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| A Silurian |
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THEIR
HISTORY
 Since
their debut, the Silurians have remained one of The Doctor’s most
popular adversaries, primarily because, unlike other alien
foes bent on Earth’s conquest, it is actually possible to sympathise
with the Silurian’s goals, due to their origins being fundamentally
tied to Earth rather than another planet. A reptilian species
with a third eye
in the centre of their foreheads - through which they were
capable of projecting deadly rays of mental energy, the
Silurians and their underwater 'cousins',
the so-called 'Sea Devils', flourished in the Eocene period
about 45 million years ago.
When they
foresaw the arrival of what mankind would later christen
the Moon, and believed that its passing would temporarily draw the planet's
atmosphere
away, destroying all life on the surface, they fled to specially
prepared underground shelters. However, while they prepared these shelters,
leading
Silurian scientist Tulok found himself being excluded from
the hibernation chambers, due to him having created genetically engineered
life forms,
seen by the council to be such a serious crime against nature
that he was banished to the surface and to certain death.
With the
whole Silurian race in hibernation in giant chambers deep
within the crust of the planet, they intended to be awoken when their world
was safe to
live upon again. However, for some initially unknown reason
the devices that would re-awaken them failed to work, resulting in the
Silurians sleeping
on, completely unaware of the changes occurring on the surface
and the creation of another civilisation who were themselves completely
unaware
of the sleeping reptiles beneath their feet.
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As the
Earth's geography altered over millions of years, so the
Silurian bases sunk further and further below the surface
and with it all evidence of their lifestyle gone man slowly
eclipsed their supremacy over the Earth. Some bases were
destroyed over the passage of time, but others survived.
When these Silurians returned to the surface, they found
that the planet that they once knew had changed beyond all
recognition, being particularly enraged at their perceived ‘usurpation’ by
what they saw as unintelligent apes.
From The Doctor’s point of view, his first encounter
with the Silurians - although chronologically it was his
second one, with the Silurians having previously fought
a later Doctor in the nineteenth century - took place in
his third incarnation, when a dormant Silurian colony was
revived from suspended animation due to the power leaks
from a neighbouring underground twentieth century atomic
research centre at Wenley Moor. Having discovered the presence
of the Silurians while investigating strange power losses
and a traumatised scientist at the research centre - the
scientist having been driven near-catatonic from terror
after seeing his colleague torn apart by a Silurian tyrannosaurus
-, The Doctor tried to convince the Silurians and Brigadier
Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, the Commanding Officer
of the British branch of the United Nations Intelligence
Taskforce (UNIT), that the Silurians could share Earth peacefully
with mankind.
Despite the old Silurian leader supporting The Doctor's
efforts to negotiate peace between the two races - initially
successfully managing to open talks with the Silurian leader
-, a more fanatical element, led by an aggressive young
Silurian who had killed the original leader, tried to wipe
out mankind with a virus that was deadly to humans, thus
thwarting The Doctor's attempt of a peaceful coexistence.
In a race against time, The Doctor succeeded in finding
an antidote that he was able to pass on to his assistant Liz Shaw,
but by then the Silurians had stormed the research centre
with plans to revive the rest of their race and destroy
mankind by amplifying the station’s power to generate
microwave energy that would destroy the Van Allen Belt,
a natural barrier shielding the Earth from solar radiation
which is harmful to humans but beneficial to reptiles.
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The Scales of Injustice
(Gary Russell) |
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As it became clear that the Silurians were prepared
to destroy every man, woman and child on the Earth until
it became their home once more, The Doctor was forced to
trick them into returning to their caves when he overloaded
the research centre's nuclear reactor, threatening to cause
a nuclear explosion. As the Silurians were forced back into
hibernation, The Doctor hoped that peace could be achieved
by the Silurians being unthawed one at a time and spoken
to directly, but The Brigadier, under orders from his superiors,
instead took this opportunity to blow up the underground
chambers much to The Doctor's disgust.
