Are you afraid of the monsters?
No, the monsters are afraid of me.
The Silurians are a good idea but they are unfortunately rather limited in their application. When you look at the combined catalogue of the Silurian and Sea Devil stories, they all seem to be rehashes of the same story. Thus it is not surprising that this two-parter hits a lot of the same high notes as has been seen in prior stories. If you like those stories, that's not bad as a new telling of an old tale can still be quite enjoyable. But if the Silurian stories of the past are not your cup of tea, this story will be a bit of a slog for you.
Plot Summary
In 2020, a man named Mo reports to work at an experimental drilling site in Wales. The drill has just past 20,000 km and he is to supervise the drill during the night shift. In the night, the drill is rocked by a small earthquake. Going to investigate, he discovers a hole in the floor filled with steam. It then backfills with a surface layer of earth. He reaches down inside it, pushing through to the space beneath. He is then sucked down through the earth and into the hole.
The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive the following morning, intending to go to Rio. The Doctor is distracted by patches of blue grass in the graveyard and wants to investigate. As they look around, the trio spies an older Amy and Rory waving back at them from a nearby hill. The Doctor heads down the hill and Amy follows him. Rory however heads back to the TARDIS, having convinced Amy to leave her engagement ring in there for safe keeping.
Rory emerges from the TARDIS and is mistaken for a plainclothes detective by Mo's wife Ambrose and their son Elliot. Ambrose and Elliot take Rory to an open grave and tells him that town tradition has the people buried in the same plot as other family members. Her uncle had recently died and was to be buried in the same plot as her aunt who had died six years earlier. Yet when they dug up the undisturbed plot, the grave was empty. Elliot is convinced that a monster took the body from below.
The Doctor and Amy enter the drill complex where the owner, Tony, has just restarted the drill. His companion, Nasreen, monitors things while also looking for Mo. As the Doctor examines their equipment, ignoring their questions, the drill complex begins to shake. The Doctor orders them to turn the drill off but as Tony runs to do it, his foot gets caught in a hole that has opened up in the floor. Amy runs back to help him but also gets caught. Nasreen pulls Tony free and the two of them go to deactivate the drill. The Doctor tries to hold on to Amy but she is sucked under the earth just as the drill stops.
When Tony and Nasreen come back, the Doctor looks over their equipment again and scans the area below. He detects mechanical sound coming up from the earth and realizes that something is coming up the drill shaft from an underground chamber. The Doctor also realizes that it is an advanced race as they are manipulating the soil to work as a weapon against those on the surface.
Fleeing from the drill site, the trio reunites with Rory, Ambrose and Elliot. They also observe a force field coming into place over the drill and church sites. Trapped within the dome, the Doctor orders everyone into the church. They gather any cameras and other recording devices they can find and install them throughout the area with Elliot making a map for the Doctor. The Doctor does chastise Ambrose for also gathering weapons and tells her to put them back.
Eliot heads back to the house to get his headphones when the invaders darken the dome for attack. The Doctor herds everyone inside the church and locks the door. As the invaders surface, they cut power, shorting out the watching instruments. Ambrose then realizes that Elliot is missing. Hearing him yelling to be let in the church, they pull the door open but find him gone.
The group heads out to look for him. Ambrose finds his headphones and is attacked by one of the creatures. Tony pulls it off of her but it lashes out with its tongue and stings him. The Doctor has Ambrose take Tony back inside while he looks around using sunglasses modified to detect infra-red. He realizes that the attackers are cold-blooded and immediately guesses what they are. He and Rory set a trap where one attacks him but the Doctor uses a fire extinguisher to drive it into a van where Rory traps it. The remaining invaders retreat leaving each side with hostages.
The Doctor takes the creature, revealed to be a Silurian warrior woman named Alaya into the basement of the church. The Doctor tells the others that he encountered a different tribe of Silurians many years ago and believes he can negotiate with them given that they have a hostage now. They saw the drill as an attack as it threatened their life support systems but he is confident that an agreement can be reached.
