What's Wrong With... The Silurians

The writer of this story, Malcolm Hulke, thought it a big mistake to have the Doctor exiled on Earth.

He foresaw a limited number of scenarios - mainly alien invasions and mad scientists. As it was, Terrance Dicks proved him wrong by suggesting a storyline in which the monsters are already on Earth in the first place, and it is the human race who are the interlopers.

Unfortunately, the Doctor actually refers to the Silurians in Part Seven as an "alien species" despite everything he knows about their origins, and the scientist in charge of the Wenley Moor research complex - Dr Lawrence - goes mad, so Hulke ends up writing the very thing he was complaining about.

Thanks to a misunderstanding with the people who wrote the title captions, this story is officially called "Doctor Who and the Silurians". 

Behind the scenes nearly every story was referred to as "Dr Who and...", and the caption at the end of The Gunfighters states that the following week would be broadcast "Doctor Who and the Savages". As it was, the title which appeared was just The Savages, without the "Doctor Who and...".

The other big mistake with this story is the name of its monsters. The Silurians were named for the geological era in which they are supposed to have originated. (Creationists, please look away now...).

The Silurian Era was the third period (of six) of the Paleozoic Era. The first two were the Cambrian and the Ordovician, and the last three were the Devonian, Carboniferous and the Permian.

The Silurian Era began 443.8 million years ago, and lasted until 419.2 million years ago. In appearance, the Earth was mostly seas covering the northern hemisphere, with all of the land masses joined together in the south. Much of the wildlife lived in the seas, with very little happening on land - certainly no dinosaurs or any large reptiles. No reptiles at all, in fact.

On the land we had things like arachnids and hexapods. Trilobites were common. The first boney fish evolved, as well as those with teeth.

Larger reptiles didn't appear until the Permian era, but if the Silurians come from any era it is probably the Mesozoic, as they say they overlapped with mammals. At no point did you have dinosaurs and apes coexisting, however.

A related problem with this story is the whole idea that it was the arrival of the Moon which prompted the Silurians to go into hibernation - thinking that this small planetoid that had wandered into the Solar System might trash the surface of the Earth as it passed by.

Latest thoughts are that the Moon is 4.5 billion years old, and that it formed not long after the Earth. It grew out of the collision debris when the Earth was struck by a Mars-sized planet (Theia).

The whole idea of plate tectonics and continental drift was very new at the time this story was written, and not widely accepted. Even so, the notion of Deep Time was known since Victorian times. It is therefore odd that Hulke believes that the Silurian shelter could remain intact, seemingly at the same depth it was built at, after millions of years.

Hulke is also confused about the Van Allen Belt, mistaking it for the Ozone Layer.

The Silurians tap into mankind's ancestral memories - and a glimpse of one causes a technician to revert to a primitive state, drawing on the walls of his room like a cave person. A farmer's wife is reduced to a similar state. However, when everyone sees the Silurians later on, they fail to have the same effect.

How big are these caverns, that a 30 foot dinosaur can run about in them?  

The Doctor states that the Silurian footprints they find are not the dinosaur's - being from a biped instead. 'Biped' means two footed - which the dinosaur also is. 

Why does Dr Quinn tell the Doctor all about the incident which befell the two pot-holing technicians? It simply serves to get the Doctor intrigued and start investigating - the very thing Quinn wants to avoid. Hulke will make the exact same mistake in the next story to feature Homo Reptilia, when Trenchard blabs about the sinkings.

In fact, Quinn does just about everything in such a suspicious way that he might as well get a badge or have a T-shirt printed announcing that he's in league with the Silurians.

What is the relevance of the missing pages in the log? If it's to conceal a pattern to the power failures, then everyone knows when they happened, so the information is out there anyway.

Dr Lawrence is the latest in the long line of people in charge of hugely expensive projects who simply should never have been considered in the first place. No matter what evidence he is presented with, he just won't accept it. Even when he's dying of the plague disease he just won't believe it.

Masters of the Ministry decides to go back to London despite feeling unwell - knowing of the threat that the illness poses. 

According to a map, the illness can leap to Paris, but is hardly present anywhere between Derbyshire and London.

Why does the Doctor waste time having drugs and equipment brought to Wenley Moor to combat the illness, when the main focus of the plague has shifted to London, and the research centre could come under attack by the Silurians at any moment?

Believing the Cyclotron is about to explode, the Silurians run back to their shelter, intending to wake up again in 50 years after the radioactive fall-out has diminished. Wasn't it their alarm clock that got them into this mess in the first place?

The biggest problem of all - why does the Doctor continue to work for UNIT after the conclusion of this story? The suggestion is that the Brigadier has blown up the shelter - killing every Silurian known to exist - so potentially an act of genocide. Even if he does need facilities to repair the TARDIS, the Doctor really ought to have walked away from UNIT after this.