"A child is born with no state of mind" by Thomas Cookson 6/8/18
The Silurians was Hulke's most important work. His purest and angriest, inspired by having been forced in youth to do national service against his left-wing politics.
It was groundbreakingly adult. Adopting a child's view of adult-world trivial concerns about careers and patriotism. Children's fiction is about children seeing what adults don't. The Doctor's curiosity compelling him to discover and understand what the other, obtuse humans never try to (to their peril).
Hulke utilizes Doctor Who's sci-fi storytelling possibilities to upturn our understanding of the world and challenge mankind's arrogant conceits. Its fantastical concept of awakening lizard men meets a realist depiction of our military response and what men like the Brigadier would do.
The Silurians' revival resembles a second birth, born as blank slates into an unfamiliar world, but, when exposed to man's incomprehensible violent hostility, they learn to respond in kind with a child's raging intolerance.
It's about the power of influence. It takes a dialogue with Pertwee for the older Silurian to consider peace with mankind. Unfortunately, his xenophobic underling thinks his leader's corrupted by Pertwee's influence. Resembling Britain's colonies, prone to unstable, internal upheavals, violent coups and militias emerging in allergic reaction to foreign occupation.
Pertwee nearly convinces the Brigadier to postpone aggressive action until Miss Dawson enters, announcing Quinn's death. Immediately, Pertwee's sermon is upstaged by calls for retaliation. Pertwee insists awakening Silurians can be influenced on an individual basis by him toward peace, rather than by their bloodthirsty usurper.
The Brigadier's final decision isn't so shocking (my inner Greenpeace activist rooted for him over the Silurians' history of germ-bombing apes), but crucially he acted behind the Doctor's back, after false assurances the caves were safeguarded. To Pertwee, the Brigadier's actions have validated the Silurians' every prejudice about mankind's treacherous nature.
The last image of the Silurian lair is their mortally wounded leader, weakly struggling to revive his comrades. Is Hulke showing the only sure way of eliminating him was the Brigadier's way? Or showing the Silurians reverted to a state of vulnerability, unable to put up a fight before being denied surrender? Putting us in the Silurians' shoes in a world once theirs that's turned against them as they try clinging onto their existence.
Perhaps Hulke understood a sequel that contrived the survival of vengeful Silurians would've exhausted our sympathies on a predictable revenge narrative and would mean the Brigadier had killed no more Silurians than they did us with their plague. So Hulke created another hibernating reptile race, the Sea Devils. The Silurians' backstory gives Pertwee's peaceful aims a redemptive poignancy, without undoing the Brigadier's genocide. Entering the Sea Devils' lair, he's almost immediately trusted at his word, and peace is agreed to quickly, whereas the Silurian elder wasn't quick to trust Pertwee.
The first half's burdened with egregious, overindulgent padding of the Master's frequent prison escapes. But Delgado makes the perfect anti-Doctor warmonger. Significantly, Pertwee's position is neutral, wanting the best for both races, whilst Delgado, wanting to cause most death and destruction, talks the language of a patriot.
Whilst the sinking of passing ships was unjustified, it's ultimately a territorial dispute, making a peaceful settlement possible. The injustice is how Walker declares the reptiles simply animals, undeserving of diplomacy, to be communicated with via bombing. He's also unrepentant over potentially killing the Doctor and submarine crew too (unlike Warriors, where it's the Doctor snidely betraying the humans' lives).
Whilst the Brigadier's actions arguably stopped further human bloodshed, here Pertwee's diplomacy is more clearly the only effective way. Walker's attempts to destroy the reptiles only make a critical situation worse. The language of violence is the worst kind of influence, and now there's no certainty Pertwee can undo what's been done. Hulke's stories didn't just sermonise, they actively involved you in how we fix and put right our mistakes.
There's a poignancy to how the Sea Devils start losing, as mankind unleashes bigger guns, inflicting devastating losses. It's a double-edged tragedy, demonstrating that the reptiles can't win, but they're too hungry for vengeance to stop. Sadly, Pertwee must eventually do as the Brigadier did, to prevent greater, bloodier war, upon realizing his power of influence has been exhausted. In a way, the Master's ultimate escape is fitting. Putting him to the sword as our scapegoat would've been an easy cop-out of mankind's own guilty part in the reptiles' injustice.
Frontier in Space retreads Pertwee's peace-making efforts between man and reptile rather more optimistically. A world-building space opera that slowly, subtly pushes the stakes toward galactic war.
Pertwee's anti-war declarations see him criminalized, imprisoned and shipped from cell to cell without fair trial, illustrating the first casualty of war: justice. Even with Earth's president sharing his peace-loving sentiments, she's under pressure from cabinet and public who won't tolerate 'peace at the price of humiliation'.
Pertwee consistently repeats his mantra of peace being the way. When in the military, Hulke was in an institution determined to drill mechanistic war indoctrination into him at an impressionable age. Perhaps repeating to himself values of peace was his way of forever fighting against that to maintain a sense of self.
It's driven by battles of words and Pertwee's desperate efforts to be heard amidst obtuse impregnable mindsets and unstoppable gears of war. There's little violence or raised voices, yet to me it's as riveting as Earthshock and better for the heart. Moffat called Classic Who the 'bad boy' of children's TV. Actually, it was a moral series that was just more honest about humanity's malignancies.
For instance, Delgado meeting the prison governor and shrewdly deducing his plot to assassinate a political prisoner. A subversive moment of the black-hat Master inhabiting real-world corrupt institutions and being in his element. The governor goes unpunished, speaking truth to how, far from getting egg on their faces, often the corrupt get exactly what they want.
