jayeless_archive | Doctor Who: The Hungry Earth

I quite liked this episode. Like I suggested in my last review, I was getting Inferno vibes from the promos and also from the first few minutes of the episode. This was actually a good thing, because I quite liked Inferno! If you ignored the entire parallel universe dimension of Inferno, they'd be VERY similar indeed (i.e. drilling deep into the Earth's crust unleashes a wave of prehistoric lizardy creatures -- although in the earlier story, of course, that was hardly the biggest threat). Anyway, despite not being Inferno, the episode was good. Although it felt extremely short.

All right. Trying to work out what to say about this episode now. Well, it starts with our intrepid space explorers arriving near a mine in Wales, when they're supposed to be going to Rio. Amy is not happy about this, because she is dressed for Rio and expressly not Wales, but the Doctor is clearly insistent on investigating this blue grass stuff and the fact that the ground "sounds" wrong. Soon after, Rory is mistaken for a policeman (because he stepped out of a police box? When does that ever happen in this show??) and told to investigate buried bodies going missing, while the Doctor harasses the owners of the mine (who are digging to the centre of the Earth), and then holes start appearing in the floor and Amy falls through.

I know, that's a summary, not a review. Trying to trigger some thoughts here! :P

All right, this window's been open two days now and the thoughts aren't flowing. So here's some quick thoughts:

Loved the scene when the Doctor and Rory are reunited after Amy got sucked into the Earth. Again, that theme of trust and distrust I love so much - the Doctor failing to protect Amy :D
The scene with the Silurian (didn't quite get if her name was Eleya or Elaya or Aleya or Alaya -- don't blame my Melburnianism please, I can differentiate between [a] and [e] but they pronounced her name [ə.'leɪ.jə] so HOW IS THAT SPELLED)¹ was quite interesting, with the stand-off between the Doctor and Elaya (this is how I'm going to spell it for now ok -- be grateful I actually caught the character's name, that never happens). I don't know, there was some element to that scene I liked. IIRC, there was Elaya making predictions about how one of the humans was going to kill her, and there was the Doctor all chilled out being the calm interrogator, and it was neat.
The cliffhanger! Which... was not much of a cliffhanger, ending on the non-dramatic moment of the Doctor and the mine-running woman (see, there my talent for missing characters' names goes again ;)) seeing the Silurian city. Oh, well, it was very dramatic for Amy of course, but that wasn't the final shot of the episode. I actually liked the cliffhanger - it's nice that the writer didn't feel compelled to put some contrived situation in there just for a something menacing to end the episode on. Well, let's say I liked it in terms of the writer having the freedom not to contrive things in his own plot?
Although I did think the "monsters are scared of me" thing was a little contrived. Maybe that's just because the ABC spammed it in their ads, though. The Doctor shouldn't sound like a walking billboard marketing himself (actually, no character should) :|
I liked the relationship between the Doctor and that boy - especially when the Doctor let the boy run off to get his earphones, only for his mother to freak out and for him to get abducted by the Silurians. It's that trust thing again, ooooh. I guess it shows, in some way, that the Doctor treats children as independent beings who can look after themselves in a lot of ways (which is true! Children aren't just infants until they hit 18... or 15... or 13... or whenever). And yet human beings are too protective of their young (I would say overprotective, but eh) to do this, and it leads to difficulties over trust again. Yeah.
For that matter, I liked that the boy's mother was all "Why are we trusting him???" earlier in the episode, too. GOOD QUESTION, YOU. Too often the Doctor seems capable of barging into a situation and ingratiating himself (especially, and most unbelievably, in close-knit space station/spaceship communities... I mean yeah, sure. Often they have an ~initial period of suspicion~ but then start to trust him completely when shit starts to hit the fan. I'd say this is when they should NOT TRUST HIM AT ALL, but then a lot of plots would be ruined... so.) without much question. In this case he did, indeed, ingratiate himself after not much of a ~period of suspicion~... but at least they had a plausible excuse for this. I mean with gigantic holes appearing in your village and sucking people and corpses through, it's really a question of whether you have any better ideas.

Lookie - I can think of stuff to say about linguistics but not the episode :| Well, good thing that's what my one of my exams is on!

Lastly, TRAGEDY (well not really): I won't be able to catch Sunday's episode, the ~conclusion to this tale~, because I'll be at dinner at my uncle's place. I know I can watch it on iView but I don't get unmetered access to iView with Optus (huykhykuek) and I'm not sure how much bandwidth it costs, or when I'll have the time, so yeah :\ That is annoying. Oh well~