I was so excited for this story when it was first broadcast! The return of the Silurians!
They had only appeared in two stories during the classic run of the series and their first encounter with the Doctor (in his third incarnation) during his time working with UNIT ranks up there as one of my all time favourite stories.
As villains go, the Silurians are a pretty interesting threat to the Earth. Well first of all, can they really be called villains? The Silurians are the original inhabitants of the Earth who went into an artificial hibernation when they believed that the moon was an object heading for a collision with the planet. After an over long sleep they are now waking up to discover that the apes have evolved into humans who have now taken the planet as their own. So I suppose technically we are the invaders.
What makes stories with the Silurians interesting are the moral dilemmas that come from their existence. Generally there are a group of Silurians and human who want to enter into a peaceful relationship and share the planet. Unfortunately there are always bad people on both sides who feel the need to destroy the other race.
In this story, the Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive in a small Welsh village in the near future where a mining operation is in place to drill deeper into the ground than ever before. Surely they haven't seen Inferno as if they had they would stop the drilling straight away! Unfortunately the drill wakes up a race of Silurians who think they are being attack and take counter measures against the people at the drilling operation.
The redesign of the Silurians is a good one but I am disappointed that apart from being green and scaly they pretty much share no resemblance with the creatures from the classic series. It's explained away as them being from a slightly different strain of the race which is fair enough I guess. What does irritate me a bit though is that they are hardly referred to as Silurians! Instead the Doctor insists on referring to them as Homo-Reptilia which just sounds daft to me! Silurian is a much cooler name if a little inaccurate.
As with other Silurian stories we are covering some of the same ground but its played out in a nice enough way. Amy and Nasreen (the lady in charge of the drilling operation) set out to negotiate with the head of the Silurians as representatives of the human race. I'm not really sure how much authority they hold to be able to do this but the scenes between them are pretty good anyway.
One Silurian is being held above ground by the humans whilst the Doctor heads underground to rescue the humans held captive. Unfortunately the Silurian being held by the humans is particularly blood thirsty and is looking to start and all out war between the two races. As such she manipulates the humans into killing her which does sort of screw up the negotiations between the two races a little.
The sting in the tail of this story comes at the very end. Escaping through the Silurian caves, the Doctor, Amy and Rory suddenly come face to face with the crack again. Rory is shot and the energy from the crack surrounds him erasing him from history. This is a fairly tragic moment as Amy desperately tries to hang on to the memories of him before they are stolen from her.
Even more worrying for the Doctor, the shrapnel that he manages to pull out of the crack, in an effort to ascertain what caused the explosion which led to the cracks in the first place, turns out to be a piece of his own TARDIS. Oh dear indeed!
Overall I quite enjoyed this two part story. I wouldn't say it was as good as the very first Silurian story but at least it's not the abysmal Warriors Of The Deep! No Myrka in sight thank God!
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