It's a grim reminder that the Doctor can't make all Earth's problems go away. Thus there's such cathartic joy to seeing him finally convincing the Draconians. Yet, even here, the Sea Devils' absence in Earth's future almost serves a devastating reminder of when peace failed.
General Williams being confronted with his heinous mistake over destroying an unarmed ship is powerful stuff. Honing Hulke's point about buried voices, borders and twenty-year silences doing nothing but ensuring continuous prejudice and war, stifling chances for understanding and the mistakes and guilt some soldiers had to live with.
The Daleks' final appearance reinforces how needless war only makes us collectively weaker against greater evils. Perhaps Genesis should've preceded this.
Unfortunately, Hulke's work was posthumously disgraced in Warriors of the Deep. A Cold War allegory, in which the resurrected Silurians presumably represent any nutters out there who genuinely wanted nuclear war. Bizarrely, it demands our sympathies for them.
Its moronic premise was based around demonstrating that if the Doctor insisted on virtue, signalling his pacifism during an ongoing massacre, then there'd be a total massacre. Wow, you don't say! It seemed made specifically for fans who considered Pertwee's final decision in The Sea Devils 'a betrayal' that needed correcting.
Why would the Doctor's desire to honour the older Silurian's peaceful intentions lead him to flatter the genocidal faction that killed him? His continuing sympathies can't be unearned. Pertwee faced a brewing conflict caused by culture shock. Assuming it could be talked down diplomatically was reasonable. Davison assumes he can dissuade Ictar from a 100-year-held genocidal stance in five minutes.
That's the chief disgrace of Hulke's work. Rendering the Doctor hopelessly irrational, whilst having him still preach about our short-sighted folly. He's basically Ian Levine: melodramatically sycophantic about Who's past and a vile bully to anyone not appreciating it. Ironically it disgraces Hulke's stories by being slavishly sycophantic to them (and to exaggerated ideas of the Doctor's piety) through hysterically hollow, meaningless praise.
The Silurian's predicament is no worse than the Thals, who'd actually devoted themselves to pacifism, realizing their own belligerence caused their devastation. Why should we sympathise with Silurians who've been no worse done by but have now decided to leave mankind no choice but to wipe them out? Davison's sycophancy towards this (or any) genocidal militia, completely cheapens why Pertwee's Doctor ever sympathized with the Silurians. Making his allegiances to them blinkered, delusional and unreasonable from the start, retroactively proving the Brigadier right.
Throughout The Sea Devils, I believed Pertwee's desperation to stop the bloodshed by reaching someone in authority. Davison actively sits out the massacre of humans just to get close to and flatter their murderers. Never warning the Myrka's first electrocution victim, nor Nilsen when blindly stumbling into enemy fire. He clearly considers human lives cheaper than their killers'.
Apologists claim Davison has an alien detachment to these human deaths, whilst simultaneously being wracked with past guilt over the Silurians. What, both? Likewise, they'll describe Davison being apparently enlightened enough to see past the Silurians' worst actions, but simultaneously too petty to ever let humanity off. Foully implying that every time Tom's Doctor saved mankind, he was secretly, spitefully contemplating exercising his long-held grudge over The Silurians' events, by letting the invaders slaughter us instead.
Tony Fyler claims it's an 'eloquent' anti-war story (whilst shifting the goalposts of how seriously we should take Warriors whenever it suits his defence), whereby the Doctor interfering with some soldiers' war effort and getting them killed somehow conveys that 'peace is the way' (after no one's left alive to disagree). Despite proclaiming himself a feminist, he happily excused Davison scolding Preston for refusing to submit to her attacker's wellbeing above her own (moments before she valiantly takes a bullet for him). Warriors doesn't just lack moral discernment, it's mercilessly inimical to it.
It never justifies its belligerent insistence that the invading reptiles are sympathetic or noble. We could've been shown the revived Sea Devils' shock at being awoken by Ictar upon a sudden war footing, demonstrating reluctance and dissent among their ranks.
The Silurians' ending was an 'injustice' because it intently ended with mankind victorious via overkill, without any comeuppance for us. Ictar being revived just to get his last dying shot on Vorshak undermines any 'injustice' angle (beyond Davison's criminal negligence) by actively showing how irredeemable he'd be if he'd lived.
It's seemingly determined to demoralize the viewers' spirit. Presenting a visceral experience of besieged, dying soldiers, whilst shaming even the slightest galvanized survival instinct or any instinct beyond Davison's insistence on paralytic guilt and martyrdom to our enemy's genocidal cause.
Ultimately, it tacitly endorses every massacre and genocide in history by asserting it's more crucial the slaughtered victims maintained the moral high ground by not fighting back (otherwise they got what they deserved). It only ends in bloodbath because Davison stalled using the gas, which he only did so the story could end in bloodbath. Seemingly, he couldn't help the Silurians' predicament and settled for worsening ours instead. It disgraces Hulke's messages about holding your nerve wisely, and defending human freedoms.
Michael Grade mocked our investment in the show's rubber-suited monsters. But Hulke's writing got us caring about the Silurians' tragedy. Warriors demands we see past both their costumes and their relentlessly irredeemable actions, and somehow be saddened and outraged at their utterly earned deaths. Because it's really appealing to fandom's perverse power-worship.
We're simply supposed to be horrified. Perhaps that's how apologists rationalise Warriors' sheer lack of entertainment value as somehow 'the point'. The story only existing for the cynical, nasty intent of devastating the Doctor all over again.
It's not a good story; it just holds you hostage to how much worse it could've been or the Doctor could've acted, to reassure our insipid relief. Somehow convincing fandom that every prior instance of the pacifistic Doctor cleverly winning was akin to broken clock being right twice a day.
It's a twisted product of the show's morality that almost renders Hulke's work, the Doctor's character conception and the entire show, a mistake.