Doctor Who: Doctor Who and the Silurians

Wait. "Doctor Who and the Silurians." What?! As any good Who nerd will tell you, his name isn't Doctor Who. They don't do story titles like this. They won't do a title like this again. What happened here? I don't know. Weird. So the story starts with two people in a cave being attacked by a dinosaur-looking creature. Then it cuts to the Doctor working on Bessie. Hooray! Bessie is the 3rd Doctor's car. The Brigadier asks the Doctor and Liz Shaw to come help him with an investigation into an atomic research center built into caves. They're having unexplained power drains on their reactor, and UNIT has been brought in to figure out what's going on.

Bessie!

So the Doctor drives them there in Bessie. It turns out that if one of these power losses happens at the wrong time, the reactor would turn into a giant nuclear bomb. Oops. There's plenty of fishy stuff going on. The Doctor says everything leads back to the caves and goes exploring.

Hee!

Mini-Godzilla starts to go after him, but then there's a musical sound and it leaves. I forgot how funny the 3rd Doctor can be. Liz Shaw and the Brigadier are worried about him and are gathering a search party to go into the caves. The Doctor walks into the room and says, "Well, this all looks very exciting. May I come, too?"

He tells them about the dinosaur creature. They all go into the caves, but the Doctor isn't happy that this is turning into a military operation. One of the soldiers gets attacked by the dino and shoots something else...there's a trail of blood. They analyze it and it's reptilian.

The Doctor says that the soldier was irresponsible; he was being attacked but that's not who he shot. The Doctor points out that each time there was an attack, the dino was called off. He thinks there are two types of creatures living in the caves- large ferocious ones and smaller, intelligent ones that may not be hostile. Oh, and here's the head scientist sneaking off to talk to those intelligent creatures.

Meanwhile, that injured creature is roaming around causing havoc. The Doctor and Liz snoop around the head scientist's office and find a globe of the Earth as it was 200 million years ago before the land masses drifted apart and notes on the Silurian era. Hm. I think it's interesting that we don't see any Silurians until the last seconds of episode three. We see their claws or their outline blurry in the distance, but we don't get a good look.

the Doctor and a Silurian

It's quintessential Doctor that when he meets the Silurian, he extends his hand in friendship. He wants to know what they want and how he can help. The Silurian hears a plane fly overhead and runs out the door, while the Doctor yells after him that the humans will destroy them if they don't say what they want. The Brigadier and the Doctor fight about the Brig's plan to invade the caves and the Doctor goes exploring again, this time with Liz. The Silurians are draining power to revive their species from hibernation.

The same arguments going on above ground are happening below. The Silurians fight about either studying humans or killing them all. Meanwhile, the Doctor tries to make peace with the Silurians.

They say Earth is their planet. They dismiss humans as apes. A small planet was approaching and they calculated that it would draw off the atmosphere, destroying all life. So they built the base underground to wait it out. The Doctor says their catastrophe never happened- the planet became the Moon. (Scientists don't think that's how we got the Moon anymore, but I guess that was the prevailing theory at the time.) The Silurian says that their hibernation circuit was faulty and didn't wake them up until a new power source appeared- the nuclear reactor. Anyway, the Doctor thinks there's room for both civilizations on Earth. Otherwise there will be a terrible war.

The Silurian leader agrees to try for peace. We know that's not going to happen, right? We know human nature only too well. There's already a hysterical person topside calling for the extermination of the Silurians, and there are Silurians who want to kill the humans.

This story has a pretty sobering end. The bad Silurians are tricked into hibernating again. The Doctor thinks he and Liz Shaw are going to come back the next day to start reviving them one by one, to reason with them. As they're leaving in Bessie, they see explosions in the distance. The government has ordered the Brigadier to destroy the Silurians. The Doctor comments that it's murder. They've wiped out a race of intelligent beings. They drive away in silence.

THE RUNDOWN

Doctor: Third
Companions: Liz Shaw
Episode: #52, "Doctor Who and the Silurians," seven parts
Adversary: the Silurians

Classic Lines: the Doctor: "It was certainly some kind of dinosaur. It was certainly nothing that I've ever seen before."; security chief: "In museums, you mean?"; the Doctor: "No, I do not mean in museums! Well, on second thought, perhaps, perhaps I do." *sly look at the Brigadier*

Tuck This Away to Impress Your Friends: This story is the first time we see Bessie, the 3rd Doctor's car.
Next Up: "The Ambassadors of Death"