-The Brigadier, after hearing of Dr. Quinn's murder
I need to preface this review with a couple of statements.
1) I already did an essay on what a terrible idea it is for a show like Doctor Who to suddenly develop the need to press the reset button. You can find it here.
2) In general, the stories that get the lowest ratings are the ones that were terribly conceived from the outset. The ones with the middling ratings will be good ideas that fell apart in the execution stage, and the best ones are the ones where both the idea people and the actors/directors/set designers etc are all firing on all cylinders. Therefore, the starting point for this review should be: was it ever a good idea to do a 7-part Cold War parable set on present-day Earth, knowing that the reset button needed to be thumped at the end? The answer, sadly, is "no."
3) The author, Malcolm Hulke, was a Communist. Anyone who reads this blog knows my political views, and I just want to say that I'm not knocking points off because of that. Virtually none of the story's flaws are Hulke's fault. Doctor Who and the Silurians is actually one of my favorite stories. The problem is, it doesn't quite work as Doctor Who.
4) You can tell how much of a Doctor Who fan someone is by how much they like this story. That's because on the one hand it is a really good story... but on the other hand it's slow, it's long, the music is... distinctive, and it's got a few other flaws. Fans can wave the usual objections aside; I can do that, but the average viewer won't. The final score will reflect that.
Now that that's out of the way...
The story begins with the new Doctor pottering around with his new car, Bessie. This is going to replace the TARDIS as his favored mode of transportation for most of the Third Doctor's life, and here he uses it to get to Wenley Moor, which is where the action takes place this month. He's summoned to go to the atomic research center there, and only really takes an interest when he learns of the nearby caves. And what caves they are. Frankly, the regular caves - not the Silurians' base - are better than those in The Caves of Androzani, all of which seem to have flat floors for some reason.
But back to this story. Nyder, I mean, Peter Miles, playing not-Nyder-at-all, Dr. Lawrence, explains that he is in charge of a cyclotron, or particle accelerator, so they can provide "cheap, safe atomic energy" for everyone. Unfortunately, there's some equipment problems, perhaps due to sabotage, and also some mental breakdowns among the staff. We also meet Major Baker, the chief of security and chief proponent of the sabotage theory, and Dr. Quinn, who's the chief scientist and who apparently thrives on a constant diet of happy-pills. The Brigadier suggests the Doctor starts by looking around, so naturally he dives headfirst into the caves after Dr. Quinn cheerfully informs him that someone died in an accident down there.
He runs into a dinosaur and returns to the research center. Baker suggests the Scooby-Doo paradigm, that someone has rigged up a fake monster to scare people away from their sabotage issues. A second expedition is mounted, where Baker sees what he thinks is a saboteur and shoots him. He is then savaged by the guardosaur, which in reality means that he needs to lie down for about half an hour, and then he's perfectly fine.
Meanwhile, Liz has investigated the mental breakdowns. The Doctor believes that "some kind of fear" has thrown one victim's mind "back millions of years." There are also some records missing - Quinn, two scenes before revealing that he's in on the plot, suggests that there's some sort of coverup going on. It's eventually revealed that something is living in the caves, and Quinn is cooperating with them because he wants their knowledge. They're cooperating with him because they need the power from the cyclotron. They task him with retrieving the individual that Baker shot at.
This leads to a rather impressive manhunt as UNIT searches for the "creature." Quinn recovers him and is killed for his trouble. The Doctor meets the creature and asks "Are you a Silurian?"
It turns out that the creatures are relics of Earth's past. They hid underground in cryogenic freezers when they thought an incoming comet would destroy the planet. Instead, the comet became the moon (this serial was broadcast after the moon landing, but probably written before it, so I'll give the scientific inaccuracy a pass) and the freezer units malfunctioned. They're only now waking up, they're using the cyclotron to wake up more of them, and they're using the guardosaur to... er, scare people off. And on top of that, their very psychic presence is enough to drive humans crazy.
This is a fantastic idea. No, that doesn't do it justice. This is one of the best ideas the show's ever had. Humans no longer have an innate claim to the planet; the Silurians were here first. The Doctor and the Brig spend a lot more time going head-to-head in this serial than they ever will again. Turning into a Cold War parable wasn't necessarily a bad idea, except for the fact that the reset button needed to be pressed. That fact, plus the dreadful padding in Episodes 6 and 7, hurts the story.
Then there's the characterization. One second, Baker's coming up with the (mostly correct) theory that the guardosaur is there to scare off anyone investigating the saboteurs; the next, he's charging headlong into the fray like another mindless grunt. The Silurians drive humans crazy in the first two episodes, but apparently lose this ability after that. Oh, and despite the fact that he knows they're native to Earth, the Doctor refers to one of them as "an alien life-form."
Baker escapes from the sickbay and gets himself captured by the Silurians, threatening to derail the Doctor's plan for peace. The Doctor is able to convince one of the Silurians to come around to his way of thinking, but, this being a Hulke script, that Silurian is killed shortly thereafter. Eventually they infect Baker with a plague and turn him loose. The plague kills him, Lawrence, and Geoffrey Palmer before the Doctor can find a cure. Still, the Silurians turn up again and kidnap the Doctor, killing Avon from Blake's 7 in the process. He agrees to re-wire the cyclotron for them so they can wake up the rest of their species, but he sabotages it at the last second. Then the Brigadier gets orders to collapse the caves and commit genocide (or is it xenocide)? He follows these orders, leaving the Doctor aghast at what's happened.
This story is too long. There are good budgetary reasons for commissioning long serials; the sets can be re-used for longer, fewer sets need to be built every year, etc. The problem is that the stories then have to be padded out. The other problem is that it has to end, which means the Silurian threat must be eliminated. What I'm getting at is that the story was ill-conceived to begin with. "Dinosaur men want their planet back" is a fantastic idea - the problem is, it can't work satisfactorily in the context of the show, because we're required to accept the Doctor working with a man who has committed genocide after this. There are smaller problems, like Dr. Quinn is far too happy and Dr. Lawrence is far too high-strung from the beginning.
I love Doctor Who and the Silurians, I honestly do. Every significant character gets to voice a particular viewpoint, and as I've already said, the central idea is great. Despite the horrible constraints imposed on the serial - that it must be seven episodes long and end with the restoration of status quo - it manages to be both a comic-book adventure in a cave and a serious mature look at the nature of distrust and conflict. As I've said, the faults aren't Hulke's fault, and my reviews tend to focus more on the writing than anything else (I've gotten this far without mentioning the Silurians' notoriously wobbly heads). If this story were a tight four-parter that didn't end with a regular character commiting genocide, I could award it ten out of ten without a second thought. If this were a seven-part miniseries with "Doctor John Smith" and "The Unified Intelligence Network," as opposed to part of Doctor Who, it would probably get an 8 or a 9. But that's not what we have, and the story we have deserves a 7.
This is just my opinion. It's something nice and different, and frankly the series could have done with more stories like it. It's second only to The Evil of the Daleks as far as extra-long stories goes. But people who go out of their way to praise this story beyond the brilliance of the "dinosaur men want their planet back" idea generally try to completely divorce it from the stories around it... which brings me back to yesterday's point about the twin evils of thumping the reset button and setting the show on modern-day Earth in the first place. If you make allowances for those mistakes, then yes, Doctor Who and the Silurians can have a 9/10. The problem is, making allowances is a very fannish thing to do, and one of the things I'm trying to do in my reviews is examine which stories are the most suitable for introducing people to the show. This, though it is, again, a favorite of mine, is not one of those stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment