One of my (few) gripes with the Sarah Jane series is that it looks so EMPTY. There are whole episodes with no passers-by in the street, no "extras" or "supporting artists" bimbling about. It makes SJA look very empty. Everything seems unnaturally underpopulated and unrealistic.

They're obviously saving a few quid by not employing "supporting artists", and spending the change on explosions, but I think it's a bit of a false economy.

I have never felt that with DW ... until last night. That whole Welsh village, with just Mum, Dad and Son living in it?! EH?! You're having a giraffe, surely?! That row of terraces, with just one little family in it? The body missing from the grave was one of the nextdoor neighbours .. was it the only nextdoor neighbour?

It made things so much worse when they drew attention to it by Bossman Character saying "all the workers travel in, it's only my family who live in the village". I didn't realise until that point that it was ONLY his family who live in the village. In the whole village. no sign of anybody else anywhere.

It looked very cheap because of it.

You couldn't run that kind of story with more than a handful of people. Either way, you'd have to split them up.

This sort of story requires a small cast to get the necessary claustrophobic feel. Difficult to see how they could have done it with about a hundred villagers wandering about.

I think it was very important for the episode to give that feel of isolation and it had a very dark mood because of it i found.
it very much added towards the tension and i really enjoyed the episode, plus the budget was saved for the more important characters too and of course the underground planet of Silurians which we will see more of next week!
and also maybe the crack is also relevant towards the story somehow ?!?!
we'll see how it all pans out over the next week!

The story is very reminiscent of Midnight - small group isolated, having to deal with their human natures and hopefully rising above them.

you can actually tell it was written by a guy who wrote Torchwood's episodes!! it is quite dark and very human related in context and imply's humankind is a threat and not the Silurian race.
it's a great concept and it works.

in fact i find series 5 as a whole is a bit more darker in elements and more adult in approach than previous series have been. it allows for more detailed dramatics and scary monsters and gives the original feel of the show back to what it has always been!

Bradley Walsh happened to be a revelation, and Russ Abbot is a memory from my childhood actually, and I enjoyed both these performances, as well as the girl who played Eve. Must say Donald Sumpter disappointed me a bit though, I'll have to watch that episode again. The episodes with Mona Lisa and the Blathereen were rubbish mind you. S2 has been the best so far.

Excellent point. And secondly, how on earth did they have ALL those cameras? What are they? The hub of the illegal camera trade?

Yep, and then imagine setting all this surveillance equipment up in less than 8 minutes

I noticed when i watched last night on BBC 3...

At the beginning, you can see all the houses are boarded up. (When the father is reading to his son, i think the houses in the background are boarded up.)

Everyone has been moved out so that they can mine there?

Maybe the was a plausible explanation. Don't forget that 15 minutes had to be cut from this episode.... Maybe it was cut there?

Makes sense to me. And given that the mining operation would likely be top secret, they'd be bound to have a lot of cameras around, too.

More likely the other way round - that it was a suitable site for drilling because everyone had moved out. Am I right in saying that it was already a mine before the scientists moved in?

As for the cameras - in a scientific project like this, you observe everything. Besides, we already saw lots of cameras in the security room.

A good point, that the place could be deserted so that the mining could happen nearby ... or the place was emptied so that mining could happen. Pity that nobody said that onscreen. Very unconvincing, and very distracting.

Mrs Chuff and I thought it highly unlikely that the whole of the village would be occupied by just that one family. Once mum was off doing her meals on wheels and dad was off at the mine, who would look after the kid? Does the kid go to school, or does dad home-educate him? Or does he just spend the day wandering around graves?

Where did all those cameras come from? And how were they set up in under ten minutes? How did they get the time to do it? If the cameras came from the mine offices, surely somebody should have said "I am going back to the mine to get some cameras", and someone should have replied "Ooer, watch out, there might be some monsters there" ... but, then, the Doctor let the kid wander off and get eaten by Silurians, so it's hardly surprising that the above bits and pieces weren't dealt with properly.

I didn't realise that tons of stuff was cut from the episode. Perhaps they should have cut more carefully ...

Some of the episode was excellent but some felt a bit slapdash. A group of characters udner siege and a small cast would be obvious advantages to the story, but I don't feel that has been very thoroughly explored yet. Certainly nothing like Midnight for claustrophobia and sinisterness. There were very few characters ... and it was so obvious that there SHOULD have been more characters. There was absoluetly no reason at all for mum, dad, son, grandad and Meera Syal to be the only residents of a little village. Saying "everyone else lives miles away" is a figleaf to cover over a glaring gap in reality. There's a row of houses, and the family talk about their neighbours, but the other houses are empty. It just doesn't add up.

Chris Chibnall wrote 42, which I thought was a hugely missed opportunity. This is better because it has Meera Syal, Silurians and a creepy churchyard; the Doctor, Amy and Rory are lovely; the cliffhanger was v good and the idea of Silurians diossecting people is one of the most gruseome that 21st century DW has dealt with. However, this is still a missed opportunity:

1. The "mine under attack" idea was done better in inferno.
2. The "hungry earth" idea was done better in Frontios.
3. The "weird things happening in a Welsh mining village" idea was done better in The Green Death.

I assumed the village was more or less abandoned because of the mine.

I thought it would have been better set ona a different planet. The idea of the lizard people disturbed by some Welsh mining when they haven't been by all the drilling that has gone on in the world to date. They live in underground caves? HOW? And setting up cameras in less than 9 mins or whatever it was - so stupid and lazy. And were they burying Auntie themselves - what did the undertaker say when a body was missing. Leave it to the relatives to call the police? It isn't budget - it is storytelling. With imagination you can work wonders. But no doubt budget cuts will have made things a lot harder.

