The Silurians v. Night Terrors
This week's review considers two stories about the destructive power of the fears that lie deep within ourselves: Malcolm Hulke's The Silurians, first broadcast in early 1970, and Mark Gatiss' Night Terrors, from September 2011.
The Silurians
A characteristic of Doctor Who across the ages is the show’s practice every few years of changing not only its lead actor but the style, tone and creative approach of the series itself, renewing itself partly to stay fresh, partly as a natural consequence of new production teams taking hold of the reins, and also – presumably – to keep pace with the changing tastes and expectations of the viewing audience. Season 7 – the first 25 episodes of Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor, broadcast in early 1970, the year of my birth – is generally regarded as having made one of the most tectonic stylistic shifts in Doctor Who’s sixty-year history. As well as the new Doctor and the fact that everything was filmed in colour (great for those who had colour TV; it would be some years before my parents did, so if they would have seen this particular Whovian revolution in black and white), it gave the impression of trying to be a little more grown up, the Doctor a more serious, confident character than his predecessor, and his adventures confined to twentieth-century Earth, with gritty themes exploring ethical and ecological dilemmas. The Silurians is the second story of Season 7, and the first story of this ‘era’ to come up in my randomised review, so I watched it with half a mind on what else made it different, and trying to imagine how it went down with audiences of the time.
Underlying my early impressions of the first two or three episodes was a sinking feeling that seven episodes seemed as though it was going to be too many. Did this story really drag on for more than a month and a half when it was first broadcast? There’s an awful lot of men standing around talking, which seems odd for the Saturday evening family adventure slot, but I’m guessing this wasn’t unusual for the time. The story throws up character tropes which I think of as typical for Doctor Who stories of this era: UNIT soldiers and white-coated scientists, government ministers and simple country folk. But once the story gets into its stride and the titular Silurians are revealed, we start to understand who is trying to do what and why, it all becomes a lot more interesting.
The Silurian creatures remain hidden from our sight at first. We glimpse shadowy figures at the back of dark caves, and we follow the progress of an injured Silurian running loose on Wenley Moor through sunlit silhouette and his eyes rather than from a human point of view. This all contributes to writer Malcolm Hulke’s clever idea that these are intelligent life forms who have always been with us, just out of sight and on the periphery of our consciousness. It’s suggested that humans have a traumatic, deep-buried race memory of an age in which we were apes and Silurians ruled the Earth, which lends a dark psychological edge to the drama that I find quite spooky, helped no doubt by the ancient and earthy kazoo-like tune that plays over some of their scenes.
The idea is a little bit Moffaty (his proposal in The Impossible Astronaut/The Day of the Moon that the Silence have been living among us all along is similarly unnerving), and – in my view – just a notch cleverer than the way alien species had been conceptualised in the previous six series of the show. The Silurians aren’t just about taking over the Earth – this is science fiction with a little more depth.
Silly voices aside, they are visually impressive creatures too. I much prefer these original Silurians over the less animalistic versions (Vastra and her ilk) that appeared in the twenty-first century series. They stomp about and quiver with rage, and have a frightening eye-like device in their foreheads that can open doors and burn holes in walls. The caves in which they have been hibernating are pretty cool and atmospheric too. The tall, damp walls illuminated in green and orange seem to us now to be quite typical of Doctor Who scenery from the 1970s, but remember that this was the first time such scenes had been realised on screen in colour, if only for a lucky few. It occurred to me when Dr Quinn enters the caves in episode two, and is led as if possessed into the control room of the Silurians’ lair, that nothing quite like that had been seen on Doctor Who before, at least in such visual richness.
Another interesting aspect of the Silurians we meet in this story is that they aren’t a lot different from humans. In fact, it seems as if their main dramatic purpose is to mirror humanity, to teach us something about ourselves. They are not a race uniform in mindset and purpose; there are ‘good’ Silurians and ‘bad’ Silurians, and, even better, complex, conflicted Silurians who don’t quite seem sure what they best thing to do is. The Doctor’s plan, to revive them one at a time after they’ve been re-sealed in their tombs, on the basis that positive persuasion is more likely to work on a gradual individual basis than by trying to appeal to a hysterical mass, seems like a sensible one. Perhaps a similar strategy could be adopted to wean humanity off capitalism, environmental destruction, racism, prejudice and all its other evils … freeze the lot of us, and let some helpful AI or super-evolved future-cat thaw us in a few million years’ time one by one, with a convincing TED talk on love, peace and socialism for each of us to set us back on a righteous path.
Unfortunately, none of the Doctor’s plans come to fruition in this story. Having worked out what’s going on in the caves beneath the nuclear research facility, his grand plan for humans and Silurians to share the surface of the Earth comprehensively fails. If not a ‘first’ for the show, it’s unusual for Doctor Who to turn out this way – we’re far more used to seeing the Doctor as a heroic problem-solver, overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles to save the day. But nothing goes according to plan in The Silurians, and the Brigadier-ordered destruction of the reptiles’ tombs makes for a hard-hitting and surprisingly downbeat ending to the story. I wonder what it felt like as an impressionable young viewer in 1970, seeing the Doctor – he whom we always expect to win the day – so disappointed and angry at the end of the serial.
It's a strong story eventually for Caroline John’s Liz Shaw, who only ever had limited opportunities to build a distinct character for herself during her short run in Doctor Who. She starts out as a bit of a spare wheel, overlooked and patronised in various rooms full of men. On a couple of occasions – in episodes two and six – she objects (‘Have you never heard of female emancipation?’ and ‘I’m a scientist, not an office boy.’) to chauvinistic orders from the Brigadier, only be told by the Doctor on both occasions to pipe down and to do what he says. It will be a few years yet before the Doctor becomes properly progressive on institutional misogyny. But Liz turns out to be the real hero of the story, discovering and completing the Doctor’s vaccination formula, basically saving the human race from annihilation.
The rapid spread of the Silurians’ virus, and also the denials and vaccine-scepticism of Lawrence and Masters, seem all the more realistic and presciently written by Hulke watched today, so soon after the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. Those moments in which news of the virus’ arrival in the big city, and then across international borders, and the objections of those who just couldn’t afford to believe that they might be vulnerable themselves, are all instantly recognisable.
I must have known at least once before that Paul Darrow had a role in The Silurians, as senior UNIT office Captain Hawkins, but I’d completely forgotten about it so I was delighted to see him here. The part was far too small for such an irrepressible screen presence, of course, but he makes it work, absolutely stealing every scene he’s in with his inimitable ability to stand, talk and stare more powerfully than anyone else in the room. What a unique force of nature he was. It’s a shame he wasn’t signed on for more stories – the history of UNIT could have developed quite differently with Hawkins appearing regularly alongside Benton and Yates.
One other observation I have to make on this serial is that the Third Doctor looks pretty hench in his white t-shirt and slacks. It led me to check how old Jon Pertwee was when he made this story, and the revelation that he was 51 – younger than I am now – is virtually impossible for me to compute. To my mind, the Third Doctor has always been an elderly man – white-haired, distinguished, urbane and old-fashioned; and, also to my mind, I’m just a kid. I mean, I think like a kid most of the time, and my inner child still carries a strong voice on the sitting council that governs my mind. How can he then possibly be younger than me now? It’s going to take me some time to come to terms with this one.
Night Terrors
The writer of Night Terrors, Mark Gatiss, is a horror guy. Clearly, this is a genre he knows and understands intimately, and over the years he has channeled his knowledge of horror into many fantastic productions including The League of Gentlemen, Dracula, The Tractate Middoth, and various books and televised scripts for Doctor Who. So it’s no surprise that Night Terrors delivers on the scary side of things in lots of obvious, crowd-pleasing ways – living dolls and plummeting lifts and old ladies being pulled into the bins – but also in deeper, darker, more upsetting fashion, as it builds its story around the despair of a young family living in challenging conditions, struggling to meet the costs of living and to care for a young child suffering acute anxiety. Feelings of helplessness and hopelessness in a real world setting make for the most effective of all horrors.
