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| A Silurian |
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HOMO
REPTILIA
 Of all the alien species to have been in Doctor Who,
few, if any, can have been so pathetic and down-trodden as the Silurians and
the Sea Devils. Their ultimate de-mise at the hands of considered inferiors is
a true trag-edy and for me at least is what makes them one of the more
interesting of monsters in Doctor Who.
The Silurians
were created by Malcom Hulk and they made their debut in
the Third
Doctor story
"Doctor
Who and the Silurians" in 1970. Their aquatic cousins appeared
two years later in "The
Sea Devils" and then, in 1984, both races returned
for a final time on television in the Fifth
Doctor story "Warriors
of the Deep".
However, the Silurians made a comeback, albeit only on audio,
in the Big Finish Productions audio adventure "Bloodtide" in 2001.
The
Silurians and the Sea Devils are different from the many monsters to attempt to
'invade' the Earth because they are infact the original inhabitants long before
humans evolved and so are reclaiming what they see as their home.
Their creator,
Malcolm Hulke, introduced them in the Target book novelisation of the
television story as:
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When all the reptile people were safely hibernating
in their deep shelters, the little planet swept low across the surface of
Earth. The force of its gravity pulled the seas into huge tidal waves that
swept over the continents. Volcanoes erupted and earthquakes brought mountain
ranges crashing down. Cyclones raged across the boiling seas and the tortured
land masses.
But the atmosphere was never completely pulled away from
the surface of Earth. Within a day the greater gravity of Earth had trapped the
little wondering planet, turning the course of its flight into an orbit that
encircled Earth.
Millions of the little furry animals were drowned, or
swept to death against rocks by the force of the great winds. But some
survived. Since there was no time of complete airless vacuum on Earth, the
devices to dehibernate the reptiles were never triggered.
With the
reptile masters of Earth safely hibernating in their deep shelters, the little
furry animals - the mammals - were able to live in peace and multiply. As
millions of years rolled by. and as Earth's cli-mate changed and became cooler,
the mammals increased both in numbers and in their variety of species. Most of
them continued to walk and run on all four limbs. But some began to stand
upright on their hind legs, lost most of their body hair, and learnt to use
their upper limbs to handle tools. Of all the mammalian species it was this one
that learned how to talk. When this animal looked up into the night sky and saw
the little planet orbiting his Earth, he gave it a special name. He called it
the Moon.
The surface of Earth changed and changed again. Whole
continents moved their position. Earth's crust fold-ed over on itself, not once
but many times. The underground shelters of the sleeping reptile people sank
deeper and deeper below the surface. In many places rocks and mountains formed
over the shelters. The reptile people remained in their state of hibernation,
knowing nothing of the world they had lost. They were to remain like that until
Man, homo sapiens, started to probe beneath the crust of what he now considered
was his planet.
Adapted from "Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters" by
Malcolm Hulke and published by Virgin Books.
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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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| Video Cover |
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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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| Video Cover |
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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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| Video Cover |
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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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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 surviving the destruction
thanks to a ‘Frotean flicker’, a temporal
anomaly that pulled objects to different locations in
space and time - the alternate universe only retaining
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 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.
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The Shadows of Avalon
(Paul Cornell) |
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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.
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"). 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 an
implied-to-be-lesbian relationship with a woman called Jenny
who worked as her servant. 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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