May 11: Doctor Who and the Silurians Episodes 3 & 4

We continue on with episodes 3 and 4 of Doctor Who and the Silurians, and episode 3 gives us a really lovely comprehensive search across the moorland for the creature who found Liz in the barn before escaping.  It's very well done, with helicopters sweeping across the countryside as a number of troops search on foot.  This also gives us our best look yet at Captain Hawkins, being played by future Blake's 7 star Paul Darrow.

The other purpose this episode serves is to show us just how lousy Dr. Quinn is at keeping secrets.  He does manage to rescue the wounded creature, but then he keeps it locked up in his cottage in order to use as a bargaining chip.  And he's hardly subtle in his efforts, with the end result being that he throws a huge amount of suspicion on himself and ends up being killed by a Silurian.  Still, as a side effect we get a lovely scene between the Doctor and Miss Dawson, as she catches the Doctor searching Quinn's office for evidence of his actions and he tries to convince her that he only wants to help Quinn.  The way she seems about to tell the Doctor what she knows until the Brigadier enters the room is really quite nice.

But still, Quinn is killed and the Doctor finds the body when he goes to the cottage to check up on the man -- and then he finds himself face to face with a Silurian.

The Doctor encounters a Silurian. (Doctor Who and the
Silurians Episode 4) ©BBC

It's really a quite lovely cliffhanger, even if the effect is spoiled at the beginning of episode 4, as the Doctor pertly asks, "Hello, are you a Silurian?"  But we should take a moment to appreciate the design of the Silurians, which are pleasingly reptilian yet not too much like humans (beyond the limitations of having to put a man in a suit).  The face in particular is quite wonderful, with the strange eyes (the top third one in particular) and the recessed beak-like mouth giving it a nice unusual look.

And now that we've actually seen a Silurian, we can move on to seeing them in their base, rather than just having them hiding in the shadows.  Thanks to Dr. Quinn's map, the Doctor and Liz get a chance to explore the caves -- though not before Major Baker wanders down there, looking for his saboteurs (and finding them, albeit by being captured by them).  The Silurians' base looks a bit odd, with a lot of textured surfaces, but it also looks very spartan.  But hey, we get our first use of colour-separation overlay (CSO)⁵⁴ in Doctor Who, as the Doctor and Liz see the dinosaur that was in earlier episodes.

And so the Doctor returns to Wenley Moor, where he finds the permanent undersecretary Masters (as played by British national treasure Geoffrey Palmer, in one of his earlier roles) waiting.  It seems everyone but the Doctor wants to send troops into the caves to flush out the saboteurs/monsters (delete according to who's talking), and they refuse to listen to the Doctor's belief that these are sentient creatures that can be reasoned with.  But when they won't listen, the Doctor decides to try and reason with the Silurians (which leads to the rather wonderful moment where the Doctor is standing in their control room while the Silurians all have their backs to him; "Ahem," the Doctor says, startling the lot of them).  Except they seem just as unwilling to listen, and one of them decides to kill the Doctor with its third eye...







⁵⁴ Better known as chroma key or blue-/green-screen.  CSO was the BBC term for this technique.