Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 8: Hungry A**e.

DOCTOR WHO
‘The Hungry Earth”
22/05/2010
BBC One

"Doctor Who & The Silurians" is one of the classics of the old series, an epic Shakespearean tragedy where the real monster is not in the form of the Silurians themselves - ancient subterranean reptile men from Earth's past - but hubris, pride, stupidity, fear and bigotry, of which all sides, the Doctor and the Brigadier included, are guilty.

Forty years later, and the Silurian comeback "The Hungry Earth", part one of a two part serial, has quite a task on its hands to follow up on that one. So it doesn't bother. Instead it just reuses plot ideas from "...Silurians" and loads of other Old Who stories. Drilling into something awful? Inferno. A church and a forcefield? The Daemons. Welsh setting with loveable boyos in peril? The Green Death. The only way they could have made it any more derivative was if they caught Liz Shaw in the Tardis reversing the polarity with a giant maggot.

The ethical dilemma at the heart of "...Silurians", as to whether we are any better than them or perhaps worse, has meanwhile been buggered up. This time, to spare you the tedious details, it is hamfistedly executed, with the inevitable fuck-up that makes us all ashamed to be human slotted in for next week but telegraphed so loudly you can pretty much guess how it will turn out.

The characters are pretty cardboard too, with the Doctor and Rory scripted to operate as if on autopilot, right down to the already overused 'HOW COULD YOU NOT SAVE HIM/HER?' routine. Speaking of clichés, the episode also maintains the 'Doctor Is Christ/Doctor Is A Wanker' binary opposition, with no nuance or subtlety in-between. The Doctor we saw in "...Silurians" was a much more well realised Time Lord.

Amy Pond remains fucking annoying, as per usual, and the episode seems to toy with the viewer when it seems she's going to get dissected next week. (She won't of course.) But her growing lack of interest in what the Doctor does suggest some character development, if not all that much.

The worst character is the boy, whose Dad gets suctioned down into the bowels of the earth at the start of the episode. Now, please do not see that as a slur on the young actor playing him. It's just that there's something incredibly depressing about the underlying notion of a character whose only real purpose is to be precocious, then run off and get in trouble and, to top it all off, suffer from a disability-du-jour, which in this case is dyslexia. Britain, if you really want to help dyslexics, don't patronise them with token sufferers being bullshitted by Matt Smith. Actually invest in their education, stop discriminating against them and actually put some effort in assisting them in their day to day lives. But of course, this is a mainstream TV show made in Britain c. 2010 we're talking about here, so the feel-bad-but-in-reality-do-fuck-all consensus rules supreme.

Did I mention that the New Model Silurians are shite? They don't look like the old Silurians, and instead go for a generic reptilian humanoid look of the sort that Star Trek at its least imaginative might use. The makeup didn't look like a reptilian humanoid so much as an actress in reptilian makeup, which might sound obvious, but there is a clear difference between the two, in the same way that a bloke in a cheap made-in-China gorilla suit doesn't look like Chewbacca.

Throw in a plot full of holes and inconsistencies, and which often just marks time until the second episode's preamble is set up, and then mix firmly with infantile, flat characterisation. Voila! You have this episode. Fittingly, it was written by Christopher Chibnall, responsible for some of the worst Torchwood episodes ever (and that's saying something). Perhaps he took Stephen Moffat at his word and wrote the script for 11-year-olds, but that rather insults 11-year-olds, doesn't it? Last week's episode, 'Amy's Choice', was indeed a fluke, because we are back to Business As Usual: Poor scripts and shallow narratives, produced and performed in a slapdash and inconsequential way.

WHOPOINTS 4