Doctor Who and the Silurians
| 052 – Doctor Who and the Silurians | |||
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| Doctor Who serial | |||
 A Silurian | |||
| Cast | |||
Others
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| Production | |||
| Directed by | Timothy Combe | ||
| Written by | Malcolm Hulke | ||
| Script editor | Terrance Dicks | ||
| Produced by | Barry Letts | ||
| Executive producer(s) | None | ||
| Production code | BBB | ||
| Series | Season 7 | ||
| Running time | 7 episodes, 25 minutes each | ||
| First broadcast | 31 January–14 March 1970 | ||
| Chronology | |||
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Doctor Who and the Silurians is the second serial of the seventh season in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in seven weekly parts from 31 January to 14 March 1970. The story is the first appearance of a recurring family of Earth-dwelling reptiles. The title is sometimes reduced to The Silurians.
Plot
 | This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. (July 2011) |
An experimental nuclear power research centre built into a network of caves in Wenley Moor is experiencing mysterious power drains and a high incidence of mental breakdowns. UNIT is called in to investigate, and the Third Doctor and Liz meet Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart at the plant. While exploring the caves, one of the workers at the centre was killed, with wounds that look like giant claw marks, and his companion's mind has been traumatised to the extent that he can only scrawl primitive cave drawings of reptilian creatures on the walls of the ward. Lawrence, the Director, resents UNIT's presence and feels that it will interfere with the working of the plant, which is trying a new process to convert nuclear energy directly into electric power. Off in a corner, Dr Quinn, the Deputy Director, argues with Miss Dawson, his assistant, when she protests that they should stop "them" from taking the power. Major Baker, the security chief, believes there is a saboteur in the centre, and the Doctor discovers that the logs of the nuclear reactor's operation have been tampered with. When the Doctor makes his way into the caves, he is almost attacked by a dinosaur-like creature before it is called off by a strange whistling sound.
The Brigadier decides to explore the caves with armed men. Baker fires at a humanoid figure he spots in the caves and is attacked by the dinosaur-like creature, but it is again called off by the same sound. The Doctor returns to the centre with Baker, taking samples of the blood that was drawn when Baker fired at the humanoid. Examining the blood, the Doctor finds similarities to the "higher reptiles". In the meantime, the humanoid reaches the surface and stumbles into a barn to hide. Quinn goes into the caves to a hidden base, where he demands the knowledge he was promised. He is told that he must first see to the wounded humanoid and is given a signal device which emits the sound heard earlier.
The humanoid is discovered by a farmer and his wife and attacks them. The farmer dies of a heart attack, but the wife survives and identifies her attacker. While investigating the barn, Liz is knocked unconscious by the creature and it flees. She tells the Doctor and the Brigadier when she awakens, and the latter orders a manhunt across the moor just as Quinn appears. Making an excuse, he leaves and summons the humanoid with his device. The Brigadier and the Doctor follow the humanoid's tracks and find they end in tyre marks.
The Doctor goes to Quinn's cottage, and notes that it is remarkably hot, like a reptile house. Quinn does not react well to the hints the Doctor is dropping or to his veiled attempts to get him to co-operate, and asks the Doctor to leave. Breaking into Quinn's office, the Doctor finds a globe that depicts the Earth's continents as they were 200 million years ago, which the Doctor identifies as during the Silurian period. Back at the cottage, Miss Dawson tries to persuade Quinn to tell the Doctor everything, but Quinn is adamant that he will keep the wounded Silurian captive until he is given the advanced scientific knowledge he wants. Later, when the Doctor goes to the cottage to once again try to reason with Quinn, he finds the scientist dead in his chair. The Doctor retrieves the signal device from Quinn's body and is surprised by the Silurian, who is still there.
