good' nor 'Bad'. Every one of them is capable of either kind of action. I don't think they're simply hateful or angry, though of course both sides display a fair amount of that. More than that, I think they’re scared, which makes them a lot more dangerous.

Fear started this mess. Everyone was ready to assume the worst of everyone else from the outset, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fear exacerbated the situation, sowing distrust not just between humans and Silurians but also between the members of each respective group, eroding their ability to work together.

And finally, fear drove members of each side to commit the unthinkable in the belief that it would protect them.

It’s one thing to try and persuade someone to set aside anger and hatred based on the past. It’s not an easy thing to ask, by any means. But it’s a lot easier than asking them to set aside fear of the future, and what their enemies may do if they fail to stop them in the present. And while you’re waiting for that miracle, the cycle of violence keeps on turning, drilling a deeper and deeper well of fear and of hatred. The longer it goes on, the harder it is to break. And there’s only two real ways that can happen: either everyone finally agrees to draw a line under the past and build the future together, or they run out of people to fight.

It’s almost as if the best way to end a cycle of violence is not to start one in the first place.

Final Thoughts

“Doctor Who And The Silurians” might take a little while to get going, but once the Silurians turn up this turns from a ‘pretty decent for a base-under-siege’ serial to a genuinely great serial. Pertwee’s on excellent form (a few very funny facial expressions aside) and the cast is solid with a bunch of characters believable enough that they sometimes gave me a migraine.

I’ll be curious to see how the Brigadier’s actions at the end of the serial affect the Doctor’s relationship with UNIT going forward. He’s stuck on Earth and I can’t imagine him turning his back on humanity, but I don’t know that he’ll ever see eye-to-eye with the Brigadier again. I hope that the Doctor makes the Brigadier better. I fear the Brigadier might make the Doctor worse.

I had expressed concern that the prominence of UNIT would result in problems being solved with killing which the Doctor could have solved with talking, but I didn’t expect to be proven right so quickly. Perhaps UNIT and the Brigadier will learn from this experience and do better the next time they encounter an alien intelligence. It’s a tragedy that the Silurians won’t get the same opportunity.

This is no surprise coming from the man who co-wrote The War Games, but "Doctor Who And The Silurians" is one of the more mature serials we’ve seen on this programme. Hulke asks the viewer to reject binary thinking and realise that two peoples can both have a right to live in the same place, and neither has the right to destroy or eject the other. People we assume are good can do bad things; and people we think of as monsters can do good. The righteousness of your cause and the righteousness of your actions are not the same thing.

As long as people continue to make these mistakes, this serial will always be relevant.

4.5 stars out of five for "Doctor Who And The Silurians".