Nasreen insists on coming with the Doctor so that leaves Rory, Ambrose and Tony to guard Alaya. Alaya smugly tells them that one of them will end up killing her and initiating a war. Meanwhile the Doctor and Nasreen enter the TARDIS but before the Doctor can start it, it is dragged below the surface. The Doctor and Nasreen explore the caverns below and find that the tribe of Silurians is not a small group as the Doctor expected but instead a vast city. They head down to investigate but are captured by a group of guards.
As the two explore the city, Amy wakes to find herself strapped to an examination table. She sees Mo next to her who warns her that she is going to be dissected and examined just as he was. She sees a Silurian doctor approach her with a scalpel and begins to scream. He uses a remote to lock the clamps on her arms but before he can start, he is called away to examine the Doctor and Nasreen. Amy then unlocks the clamps with the remote that she picked from the doctor's pocket, releasing her and Mo.
Amy and Mo slip out of the examination room and find Elliot being held in suspended animation in a room off the main hallway. Mo tries to rouse him but they are locked out. Amy promises they will come back for him either through the Doctor or by capturing the Silurian doctor and forcing him to open it. They travel down another hallway where they find an army of Silurian warriors being held in suspended animation and standing on disks that will carry them through tunnels to the surface. She and Mo take two guns held by suspended warriors and continue to look for a way out.
The Doctor and Nasreen are taken to the examination room where the Silurian doctor, Malohkeh, starts to decontaminate the Doctor. The Doctor tells Malohkeh that as he is not human, that will kill him. Malohkeh stops and examines him further. The Silurian defense commander, Restac is convinced that the four invaders are the scout party for a planned invasion. The Doctor denies this and notes that he only wants to trade hostages, offering Alaya for the humans. As Alaya is from the same genetic line as Restac, she is interested.
Restac orders the Doctor and Nasreen taken to the great hall. Along the way, the Doctor admits that he's met Silurians before but that that tribe was destroyed in a fight with the humans. Restac doubles down on her contempt and flings them into the great hall. Once in, Amy and Mo burst in with their guns but they are quickly disarmed and tied to the pillars of the hall with the Doctor and Nasreen.
On the surface, Tony sneaks to the basement and offers to free Alaya in exchange for the cure to her venom which is killing him. She scoffs at his treachery and ignores him. Tony begins to show signs of the poison attracting the attention of Ambrose and Rory. Rory tends to him while Ambrose heads to the basement. She demands to know how to cure her father and get her family back but Alaya only taunts her. Ambrose produces a Taser and threatens to shock Alaya if she doesn't help. Seeing the chance of death, Alaya doubles down on her taunts. Ambrose shocks her once and then hits her in the chest with the Taser.
Hearing Alaya's screams, Rory and Tony run down to the basement. Rory tries to revive Alaya but she dies, refusing to speak of her anatomy. As they stand over her body, a CPU monitor comes to life with Restac transmitting to them. She demands to speak to the leader (Rory) and shows the four hostages she has. She then demands to see Alaya. Ambrose refuses, fearful of Alaya's death, demanding instead for her family to freed. Restac refuses and cuts transmission, preparing to execute the hostages via firing squad.
Restac is stopped by the entrance of the city leader, Eldane, summoned by Malohkeh who did not want to see the humans executed. Eldane dismisses Restac and the Doctor sends Mo with Malohkeh to revive Elliot. The Doctor then designates Amy and Nasreen to negotiate with Restac as to how to share the planet. The Doctor contacts Rory and sends up four transport disks, telling the three of them to come down with Alaya.
Rory and the others do come down with Alaya's body but not before Ambrose convinces Tony to set the drill to a delayed start, which will destroy the life support mechanisms of the Silurian city. They eventually arrive with Alaya's body, just as Nasreen and Eldane had come to an initial agreement about habitats. The Doctor gets angry with Ambrose, who confesses to killing Alaya and apologizes to Eldane, hoping that he can see past this. He is also distracted by Tony who collapses, the venom taking hold and mutating his genetic code.