The Doctor attempts communication, only for the Silurian to run away. Baker, still convinced that the answer lies in the caves, overpowers the UNIT man guarding the sickbay and enters them by himself. He is soon captured by the Silurians and interrogated as to the capabilities of the humans. The Doctor and Liz follow Baker's route and open the entrance to the Silurian base with Quinn's signal device, where they find Baker in a locked cage. He tells them that they must warn the surface. The Doctor and Liz leave undiscovered, but not before they see a Silurian being revived from hibernation by a machine, explaining the energy drains that the reactor has been experiencing. Meanwhile, Masters, the Permanent Under-Secretary in charge of the centre, arrives for a personal inspection, and Lawrence complains to him about UNIT's interference. The Doctor decides to tell them all about the Silurians in the caves, urging a peaceful contact instead of the Brigadier's proposed armed expedition. However, this falls on deaf ears when Miss Dawson reveals that Quinn was killed by the Silurian he held captive. The Doctor goes to warn and reason with the Silurians, but they put him in a cage. Then when The Doctor tries to reason with the younger one, it attacks him psychically using its third eye.
The older Silurian puts a stop to it. The older Silurian tells the Doctor how their race retreated underground when they saw the Moon approaching Earth millions of years before. The hibernation mechanism malfunctioned, and they did not revive until a new power source — the nuclear reactor — was discovered. The Doctor manages to persuade the older Silurian to release the Brigadier and his men, but the younger Silurian orders Baker infected with a virus before he is released. When the older Silurian discovers this, he releases the Doctor, giving him a canister of the virus so he can discover a cure. The younger Silurian kills the older one for this act. The Doctor reaches the centre, and he warns everyone to stay away from Baker, who collapses with the virus. Masters, however, decides to return to London, unaware that he has also been infected. Baker is taken to a local hospital without the Doctor's knowledge and dies there. "The first one." The Doctor grimly notes.
The Brigadier holds Baker's doctor and nurse at gunpoint to prevent them from leaving and spreading the virus while the Doctor returns to the centre to work on the cure. The Brigadier and Liz try to warn London, while all of the centre's staff are inoculated with a stopgap vaccine. All, that is, except for Lawrence, who refuses. Masters, in the meantime, has reached London and eludes the search parties desperately looking for him. The virus begins to spread and the deaths begin. The infection even reaches France. Doctor Lawrence, who eventually dies from the virus, complains in his last moments that the affair has ruined his career. The young Silurian decides the Doctor must be killed before he finds a cure. The Doctor has indeed found one, and as he writes down the formula, the Silurians attack the centre and stun him with their third eyes, taking him away.
Liz, however, discovers the formula and it is soon being mass-produced and distributed. The Silurians have a back-up plan, however. They intend to use a weapon to destroy the Van Allen Belt and make the Earth's environment hostile to humankind, and will force the Doctor to connect the reactor to provide power to the weapon. UNIT troops are lured into the caves and commence a battle with the Silurians while the younger Silurian takes the Doctor to the reactor control room along with Liz and the Brigadier. The Doctor, however, overloads the reactor and tells the younger Silurian that the area will be irradiated for at least 25 years. The Silurians disengage from the battle with UNIT and re-enter the caves to hibernate until the danger has passed. Since the mechanism is faulty, the younger Silurian will stay awake to operate it and sacrifice his life, while the new leader of the Silurians having orders to return to the area in 50 years and exterminate Humanity as the colony's first order of business. The Doctor and Liz, meanwhile, repair the reactor, and go to the underground base, where the younger Silurian realises he has been duped into sending his race back to sleep. He attacks the Doctor in a rage, but is shot by the Brigadier.
Later, on Wenley Moor, the Doctor tells Liz that he proposes to revive the Silurians one by one and try to reach a peaceful compromise between them and humanity. However, the Brigadier has other orders, and the Silurian base is blown up, which inadvertently prevents the still alive Silurian from reviving his people with their standing orders to attempt to exterminate humanity again. The Doctor is horrified at this act of genocide, but Liz guesses that the Brigadier was acting on orders of his superiors, who obviously did not want to take the chance of this alien and openly hostile power threatening Humanity again. The Doctor, still disgusted, drives off.
Continuity
This story marks the first appearance of the Doctor's yellow vintage car, Bessie.[1] The Doctor remarks in this episode, "You know, I'm beginning to lose confidence for the first time in my life — and that covers several thousand years." This comment adds to the many conflicting ages for the Doctor provided in the television series over the years.