Although The Doctor and The Brigadier eventually reconciled
about his decision, The Doctor remained angry about The
Brigadier’s actions, to the extent that, when he heard
rumours of another Siluran colony that had recently awoken
("The
Scales of Injustice"), he left to investigate
the situation himself rather than report his actions to
UNIT and risk a repeat of last time. Having located the
colony, The Doctor was subsequently led to the Silurian
Triad, impressing them with his intellect and his passion
for peace, but his attempts were ruined when Liz Shaw unintentionally
led an assassin working for C-19 - a rogue government group
who sought to use alien technology salvaged from UNIT operations
to rule the world - into the council chamber, the assassin
killing the only member of the Triad who might have listened
to The Doctor and nearly ruining his efforts for peace.
Fortunately, as the new Triad leader led an assault against
a UNIT group looking for The Doctor, Liz was able to help
the Silurian scientist Baal with his experiments, helping
him realise that humans and Silurians could work together,
culminating in The Brigadier arranging for their colony
to be left in peace (Although reference has been made to
a second attempt by the Silurian Triad to make contact with
humanity that ended badly, the circumstances of this encounter
are unknown).
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| A Sea Devil |
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On a later occasion, while the Third Doctor and new companion
Jo Grant visited
The Doctor's arch enemy, The Master,
in his high-security prison on an island off the south
coast of England they heard that ships have been mysteriously
disappearing at sea. His curiosity piqued by this information,
The Doctor learned from the commander of a nearby naval
base that the sinkings had centred around an abandoned
sea fort. While visiting the fort The Doctor and Jo were
attacked by what one of the workmen there terms 'a Sea
Devil', but which The Doctor identified as an amphibious
breed of the prehistoric creatures that he encountered
on Wenley Moor. With this information, The Doctor was
able to deduce that nearby drilling operations has awoken
a colony of Sea Devils who, armed with deadly hand guns,
set about reclaiming their planet from humanity.
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Unknown to The Doctor, The Master, aided by the misguided
prison governor-who had been tricked into believing that
The Master was merely a patsy for UNIT’s blunders
-, was stealing equipment from the naval base in order
to build a machine to find even more Sea Devil bases to
enable them to revive their comrades from their hibernation,
the Sea Devils also utilising The Master's expertise with
electronics to try and take over the naval base. Having
gained the use of a navy diving-ship to gain access to
the Sea Devil base after they captured a submarine, The
Doctor tried to convince the chief Sea Devil to negotiate
peace with mankind, but he was thwarted by The Master’s
efforts to encourage the Sea Devils to provoke a conflict
and a civil servant who ordered a depth charge attack
just as The Doctor was making progress in making his case.
In the end, The Doctor was forced to modify The Master’s
device so that it would trigger an explosion when it was
used, the resulting detonation destroying the Sea Devils'
undersea base and so preventing more Sea Devils from awakening
and triggering a war (Although The Master escaped by disguising
a member of the submarine crew as him and stealing a boat).
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Another Silurian assault took place in 2084, this time
in the form of leading scientist Icthar, along with at
least two other Silurians from the confrontation at Wenley
Moor, who managed to reanimate an elite group of Sea Devil
warriors. With this small army available to them, Icthar
planned to launch a combined attack on Sea Base 4, a military
headquarters located on the ocean floor. Having taken
control of the base, Icthar, now disdaining his original
belief that peace was possible, intended to launch the
base’s nuclear missiles, thus provoking a global
war between the two power blocs currently locked in a
cold war state (Believed by some to be the United States
and the Eurozone witnessed by the Eighth
Doctor in "Trading
Futures"), thus eradicating mankind for good
and allow the reptiles to conquer the Earth. Fortunately,
the Fifth Doctor, with his companions Tegan
Jovanka and Turlough, arrived at the underwater Sea
Base just before the Silurians and Sea Devils attacked.
The Doctor once again tried to make the Silurians see
reason and make peace with mankind, but he soon realised
that the Silurians were far from interested, as most keenly
demonstrated by their use of the vicious sea-beast known
as the Myrka; indeed, Ichtar claimed that they were merely
waging a ‘defensive’ war, simply using the
nuclear missiles to provoke the humans into destroying
themselves without the Silurians doing anything more than
starting the conflict. Having defeated the Myrka by using
ultra-violet light, The Doctor, forced to accept that
there was no other way to stop the Silurians triggering
a nuclear war, reluctantly agreed to using hexachromite
gas, which is fatal to marine life, to kill the remaining
invaders. Although he attempted to provide the Silurians
with oxygen and keep them alive right up to the last minute,
still hoping that he could reason with them, the episode
concluded with The Doctor and his companions the sole
survivors of the Silurian attack, humans and homo
reptilia lying dead around them as The Doctor regretfully
stated that 'There should have been another way'.
