The Hungry Earth: A Drill, a Welsh Village and Missing Bodies

This is the second two-parter of the Matt Smith era, and just like the Angels episodes it delivers. The Hungry Earth is all about the Silurians (more on them further down), and it also moves the overall season arc forward, although only incrementally. I’d call that the right call for a story like this, because the first half is busy enough setting up a village, a drill and a threat without also stopping to explain the wider season. If you liked the way The Time of Angels built itself over two weeks, you’re in familiar territory, and I was glad to find the show running another two-parter straight after that one.

The TARDIS materialises ten years in Amy and Rory’s future, and the Doctor and the team end up in the small Welsh village of Cwmtaff. A team there is running the most ambitious drilling project in history and has managed to break through the crust 21 km below the Earth. But while they’ve been drilling downwards, something else has been drilling up, and some mysterious disappearances have started to plague the town. It’s a very old-fashioned setup (a remote place, a project that’s gone a bit too far, people going missing), and the show plays it straight. After the run of bigger, shinier episodes before it, I rather liked how small and muddy it felt.

It helps that the setting is so ordinary. A Welsh village with a church, a graveyard and a mine is about as far from a spaceship as the show gets, and the Doctor, Amy and Rory wander in as if they’ve turned up for a day out. The fact that they land ten years ahead of where Amy and Rory started from is mentioned and then left alone, which suits me fine, because the story’s got enough to do. What matters is that there’s a drill going down, something coming up, and a handful of people in between who have no idea what they’ve started.

Bodies out of the graves

Rory gets separated from the others, and when he finally joins up with people in the town he’s mistaken for a police investigator. It’s a nice little bit of comedy that also drops him straight into the mystery. The locals tell him that bodies are being taken from the graves, without any sign of the ground above them being disturbed, so Rory goes off to investigate. I liked seeing him get something to do on his own, because up to now he’s mostly been the one trailing after the other two.

While Rory is looking into the graves, the Doctor and Amy break into the mine and speak to the scientists. An earthquake hits and pulls Amy into the ground before the Doctor can persuade them to turn their drill off. Searching for the cause of the quake, and for whatever has sucked Amy underground, the Doctor reviews the sensors and works out that several entities are heading for the surface from deep beneath them. So the drilling project and the missing bodies turn out to be two ends of the same problem, which I enjoyed seeing the Doctor put together in one scene.

A village under a dome

With the attackers closing in, the remaining townsfolk are herded into the church for safety. The attackers then seal the area off with a dome-like forcefield and gradually blacken the sky to give themselves the cover of darkness. That church-under-siege stretch is where this episode earns the “base under siege” feel that other fans picked up on too, and it works because everyone is stuck in one building with the doors shut and the sky going dark, and nobody inside has any real idea what’s waiting outside it. The darkness is a neat touch too, since it means the whole village is cut off from daylight as well as from the rest of the world. In the chaos, Elliot (the child of one of the earlier abductees) is captured, and Tony, one of the scientists, is infected by the attackers as well.

What I keep noticing is how many people end up with a stake in the same few hundred yards of Wales. There are the scientists at the mine, the townsfolk with missing relatives, a child who’s been taken, and a prisoner who has no interest in being talked round. Each of them wants something different, and none of it can be solved by the Doctor simply turning up and being clever, which is a nice change. Even the Doctor’s own plan, whatever it is at this point, mostly seems to be keeping everybody alive until he can work out what he’s dealing with.

The Doctor meets a Silurian

The Doctor and Rory manage to capture one of the attackers, and the Doctor quickly recognises them as part of the Silurian race. He tries to negotiate peacefully with the Silurian, but she’s adamant that they’ll wipe humanity from the surface of their planet. The Doctor dismisses the threat as ludicrous: a small tribe of dozens of Silurians won’t be able to withstand billions of humans, he says, and it’s a futile struggle. I liked that he sounds so sure, because it sets up exactly the wrong assumption for the episode to knock down.

As his prisoner won’t negotiate, the Doctor decides he needs to travel below and speak to someone else, and he leaves in the TARDIS with Dr. Chaudhry, the other scientist. Down there we see the discovery of not a small tribe of Silurians but a massive city and civilisation. That’s definitely enough reptiloids to cause massive death and destruction, because even with limited resources their technology is so far ahead of ours. It’s a proper cliffhanger-style turn, and it makes the Doctor’s brush-off earlier on look a bit foolish in hindsight. On to Part 2.

It’s the contrast that sticks with me: a quiet village on the surface, and an entire civilisation sitting under it that’s been there far longer than any of us. The Doctor’s argument that a few dozen Silurians can’t beat billions of humans is perfectly reasonable right up until he sees the size of the city. And that’s the whole hook of the cliffhanger, because everything he said to the prisoner was true about the tribe he thought he was dealing with and completely wrong about the one that’s actually there. A less careful story would have shown us the city up front and let the Doctor be right all along, so I’m glad this one lets him be a bit smug first.

Who the Silurians are

In case you haven’t seen the original Doctor Who series and don’t know who the Silurians are, here’s a brief summary. They’re generally a peaceful race, and they were Earth’s first sentient species, with a celebrated time on the planet and an extremely highly developed, technological society. Near the height of their civilisation their scientists worked out that a rogue planetoid was going to crash into the Earth, and with this in mind the bulk of the civilisation was placed into hibernation to make sure the species survived. The hibernation technology was faulty, though, and never woke them.

For anyone keeping score, they first turned up in the original series back in 1970, in a story with the Third Doctor, and came back in the 1980s for another run-in with a later Doctor. So this isn’t a brand new monster, it’s an old one getting a proper return after a long gap. That history is why the Doctor knows who he’s talking to the moment he sees one, and why he’s so quick to try talking instead of fighting. It also explains why this story feels a bit like an old-school one set in a modern village, with all the mud and flashlights that go with it.

They also didn’t know that the dangerous planetoid they believed would devastate their world was instead captured by the planet and became the Earth’s moon. Over the course of the Doctor’s many lives and adventures the Silurians have appeared in several stories, and their original purpose seems to be wiping humanity off the face of the Earth and returning as the rightful rulers of the planet. In more recent stories, though, the Doctor seems to be making progress toward uniting the two species, humans and Silurians, into a new and more powerful force in the universe. Whether that happens this time is the question hanging over the second half.