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The Silurians |
Reviews
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The Silurians |
Culture Crisis by Thomas Cookson 12/9/12
The idea of the Silurians is intriguing. That in the distant past existed an intelligent civilisation of reptiles ruling the Earth long before man. Now these million-year relics are awakening and want their planet back. An underground civilisation beyond our understanding waging war upon us. Sci-fi monster movies have long followed King Kong's premise of showing the monster as a misunderstood victim of man's fear and hostility, and eventually persecuted to death by the military. Then Planet of the Apes continued that love affair with self-hatred of humanity and added a dose of thrilling euphoric glee over the possibility of mutually assured destruction, whilst replacing the tragic lone monster with an actual caste civilisation with a philosophy based on condemning mankind for its worst nature. It also pioneered four-dimensional cinema (before Back to the Future or Terminator) and was the first sci-fi franchise to become an unending, monstrously bloated juggernaut.
Tat Wood argued that The Silurians' premise could have been a long-running series in itself, with the Silurians hatching new plots against mankind every story.
But there are issues with the first Silurian story. The Silurians, whilst not homogenously evil, still aren't as sympathetic as the Doctor seems convinced they are. So his condemnation of the Brigadier's actions seems disproportionate to its legitimate provocation given the many humans killed by the plague.
Malcolm Hulke was left wing but he, like many men then, had been forced to do national service, so he was understandably bitter about the military and authority in general. The Silurians airs a lot of those sour grapes. The hardest of which to take is when the plague is spreading and they can't find Dr. Lawrence to immunise him, the Doctor remarks "I'd be very happy to lose him."
However, despite bearing signs of 'writer on board' long before RTD's time, The Silurians was arguably a triumph, with a disturbing realism to its events and its characters' decisions and motivations. It's a very serious and mature work, marking the point where the show 'grew up'. Whilst I question the wisdom of doing another Silurian story, which would instantly undo that perfect downbeat ending, I can understand it. The concept is irresistible, as is the idea of the Doctor seeking redemption for both himself and mankind when the chance for peaceful co-existence was lost, but has now maybe come again. This gave The Sea Devils such poignance, as he came closer than ever to achieving it, only to have to destroy them himself. But once you've had the Doctor reckon with that guilt, you can't go back on it.
But I can understand the demand for yet another Silurian story, even twelve years later. Unfortunately, by then, the show had become staid and all the models it took were wrong. With only two downbeat Silurian stories to hand, it drew on the bitterness alone, on the 'revenge' angle. The very aspect that should have been played down in favour of the more interesting aspects of the Silurian concept.
Any sequel requires there to be survivors of the Brigadier's actions, at which point mankind becomes less and less guilty of the very 'genocide' we're supposed to condemn ourselves for. The Brigadier's atrocities then become merely on par with the Silurians' plague and probably had an equal number of casualties, but of course no one talks about the plague. Meaning the entire moral point of Warriors is a horrifically one-sided double standard.
The other model was Earthshock. The successful monster comeback in an actioneering shootout, and a return to the base-under-siege format. But neither format suits what The Silurians was about. Dialogue, mediation, morality play theatre, and the Silurians having a cultural homebase. But in the 80s the show had become so reductionist that now the invading Silurian army represented all that they were. They had no homebase, there was no strike against their territory, no case of them being shot in the back. Perhaps if Earthshock hadn't happened, or Bidmead had remained script editor, things would be different.
The four-part restriction is a problem. The Silurians couldn't have been cut down to anything less than seven episodes. The Sea Devils is cumbersome and padded, but it affords enough breathing room for striking, evocative images that get its point across. The sight of the navy ships firing into the murky depths and bringing Sea Devil corpses to the surface is a perfect metaphor for mankind's blind aggression, destroying without understanding. And, in those few seconds, it says more than Warriors of the Deep does in 90 minutes. The story gets no chance to show the Silurians as anything other than aggressors, making the Doctor's claims otherwise sound like hearsay or delusional white guilt. Pertwee's moral angle made sense from a utilitarian perspective, of the greater good for the greater number, including the Silurian civilisation. Davison is dealing with only an invading army, so his position is merely whiny, angry, warped favouritism. He's living in the past, not interacting with any awareness at all to what's happening now. Resulting in a warped, corrosive anti-drama where nothing happening on screen has any impact or registers any awareness on the protagonist.
The Fifth Doctor was like a weak, uncertain courier of the real Doctor's essence, which had gone into withdrawal within him. Unfortunately, Christopher Bailey seemed the only writer who understood this. But Johnny Byrne wrote the Doctor as maintaining the same authorative position as his Pertwee predecessor. But it comes off as vulgar overcompensation. Setting off their base reactor, and then condemning the humans for their paranoid aggression.
