Day 134 — May 14th 2021
Doctor Who and the Silurians Episode Seven and The Ambassadors of Death Episode One
Doctor Who and the Silurians — Episode Seven
Do we think Doctor Who and the Silurians is the story in which Doctor Who undergoes the most costume changes? We’ve got the gear he wears while fixing up Bessie at the start, his regular Season Seven outfit, the potholing gear which he wears on and off across the story, the white outfit he puts on for doing Important Scientist Work™ and the white T-shirt he sports in this final episode to indicate that he’s working under pressure.
Ohh, I really want to like this story more than I do. It’s filled with great ideas, and there’s some interesting moral dilemmas, but on the whole it’s just been sort of okay.
I think my big issue is that the Silurians themselves are just so generic. There’s very little here to differentiate them from, say, the Voord. And I found myself almost annoyed by how easily duped they were in the final minutes.
Doctor Who tells them that the whole place is flooded with deadly radiation and they say ‘oh dear, we’d better go back into hibernation for a bit,’ and then decide not to bother killing anyone, because the radiation will do it for them. It feels like a let down having spent six episodes building up to this climax.
I’ll say that I do really like the Brigadier blowing them up at the end, and especially that he chooses to do it behind Doctor Who’s back. I shouldn’t be condoning his actions, considering he’s effectively committed genocide and all, but I think he made the right call. Especially given that he’d had to go down and save Doctor Who’s life again only minutes before.
Something that I’ve really noticed watching this time around is just how much The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood take from this one. I mean obviously they’re episodes featuring the Silurians, but the general plot is basically the same. A human engineering project (the reactor / mining) is beset by mysterious problems which turn out to be the result of their accidentally awakening a nest of Silurians. One of the Silurians is willing to listen and make peace with the planet’s new inhabitants, while another is keen to start a war. A lone Silurian makes it to the surface and is killed by the humans.
Both stories end with a bluff about the Silurians’ base being destroyed (by radiation or the drill breaking through) and the Silurians decide to return to hibernation. The plan to have the two species live in peace is even the same in both stories — in this one he says ‘your people are used to living in extreme heat, whereas these areas on Earth are of little interest to man. I believe with your advanced technology that you could build cities in parts of the world that man has hitherto completely ignored’, while in Cold Blood it’s Amy who suggests ‘the areas that aren’t habitable to us? Australian outback, Sahara desert, Nevada plains. They’re all deserted...’.
There’s enough difference for them to be distinct stories — the later one doesn’t feature a military response to the situation, for example, and focusses more around a single family and how they’d try to protect their own — but at their most basic level I was surprised by just how similar the two narratives are.
After a surprise high for Episode Six, this one’s dropping back down to a 6/10.
One final thing; this episode is, I think, the first time we hear Pertwee’s Doctor Who talk about the Neutron Flow. In this case he’s ‘fusing the control’ of it, but we’ll go on to hear those two words a few more times in this era and beyond. Mostly, I think, beyond. I seem to recall that while everyone talks about ‘reverse the polarity of the Neutron Flow’ being Pertwee’s catchphrase, it actually ends up being referenced far more often than it was ever actually said. I look forward to keeping track and finding out over the next couple of months.
The Ambassadors of Death — Episode One
The Ambassadors… TWANG… of Death! Everyone talks about how this story does something different with the opening titles, but I think that’s broadly true of all the stories in Season Seven, isn’t it? Spearhead From Space has the title zoom towards the screen over the opening titles and Inferno will present the title over footage of volcanos exploding. So far only Doctor Who and the Silurians has done something that’ll go on to be ‘standard’ from the start of the next season.
I think The Ambassadors of Death possibly works the best, though. Perhaps not the strange musical sting that accompanies the second half of the title, but the idea of giving us a little ‘mid titles’ sequence to establish the story before launching into the title. It feels a lot like the pre-titles sequences we get in New Testament Who, and I like that.
It also helps that it’s a good little teaser, ending on an ominous note;
Cornish: ‘There’s been no contact for seven months.’
Van Lyden: ‘How do we know they’re still alive?’
Cornish: ‘They took off from Mars manually. They must have been alive then.’
Van Lyden: ‘Something took off from Mars.’
