The colour recovery process, while miraculous, works better on some episodes than others. This one has a slightly nicotine-stained patina which actually suits the seedy nature of the the villains introduced here (disposing of bodies in a gravel pit), with grey grass and a washed-out sky giving a properly wintry feel to the location filming.
This is about as Quatermass as Doctor Who ever gets: a space capsule lands in the middle of the British countryside, its occupants incommunicado; a conspiracy has reached the highest levels of the military and civil service; an overbearing genius rails against the Establishment. If they’d cancelled the series in 1969 and decided to do a Nigel Kneale show it might have looked quite like this.
Season Seven has an ongoing interest in being “down to Earth” and current, which is reflected in the fact that reporters have featured in every serial to date: badgering the Brigadier at the cottage hospital in Spearhead from Space, and somehow obtaining his number at the Wenley Moor research centre. Now, we have Michael Wisher playing John Wakefield, reporting directly to us from British Space Control, and filling in the background of a mission to Mars that has lost contact. Behind him play black & white images from the rescue capsule – all of which must have seemed pretty familiar to viewers in 1970. Meanwhile, the space programme management is fretting about public opinion,
In the end, right until the last couple of scenes, this is a bit of a disappointment. There’s some drama around the Doctor having been kidnapped before he can reveal the formula for the cure to the plague, until Liz finds it written down on a bit of paper. Then, to create some drama for the final episode, the Silurians reveal they have another genocidal plan – to use a gizmo to remove the Van Allen Belt and roast humankind – that can only be foiled by the Doctor fusing the control of the neutron flow in the cyclotron.
The focus of the episode is the spread of the Silurian plague and the Doctor’s attempts to find a cure. As such, there’s nothing much for the Brigadier and UNIT to shoot at, and for the majority of the episode the Doctor is out of his velvet and into a lab coat testing samples while the Brigadier has lots of urgent phone calls.
All the effort Timothy Combe has gone to so far to make the Silurians credible is thrown away in a tsunami of what Gary Gillatt calls “squabbling rubber”, most preposterously from Nigel Johns as the Young Silurian. His arrogant hot-headedness is indicated by the way he vigorously wobbles his head to emphasise he’s the one talking, and dramatically pointing to his third eye when he’s threatening the Silurian Scientist with death. It highlights the limitations of these costumes, and perhaps got Barry Letts, producing Doctor Who for the first time, thinking about how to tackle talkative aliens more effectively. It’s heresy to say it, but the prosthetics and half-masks of the 21st Century Silurians work a lot better.
Brilliantly, the resolution to last week’s “monster reveal” cliffhanger is the Doctor extending his hand and asking, ‘Hello, are you a Silurian?’ This feels like the first indication that some thought has been put into making the new Doctor a different flavour than the old one: reaching out the hand of friendship to alien life forms rather than darkly contemplating corners of the universe that have bred the most terrible things.
The scale of this serial keeps increasing, as events begin to escalate. As well as Dr Quinn’s cottage, this episode features the biggest action sequence the show has attempted: a cordon of UNIT soldiers sweeps across the moor in a ‘man’ hunt for the escaped Silurian, as a helicopter flies overhead, and the Doctor and Brigadier drive along the ridge observing it all. And all this is just the middle part of the episode, passing without much comment. A year ago, Douglas Camfield’s set pieces were battles between small squads of soldiers and monsters in the confines of Covent Garden or the IE factory. This scale feels like a real difference in Season Seven: the scope of what’s achievable on the budget opening up just as the show’s fictional scope is closing down.
After establishing the research centre and its main personnel last week, this time Malcolm Hulke’s script focuses on what lies beneath, with most of the episode following three expeditions into the caves, and the flight of an injured Silurian across the moors.
Blimey, there’s a lot going on here. Both of Malcolm Hulke’s previous scripts have featured a realistic setting (airport, WW1 battlefield) infiltrated by something uncanny, and this continues in the same vein. The Wenley Moor research centre is TV realistic (all the very serious briefings and personnel problems – Major Baker, for instance, ‘slipped up badly once some years ago’), and feels very 1970s contemporary with its backdrop of energy crisis and atomic power. This is offset by the very dodgy-looking dinosaur lurking in the caves, and Spencer’s regression to a caveman state, which fits much more in the 1970s strand of the ‘return of the repressed’. It’s obvious the two plotlines are connected, but so far this doesn’t indicate how. If this were an ITC series the dinosaur would probably turn out to be a special effect to keep people away from the enemy agents’ base, but as this is Doctor Who it’s clearly going to be something alien.
Next Time... 