BBC airings of Doctor Who run a bit ahead of premieres on BBC America. So if you're on the North American side of the lake, fair warning that spoilers lie below! – Eric TVGA
Quick Take: Doctor Who, “The Hungry Earth”/“Cold Blood”
When the key events of a story can all be summed up in the end ten minutes of each episode and the rest is little more than padding I guess all that’s left is to break out the old red pen and write on the script “Must try harder”.
Review: Doctor Who, “The Hungry Earth”/“Cold Blood”
(S0508/S0509) Originally I intended to write about this two-part story in the same manner as "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone". That is, as two separate reviews. Unfortunately a couple of problems have made that somewhat impossible.
The first (and largest) problem is twofold; in short this two-part story is penned by Chris Chibnal. The man who penned the awful Doctor Who episode “42” and was responsible for many of the worst Torchwood episodes ("Cyberwoman", "End of Days" and "Adrift" to name a few) and as such ended up near the top of the list of my least favourite Doctor Who writes. Now in his defence he isn’t responsible for the true horrors like “Love and Monsters” or “Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks” but seeing his name next to an episode never fills me with confidence.
We’ll deal with "The Hungry Earth" first of all – it had a kind of fun opening section playing a little with the concept of time travel by having Amy and Rory see themselves 10 years later (on an adjacent hillside waving hello). It’s a nice touch, but it was clearly designed as a set up for later events.
The plot of the episode itself is almost entirely set up – there’s a facility ten years into the future that is drilling as deep as possible into the Earth’s crust just to break records (why in Wales? Budget my dear Watson, budget). The drill awakens some form of defence mechanism and people (both alive and dead) start disappearing. A pretty standard hook for a Who story, nothing much to complain about one way or the other.
Gradually we discover that there’s something coming up from below, the Earth swallowing people is part of a defence mechanism – more people get abducted, one of the denizens of whatever it is from below comes up and she’s a Star Trek-style lizard-woman ‘Homo Reptilias’ (yup, that’s what they’re called in this episode, though apparently they are Silurians, which is news to me as I can’t recall it being mentioned in the episode.)
The episode closes with Amy, a Welshman who’s only real personality trait is that he is ‘a father’ and the man’s son abducted and below ground; and the lizard-woman-warrior captured after injuring the grandfather of the family unit by giving him a sound tongue lashing.
If I sound like I’m being a little blasé and offhand with the episode it’s because I spent 45 odd minutes watching the episode and being completely unentertained. Now I know I didn’t go into the episode with the most confident of outlooks but there was about 30 minutes of absolutely nothing relevant happening with all of the important stuff taking up about ten minutes of the total run time. Now to be fair the two part structure to the episode did give us the first genuinely tense cliff-hanger moment since, well, pretty much the 1990s (Amy about to be dissected and The Doctor encountering an entire underworld city), and I appreciate that a great deal. But the truth of the matter is this two-part story did not have the content to stand being stretched across two episodes, it feels like it was heavily padded out in order to make it fill the required time, and then stretched a bit further.
Everything important (apart from the last five minutes or so) happens in the second part of the story (“Cold Blood”) and that’s where the rest of this review is going to dwell.
"The Hungry Earth" was an episode filled with pretty much nothing, but fortunately "Cold Blood" has plenty going on in it. Opening with an intriguing narrative from Stephen Moore (I recognised his voice from the BBC Radio play and TV Show The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy; he played Marvin, the whale and the Ruler of the Universe amongst others) that gave the episode a bit of an epic spin, providing the significance that the previous episode completely lacked and desperately needed.
His role as the leader of ‘Homo Reptilias’ is a relatively minor one when you consider the framework of the episode: he’s brought in to provide a voice of reason and temper the military leader. Stephen Moore’s a great actor and a minor British icon (he was also in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole and has guested in many other classic British shows) but he’s woefully underused here, spending a lot of his time in off-screen negotiations and then later siding with The Doctor with very little persuasion. I had to suspend my disbelief above a very high ravine in order to accept the speed in which he switched from ‘protecting his people’ to ‘gassing them if they’re not smart enough to run back into suspended animation’.
If you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned much about the scientist who headed up the drilling project (played by Meera Syal), it’s because she’s another rather incidental character - the end of the episode sets things up to give her a possible return, but honestly I’m not bothered if she does make another appearance because she was another exceptionally shallow character in a story full of them. (I suspect she’s due to return in the series finale as the Silurian are rumoured to be appearing in it).
In fact the only character (outside of our TARDIS travellers) who had any depth was Ambrose, the Mother/Wife/Daughter of the Welsh family and the one who kills Alaya. She’s portrayed as a worried and scared woman who’s lost her son and husband in a single day. It’s just a shame that she comes across as a horrible and unpleasant individual who really deserved a more unpleasant end than the one she received.
So on the whole the episode was not a good one either, making the entire story almost redundant. At least it would be if it wasn’t for the last few minutes of the episode (sound familiar?). Where we’re treated to not only another major teaser for the series finale with the Doctor pulling a burnt part of the TARDIS from one of the cracks in the wall – talk about deepening the mystery in a way that is infinitely superior to “Bad Wolf”. Not only do we get that, we also get poor old Rory diving in the way of a shot intended for the Doctor, acting exactly in the manner he warned that The Doctor caused the people he travelled with. But dying isn’t enough of a fate for Rory; not only is he killed but the crack in the wall gobbles him all up, removing him from the pages of history and making Amy forget her fiancé ever existed.
But when the key events of a story can all be summed up in the end ten minutes of each episode and the rest is little more than padding I guess all that’s left is to break out the old red pen and write on the script “Must try harder”.
Other Observations:
