Doctor Who A-Z #52: Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970)

The Jon Pertwee era gets some stick for showing the Doctor working alongside the military, but in a strange way it’s the series’ essential anti-militarism that makes this work. At no point does the Doctor reject the principle that invasion, colonisation and enslavement are the acts of villains, and since a big chunk of the early Pertwee stories are about aliens invading Earth this allows him to fight on the same side as the Brigadier with a clear-ish conscience. The difference is, the Brigadier is fighting for humanity because they’re his species, while the Doctor is fighting for them because, compared to the Autons and the Daemons, they’re the non-aggressors. If there arose a situation where humanity was the aggressor, the Doctor and the Brigadier might end up fighting each other.

Something close to that happens in Doctor Who and the Silurians – the extended title is the result of a fairly boring paperwork error – despite this being only the second story of the Third Doctor’s run. There were a fair few sceptics of the show’s new Earthbound format in the production office, and one of the most vocal was Malcolm Hulke. Hulke complained that setting Doctor Who on Earth left them with only two possible stories – alien invasion or mad scientist – and script editor Terrance Dicks suggested he should try to invent a third. Dicks, who also had his misgivings about the show’s new direction, seems to have wanted Hulke to stress-test the format, perhaps opening up some new possibilities as he did so. 

What The Silurians does – particularly in its sharp, devastating ending – is ruthlessly expose the problems inherent in this version of the show. It’s a daring thing to include in a sophomore outing, and it’s telling that, in his novelisation, even Hulke tones down the Brigadier’s actions so that he entombs, rather than kills, the Silurians. There really isn’t any way in which the Brigadier’s massacre of the Silurians can be reconciled with the unfailingly decent, semi-comic character he becomes, other than just forgetting it ever happened. But while The Silurians might be a hard pill to swallow when considered as part of the Pertwee years as a whole, it succeeds wonderfully on its own merits. It has a few of the era’s characteristic weaknesses – take a bow, the first of this era’s many crap dinosaurs – but all of its strengths are present and correct.

Indeed, some of them are stronger than usual. I loved the Pertwee era as a child because it invested so heavily in the scariness of monsters appearing in familiar places. The series’ previous experiments with this idea had leaned towards spectacle – the Cybermen in front of St Paul’s Cathedral, two British icons for the price of one. There is, though, something much more frightening about the idea that an unremarkable barn in the middle of the countryside might contain a Silurian, and director Timothy Combe goes all-out to emphasise this with POV shots of the creature advancing on terrified humans. The revelation that the Silurians aren’t all bad – a revelation Hulke had attempted before in The Faceless Ones, but pulls off unforgettably here – doesn’t nullify their fear factor. The Doctor and the Brigadier are alerted to their presence by a caver who’s been reduced to a gibbering, paranoid wreck by the very sight of them and their pet dinosaur, and even as the Doctor opens up diplomatic channels with the Silurian elders this seems like a valid response.

The material with the caver can sit alongside Image of the Fendahl and The Curse of Fenric as one of Doctor Who‘s fullest engagements with Lovecraftian horror, fuelled as it is by the fear that humanity is the least significant race in its own history. If the Silurians are more sympathetic than the standard Doctor Who monster, it’s largely because they have a solid moral case for inhabiting Earth. They were here before us, and they never relinquished control. The Doctor recognises this, and maintains his optimism that the two species can share the planet, even if the audience never really believes the show will pull the trigger on this. Having the Earth part-inhabited by Silurians, after all, would mean the end of Doctor Who stories set on a recognisable contemporary Earth, and the whole of Season Seven is dedicated to making the case that this is a good setting for the show. 

Even if the show never comes to the correct moral conclusion – and it’s telling that no solid argument is advanced against the Silurians’ claim to Earth – it’s a lot of fun getting there. The guest cast includes absolutely fantastic actors like Fulton Mackay, Peter Miles and Geoffrey Palmer, the latter of whom plays a character whose surname – Masters – would mark him out as bad news in just one season’s time. Indeed, he’s a bit of a bastard here, downplaying the threat all the way up until his Dominic Cummings-length car journey results in him spreading a Silurian virus. 

The scenes of viral outbreak are deeply unsettling, closer to the unvarnished verite of Peter Watkins’s The War Game than The Ark. You might argue that the Silurian virus is a bit of a contrivance, that it exists solely because Hulke needed at least one Silurian to do something unforgivable in order to take the sting out of the fact that this decent race has to lose for reasons outlined above. Perhaps Steven Moffat, who has as sharp an eye for flaws in the show’s format as Hulke, was inspired by this problem when writing the Zygon storyline in The Day of the Doctor – as well as using the delightful Silurian lesbian detective Madame Vastra to demonstrate that, despite the Brigadier and Masters’s best efforts, some Silurians have managed to live on a planet that’s as much theirs as it is ours.

Vastra is one of the serial’s more unexpected legacies, but not quite the oddest. That title goes to the Silurian hypothesis, a 2018 paper by the astrophysicist Adam Frank asking whether it would be possible to detect evidence of an intelligent civilisation that predates our own. It’s a tribute to how thought-provoking Hulke’s script is; if it doesn’t quite close the book on the Doctor’s relationship with UNIT, it at least opens it up to some fascinating lines of inquiry.

Next: The Ambassadors of Death (1970)

Graham’s Archive – Doctor Who and the Silurians

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