This entire essay was going to come at the start of my forthcoming Doctor Who and the Silurians review, as a means of explaining why I'm going to give one of my all-time favorite stories a less-than-exemplary score. So consider this either an addendum or a preface to that essay.
The simple fact of the matter is that there's no way the first three stories Barry Letts produced (i.e, the seven-parters in season 7) can possibly occupy the same continuity. Inferno cops the same plot as Doctor Who and the Silurians; that is, an underground science project awakens an ancient evil and threatens life as we know it. And yet, nobody comments on the similarities. Britain loses a massive power complex at the end of Silurians, and yet The Ambassadors of Death features manned missions to Mars. Surely, getting the taxpayer's power back on is more important than gallivanting about in space? (Then again, the guy in charge of the Mars missions turns out to be a nutjob...)
The culprit is the notorious "reset button," which stipulates that status quo is God, and that every serial must end with the main characters completely unchanged and the world back to normal. See Star Trek Voyager for, well, 120 episodes of this. And of course the reason Doctor Who needs to employ this so often is that the series was stuck on present-day Earth due to budget constraints. We break out of this a little bit when we get to Season 8 and have a recurring threat in the character of the Master, and The Green Death, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and Planet of the Spiders form a loose trilogy. But for the most part there's no continuity between serials. The Doctor, the Brig, Jo, Mike and Benton are all still alive and that's about it.
When we go to other planets, we know we can see sweeping changes. When we're in the future, we can overthrow tyrannical governments even on Earth. But in the present day, all we can do is fight off aliens and government conspirators, but don't expect anyone to comment on it, ever. Things reach an absolute low in The Sea Devils, which takes the second-greatest idea from this era (dinosaur-men want their planet back) and squanders it so that the first-greatest idea (the Master, like you needed to be told) can escape from prison and return to his wicked ways. We already know, given how obtusely the reset button was smashed at the end of Silurians, that the sea devils aren't sticking around past this serial. Meanwhile, the reset button gets pushed on the Master's story; he's on the loose again.
In light of this, it's somewhat appalling that they even decided to have a UNIT era at all. The show was popular enough to justify its continued existence, but now epic stories in far-off places where important characters just might die get replaced with "ho-hum, Earth's being invaded again." This, just as much as some atrocious pacing, is what really hurts the Third Doctor's era like nobody's business. The highest-rated stories you're going to see from me - Carnival of Monsters and Frontier in Space - don't take place on Earth at all. The sense of danger and excitement are back. On the other hand, you can get dull polemics like the Peladon stories. Oops.
To borrow a statement from a different show, the problem in a nutshell with the UNIT era is this: "The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and we always defeat them and save the day." And the audience knows it. Look, I have no problem with Our Heroes winning all the time. That doesn't mean that we can't see some real consequences of their victories from time to time - hell, look at how in the new series, the Doctor's victory in "The Long Game" ends up being entirely pyrrhic and sets in motion the events of "Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways."
And ultimately, therein lies the problem with Doctor Who and the Silurians. It's a perfect way around the more obvious flaw inherent in the UNIT format, that you're stuck with "alien invasion" or "mad scientist." At the same time, though, it's a concept that can't be done justice within the confines of the "we must always win" guidelines. Define "winning" in this case, because what happens at the end of that story sure isn't that.
This week's word I'm surprised the spellcheck recognized: "Silurians."
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