Cold Blood: Peace Talks Under Cwmtaff

This is the second half of the second two-parter of the Matt Smith era, and just like the Angels episodes it delivers. The pair of episodes is all about the Silurians, and it also advances the overall season arc, although only incrementally. OK, ultimately Cold Blood is a really good episode and one that you will remember. While to some extent expected, the final scenes are extremely haunting.

The episode opens with a bit of narration about the story of our planet, Earth, and the day a thousand years past when we came to share it with a race known as Humanity. It’s the story of the Doctor, who helped the two races find common ground, and of the terrible losses he suffered. I really like starting on that framing, because it tells you straight away that this is about the aftermath of something and not just a monster hunt. It’s also a nice way of picking up from last week without having to recap the whole thing.

Strapped to a slab

Picking up from Part 1, the Doctor has entered the Silurian city and been captured almost immediately. Malokeh, a Silurian scientist, now has the Doctor and Nasreen strapped to slabs in his laboratory. First he scans the Doctor and then tries to decontaminate him of the surface bacteria, but that harms him instead, since he isn’t human, and Malokeh stops the procedure. It’s a small scene but I liked it, because it shows the Silurians as curious scientists first and soldiers second.

While Malokeh is busy with the Doctor, Amy and Mo (Elliot’s dad) manage to escape. They find Elliot, but they can’t rescue him, and he turns out to be alive, only in some sort of suspended animation. That keeps the stakes personal for the humans, because the one thing they came down for is right there and they can’t touch it. It also gives Mo something to do beyond worrying, which I appreciated.

There’s some internal dissension in the ranks of the Silurians, too. The military group, led by Restac, wants to kill the Doctor and take the fight to the surface. But Malokeh manages to revive the leader of the Silurians, Eldane, who agrees at the Doctor’s urging to a parlay with the humans to discuss peace terms for the two races and mutual sharing of all the resources on the surface of the Earth. For a while it looks like the Doctor’s way might actually win, and I was properly rooting for it.

What works about the Silurian side is that they’re not all one thing. Malokeh is the curious scientist, Eldane is the elder who’s willing to talk, and Restac is the soldier who’d rather finish the argument with force, and the three of them pull in different directions the whole time. That makes the underground city feel like an actual society with its own politics, not a pack of monsters waiting for the Doctor to turn up. I especially liked watching the Doctor read the room down there, working out who he can talk to and who he can’t. It makes the surface half of the story, with its mud and its flashlights, feel a bit small by comparison.

Peace talks, and what went wrong

Unfortunately, while the Doctor is negotiating peaceful terms, Ambrose (Elliot’s mother and Mo’s wife) fatally tasers Alaya, the Silurian captured in Part 1, after Alaya keeps provoking her. While the humans above ground make their way below, Amy and Dr. Chaudhry successfully negotiate a sharing of land and technologies with the Silurian people. As the meeting winds down the Doctor walks in and comments on how well things have gone, which is the moment I started to dread what came next. Rory then enters with the body of the dead Silurian, and the Doctor is devastated that the humans have done this and fears that all the work toward peace has been irrevocably damaged.

I think it’s the Doctor’s reaction that sells it. He’s not angry in a shouting way, he’s just flattened, because he’d got both sides to the table and one lost temper has undone it. If you want a fan take on the Doctor sticking to peace over violence, it’s well worth a read, and it matches how I felt watching it. The Doctor tries to make sure the two races don’t start a war, but Restac revives Silurian soldiers from suspended animation and sets out to destroy the humans.

It also helps that Amy gets something proper to do in the middle of it. She isn’t rescued and she isn’t a spectator, she’s sitting across a table negotiating land and technology with an entire civilisation alongside Nasreen, and she’s good at it. After the stretch of episodes where she’s been pulled between the Doctor and Rory, I was glad to see her hold her own as the one making the practical case for peace. It makes what happens afterwards hit harder, because we’ve just watched her do the hard bit.

It’s also another episode where the Doctor’s tidy plan gets wrecked by ordinary people being scared and angry, which, after the way Amy’s Choice put the whole TARDIS crew under the microscope, feels about right. Nobody here is a villain exactly. Ambrose is a mother who’s lost a child to something she doesn’t understand, and Restac is a soldier who never believed in the deal. That’s why the ending has so much weight, and why I didn’t want to be told who was to blame.

Eldane’s gas, and Tony staying behind

In a selfless act, Eldane decides to use a toxic gas to force the Silurians back into suspended animation, and then to send up an energy surge that will destroy the drill. Tony decides to stay behind, since the venomous sting he received earlier is causing him to mutate (I wonder if we’ll see him again in a different fashion at a later stage), and Dr. Chaudhry stays back with him too. Eldane sets the clock on the chambers to awaken after 1,000 years and tells everyone they must spread the word that, after that time, the Silurians are coming to share the Earth. It’s a graceful way to end the conflict without anyone winning, and it gave both Tony and Nasreen a quiet exit I didn’t see coming.

Everyone else escapes to the TARDIS, but just before he steps inside, the Doctor sees the crack again and reaches into it to see if he can discover anything. He pulls out a piece of smoking debris, and before he can look at it, Restac confronts him. She takes a final shot at the Doctor, and Rory takes the shot meant for him and dies in his place. As Amy is forced to leave the dead Rory’s side, his body is consumed by the energies of the crack, erasing him from history.

It’s the sort of ending that makes you go back over everything that came before it. Rory has spent the two episodes in the background of the story, bringing food to the prisoner in the barn and trying to be the sensible one, and then he’s gone in a matter of seconds. There’s no big speech, no goodbye, just a shot and the crack closing over him. Because Amy forgets him almost straight away, we’re left holding it on our own, which is exactly why the last scenes are so haunting.

The scorched fragment

The Doctor, Amy, Elliot, Mo and Ambrose come out of the TARDIS in time to see the drill destroyed by the Silurian energy surge. Amy looks back at the spot, and for a moment thinks she’s seen someone else there, but she quickly forgets about it and reminds the Doctor of his promise of Rio. That moment is the haunting part for me, because she’s already lost him without knowing, and the Doctor’s the only one left who remembers. It’s one of those scenes that sticks because nobody on screen is allowed to grieve.

As the Doctor returns, he looks at the debris he pulled out of the crack. It’s a scorched blue and white fragment of wood, with the incomplete words “POLICE TE” and “FR” in black on the white. He recognises it immediately and holds it up against the TARDIS notice, which reads “POLICE TELEPHONE FREE FOR USE OF PUBLIC”, and he’s left dreading the possible implications. After that last image I wanted the next episode right away.