Unbeknownst to any of them, Malohkeh discovers Restac waking several squads of troops, preparing to fight the humans. She kills Malohkeh and then storms the council chamber, just missing Tony being lead to the examination room by Mo to have the toxin cleared out of his body. Restac sees Alaya and declares open war, especially after Ambrose informs all of them that the drill will penetrate the life support system in fifteen minutes. Restac orders her troops to fire but the Doctor disables their guns with his sonic and the group flees to the same examination room, which is defendable by a heavy door. The Doctor pauses in the hallway, giving Restac a chance to make peace but she ignores him.
Barricaded in the examination room, Eldane agrees to activate a toxic gas system designed to purify the city of intruders. It will trigger an automatic response system in the soldiers to return to suspended animation. The Doctor thanks him and tells him to trigger the awakening for 1,000 years in the future, by which the humans will pass down the information of the Silurians and be ready to share the planet by then. He also has Nasreen set up a response to destroy the drill, ending the threat to the Silurian city.
Once the gas is announced, the soldiers abandon the siege and return to their chambers, leaving Restac alone. The group runs out a side door and to the TARDIS but Tony is not purged of the toxin and decides to stay behind and be suspended with the Silurians. Seeing this, Nasreen also elects to stay and be suspended. They will also act as human liaisons when revived. With that agreed, the Doctor also runs for the TARDIS.
They arrive as the gas sweeps over the city. Mo, Ambrose and Elliot all get in the TARDIS. The Doctor, Rory and Amy prepare to enter as well but they are distracted by the appearance of a glowing crack, identical to the one in Amy's bedroom and on the Byzantium. The Doctor wraps his hand with a cloth and reaches in to the crack, pulling out a small object.
Before he can fully examine it, Restac crawls from out of the passage, dying from the gas. With her last bit of strength, she fires her gun at the Doctor. Rory leaps to push the Doctor out of the way and gets hit by the blast. He then dies, confused as to how he could have seen himself on the hill at the start of the adventure.
Amy is devastated but the Doctor drags her into the TARDIS as tendrils of light issue from the crack and envelop Rory's body. In the TARDIS, the Doctor urges Amy to hold on to her memories of Rory as he is being erased from existence by the crack. They land back on the surface but the jolt of the landing breaks Amy's concentration and she gets up with no memory of Rory.
The five of them exit the TARDIS just as the drill explodes. As Mo and Elliot settle back to their house, the Doctor pulls Ambrose aside. She thanks him for not letting the Silurians kill her. The Doctor impresses on her to use her failings to teach Elliot to be the best of humanity; that those traits would be passed on when the time for the Silurians to wake again comes.
Amy and the Doctor return to the TARDIS where Amy sees her future self waving from across the hill. Amy waves back but has a moment's hesitation where she thought she remembered seeing someone with her future self. She dismisses it and suggests they head to Rio as planned. The Doctor stalls and pulls the fragment from his pocket that he got out of the crack. He holds it up to the TARDIS and the pieces match, revealing that his TARDIS exploding appears to be the source of the cracks.
Analysis
It is rather unfortunate the turns this story takes. Before the Silurians are revealed, there is an air of mystery an allusion to Third Doctor stories of the past (Inferno and The Green Death most notably). Even after the Silurians show up, there is still an interesting aspect that keeps your attention through The Hungry Earth. Cold Blood however is like someone who read a quick summary of Doctor Who and the Silurians and then tried to do a slap-dash Malcolm Hulke impression, failing to capture the best of that story on both accounts.
Cold Blood takes a slimmed down view by portraying all the humans, save Nasreen, as emotional idiots and the Silurians, save Eldane and Malohkeh, as racist, bloodthirsty monsters. What little character development is done is all for the purpose of having everything fall apart at the end and very few of the positive aspects of either side are shown. No one is given time to think or explain and the Doctor himself jumps on the humans as morons and murders much quicker than he does with the Silurians, who are also fully prepared to murder.
While Doctor Who and the Silurians is too long at seven parts, it still would have needed at least four or five episodes to breathe and get the proper amount of development that it needed. Here, Chibnall is clearly trying to take everything from about Episode Two on and cram it into one 40-minute block. Actually it's even less than that because the last 5-7 minutes deal with the crack, Rory's death and the denouement where the Doctor imposes the lesson to Ambrose. Compressing to that level robs a story of nuance, character and development. I had some problems with Doctor Who and the Silurians but they were relatively small and dealt as much with perceived fan wisdom than the actual story. But that's nothing compared to how squashed and boiled down Cold Blood is.