We learn that young George is not a human child, but a Tenza – a species of spacefaring entities whose young insert themselves into the family environments of other beings, hiding their true identities with a perception filter. Unfortunately this particular little Tenza is crippled by fear of pretty much everything in the small flat in an intimidating tower block estate in which he lives, fears heightened, it seems, by a lack of confidence in the love of his parents. It’s all pretty dark stuff. As for most people, there are few things I find more upsetting than the thought of a young child confused and distressed. We’re programmed to respond to a child’s cry – it hits us in the heart just like George’s psychic message across the galaxies hit the Doctor in one of his – so Night Terrors succeeds in enlisting the audience’s attention right from the start. Something must be done to help this little boy!
‘Please save me from the monsters,’ is George’s SOS, and the Doctor responds by ‘making a house call’. This idea of the Doctor being an actual, practising doctor, with a mission sans frontières to help and to heal people, seems to have been a recurring theme of the Steven Moffat-produced years of the show. On a number of occasions he mentioned the importance of the Doctor’s name, as a sort of signpost for what the Doctor’s purpose is – what are they there for, and what is Doctor Who really supposed to be about? It provides an interesting perspective on the programme, but of course his conclusions don’t always seem consistent with what we see in other eras of Doctor Who. I don’t think the Doctor was always on call – in the beginning, and at various other points in the show’s history, they seemed to be a traveller without purpose or direction, actively trying to avoid helping out or getting involved in other people’s troubles. There have been occasional instances of the TARDIS landing at a destination in response to a distress call, but more often than not they seem to stumble unwittingly into other people’s dilemmas. Unless, of course, we accept the TARDIS’s claim – through the voice of Idris in The Doctor’s Wife – that she always takes the Doctor to where they need to be, acting in effect as a sort of GP appointment-booker.
When the Doctor first meets George, the little boy asks ‘A doctor? Have you come to take me away?’ ‘No George,’ the Doctor replies, ‘I just want to talk to you.’ We learn later on that George asks this question because he has overheard his parents talking about giving him up into care, but when he first says the words it wasn’t immediately clear to me why he thought a doctor might take him away, nor whether the question is asked in hope rather than fear. I get the impression that he seems resigned to the fact that his mum and dad are rejecting him; he’s reached a point of such desperation and disillusion that he’s ready to give up on the whole ‘being a human’ plan and is looking for an exit (which is pretty horrible when you think about it – if he wasn’t a Tenza, what else would he do having reached a point at which he is ready to give up on life?).
This little exchange reminded me of a time in my life, maybe one or two years older than George in Night Terrors, when I had problems with my pooing – some sort of disconnect between my mind and my bowels was causing me keep it all in at the wrong moments, and to let it all out at even worse moments. It’s a condition that I now understand to have probably been encopresis, but I don’t know if that was ever diagnosed at the time, nor whether anyone really knew what to do about it. It caused me a lot of difficulties and embarrassment, and I think contributed to a severe lack of self-confidence in social situations. My parents sought help for the situation, and I remember on one occasion my mum telling me that we were going for an appointment with a doctor, and me asking ‘Which doctor – the tummy rubbing one, or the talking one?’ The tummy-rubbing doctor was a specialist at the hospital who I remember massaging my stomach, presumably feeling for blockages in my bowels. My memory of the talking doctor is a man who we went to see as a whole family, and he talked a little bit to me but mainly to my mum and dad while I sat across the room drawing comics. He was clearly a psychotherapist of some sort, and I remember feeling for a long time that I and my pooing problems were the reason for our visits, but thinking back on it in more recent years I’ve thought that there was probably more to it than that – he must have been a family psychotherapist of some sort for us all to visit him together (I think my younger sister was probably there too) so maybe there were wider issues being explored. I have asked my parents about it but it’s not something they seem keen to talk about, so I’m not sure I’ll ever know. Anyway, this is what the doctor who just wanted to talk to George reminded me of, and I suppose this is the role fulfilled by the Doctor in Night Terrors – that of a family psychotherapist.