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Bloodtide
(Jonathan Morris) |
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Chronologically, the Silurians’ first encounter
with The Doctor occurred when the Sixth
Doctor visited
the Galapagos Islands in September 1835 to give his
companion Evelyn
Smythe a chance to meet Charles Darwin
- one of Evelyn’s favourite historical figures
- as he developed his theories on natural selection,
the two posing as students of geologist Charles Lyell
(The Doctor going by the alias of Doctor Albert Einstein).
While dining in a nearby town, The Doctor was confronted
by a group of Silurians while investigating the location
where a young man had been driven mad by the sight of ‘devil
men’; Silurians who had triggered his primitive
instinctual reaction to the Silurians. Confronting the
Silurians - consisting of Tulok and his exiled friend
Sh’vak, although Tulok claimed that their clan
was the only one to survive - The Doctor once again
tried to convince them to seek peace, but Sh’vak
rejected his claims, regarding man as an infestation
that should be removed. As the Silurians’ human
agents delivered human specimens to the Silurians to
test various artificially-created bacteria on them
- including Evelyn and Darwin - The Doctor infiltrated
the Silurian headquarters, and learned the true reason
why the Silurians hadn’t woken up earlier; the
hibernation chambers had been sabotaged by Tulok in
revenge for the Silurian Triad’s decision to exile
him… and his ‘crime’, as it turned
out, was that he had originally created humanity. Despite
the shock of this revelation, Darwin, with The Doctor’s
help, recognised that mankind had grown beyond their
original purpose, giving him the strength to help the
now-repentant Sh’vak fight off Tulok, keeping
him occupied long enough for Evelyn to plant a signalling
device on Tulok’s submarine when he attempted
to release the cultured bacteria. As a result, Tulok’s
ship was destroyed by a Myrka that he had released earlier,
his base’s reactors subsequently going nuclear
and ending the threat he posed.
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The Silurian Candidate
(Matthew J Elliott) |
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While travelling with Ace and Melanie
Bush, the Seventh Doctor was inspired to deal with some personal business with the Silurians, travelling to Earth in 2085 to track down the Silurians' former capital city in China, arriving there at the same time as Doctor Ruth Dexler, who had determined the existence of the Silurians from various clues and had gone there to try and find information about their hibernation systems with the goal of adapting those systems for use in colonisation ships. However, Dexler's plans to download information from the city's database revealed that not only had three of the existing Silurian Triad woken up over four years ago, but also uncovered video footage of the Triad operating on a figure they only identified as one of the leaders of the two human nations in existence at this time, having brainwashed him for their own purposes. Travelling to a distant island where the Eastern and Western leaders were about to have a pivotal meeting about the events on Sea Base 4, it was revealed that the Silurians had brainwashed Chairman Bart Falco of the Western power block, intending for him to seemingly blow himself up while the meeting was being recorded and trigger a new world war that would wipe out humanity. Fortunately, Ace and Ruth were able to interrupt the broadcast while The Doctor and Mel confronted the Triad, The Doctor revealing that he planned to essentially offer the Silurians a chance to reclaim Earth several thousand years in the future, after Earth was struck by solar flares ("The Ark in Space"). Based on The Doctor's knowledge of how long it would take for Earth to become habitable after such a catastrophe, he proposed that the Silurians still in hibernation simply wake up once the human race started to gradually return to Earth, The Doctor reasoning that this way both sides would gain a presence on Earth at a gradual rate and be more willing to work together to re-civilise their homeworld.
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Blood Heat
(Jim Mortimore) |
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Following this, The Doctor’s next encounter with the
Silurians was easily his most traumatic, if not one of
his most traumatic adventures ever. As a result of an
attempt by The Doctor ’s old foe the Meddling
Monk - who attempted to prevent The Doctor interfering with
his plans by arranging for him to die in his past - the
Third Doctor was killed during his initial confrontation
with the Silurians and his subsequent regeneration prevented
(Blood
Heat"), thus leaving humanity without
a cure for the Silurian plague. Despite the best efforts
of UNIT, the plague was unleashed upon the world, decimating
all but a small percentage of the human race and forcing
the survivors to go underground, mounting increasingly
desperate offensives against the Silurians as they expanded
their control over Earth, pushing The Brigadier in particular
into the brinks of megolomania as he fought to ‘save’ humanity
regardless of the costs. This situation continued until
the creation of this alternate universe ‘caught
up’ with the current Doctor - presently in his seventh
incarnation accompanied by Ace and Bernice
Summerfield - causing the Seventh
Doctor’s TARDIS to crash-land
on the Silurian Earth, forcing the Seventh Doctor to work
with alternate versions of his old UNIT colleagues to
try and save this world after the loss of his own TARDIS
in a tar pit.
As the ever-escalating tensions between the two sides made
nuclear war increasingly inevitable, the embittered Brigadier
believing that humanity could only be safe if the Silurians
were totally destroyed and many Silurians unwilling to
halt their campaign of destruction despite the best efforts
of both The Doctor and their now-mellowed leader, The
Doctor , Ace and Benny narrowly managed to save the day
after Ace, using the alternate Third Doctor’s TARDIS
key, was able to restore his TARDIS to full working condition
- the alternate TARDIS having gone into internal shutdown
and reverted to a seemingly ordinary police box after
its Doctor’s death - based on her memories of the
Seventh Doctor’s TARDIS. As nuclear missiles were
launched, The Doctor was forced to take a desperate gamble
and materialise his other self’s TARDIS around Earth,
thus rendering the warheads useless due to the entire
planet now existing in a state of temporal grace, allowing
The Doctor to delete the warheads using the TARDIS’s
architectural reconfiguration. Witnessing a dead Silurian
child who had been killed in the ‘earthquakes’ caused
by The Doctor ’s gambit, The Brigadier was forced
to recognise what he had become and finally agree to talk
with the Silurian leaders at last. As The Doctor departed,
however, he was forced to destroy that timeline in order
to heal the damage that its creation had caused to the
real universe - his old TARDIS only survived the destruction
thanks to a ‘Frotean flicker’, a temporal
anomaly that pulled objects to different locations in
space and time). The alternate universe only retained enough energy for its current inhabitants to live out
their natural lifespans before coming to an end, the energy
released by its destruction repairing the damage its creation
had caused to the ‘main’ universe.
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The Seas of Titan
(Lizbeth Myles) |
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When the Ninth Doctor visited an outpost on Saturn’s moon Titan ("Hidden Depths: The Seas of Titan"), he was initially intrigued at the chance to meet Doctor Diana Hendry, who was staying on the dying colony to investigate the possibility of life in the methane sea. When The Doctor accompanied Diana on her next expedition into the sea, they discovered an underwater city populated by Sea Devils, The Doctor naturally fascinated at the idea that Earth’s original inhabitants had been capable of space travel. Meeting with Sea Devil scientist and councillor Mirtar, The Doctor and Diana learned that these Sea Devils were descendants of a group that had evacuated to Titan when they believed Earth was in danger as the only other planet in the solar system with a sea they could inhabit, but Earth’s outpost was poisoning the seas as it pumped various toxins into the waters through its fuelling operations. The Doctor was also outraged when he realised that the human colony’s current sickness was due to the Silurian sickness he had encountered previously, used by Councillor Taroth as a ‘defence’ against the ‘apes’. Although there was some initial hostility, The Doctor and Diana were able to help Solomon Read, the leader of the human colony, make peace with the Sea Devils to the extent that the humans relocated to live with the Sea Devils in their own city, rather than stay on the dying colony that Earth had basically abandoned.
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| The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood |
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The Eleventh Doctor found himself dealing
with another Silurian attack when he landed in a small village in 2020, discovering
a drilling expedition lead by Doctor Nasreen Chaudhry - including her friend
and love interest Tony, his daughter Ambrose, her husband Mo and her son Elliot
- investigating strange mineral readings in the area. Unfortunately, the subsequent
drilling project disturbed a Silurian city underneath, prompting the Silurian ‘warrior
class’ to awaken, believing the drilling to be a deliberate attack rather
than an accident. Although the Silurians were able to capture three humans after
containing the area behind a force field using geo-morphing technology that allowed
them to manipulate the Earth itself - their ‘hostages’ including
The Doctor’s companion Amy -, The Doctor and his other companion Rory were
able to capture Silurian warrior Ayala - although Ayala was unfortunately able
to infect Tony with a Silurian virus -, The Doctor leaving Rory and the remaining
members of the drilling team to keep an eye on Ayala while he and Nasreen travelled
down to the Silurian city in the TARDIS, only to be shocked at the discovery
that he was dealing with an entire Silurian city rather than the small base he
had initially assumed.
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| The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood |
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Despite the numbers against him, The Doctor continued with
his attempt to make peaceful contact with the Silurians,
making contact with Ayala’s sister Restac, the military
commander of the awakened Silurians, and Malohek, a Silurian
Doctor who had apparently been waking up at regular intervals
over the centuries to monitor humanity’s development
while his race slept. Although Restac sought war with
the ‘apes’, Malohek, recognising that mankind
had evolved since those days, was more willing to consider
peace between the two sides, awakening the Silurian leader
Eldane to begin negotiations when Restac threatened to
execute Amy. With Amy and Nasreen speaking for humanity
while The Doctor acted as chairman of the ‘debate’ with
Eldane, Amy suggested that the Silurians inhabit the areas
that humanity couldn’t use such as the Australian
outback while the Silurians provided new energy resources
and technology in exchange. Unfortunately, the debate
was jeopardised when Restac awakened further Silurian
soldiers in her determination to provoke war, matters
becoming worse when Ayala was revealed to have been killed
by Ambrose while she was trying to make Ayala reveal the
cure for the venom that she had infected Tony with.
Even
worse, Ambrose, scared and desperate for her family to
survive, had convinced her father to start the drill if
the Silurians didn’t abandon their efforts, the
humans only just managing to escape after The Doctor used
the sonic screwdriver to disable the Silurian weapons
and distract them while they escaped.
Recognising the
humans’ willingness to negotiate compared to Restac’s
thirst for violence, Eldane offered to trigger the city’s
fumigation systems to force the other Silurians back into
stasis, The Doctor suggesting that Eldane set the Silurian ‘alarm
clock’ to awaken them in a thousand years while
the team passed on tales of the Silurians to help prepare
the human race for the day when they would revive in the
hope that the planet would be ready for them.
Nasreen
and Tony remained with the Silurians to treat Tony’s
infection and help improve human/Silurian relations when
they awoke again while Mo, Ambrose and Elliot returned
to the surface as the drill was destroyed by an electrical
discharge, The Doctor charging Ambrose to make sure that
Elliot grew up to be a better example of humanity than
she had been. A voiceover by Eldane as the episode concluded
suggested that The Doctor’s plan for human/Silurian
integration would prove successful, but this remains to
be seen.
Unfortunately, The Doctor's next significant encounter with Earth's original inhabitants occurred in an alternate timeline where they had conquered Earth decades ago thanks to the actions of the Skithra ("Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror") and a temporal paradox unintentionally caused by the Tenth Doctor and the Thirteenth Doctor during a confrontation with the Autons and the Weeping Angels ("A Little Help From My Friends"). Where the original timeline of events ended with the Skithra being forced to withdraw after The Doctor and her companions turned their stolen technology against them, the paradoxes caused by the confrontation with the Autons and the Angels created a new timeline where the Skithra instead allied with the Sea Devils to conquer the planet. Fortunately, the two Doctors realised what had happened when they materialised in the alternate twenty-first century, the Thirteenth Doctor and her companions Graham O'Brien, Ryan Sinclair and Yasmin Kahn meeting the Peter and Jackie Tyler of this reality while the Tenth Doctor met the alternate Rose Tyler. With the aid of a rogue Skithra queen who objected to her peoples' methods, the Thirteenth Doctor was able to identify the point of divergence and travel back, intersecting with the Tenth Doctor's TARDIS as he was going back with the alternate Rose. Arriving in 1903, the group were able to trace the location of the Sea Devil base the Skithra would have awoken to assist their campaign, subsequently stopping the Skithra ship before it could awaken the Sea Devils and erasing that entire timeline (apart from the alternate Rose as she had been in the TARDIS when everything changed).
