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Wednesday 23 May 2012

Doctor Who - 5.8: "The Hungry Earth" Review


The Doctor and Nasreen being captured and put into decontamination, where Amy has just escaped from cos of him. The Doctor attempts to negotiate peace for the future.

CWMTAFF, SOUTH WALES 2020 AD.   Nasreen (Meera Syal) is excited about the drill hitting a new level of 21K.   Mo (Alun Raglan) returns to work after reading with his son, Elliot (Samuel Davies.)  The Doctor (Matt Smith) steps out of the TARDIS and thinks they've arrived in Rio.   But it's a cemetery and he notices something strange: blue grass.  Amy (Karen Gillan) notices herself and Rory (Arthur Darvill) on a hill and they appear to be waving.   The Doctor comments they can both relive past glories from their future.   Amy is surprised they're still together in the future.

Doctor: "I love a big mining thing."  Rory takes Amy's ring and puts it in the TARDIS for safe-keeping and for a future plot line.  Mack (Robert Pugh) and Nasreen notice the hole in the ground.   Elliot asks Rory if the TARDIS is a portable crime lab, as they think he's a policeman.   Ambrose (Nia Roberts) shows Rory the family plot from which bodies have been disappearing.   The Doctor eats the blue grass, he's only been disgusting recently, was that when he became the eleventh Doctor.   Amy: "I dressed for Rio" which she'll reiterate a few times.   The Doctor sees something on the screen, something's moving, "shifting when it shouldn't."  The ground that is.   Steam rises from the ground and the Doctor says the ground is attacking them.   Of course Amy wouldn't stay away form the earth and she's taken again, once more down the hole with her.   The Drill's shutdown.

Rory investigates the grave and it appears to be eating people as Elliot puts it.   He's listening to Sherlock Holmes audio book.   Coincidentally bringing up Sherlock Holmes as we in the UK were about to get the new Sherlock in July 2010.

The Doctor says it's not quicksand, when the drill was restarted the ground retaliated.  "Bio-programming," it was an attack to stop them drilling.   The Doctor demands "Absolute silence." (!)  He can still hear drilling underground.   The patches of blue grass appearing were warnings to keep away.   Nasreen was drilling down and someone's drilling up.   The noise he can hear is a transport coming up.

Outside he uses a sling shot to find the sky's surrounded by a forcefield: an energy barricade.   Rory's just noticed Amy's not there.   Doctor: "I'll get her back."  The same story here, he'll find her and they both have an argument over her, at least Rory gets angry.   They head to the church for cover.   Nasreen is sure the Doctor's the only one who's made sense of what they've seen.   They need to trust him as he can get them back.   Always the trust word with him, another one of his lines and Rory will say the same thing next episode: that he trusts the Doctor with his life.   They set up a defence and place sensors around themselves.   The Doctor tells Elliot he can't make a decent meringue, which is hard to believe.

The Doctor tells them not to use weapons and asks Ambrose nicely, "put them away."  The Doctor tells Elliot he got away too and couldn't wait to leave home when he grew up.   Monsters are afraid of him.   Elliot laves the church for his headphones.   The Doctor says they're surrounding them with darkness.   The Doctor tries to open a door and says the Sonic "doesn't do wood...oi don't diss the Sonic."  When Rory complains about it.   No one notices Elliot didn't come back and the Doctor realizes he saw him last.   A bit of a bad habit of the Doctor not realizing until the last minute he's lost people.   The creatures creep about and scans Ambrose.   Mack gets stung on the neck by the creature's tongue, I was going to say he gets tongued but that doesn't sound right.

Doctor: "There is always hope."  He promises to find Elliot too, that's 3 now and 3 promises to keep.  He uses IR (infra red) glasses and sees the creatures are cold blooded.   He knows what they are, though we're not told until later.   They capture one in the 'Meals on Wheels' van and can use it as a hostage.

Amy's given gas for "acting out."  The Doctor has seen a different species and the sting takes 24 hours to recharge itself.   The Doctor removes the creature's mask: she's beautiful.   They used geothermal currents to travel.   He's going to negotiate for Amy (no mention of the others.)  She claims to be the last of her species.   She isn't the last because he is and "I know how it sits in the heart - so don't insult me!"  He gets angry when he talks about being the last of his species cos of what he had to do to them, but we know he can't be the last of the Time Lords.   Alaya (Neve McIntosh) claims they were attacked and their warriors were activated.   She defers to humans as 'vermin.'  Again it's a case of humans v aliens for the Doctor or rather humans v reptiles here.   (Like V.)  She's ready to die for her cause and asks what he's sacrificing for his.   The doctor will negotiate for the others below.

 He calls them Silurians: homo-reptilia - aliens - earth-aliens.   The humans are the invaders and the Doctor says Alaya is their bargaining chip, as soon as he said that you realize something will happen to her.   He tells them they have to be "the best of humanity they can be...nobody dies today."  Nasreen wants to accompany him and the TARDIS is pulled down into the earth (like the Daleks were pulled towards the magnetism in the earth's core in one of the earlier Dr Who movies.)

Alaya calls the humans apes and she knows one of them will kill her and there'll be a war.   She knows which one will kill her.   The TARDIS fell to the bottom of the tunnel, further than  21K.   This is every other day to the Doctor.   Amy and Mo are being decontaminated in chairs.   The Doctor thinks there can't be more than a dozen of them but they find an entire civilization living beneath the earth.

The Silurians last appeared on the show in the 1984 episode Warriors of the Deep.  As soon as they utter no one will die today, it's ironic since that always happens, someone has to die for them to realize their mistakes and what they do wrong, though sometimes that's not the case.   Also there was talk on the Web that when the Silurian doctor scans Amy, the camera focuses on her stomach indicating she may be pregnant.   Though really a bit too early to focus on that aspect, since although this season was about Amy, it was also about the Crack and the Doctor's entire existence being in jeopardy.

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