aWill Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 266: Doctor Who and the Silurians, Episode Two
Dear diary,
I’m a bit surprised how much Liz is left to just get on with things by herself. In the last story, she doesn’t even properly meet the Doctor until the latter half of Episode Two, and in this one the Doctor seems to simply be leaving her behind a lot. ‘No, no, Liz, you go and take a look through the personnel files, while we take a look at the big scientific stuff,’ or ‘the men will go and take a look down the caves… why don’t you wait here?’ We even get it with Liz being left behind to examine the barn forensically, while the Doctor and the Brigadier head off to question the farmer’s wife.
In some ways, I feel as though this fact should bother me. In the back of my mind, there's a little voice that says 'the Brigadier is acting like more of a companion, and he doesn't even really get on with the Doctor!', but the rest of my mind is simply drowning it out. Liz feels like a far more mature character than I'm used to. Jamie, Zoe, Victoria, Ben and Polly… many of our companions over the last few years have been little more than children - it was really Steven that last filled the 'grown up' role in the Doctor's team.
With Liz, we've got a companion who's quite capable of being left behind by herself to simply get on with whatever task news doing. Zoe was fiercely intelligent, but she lacked the skills to interact with a world that was more than stings of data. Liz is a character who has the knowledge (I'd like to have seen them ask Jamie to stay behind and perform forensic tests!) suited to this role, and is also enough of a grown up to not need the Doctor by her side. It's a very different dynamic, and I really quite like it.
I've already mentioned the Brigadier not especially getting on with the Doctor, and I discussed it at some length yesterday, but it really is fascinating to me. I'm so used to this pair being such friends that it almost feels out of place that they shouldn't be seeing eye-to-eye all that much here. When the Brig finds out that his scientific advisor has gone off down the caves all by himself, he states that the Doctor 'deserves all he gets' as a result of his actions, and he doesn't seem all that relieved when the man turns up safe and sound. I know that things will thaw between them as the stories go by, but it's really an interesting way of playing the two characters, and I've never know that it was here. It almost adds another layer to their friendship, knowing that they've had to overcome the struggles with this incarnation.
The thing that really appeals to me about this story, over a quarter of the way in, is that we haven't actually seen a Silurian yet. Oh, it feels like we have, but it's all been glimpses of their hands, or shots of them from a distance, where they're shrouded in darkness, or lit from behind by the sun. The closest that we've actually come to seeing one of the creatures in full is through the drawings on the wall in Episode One. Because I know what a Silurian looks like, I'm quite impressed by the artwork (if anything, I'm a bit surprised the line drawings haven't turned up on one of those retro Doctor Who notebooks or something…), but I'm really liking that we still don't really know what the menace is.
I've spent so long worrying about this string of seven-part stories that I really thought the timings would be all over the place, but Doctor Who and the Silurians is keeping me hooked pretty well…
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