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| Legend of the Sea Devils |
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The Doctor's next 'valid' large-scale encounter with Earth's past inhabitants occurred when the Thirteenth Doctor's attempt to take Yasmin and their new companion Dan Lewis on holiday were diverted to a Chinese fishing village in 1807, where pirate queen Li Ching had unleashed a Sea Devil commander who had been imprisoned as a statue for decades, believing that it held a clue to an ancient treasure ("Legend of the Sea Devils"). With the Sea Devils having left on a floating ship and Dan trying to help a survivor of the village confront Li Ching, The Doctor and Yaz went back in time to the sixteenth century to find out what had happened to the treasure, witnessing the pirate captain forcing his crew off the ship before swearing allegiance to a Sea Devil that attacked him with an unknown beast. With the coordinates where the ship went down as a bargaining tool, The Doctor materialised the TARDIS underwater using an oxygen shield, but the 'treasure' was revealed to be the location of the monster. Meanwhile, Dan learned that Li Ching was seeking the treasure to pay a ransom on the rest of her crew, including her young sons, but they were then attacked by the monster. Taken to the Sea Devil base, The Doctor confronted the captain about his dishonourable actions and learned that he was looking for a 'keystone', as well as how he had converted the pirate ship into a base for the symbolic fear value and kept the captain in a kind of stasis. Questioning the captain, The Doctor and Yaz learned that the keystone had been part of a Sea Devil hoard discovered by the captain who had banished his crew to protect them. The Sea Devils had already determined that the keystone was on the surface rather than with The Doctor, but The Doctor took the ship to the surface to rejoin Dan and Li Ching, learning that the descendant of the pirate crew had the keystone on him as a family heirloom. Realising that the power of the keystone could allow the Sea Devils to reshape Earth to suit them by manipulating Earth's magnetic poles to flood the planet, The Doctor refused to let the Sea Devils complete their plan, provoking the Sea Devils into a fight with the pirates and the TARDIS crew. While Dan and the pirates kept the Sea Devils occupied, The Doctor reconfigured the equipment so that the gravity manipulation would be focused on the base, the pirate captain activating the equipment himself as he recognised that he had no place in the modern world.
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UNIT: Assembled - Retrieval
(Guy Adams) |
|
Back in the present day, UNIT was revealed to have established that there were actually a wide range of Silurian hibernation caves in existence all over the world, many of which had different policies as they had gone into hibernation at different times rather than the entire race putting themselves into cryogenic suspension all at once. One particular crisis occurred when a Silurian group led by Grand Marshal Jastrok came out of hibernation near the village where former UNIT officer Benton had retired to, forcing Benton and his old colleague Mike Yates to assist Kate Stewart - the daughter of the Brigadier and the new head of UNIT - in investigating the Silurian colony ("UNIT: Assembled - Call to Arms"). The crisis 'concluded' when Jastrok faked his death to prepare for a new attack, starting with him brainwashing a UNIT soldier so that he would divert the test of a new underwater survey vehicle to a point where it would 'attack' a Sea Devil base with the goal of provoking the Sea Devils into joining Jastrok's offensives against the humans, to the point of contributing the living weapons held in the facility ("UNIT: Assembled - Tidal Wave"). Fortunately, Jo Jones was part of the team testing the survey vehicle and was able to negotiate peace with the Sea Devils instead of them joining Jastrok's assault, although they decided to fake their deaths and remain in isolation to protect themselves rather than aid humanity directly.
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The Shadows of Avalon
(Paul Cornell) |
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With some of the living weapons now released, UNIT attempted to track a Silurian research and archive base that could provide them with further information about the new weapons, based on information gained from the Sea Devil commander ("UNIT: Assembled - Retrieval"). Unfortunately, a Silurian force dispatched to the base by Jastrok opposed the humans' attempt to claim the facility for themselves, which resulted in the Silurians setting the base to self-destruct to 'protect' themselves from the humans. Back on the surface, Jastrok's main Silurian force launched a mass assault on Britain, keeping it isolated from the rest of the world with various aerial and aquatic dinosaurs to repel potential external assaults, forcing Jo, Benton and Yates to take charge of the local UNIT forces while Kate and her own senior staff were out of the country on business ("UNIT: Assembled - United"). Eventually UNIT forces were able to use the Silurian weather control to force the Silurians back into hibernation by making Britain too cold for them to continue their assault, although they negotiated to just send most of the Silurians back into standard hibernation while Jastrok and his immediate commanders were put into private long-term hibernation underneath the Black Archive to keep them isolated from the rest of their people.