The term "Silurian" is never actually used by the creatures themselves; only by humans and the Doctor. Its use resulted in many letters from scientists and geologists who argued that it was impossible for a reptilian lifeform to have existed in the Silurian period.[citation needed] In the later The Sea Devils, the Doctor admits that the name "Silurian" is inaccurate and states they should more properly be called "Eocenes", again an unlikely candidate for the creatures' own era. Both names are mentioned in "The Hungry Earth", along with the more generalised "Homo reptilia". The Virgin New Adventures, beginning with Love and War refer to the creatures as Earth Reptiles for the most part. Ben Aaronovitch's The Also People calls them Indigenous Terrans.
The Sea Devils, the aquatic cousins of the Silurians, would appear in The Sea Devils (1972). The Sea Devils and the Silurians return in Warriors of the Deep (1984). In Warriors of the Deep both they and the Sea Devils use "Silurian" to refer to themselves.
The Virgin New Adventures novel Blood Heat features an alternate universe where the Doctor died in captivity during the events of this serial and Earth was subsequently conquered by the Silurians. The Virgin Missing Adventures novel The Scales of Injustice is both a sequel to this story as well as a prequel to the events of Warriors of the Deep. Other novels in both series, such as The Also People and Happy Endings, reveal that at some point the Silurians will be revived and successfully integrated with human society. The Silurians also appear in the Big Finish Productions audio play Bloodtide, which explains why they did not wake up from hibernation and what role they played in human evolution. They also appear in UNIT: The Coup (given away free with Doctor Who Magazine #351) and attempt to create a peace with mankind, with the aid of General Lethbridge-Stewart.
Production
Template:Doctor Who episode head After the previous story, producers Derrick Sherwin and Peter Bryant (who was originally to have the producer's credit on this story) were transferred to the television series Paul Temple, and the BBC intended for Barry Letts to become producer. However, Letts was committed to another production, and could not be released until after the location work on Silurians was completed. Script editor Terrance Dicks and his assistant Trevor Ray shared the production responsibilities for the location work.
The incidental music for the serial was composed by Carey Blyton, who would also contribute music for Death to the Daleks (1974) and Revenge of the Cybermen (1975).
This story is the first to be recorded using colour studio cameras. The previous serial, Spearhead from Space, was the first in colour, but was shot entirely on location (i.e., outside the electronic TV studio), and on film (as opposed to videotape, the standard method for recording Doctor Who). Due to the move to colour, the production team made use of a technique known as Chromakey (or sometimes CSO), which allowed images to be superimposed over each other using colour separation. This was used extensively in the series for many years, beginning with this serial.
Location filming took place at Marylebone Station in London on 12 November 1969, but after the prints were damaged, the scenes were reshot on 24 November after the rest of the serial had been finished. Other location work was undertaken in Surrey, with the heathland scenes filmed at Hankley Common.[2]
Alternative titles
This was the only time the name "Doctor Who" was used in the title of a serial on-screen (although Episode 5 of The Chase was titled "The Death of Doctor Who" on-screen). Although it was common in production paperwork to prefix "Doctor Who and..." to the story title at the time, the prefix was usually dropped when the director ordered the titles from the captioning department for transmission. However, this was not done for this particular story.
The reasons why this happened are not entirely clear. Director Timothy Combe states that he was presented with a story called Doctor Who and the Silurians and that it was always intended that the serial go out with that name. However, as Doctor Who historian Andrew Pixley points out, this was Combe's first serial as a full director and there was effectively no producer at this time, as noted above. In addition, the rehearsal scripts for the serial simply have The Silurians as the title. Pixley theorises that Combe was unaware of the standard production practice and gave the order to the captioning department for the "proper" title, as he believed it to be at the time.
Whichever the case, production paperwork from this point on stopped the practice of adding the prefix, perhaps as a measure to prevent the "mistake" from happening again.[3]
Cast notes
Actor Paul Darrow would return to the series playing Tekker in Timelash, and he also appeared in the audio play The Next Life. Geoffrey Palmer who played Masters also appears in The Mutants and in "Voyage of the Damned". Peter Miles later played Professor Whitaker in Invasion of the Dinosaurs and Nyder in Genesis of the Daleks. He also played Tragan in the radio drama The Paradise of Death and Gantman in the audio play Whispers of Terror. Norman Jones had previously appeared as Khrisong in The Abominable Snowmen and would later play Hieronymous in The Masque of Mandragora.
