Story 210 - The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood

In which the TARDIS arrives by mistake in the small Welsh village of Cwmtaff, in the year 2020. The Doctor had intended on taking Amy and Rory to Florida. The ship has materialised in the graveyard of an abandoned church. The Doctor notices strange patches of blue grass, and they see a huge drilling project in the valley below. They also see two figures watching them from a nearby hillside, and the Doctor identifies them as his current companions from their future - revisiting the scene of an earlier trip. Rory insists that Amy leave her engagement ring in the TARDIS in case she loses it. Whilst he is in the ship, Amy and the Doctor make for the drilling rig. About to join them, Rory is confronted by a young boy named Elliot and his mother, Ambrose. They think he has been sent by the police, as they had earlier reported bodies going missing from this graveyard. The surface of the graves is undisturbed, so the bodies could only have been moved from underneath. The Doctor and Amy arrive at the drilling project and meet team leaders Tony Mack and Dr Nasreen Chaudhry. They have just drilled deeper into the Earth than any previous project - attracted to this area by the blue grass. Tony and his family are the only residents of Cwmtaff now. Ambrose is his daughter, and Elliot his grandson. Ambrose's husband, Mo, also works for the project but seems to have disappeared since covering the night shift. The Doctor tells Tony and Nasreen that the blue grass was a warning, rather than an invitation. He detects underground tremors which are not coming from the drill. When it is turned off, they can still hear drilling, and scans reveal a network of tunnels beneath the site. Something is burrowing up towards them from deep beneath the surface...

Holes suddenly start to appear across the drill site, and Amy gets sucked into one of them. The Doctor, Nasreen and Tony rush outside and meet Rory, Ambrose and Elliot. They see an energy barrier cover the village like a dome. The Doctor breaks the news to Rory that Amy has been taken. They rapidly set up cameras around the village then take refuge in the church. The energy barrier becomes opaque, plunging Cwmtaff into darkness. Elliot has gone outside to find his earphones, and he is abducted by a lizard-like creature in the graveyard. Tony is attacked by another when they go out to find the boy - hit on the chest by its long tongue. The Doctor manages to capture one of the creatures as the others retreat. The barrier clears again. The Doctor has guessed the identity of their attackers, and his suspicions are confirmed when he speaks to the captive as it is is held in the church cellar. It is a Silurian, or Homo Reptilia - a female named Alaya. She claims that her settlement deep beneath the village has been attacked, their air pocket threatened. She refuses to believe that the drilling was not deliberate. Her race will retaliate, wiping out the humans who have taken over their planet. The Doctor decides that he must descend to their settlement to negotiate with them and gain Amy's release. He will use the TARDIS. Nasreen insists on going with him. Alaya will be left in the safekeeping of Rory, Tony and Ambrose. She will be exchanged for Amy if the Doctor is successful.
When the Doctor and Nasreen reach their destination they discover that it is no small settlement, but a vast Silurian city...

Amy, meanwhile, is being held in a laboratory presided over by a Silurian biologist named Malokeh. She meets Mo, who has been experimented upon. Amy manages to steal the scientists control device when he is called away by the alarm which has been triggered by the TARDIS arrival. She and Mo escape and find Elliot in suspended animation. They then find a huge chamber full of thousands of Silurian warriors, all still in hibernation. Only a small group has been revived to investigate the threat from the drilling. The Doctor and Nasreen are captured by Restac, leader of the Silurian armed forces. She is identical to Alaya, coming from the same genetic group. They are taken to Molokeh's laboratory. Back in the church Tony offers to free Alaya if she will tell him how to cure the poison that her tongue has infected him with. She refuses to help. When Ambrose finds out that her father is sick she becomes desperate. The Silurians have her son and husband, and now her father is dying because of them. She goes to see Alaya armed with a taser, determined to force their captive to help them. However, the electric shock proves fatal to the Silurian. In the Silurian city, Malokeh disagrees with Restac's plan to execute the humans. He goes off and fetches their leader Eldane, who dismisses Restac and agrees to listen to what the Doctor has to say. He insists that Nasreen and Amy, as representatives of the human race, begin negotiations for the Silurians to return to the surface. As talks progress, the Doctor then sends transport up to the surface so that Alaya can be returned to her people. Rory and the others don't tell him of her death. Restac ambushes Malokeh in a nearby tunnel and kills him for interfering with her plans.

When they arrive in the city's council chamber, Restac learns of her sister's death. She orders her troops to kill all the humans. Eldane is forced to flee with them and they take refuge in the laboratory. The Doctor and the Silurian leader agree that the time is not right for their reanimation. Perhaps in another thousand years. Eldane sets off the automated fumigation procedures, which will flood the city with toxic gasses. This will force Restac and her troops to go back into hibernation. The soldiers respond, but their commander refuses to heed the alarms. There is technology in the laboratory which can cure Tony and Eldane agrees he can stay behind in hibernation with them. Nasreen elects to stay with him, partly due to her scientific curiosity, and partly because she and Tony have fallen in love. The Doctor takes everyone else to the TARDIS. Once Ambrose, Mo and Elliot are on board, the Doctor and Amy see the mysterious crack which has been dogging their travels. The Doctor decides to investigate and reaches inside, pulling out an object he finds there. A dying Restac crawls in and shoots at the Doctor, but Rory intervenes and is shot instead - killing him. Light from the crack extends to envelope his body as the Doctor pulls Amy into the ship. He tries to make her remember her fiance, but as he vanishes so she forgets he ever existed.
Back on the surface, the Doctor tasks Elliot with helping to prepare for the eventual return of the Silurians. Amy notices someone watching from a nearby hillside - but it is only her own future self this time. The Doctor takes a look at the object he pulled from the crack, and discovers that it is a charred piece of the TARDIS Police Box shell...