One of my major complaints about Season Seven so far has been just how slow it’s been so far. Both of the stories I’ve done have been paced a little too slow for my liking and I think that’s actively hampering my enjoyment of them. And yet this episode has been just as slow and I’ve loved it. For some reason the pacing here has worked for me and helped to suck me in. The ominous tension, the waiting for replies, it’s all kept me gripped throughout.
In many ways it feels like they’re trying the same trick that The Space Pirates employed — trying to make space travel feel real. It’s not all zooming around and fancy high-tech machines, it’s something that takes time and skill to get right. But again, on this occasion I’ve really enjoyed that, where the earlier attempt left me bored rigid. Perhaps it helps being able to see it properly? Or perhaps it’s simply because the mystery presented here is far more arresting than the argonite pirates could ever hope to be?
And that story certainly didn’t have any scene as captivating and terrifying as Van Lyden opening the capsule of his space craft and screaming in pain as a hideous sound rings out. That’s the scariest image of the colour era so far, and it’s going to take some beating.
There’s a really ominous tone to all of this which feels like new ground for Doctor Who, and it’s also brought us closer than ever to Quatermass. By all accounts Nigel Kneale wasn’t overly keen on the series, and you can’t help but think he might have been a bit miffed about them muscling in on his territory. That said, it feels like they’ve hit on what the series should be for this year in this episode, with even Doctor Who himself getting involved in the sinister atmosphere;
Doctor Who: ‘That sound. Have you heard it again?’
Brigadier: ‘No.’
Doctor Who: ‘You will.’
Pertwee is on fine form in this one, and it’s possibly his best performance in the role yet. He gets to give us plenty of sides to his personality which certainly helps. All the ‘Time Warp Field’ stuff with Liz could feel like an attempt to pad things out and give them a bit of business at the top of the episode — akin to his fixing Bessie in the last story — but it’s a lot of fun, and I can imagine Troughton playing those lines against any of his companions.
I always forget about the bizarre room in which we find Doctor Who and Liz here. It’s sort of a study, sort of… well, I don’t know what. I even wondered briefly if it was an ‘out there’ attempt to shake up the TARDIS Control Room, but the script calls this location ‘Dr. Who’s Laboratory’. It goes on to describe it as ‘a cluttered room with a mixture of old fashioned bric-a-brac and the most modern scientific equipment’.
This is the first of several slightly bizarre designs for Doctor Who’s quarters with UNIT, and I’m not entirely sure what they were going for. It sort of fits the brief from the script, but I’m not sure it’s quite how I’d have pictured it!
And then Pertwee gets to be all self important when demanding to be taken seriously by the team at Space Control. His showdown with the Brigadier and Professor Cornish is brilliant, and works far better than the attempts to make him bristle against authority in Doctor Who and the Silurians did;
Doctor Who: ‘The man’s a fool! How can I possibly tell who the message is from until I know what it says? Let me explain this to you in very simple terms…’
Brigadier: ‘He is trying to help, you know. You might find him quite useful.’
Doctor Who: ‘Might find me useful?’
So far all the moments I’ve highlighted for him have been lighter ones — wiggling his eyebrows at Liz or offering a handshake to a lizard — but this is just as brilliant, and I really enjoyed it. I seem to recall we’ll get a lot of this kind of showdown across his era, I just hope that more will be written as well as David Whittaker does it.
But it’s not all talking and ominous atmosphere — we get plenty of action in this one, too, in the form of UNIT storming the warehouse and engaging in a shootout with the bad guys. This is perhaps the clearest example we’ve had yet of the idea that UNIT themselves are as important to the programme as Doctor Who at this stage, and it works. Even here the pace is rather measured, but that only adds to the tension, and if I didn’t know the Brig has to survive for a lot more stories to come, I’d have been genuinely concerned for his safety during the final stand off.
I’m fairly sure we also get a snippet of the UNIT theme from The Invasion when they’re on their way to the battle, too, which automatically scores the episode another point. I love the UNIT theme.
One last thing to note here; is there something going on with the number seven this week? The astronauts originally went up in Mars Probe Seven, and have been out of contact for seven months. The capsule which is sent up after them is Recovery Seven. They track the reply to the mysterious sound to a warehouse seven miles away. And off screen this is a seven episode story in the middle of the programme’s seventh season… I’m tempted to pretend that The Wheel in Space never happened, so we could call this the seventh story by David Whittaker too, but that’d be cheating.
Anyway, a brilliant episode which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe going in with no expectations is the way to do it? 10/10.
