7.2: Doctor Who and the Silurians
- Doctor: Jon Pertwee
- Companion: Liz Shaw
- Creators: Malcolm Hulke (Writer), Timothy Combe (Director), Barry Letts (Producer)
What’s the rating?
Worth Watching.
What’s interesting about it?
Pertwee's Doctor gains Bessie, his beloved car.
The car itself is a fine fetish for this incarnation of The Doctor, but I'll never forgive the producers for allowing Bessie to have the license plate “WHO 1”, or for their general cluelessness on how to refer to The Doctor during these years.
For a Doctor Who fan, many things can be forgiven, but treating The Doctor as a person named "Who” is beyond the pale. True fans bear an eternal burning grudge where we can can do naught but shake our fists at the heavens and let out a primal scream emulating the sound of the TARDIS landing.
To the credit of producer Barry Letts, in the “making of” documentary on the DVD he makes clear that had he taken on the reigns earlier, the “WHO 1” fiasco never would have occurred. But he didn't, and it did.
As for the story itself, the director tries some interesting things. Unusual for the series, we have segments not only featuring a monster with no one else around, but also from the monster's point of view, shown through a three-lens effect. With lots of heavy monster breathing.
This is the first appearance of the Silurians, who come to play a role in the modern show.
This story establishes the template of Pertwee's Doctor being in constant opposition to authorities, including U.N.I.T., the organization he allegedly works for. Fans have suggested this is the result of how the Time Lord's treated him, forcing his regeneration and exiling him to Earth, making him particularly sensitive to the idiocies of authority figures.
Geoffrey Palmer, probably best known as the co-star of As Time Goes By, is a typically banal evil bureaucrat here who will play a very different role in a Doctor Who story decades later.
I like that in this story both The Doctor and his companion are true scientists (something lost in the modern incarnation of the show), occasionally stopping to do a series of tests to figure out what's going on.
And what's going on is an Ebola-style breakout, mixed up with ancient aliens who have been living underground since before humanity got going. The story is a bit too long, but still worth watching for the directing and the establishment of the new Doctor's style, not to mention a surprisingly brutal portrayal of the symptoms of the plague. The final episode is particularly strong, emphasizing that The Doctor's interests and those of the military and government (and perhaps humanity) are not always in alignment.