Day 131 — May 11th 2021
Doctor Who and the Silurians Episodes One and Two
Doctor Who and the Silurians — Episode One
I think — outside of the closing credits, which remains the case for the rest of this decade — this is the last direct piece of evidence I have for suggesting that the lead character in Doctor Who is called… Doctor Who. I mean come on, his name is in the actual title for the one and only time*!
Yes, yes, I know that Barry Letts has gone on record to say that this was an error and that the department creating the captions simply forgot to remove the ‘Doctor Who and…’ bit which they’d been doing as standard since the programme went to overall titles with The Savages. But equally, that they’d been commissioning stories with that title for so long by this point just adds weight to the idea, I think!
And even if it was an error in 1970, the BBC have been releasing this story under the title of Doctor Who and the Silurians for decades now. It’s that way on the VHS tape, the DVD, the Narrated Soundtrack and even on BritBox.
I don’t know if this might be considered heresy, but I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of Bessie. There’s nothing actively wrong with the car, but I just think I prefer the smart red number Doctor Who stole in Spearhead! I also wonder if I’ve been slightly jaded by having to cut out an image of the car for some merchandise a few years back, and it took forever. That said, there’s something really fun about the opening sequence here where he’s fixing the car up, and listening to bits of it fall apart afterwards.
It’s also strange just how right Pertwee’s Doctor Who looks driving the car around ordinary streets on his way to Wenley Moor. During The Invasion I commented that seeing Troughton behind the wheel of a car just felt wrong, but this is the total opposite.
On the whole this episode hasn’t grabbed me massively, and I’m surprised about that. I wonder if I’ve gone into Season Seven with expectations raised too high. While I can’t remember a lot of my thoughts about this era of the programme, I was fairly sure that this opening season was one of my highlights. There’s plenty in here to like, and it does a decent job of setting up the initial mystery, but I’ve come away almost with a sense of ‘is that it?’.
Part of that might be that, like Spearhead, this one has a fairly leisurely pace. It makes sense — we’ve got six more episodes to fill after this — but it’s not what I was expecting at all. The opening of the story really hits the ground running. Our guest characters only get to say a total of four words before we hear the roar of a monster, and within 90 seconds one of them is dead and the other is out of his mind. I was excited for some War Games style pacing, so the change of gear after the opening scene left me a little lost.
I’m not writing it off just yet, though. I’ll be going with a 6/10 for this opening episode, and going into the next one with a better idea of what’s in store. Fingers crossed that’ll help.
Oh, and I can’t go through this episode without pointing out one of my favourite rubbish bits of dialogue;
Doctor Who: ‘He’s just frightened, that’s all.’
Liz: ‘So was I. What’s made him like this?’
Doctor Who: ‘Some kind of fear.’
Doctor Who tells the Brig here that he’s ‘not exactly a little Sherlock Holmes’, but the adage about people in glass houses springs to mind…
*Yes, okay, the final episode of The Gunfighters introduces the next episode as Dr. Who and the Savages, but it’s not quite the same thing.
Doctor Who and the Silurians — Episode Two
I have a feeling that the dinosaur in this one comes in for a bit of stick; one of those ‘this story would be perfect if it wasn’t for that one silly costume’ moments. But I have to confess that I think it looks pretty good on screen! There’s a particular moment in the cliffhanger to Episode One, repeated here, where we get a close up on the creature’s eye and it’s surprisingly effective. It certainly looks better in the episodes as transmitted than it does in still photos.
It’s also something fun to see turn up in Doctor Who, and I’m amazed it’s taken until 1970 for them to give it a go. Doctor Who wishes to see some ‘prehistoric monsters’ in The Underwater Menace, but this is the first time we’ve actually seen him encounter them. It’s clearly not his first encounter, though, and we get a brilliant little exchange about that;
Doctor Who: ‘Well, it was certainly some kind of dinosaur. Certainly nothing that I’ve ever seen before, though.’
Baker: ‘In museums, you mean?’
Doctor Who: ‘No, I do not mean in museums! Well… on second thoughts, perhaps, perhaps I do, yes.’
I like the idea that Doctor Who has clearly been told he needs to at least try to fit in (probably via a lengthy lecture from the Brigadier) and so clearly catches himself here.
Something else I’m enjoying in this one is Doctor Who’s open dislike of the military for whom he now works. Het gets in a handful of jibes about their methods in this episode, and they all raised a smile. I’m particularly fond of these two;
‘That’s typical of the military mind, isn’t it? Present them with a new problem, and they start shooting at it.’
‘Well, Brigadier, all set to start playing soldiers, are we?’
The run of seven parters in this season isn’t something I’ve been looking forward to, I must admit. As much as I enjoyed The Invasion and The War Games last season, regular readers will know that I’m a believer in three episodes being the perfect length for a Doctor Who adventure. Anything else requires too much dragging out.
Malcolm Hulke and Timothy Combe are making the most of the added length so far, though, by teasing as much of the Silurians as he can get away with before revealing the full creature. We get glimpses of them in the darkness of the caves, hints of claws and scaled arms, and there’s a beautiful shot of the creature silouhetted against the setting sun as it escapes out on to the moors. It’s got fair claim to being one of the best shots in all of Doctor Who.
And the thing is we actually have seen the Silurians in full already. Spencer has drawn a pretty accurate example on his wall in Episode One, and Doctor Who draws another here. I can’t think of any other examples in the programme where we see something like this — a representation of the monster before we’ve seen the actual monster itself. It helps to build the anticipation nicely.
And keeping the monster as a mostly unseen menace works wonders — as always. The shot where the farmer pulls back the hay to discover the claw buried among it is brilliant, and it helps to add extra terror to the cliffhanger, which I think is my favourite of the Pertwee years so far. Poor Liz!
A 7/10 for this one.