Now there were positive aspects. The Doctor, Amy and Rory were all enjoyable. It's interesting to see Amy get most of The Hungry Earth off, counterbalancing Rory's absence in Vincent and the Doctor. What time she does get she does well in, though her false bravado can get grating if used too much. Rory is also good and although he doesn't get as much time with him, I do like the times that Rory and the Doctor are together as they have a very good chemistry together.
Much like the Fifth Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor does well with an older woman acting as his pseudo-companion. Nasreen actually probably would have made a good companion as she is enthusiastic, open-minded and highly intelligent. Her romance with Tony was a bit forced, but I think that's more of a time issue and the fact that the nature of their relationship was not given time to develop.
In their brief instances, I liked Mo and Elliot. I do think Elliot was a waste though. Mo not getting much development is understandable as he was the first victim and there are other things to work on by the time he gets back involved with the plot. But Elliot had a nice little relationship develop with the Doctor, even including the bit about him being dyslexic. To have him be reduced to window dressing with no active role in anything in Cold Blood just feels like a waste. A plot thread that was supposed to do something or have a small pay off but instead went no where.
I'm more ambivalent on Tony. He was wounded in the attack and didn't serve much of a role other than be the thing that keeps Nasreen around and show the more cowardly side of humanity. But it was Ambrose that was the worst. She was the go to bad guy for everything but she wasn't even good at being a bad guy. She shoves a Taser in Alaya's chest while whining about not being given her family back. Anyone with any common sense would have realized that could have stopped a creature's heart. Then, even after realizing that she's totally screwed the pooch, she decides to go Machiavellian and destroy the Silurian city with the drill while being xenophobic. Which is she: a terrified wife and mother or a speciesist? I think we are supposed to feel sympathetic with her fear at first but she never presents redeeming qualities. She is morphed whenever convenient to the plot to become the villain. She is just an annoying, inconsistent character.
The Silurians aren't much better. There is no attempt at communication, it's just instant military invasion when the life support systems are endangered. Yet, despite launching a military raid, the Silurians are somehow indignant that the humans defended themselves from being captured. Restac and Alaya are so one note with their anti-human feelings that they see and act in no other manner. Restac isn't even a good military commander as she assumes there is a human army waiting to attack them despite their recon providing no information on any army and only capturing one unarmed boy. Malohkeh did better in capturing two people (Mo and Amy) with his science and he was fully convinced that the humans were not attacking them.
Restac wasn't even able to pull off her full coup, which at least happened in Doctor Who and the Silurians. Here she tries and fails with another round of terrible shooting. Yes the Doctor disabled some of the guns, but there were clearly a good ten armed soldiers, any of which could have gotten off a shot to take someone out. The only decent shot is Restac's final shot where she kills Rory and there the Doctor was standing still, distracted by the crack, giving Rory no choice but to push the Doctor out of the way. The Silurians in Doctor Who and the Silurians, killed hundreds and would have worked towards total genocide if not for the Doctor and Liz. When compared to the old, the nuance and detail just isn't there for the new Silurians compared to the ones of the classic era.
The direction was nice and I do like the look of the new Silurians over the old ones. One of my complaints about the old Silurians was the overreliance on the third eye which could do anything they wanted. Here, the Silurians are far more obvious in their employment of technology and it fit better. The new design also gives them much more movement and expression which is nice. This comes more to the fore with Madame Vastra in later episodes but the groundwork is here.
Ultimately, this is a good set up undone by trying to do too much in too short a time. Chibnall's attempt to put a seven-part story into the span of less than 80 minutes just leaves so much left undone. Worse, the near identical set up and follow on from the source material leave the viewer pining for the deeper and more textured version. If a viewer hasn't seen Doctor Who and the Silurians, they might get more out of this two-parter but once the source material is known, it's hard to see this one as anything but a pale imitation. It's just not one that I would want to go back to with any regularity.
Overall personal score: The Hungry Earth - 3.5 out of 5; Cold Blood - 1.5 out of 5
