An Hour of Who a Day: May 4: "The Hungry Earth"

May 4: "The Hungry Earth"

This episode, more than any other in recent memory, may be the hardest to judge, simply because it's emphatically the first part of a 2-part story. Other Part One's have tended to go for setting up a story and then exploring the setting along the way, electing to either change things or increase the stakes at the cliffhanger. Even something like "The Stolen Earth", which is almost pure set-up for their climactic series 4 finale and thus probably the closest relative to "The Hungry Earth", has action sequences and loads of familiar characters for the audience to latch on to.

"The Hungry Earth", by contrast, is going for the slow burn. It clearly has a lot of old Doctor Who in its DNA -- most obviously Doctor Who and the Silurians, but also stories like Inferno, Frontios and, to a lesser extent, The Dæmons and Warriors of the Deep. There's nothing wrong with mixing and matching old stories to see what comes out, but because writer Chris Chibnall is delaying much of the action until the next episode, it's somewhat hard to judge how successful this remix is.

One thing that's a tad disappointing is the new look of the Silurians (or whatever we're calling them now²²⁰), as they look incredibly human. I sort of understand why they did it (so that the actors under the makeup can use their faces to act), but it's frankly rather jarring to see a race that we've previously seen as looking only vaguely humanoid to go to almost full homo sapiens. They don't even give us a third eye anymore, instead providing a long venomous tongue instead. I'm sure this probably falls more under "grumpy fan" than an actual independent problem, but it's still a bit of a disappointment.

Of course, countering this, the moments in the caves near the end of the episode are really good -- the caves themselves look good, and the cliffhanger reveal of the size of the Silurian settlement ("We're looking for a small tribal settlement," the Doctor says optimistically before he's confronted by the actual thing. "Ah. Maybe more than a dozen," he remarks) is cool, even if it's not exactly the most exciting cliffhanger ever. The way Amy is sucked into the ground is also really well done, even if it's incredibly reminiscent of Frontios (but they do a better job here), and there's some lovely interplay among all the characters -- particularly the Doctor, as he chats with Elliot, speaks with Alaya the captured Silurian warrior ("I'm not going to let you provoke a war, Alaya," he tells her; "there'll be no battle here today" (so there's a touch of Battlefield here too)), and later exhorts Ambrose, Tony, and Rory to be "the best of humanity". "No dissecting! No examining!" he tells them. "We return their hostage, they return ours. Nobody gets harmed. We can land this, together, if you are the best you can be. You are decent, brilliant people. Nobody dies today. Understand?"

But ultimately, "The Hungry Earth" puts a lot of pressure on its follow-up to really deliver. We can see a lot of homages to old stories and a lot of buildup for the second half, but there's not much else there. That's not really a bad thing (after all, we don't judge, say, The Caves of Androzani based solely on its first (two) episode(s)), but it does mean that the pay-off needs to be worthwhile. What is there isn't bad, so there's promise for "Cold Blood", but we'll have to wait to know for certain.

²²⁰ The Doctor here describes them as Homo reptilia, which on the one hand simply means "reptile man", but on the other hand suggests the actual genus Homo, of which humans are a part. Of course, this would mean that this group of Silurians are descended from primates rather than reptiles (which are a different class from mammals), and thus the "primitive apes" are their distant relatives. While it would explain why the new Silurians' faces look so human, it throws up so many other awkward questions (such as the cold-blooded thing) that it's probably best to assume the Doctor simply meant the "reptile man" meaning.