The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood was written by Chris Chibnall, and was first broadcast on 22nd and 29th May 2010. It marked the return of the Silurians after a 26 year absence, having last been seen in the Peter Davison story Warriors of the Deep. They and their marine cousins - the Sea Devils - had first appeared during the Jon Pertwee era, and Chibnall borrowed other elements from this period for this story. A drilling project had been the location for the 1970 story Inferno, whilst the idea of a village being cut off by an energy barrier had featured in 1971's The Daemons. The basic idea of the Doctor trying to negotiate peaceful coexistence between the human race and Homo Reptilia, but failing to do so due to belligerence on both sides, had been seen in both The Silurians and The Sea Devils. Something nasty coming up from under the ground around a small Welsh mining village could also be a description of The Green Death.
The setting of this story to 2020 makes little sense, unless it is a nod to the "near future" setting of the UNIT stories. It would seem to have been set in the near future purely so that Amy could see her future self on the hillside - first with Rory and later by herself, after Rory has been deleted from history by the crack. Quite why Amy and Rory, or Amy on her own, would go to the back of beyond just to see themselves from afar for a few minutes is never explained. We can assume it is just a very clumsy bit of plotting.

The new version of the Silurians look quite good when they are seen wearing their masks, but the idea of redesigning their faces is a bad one. The originals were very well designed, and it was intended that the new ones would look similar. However, it was decided to make them more human looking, which sadly renders them unremarkable, like dozens of alien-of-the-week creatures which show up in Star Trek and other Sci-Fi franchises. The biggest mistake is the scrapping of the third eye, on the preposterous grounds that Davros had an eye in his forehead and kids might confuse them. Half way through his first season in charge, and Steven Moffat has basically managed to screw up two classic monsters with inferior redesigns.
As only three people seem to work at the drilling project, and two of the Silurians are played by the same actress, the guest cast is relatively small for a two part story. Only one new actor is introduced for the second half, and that's Stephen Moore as Eldane. For Sci-Fi fans he will be forever remembered as the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android in the BBC TV and radio versions of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
The other Silurian performers are Neve McIntosh as Restac / Alaya, and Richard Hope as Malokeh. Both will return multiple times in later series as other Silurians.
On the human front, the main guest artist is Meera Syall as Nasreen. Joining her as Tony Mack is Robert Pugh, who is rarely off our screens. As a Welsh actor it was inevitable that he would appear in Doctor Who, though it was Torchwood which got him first - appearing only briefly and under make-up in the second series episode Adrift. Tony's family are played by Nia Roberts (Ambrose), Alun Raglan (Mo) and Samuel Davies (Elliot).

As well as the return of the Silurians, this story should have been notable for one other major development - the death of Rory Williams. Unfortunately the impact of this was severely diminished by having had him apparently killed just two weeks before, and fans knew that Arthur Darvill was going to be appearing in later episodes. Casual viewers and younger fans may have been upset, but the rest of us went relatively unmoved.
When it comes to the story arc, the crack appears in the Silurian city and removes Rory from time after his death. The Doctor also gets a clue as to what is causing it, when he pulls a fragment of TARDIS from it. Even though Rory has gone, Amy's engagement ring is still in the TARDIS.
The potential is also laid for future stories set 1000 years hence to feature Silurians and humans coexisting on Earth. To date, no-one has attempted this - even though this story's writer now runs the show.

Overall, a rather weak story for a two-parter. The exact same themes had already been done better in the 1970's. As you will have read, I'm not impressed with the new Silurians at all, and Rory's demise lacks the impact it ought to have had.
Things you might like to know:

• This is what they originally intended to do with the Silurians. So much better than what they gave us.
• The Doctor addresses the naming controversy by mentioning the word 'Silurians' just the once, and also referring to the fact that they were also called - just as mistakenly - 'Eocenes'. The Third Doctor said they ought to be called the latter when their creator Malcolm Hulke came to write The Sea Devils. Here, the Eleventh Doctor prefers 'Homo Reptilia'. However, all the publicity material ever since has called them Silurians. 
• Hulke had actually used the name Homo Reptilia himself, but only in his novelisation of their first appearance - Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters.
• Malcolm Hulke did not receive a "created by..." credit, whereas Robert Holmes, Terry Nation, Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis all had this for the reuse of their creations in earlier stories.
• The council chamber location is our old friend the Temple of Peace in Cardiff, which has featured in just about every series so far.
• Eldanes' opening narration to Cold Blood wasn't in the original script. It was added much later at the editing stage. It states that the Silurians and Humans do eventually live together.
• The Hungry Earth had a working title of "The Ground Beneath Their Feet".
• The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to disarm the Silurian weapons. He had never used it against guns before - and hasn't used it in the same way again since. If it can do this then why not do it all the time? More shoddy plotting is probably the answer.
• Even worse is the sequence when the cameras get put up around the village - despite the Doctor saying the Silurians would arrive in 12 minutes. That was before they had even left the drilling project for the village proper. And then they don't even use them.
• Whilst it was Restac who fired the shot, the blame for Rory's death really ought to lie with the Doctor. If he hadn't stopped to investigate the crack the TARDIS would have been long gone before she got to the cavern.
• Last, but by no means least, why haven't Tony, Nasreen and all the other drilling crew been transformed into Primords? Inferno showed quite clearly that drilling too deep into the Earth released volcanic forces which could never be contained and would eventually destroy the planet. There should also be loads of mutagenic green slime coming up the bore hole. I raised this same point when looking at The Runaway Bride, where the Racnoss Queen has drilled to the very core of the planet.