Reception
Mark Braxton of Radio Times wrote that the story had "quality in spades", especially in the location filming, and that the story was "gritty" and "provocative" with "fine character actors". He praised the design and the voice-acting of the Silurians, but felt their rubber costume on-screen made them come across as "silly". Braxton was also disappointed with other production "shortcomings", such as the "cheap-looking" cave set, the dinosaur, and "Carey Blyton's electro-bagpiped Silurian theme".[4] The A.V. Club reviewer Christopher Bahn wrote that it "keeps a snappy pace throughout thanks to Malcolm Hulke’s well-plotted script". He noted that both the monsters and the humans were more complex than previously seen on Doctor Who. Like Braxton, he also felt the serial was "badly served by the Silurian costumes, which are terrible even by the standards of low-budget, 1970s TV".[5] DVD Talk's John Sinnott noting that some parts were "a bit slow" due to the length, but it was a "mature" story where Pertwee defined his Doctor. However, Sinnot felt that John was still trying to find her character's place, and did not have much chemistry with Pertwee.[6] In 2010, Charlie Jane Anders of io9 listed Episode Six's cliffhanger as one of the best in all of Doctor Who.[7]
In print
A novelisation of this serial, written by Malcolm Hulke, was published by Target Books in January 1974 under the title Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters. In this adaptation, the Silurians were given names like Morka, Okdel and K'to. The novelisation gives extensive background to the reptile culture, including a prologue featuring their hibernation beginning. Large parts of the novelisation are told from the reptiles' point of view and there is an extensive back-story given to several characters including Quinn and Major Baker (for some reason, the character is called Major Barker in the novelisation). The novelisation avoids referring to the reptiles as Silurians (the word turns up as a UNIT password) but identifies the dinosaur in the caves as a tyrannosaurus rex. The novelisation was also translated into Dutch, Finnish, Japanese and Portuguese. An unabridged reading of the novelisation by actress Caroline John was released on CD in September 2007 by BBC Audiobooks.
VHS, CD and DVD releases
The original 625-line PAL videotapes of the serial were wiped by the BBC for reuse, although they retained 16mm b/w film recordings. In 1993, the colour signal from a 525-line NTSC version of all seven episodes (except for part of the beginning of episode four) was used, along with traditional colourisation techniques, to colourise the film prints for the VHS release, which was in July of that year. In October 2006, the story's original soundtrack was released on CD as part of the 'Monsters on Earth' tin set, again alongside The Sea Devils and Warriors of the Deep, with linking narration from Caroline John.[8] The CD was then individually re-issued in January 2008.
On January 14, 2008, a fresh restoration of the story (the black and white prints and off-air colour recordings were combined, with the colour prints distorted to reduce fringing and both prints VID-FIRED'd to restore video sections to 50 unique fields a second, rather than 25 frames a second with no motion information between the two fields corresponding to each frame) was released on DVD as part of boxed set called "Beneath the Surface" with The Sea Devils and Warriors of the Deep.
References
- ^ "The Silurians". BBC. Retrieved 7 October 2012.
- ^ "Now and Then" BBC DVD documentary, 2008
- ^ Andrew Pixley (2006-06-30). "Re: The Doctor Who Serial Titles Debate". Outpost Gallifrey (registration required). Archived from the original on 2007-09-30. Retrieved 2006-12-19.
- ^ Braxton, Mark (21 September 2009). "Doctor Who and the Silurians". Radio Times. Retrieved 14 October 2012.
- ^ Bahn, Christopher (18 December 2011). "Doctor Who And The Silurians". The A.V. Club. Retrieved 14 October 2012.
- ^ Sinnot, John (27 June 2008). "Doctor Who — Beneath the Surface". DVD Talk. Retrieved 14 October 2012.
- ^ Anders, Charlie Jane (31 August 2010). "Greatest Doctor Who cliffhangers of all time!". io9. Retrieved 14 October 2012.
- ^ http://www.timelash.com/tardis/display.asp?1462
External links
- Doctor Who and the Silurians on Tardis Wiki, the Doctor Who Wiki
- Doctor Who and the Silurians at BBC Online
- Template:Brief
- Template:Doctor Who RG
- Doctor Who Locations - The Silurians