Attacking and condemning the slightest suggestion by the humans of using defensive force against their invaders, just to prove himself morally superior. The Doctor's warped, angry, confused message of suicidal pacifism and disarmament has to be shoved down our throats whilst obfuscating and demonising all other viewpoints in order to still seem like he's right. In Owellian fashion, the Doctor's history and moral nature is rewritten. Now this new version is the past and always has been. I wonder why fans even complained about the moral degeneration of Resurrection of the Daleks and Season 22. There wasn't even anything left to ruin, and by Warriors of the Deep' standards, any moral torpor that followed could only be seen as progress, if the show's morality itself had become this twisted and almost spitefully impotent.
Johnny Byrne was of the hippy generation. But it seems he was such a fan of the original story's left-wing source that he thought it would speak for itself in his emulation. So in awe of the original idea that he didn't feel the need to convey it himself. Then we had the producer, essentially running the show on the same cut-throat 'weed out the dead wood' business model as Thatcher; like her, he'd risen from a not-so-privileged background into the world of the higher ups, and so aggressively asserted arbitrary iron authority and a media cult of personality. Then there's the put-upon script editor projecting his own passive aggression onto the Doctor. The result is like a bunch of cranky, reactionary old squares trying to emulate an angry, radical, left-wing voice for the sake of shock value.
The danger is that revisiting the concept can demystify it, potentially overexposing it to the point where the inherent magic is spoilt. Unfortunately, Warriors of the Deep represents an era with a vested interest in shallow reductionism and exposing failure, specifically the Doctor's. After all, fans liked seeing the character dismantled to see what made him tick or crumble. Warriors of the Deep exists for that purpose, to snidely make the Doctor lose, and covers its contrivances via the era's typical pretension and histrionics.
With scene running orders never quite certain, the makers felt the need to compensate by making each scene as fraught or portentous as possible in the hopes that this would make the casual viewer become hooked or engaged by the 'drama'. But it only made the show unpleasant to watch.
Hence Adric and Tegan's constant sniping, Robin shouting at the hostel receptionist in Arc of Infinity, and the Doctor condemning the humans for wanting to use the Hexacromite, feigning a shocked outrage that makes no sense given the massacre going on around them, or the fact that the Doctor has destroyed the Sea Devils himself before. This significantly was not in Byrne's original script.
Whereas the Tom Baker years were like reliving the best moments of childhood, the Davison era was like living the worst moments of parenthood, where no matter how many times you tell the bickering, shrill, recklessly fickle children to stop misbehaving, you just know they're going to carry on. In Warriors of the Deep, this applies even to the Doctor being an out of control menace, doing unfathomably stupid things. In the original Silurian stories, each moment and development played its part, every character had strong, lucid and believable motivation and the whole thing aligned. On every single above factor, Warriors of the Deep fails pathetically.
But even foregoing Saward's disastrous rewrites, and the limited runtime, there are many missed opportunities here. The very brief of having the Silurians and Sea Devils in a cold war parable could have inspired a story where the Doctor must mediate an actual conflict between the two separate reptilian races. A story about subjugated people turning on each other. That'd be something different, and would validate the Doctor's hope that something survives.
The main problem with Warriors is the hexacromite gas solution. He can solve this at any point and refuses simply because the plot requires him to place the Silurian's lives over the lives of the very humans they're massacring (even when one such human takes a bullet for him). If you removed it, the viewer is on the same page as the Doctor. His peacemaking wouldn't be based on sickening favouritism, but because he genuinely believed fighting back was impossible. That this was the only option.
Therefore he must eventually mix up the Hexacromite solution himself in the chemical store. He could rant about mankind's war machine and how he's hates having to do this whilst he does, but at least he's not procrastinating over artificial moral indecision.
Alternatively, more potent to the MAD angle, perhaps the Doctor actually does make a gas that only paralyses the reptiles into a comatose state, triggering their hibernation. But once that's done, the Doctor finds it's too late. The nukes are set to launch and can't be disarmed. The only option is to detonate them on the base itself. So Vorshak stays behind and synchs up, sacrificing himself to save his species. The Doctor gets Preston and Bulic away in his Tardis, but can't stop to save the immobile Silurians. Both sides destroyed in the nuclear madness they pursued.
The Silurians' strengths were born of a new era of discovery of what the show could be now. Warriors of the Deep failed because the show had become too navelgazing, rigid, constrained and knowing. But despite this dead end, the Silurians endured in the spin-off material, where the franchise could experiment with new ideas again. Some avoided the predictably fatalist route by being set in a parallel universe, like the New Adventures novel Blood Heat or the DWM strip Final Genesis, showing how peace could have been made after all. The audio stories Enclave Irrelative and Bloodtide evaded the 'wronged minority takes revenge' tropes by being set before The Silurians, in an age before fatalism became the zeitgeist, when scientific progress and religious faith still galvanised optimism in the people. They were more about the themes of evolution against Victorian tradition, and the age of explorers wandering into uncertain, perilous new territory.
The New Series, in revisiting the Silurians, has unfortunately reverted back to the 'revenge' angle. I'll review The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood separately, but, suffice it to say, whereas once the Silurians were an unknowable, rarely glimpsed species, nowadays they're just part of the scenery.