George’s mum and dad don’t seem to have tried to really address any of the boy’s fears. Instead they employed a practice of sticking anything that really scared him into his bedroom cupboard – a literal compartmentalising of what they couldn’t or didn’t feel able to deal with. Is it good to be able to compartmentalise? It’s something that Shaz and I talk about every now and then. It’s something that I think I’m quite good at, and it’s often helpful in the short term, allowing me to get on with other aspects of my life when something else that I don’t want to or can’t deal with in the moment is in danger of derailing me. But things put in the cupboard often just get left in the cupboard – believe me, I have a garage steadily filling up with boxes of all sorts of stuff accumulated over the course of my fifty-three years on this Earth. They can’t stay in there for ever, and surely it’s better if we deal with our own stuff ourselves before it all bursts out and impacts other people, as powerful as George’s cupboard – a psychic repository for all his fears.
The terrors of the night end when Alex runs to George and hugs him, promising that he will never, ever send him away, because he’s his son whatever, and he loves him. There’s sufficient reassurance in this promise for George to find the courage to open the cupboard doors, destroying the mini-universe of psychic horrors within. I don’t know how convinced I was by this sudden pronouncement of unconditional devotion from dad, but I guess it’s dramatic shorthand for a major shift in the relationship and understanding between father and son, sufficient to set George back upon the right path to a healthy and happy childhood. These really should be the sort of thing a father, a mother, any parent says to their child as a matter of course, however confident they feel about being able to live up to their promises. Children need to know that they’re loved.
I haven’t mentioned Amy and Rory, who have a big adventure of their own in this episode, teleported somehow into George’s doll house where they are haunted and pursued by the frankly terrifying peg doll monsters. Amy is even turned into one, which is pretty horrific. All I really want to say here has been documented well enough elsewhere, so I won’t go on about it: Night Terrors was written and made for broadcast in early spring 2011 as one of the earlier stories of Series 6, i.e. before Amy gave birth to baby Melody, and before she even knew for certain that she was pregnant. For technical reasons, the story wasn’t actually broadcast until the autumn of 2011, as the episode immediately following the A Good Man Goes to War/Let’s Kill Hitler sequence, the ones in which she suddenly became a mother, had her baby taken away from her, and didn’t knowingly see her again until she was a young woman. Amy seems remarkably chilled in Night Terrors, considering the trauma she has just suffered, and especially given the theme of young parenthood and terrified children. I remember it all seeming a bit odd within the context of the season narrative, but I guess it was just one of those unfortunate things that it probably wasn’t possible to do anything about.
Connections
Both The Silurians and Night Terrors feature broken elevators leading to perilous circumstances. The Brigadier and Liz find themselves unable to escape in the lift when the Silurians attack the research facility because all electric power in the station has been cut off. Amy and Rory experience the stuff of nightmares as reality when their lift fails and torpedoes towards the basement. They all should have taken the stairs – much healthier.
There’s a dinosaur stalking the caves beneath Wenley Moor in The Silurians, and a dinosaur on the bedroom floor contributing to poor George’s Night Terrors.
‘You know, I'm beginning to lose confidence for the first time in my life. And that covers several thousand years,’ the Doctor tells Liz. If true, it plays havoc with established wisdom on the Doctor’s age, unless it’s an unconscious slip of the tongue, something inside him acknowledging the many pre-First Doctor incarnations of the ‘Timeless Child’ years. ‘You see these eyes?’ Eleven asks Alex, ‘They’re old eyes.’
The clearest connection between the two stories seems to be that they are both about fear; not just a fear of the dark or a fear of the monsters, but a deep-seated fear that generates a destructive power all of its own. In The Silurians we see the deranged and violent behaviour of young technician Spencer after he came into contact with the reptiles’ subterranean world, triggering race memories of when these creatures ruled the Earth. Assuming all, or at least most, humans have the same primal trigger-point, it’s possible that this overriding fear may have influenced the Brigadier’s draconian decision to destroy the hibernating Silurians at the story’s conclusion. In Night Terrors the young Tenza’s terror at being rejected (nobody likes being rejected, but for a species whose very survival depends upon being accepted, this must be a pretty base fear) triggers his powerful perception-altering powers to wreak all sorts of havoc. As Clara Oswald would later say (in Listen), ‘Fear is a superpower,’ but super powers can be dangerously wielded.
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