11.8: The Hungry Earth

In which we learn that Welsh people can be reactionary racists, too.

Broadcast: May 2010 

Watched: November 2021

Maybe the last three years have inured me to Chibnall, but... this wasn’t actually that bad? It’s a bit cold and charmless – I’m not sure there’s a single joke in there – but it’s basically fine, it isn’t the catastrophic disappointment I remembered. 

The pre-credits sequence, of Mo getting pulled into the ground, is a decent enough horror opener. The script very efficiently splits the three regulars up, in a manner the writer will entirely forget he knows how to do later. Love Rory accidentally pretending to be the police. 

Later on, when Amy too has been disappeared, it’s notable how hysterical Rory isn’t – he must trust the Doctor by now, as he doesn't, y’know, punch him when he does the “I need you alongside me” bit. As with Amy’s Choice, the implication is weirdly that Rory has been there a lot longer than the episode count suggests.

The thread that has real potential is the stuff about (let’s be honest) immigration, paranoia and fear of the other. It’s quite funny that the Doctor does a big “you have to be the best of humanity” speech, then the best of humanity *immediately* go look at the Silurian so that she can taunt one of them into killing her. “Ambrose, you’re better than this,” the Doctor tells her at one point. But... she isn’t. It’s a convincing portrait of the type of woman who thinks that, because she’s a mother, she’s now the centre of the universe. (In fairness: her son has been taken by lizard people.) That stuff feels like a genuinely Chibnall twist on the Malcolm Hulke original.

Something else that feels very Chibnall in a bad way: he totally forgets to introduce a familial relationship. Tony Mack does not visibly give a shit that Mo has disappeared, even though he’s his son in law. Some of the cast are shit, too – pains me though it does to relate that Meera Syall is really not that good, and the proto-Ryan dyslexic kid is really annoying.

Oh well. It’s not a bad cliffhanger – the lost city, Tony visibly ill, Amy about to be dissected, “one of you will kill me” etc. The “next time” looks quite good, too. Shame about the reality.

Random other observations:

• The Earth has been stolen and hungry. I wonder what other adjectives the future has in store.

• You can tell this is sci-fi because it’s 2020 and nobody is trapped inside...

• ...unless you count the energy dome nicked from The Daemons, which is transparently about keeping the cast manageable. Also the drilling is nicked from Inferno, and the concept – if not characters, plot or structure – from The Siluarians. I wonder if one of the reasons this felt so terrible at the time is because it’s a remix of some much better Pertwee stories?

• ”A different branch of the species” is a nice way of handling what might be termed “the Klingon problem”. 

• Bit baffled by “300 million years out of your comfort zone” – surely it’s 65?

• I have written the words “Kermit Mengele”. I have nothing to say about this character but I am quite proud of that description.