So… what did I think about The Hungry Earth?
Posted on May 29th, 2010 in Culture | No Comments »
As ever, spoilers. Read on with care.
I’m quite tempted not to review The Hungry Earth at all until after Cold Blood has gone out. Not just because this review is so late, but also because I can only remember one other two-part story in the Modern Era which has had so much set-up and so little actual story in the first part. That story was the 2008 season finale The Stolen Earth. This very curious episode is structured so as to first remove the Doctor from the action so he can have some neither terribly relevant nor terribly dramatic backstory explained to him by a convenient galactic secretary. Meanwhile, we get reintroduced to all sorts of friendly faces from the past until finally the Doctor and Rose can be reunited and the Doctor blasted by a Dalek triggering the infamous faux-regeneration. What this means is that after about the first ten minutes and before the last five, the plot hardly advances at all, and we get thirty minutes of narrative “vamping”, with almost all of the actual story crammed into a bloated 65 minute denouement.
Of course, we classic fans are used to this. Many’s the four part story which is basically a pretty decent set-up in episode one, a pretty decent climax in episode four and an awful lot of running around, being locked-up, discovering a tiny smidgeon of plot and then being locked up again in the middle episodes. And god help you if your first experience of classic Who is one of the shapeless, swampy Pertwee six-parters. The Time Monster, be named-and-shamed; Colony in Space, let’s be having you; The Monster of Peladon, stand up and be counted.
Having seen The Hungry Earth – a Pertwee nostalgia-fest, lacking only a Brigadier-substitute – many younger fans may now be tempted to go at revisit some Pertwee stories, but thankfully Chris Chibnall has picked some of the better ones to pay tribute to. Here’s the obligatory roll-call of Pertwee elements making a reappearance here – Welsh miners digging up something nasty from The Green Death, domelike incorporeal barrier over the church and its environs from The Daemons, foolishly boring to the centre of the earth from Inferno, the Silurians from, er, The Silurians and being-set-about-ten-years-in-the-future from – oh look, let’s not go there.
But where’s it all going? Bafflingly, Doctor Who Confidential claimed that the rough-cut of The Hungry Earth was a full 15 minutes overlong, and implied that this was rather unusual. And the transmitted version does bear some signs of having had the hatchet taken to it at a relatively late stage, as so many of the scenes exist simply as obviously sign-posted set-ups. Some paid off in this episode, at least to some extent, others haven’t yet. Rory’s sudden and unmotivated desire to return Amy’s ring to the TARDIS is about as blatant a device for splitting up the TARDIS crew as I can remember, but at least we leave the episode understanding that the point of him returning to the TARDIS is to discover the subterranean grave-robbing with Ambrose and Elliot. But, on the other hand, what was the point of that? If you’re trying to establish that there’s something under the ground pulling stuff down then the Doctor and Amy have managed to tell us that rather more dramatically while you’ve just been standing around and talking calmly.
Worse is to come when Elliot announces in the middle of a tension-filled countdown that he is just popping off to reclaim his headphones and nobody even blinks let alone tries to stop him. Was Chibnall hoping no-one would notice, or was a more elegant version of this, with a little more justification present in the sixty minute cut and it only looks so crass now because the story has been stripped to the bone? Except it hasn’t. Apart from PC Rory’s deadend investigation of those graves, all of that fannying around with surveillance equipment also goes nowhere, and right at the end when the Doctor and Nasreen get in the TARDIS to take a trip down to the lower caves we spend several minutes with them being buffeted around as the Silurian sciencey somethingorother screws up the TARDIS controls before depositing them exactly where they had been trying to go. Why not cut some or all of these narrative “loops” (see Terrance Dicks on writing The War Games) instead of paring back the central plot to its most basic and functional components? Why not give Amy Pond, the ostensible second lead, something to actually do instead of removing her from the action and keeping her chained up in limbo until part two?
Maybe part of the motivation for this delaying procedure was to withold the revelation that the Silurians were responsible, but in that case nobody told the BBC continuity announcer who cheerfully blew the surprise while chatting over the closing credits of the previous programme. And it’s been an open secret for weeks in any case.
Other obvious set-ups which haven’t gone anywhere yet include Elliot’s dyslexia, the Silurian “dissection” of Mo, the future Rory and Amy glimpsed on the hillside, the blue grass (mentioned two-or-three times but it hasn’t amounted to anything yet), Tony’s sting wound, the Silurian barrier which just keeps coming and going and switching the lights on and off purposelessly so far, and the Doctor’s continual promises that he will bring people back / keep everyone safe / make sure nobody dies today. Does Chibnall really have no idea what he’s doing?
Well, other evidence makes that seem a little less likely. Once we finally arrive at where a Moffat, a Davies or even a Cornell might have delivered us in half the time – the humans having to stand guard over a defiant Silurian – the script suddenly takes flight. The moral ambiguity which the Silurian backstory invites bursts into life, the Silurian make-up is fantastic, and Alaya’s taunting of Rory, Ambrose and Tony with her prescient visions of her own murder are wonderful stuff, as is the spectacular reveal of the Silurian city, hugely raising the stakes and providing a marked contrast to the rather self-consciously small human cast (“all the rest of the staff on this colossal, record-breaking drilling project drive in and overnight it can be looked after by just one bloke reading The Gruffalo”).
Will all this pay off next week (i.e. tonight)? Well, I just don’t know, and that’s what makes it so hard to give this episode a definitive rating. In amonst these structural gripes, there are many moments of charm and grace. The benefit of a smaller cast is that the actors have more room to work, and four nicely-defined human guest characters are starting to emerge – Tony, Nasreen, Ambrose and Elliot. Only Mo is a little underdeveloped so far. The being-sucked-into-the-earth effects while not perfect are at least an improvement over the Dave Chapman video wipe seen in Frontios or the Colin Baker wiggle-your-tummy-into-the-sand manoeuvre from The Ultimate Foe. Ashley Way directs with vigour and elegance and Murray Gold’s music is at its lyrical best, so there is hope. But ultimately, I will be much more inclined to forgive the clunkiness of the setting-up if the paying-off is truly spectacular. So, for now I reserve judgement. A full review of the whole two-parter will be up in a day or two.