Even without appearing as the main characters in a full-length
adventure, the Silurians have been referenced on minor
occasions in various novels. Two of their most prominent
appearances in this fashion have been in the Sixth Doctor
novel "Spiral
Scratch" (Featuring an alternate world where humans and
Silurians were apparently able to co-exist, to the extent that
the Sixth Doctor’s companion Mel Bush was now a human/Silurian
hybrid named Melanie Baal), and the Eighth Doctor novel "The
Shadows of Avalon" (Where a group of Silurians had been
transferred into the mystical dreamland of Avalon centuries
ago, becoming ‘reinvented’ as the mystical ‘Fair
Folk’ to give them a purpose in this new realm). When
Time briefly faced collapse after The Doctor’s death
was averted despite it being a fixed point, an alternate version
of Malohek appeared as The Doctor to Holy Roman Emperor Winston
Churchill as all of history tried to happen at once, although
this timeline was resolved when The Doctor faked his death
("The Wedding of River Song").
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| Madame Vastra |
|
The Silurians also played a minor but important role in "A Good Man Goes to War", where it was revealed that The
Doctor had once faced Ayala and Restac’s previously-unknown
third sister, Vastra, defeating her attempts to attack innocent
tunnelers and sentencing her to make a new life for herself
on Earth in the late eighteenth century. Despite having to
wear a cloak to pass in public, Vastra appeared to make a life
for herself as a ‘trouble-shooter’ of the time,
claiming at one point to have caught and eaten Jack the Ripper
(Although given his true origins as The
Valeyard ("Matrix") she may have simply disposed of a copycat), even forming a
lesbian relationship with a woman called Jenny who worked as
her assistant. The Doctor eventually contacted her again when
he was recruiting a strike force to rescue his companion Amy Pond from the Demon’s Run asteroid ("A Good Man
Goes to War"), Vastra later helping The Doctor realise
why the army at Demon’s Run had stolen Amy and her baby
in the first place.
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| Dinosaurs on a Spaceship |
|
When investigating a mysterious spaceship heading for Earth
("Dinosaurs on a Spaceship"), The Doctor, Amy and
Rory - accompanied by temporary companions Queen Nefertiti,
big-game hunter Riddell, and Rory's father Brian -, discovered
that the ship was a Silurian ark that had been launched with
various dinosaurs and plant-life on board, with the intention
of repopulating Earth after the moon had crashed into it, but
the ship had been attacked by space-pirate Solomon, who had
killed the Silurian crew in order to sell the dinosaurs on
the interstellar black market before he realised that he couldn't
steer the ship. While Solomon attempted to take Nefertiti and
sell her, The Doctor was able to reactivate the ship's controls
while he was occupied, using Rory and Brian to steer it away
from Earth - the ship would only respond to two pilots in the
same gene pool - while Amy and Riddell kept the dinosaurs back
with stun weapons, giving The Doctor time to rescue Nefertiti
and send Solomon's ship flying into space to be destroyed by
the missiles Earth had launched to stop the ship, considering
Solomon's death a fitting punishment for his genocide against
the dormant Silurians.
When The Doctor ‘retired’ after Amy and Rory’s
loss ("The Angels Take Manhattan"),
he made a new home for himself in Victorian London, with Vastra
and Jenny
- along with the Sontaran Strax,
cloned back to life and working with them as an occasional
enforcer - keeping an eye on him
even if they failed to encourage him back into action. However,
with the appearance of The
Great Intelligence ("The
Abominable Snowmen") and the mysterious Clara ("Asylum of the Daleks"),
The Doctor was convinced to go back into action to stop his
old foe, Vastra and Jenny approving of his return
to life as he departed to search for another version of Clara
("The Snowmen"). Vastra would remain an important ally for The Doctor after this, to the extent that the TARDIS returned to Victorian London so that Vastra, Jenny and Strax could help The Doctor recover after his regeneration into his twelfth incarnation ("The Time of The Doctor" and "Deep Breath"), as well as assisting him against the ruthless weapons designer Orestes Milton ("Silhouette"). |