Someone wrote a very eloquent recent post about how RTD set DW in the present - this was an example of how it is set in the past now. In the 70s you might have got away with the idea of underground creatures but not now. The world is seems small and we feel we know every inch - even underground. It was frankly ludicrous - whcih is a shame as the Dr was a bit better for me, as he was given more acting to do. I just filter out Amy and Rory

Strangely, this is one of my favourite episodes so far...

Anyway, they weren't awakened by any other drilling, because none of the drilling done so far got close to how deep they lived. The earth's continental crust is typically only between 30 to 50km thick (under the sea, it is generally only 5 to 10km). And they kept mentioning that by drilling 21.9 km they were drilling further than anyone before.

The Doctor also comments that they fall further than the 21.9km when the TARDIS gets sucked into the ground, and makes an obvious comment about them not burning up in the heat of the mantle that should be affecting them...

The cameras would already have been set up, it was the computers themselves they were setting up in a few minutes, as they were moving headquarters to the Church. People had been drilling there for a while, so it's not a great stretch to imagine these things.

All the clues are there on screen to watch and listen to... Sometimes I wonder if I'm not watching different versions of the same show!

The big explanation missing from the story is Why the Silurians are down there.
Being a fan of 40+ years standing I know the reasons why homo reptilia is hidden away, hibernating under the earth, but for the newer viewer no reason is given for a massive underground city buried x miles beneath the surface. Perhaps it was a victim of the cuts made due to over-running but really important stuff shouldn't be filmed and then cut - this sort of thing should surely have been addressed at the script stage.

The lack of workers at what was presumably a massive undertaking also seemed strange. You don't drill down 21+ miles with only a handful of hardhatted welshmen who all knock off at 5pm. And how tatty, old and dilapidated was the workplace? Especially for a story set ten years in the future. In fact why was it set in the future at all?

Having said all that I rather enjoyed the story - it felt quite like 'old-fashioned' Doctor Who in both pacing and execution and I loved the redesign of the Silurians. One final question though - why was she wearing a mask? I mean what was the point of it?

Cheers,

Richard

I get what you say but in fact as the poster above has said, it all seemed very hand-made to be drilling further than before - it was set in someone's lock-up. And the Doctor did say "get cameras, phone and recording equipment" - Rory was shown fitting a camera to a pole.

I thought the lizard people were disturbed by the drilling - I may nodded off occasionally though as the link between them and the bioenergised earth now escapes me. Did they just run around at night? Where do they get their clothes from? what do they eat 21.9 kms down.

Tune in next week.....

Well, considering the massive underground city was only revealed at the last minute of the episode, I feel you're being a bit harsh! The Doctor was only expecting a small tribe, remember.


It's only ten years in the future - as close to today as makes no odds. I strongly suspect that the choice of year was for no purpose other than to set up the 'seeing your own future' sequence. Whether that'll be significance in this episode or a future one, we don't know.


Same reason you'd wear a helmet - hide your vulnerable bits. She's a warrior, and the back of her head look pretty bony and protected already. And I think the eyepieces provide the high-tech scanning overlays we saw.

I agree with some of the points raised, especially about the cameras....it wasn't the miming cameras, because they stopped working when Mo was on his night watch....so the cameras used were things like, well proper video and phone cameras...and sorry the time limit thing was spitfires in space all over again. I did also question the amount of people there in the village, but try to ignore and use the few boarded up houses to convince myself that others apart rom Tony and his family do not live there....but then again there were a lot of graves, so people must have livid there for a while, and if recently Tony and his family buried someone, there would be at least a priest/vicar there...like a small parish? But overall it didn't bother me too much. Apart from the cameras.

Well, presumably they had stocks of clothing when they went into hibernation 65 million years ago, and took food animals into hibernation with them. Their backstory was told in their first appearance 40 years ago. I suppose a couple of lines to clarify it for any newer viewers who didn't know it might have helped, but then maybe that'll be covered in part two.

Many vicars cover more than one parish these days, so there wouldn't necessarily be a vicar living locally. He'd just come in to perform services. The church is making cutbacks like everyone else.

Oh okay thanks....

I am not sure that we do know every inch underground: I had no problem with the idea of the Silurians living underground (mind you, I have seen The Silurians, the Sea Devils and Warriors of the Deep several times each), and am quite accepting of that idea.

The mining is happening in that spot because there are new (or "old") nutrients turning the grass blue. That is linked somehow to the Silurians. Earth being attacked from within is a nice change for 21st century DW. The Silurians have woken up because the drilling is happening right over their heads. All of that makes sense.

It's the "desertedness" of the village; the smallscaleness of the drilling; the speedy set up of the surveillance equipment (why did they need all those cameras, where did they get them from, and how did they set them up so quickly?) ... these are the niggles for me.

The Davies Era of DW was very big-city based. Everything seemed to happen in London, and there were countless shots of CGI aliens flying over well known world heritage sites. I am very glad that the Moffat Eta has changed that. It's nice to see villages, a beach, caves and forests. I love that slightly fairytale-ish, Harry Potter-ish atmosphere of some of the Moffatt stuff, but it felt very "otherworldly" and unreal to have everything so underpopulated, this week.

I don't agree with Ella's thoughts about when DW is set. Moffatt's DW is still set in the present, but a different view of the present. The Davies stuff had a "highrise flats and digital telly" approach to the present day, but the Moffatt stuff doesn't feature those things (so far). I got very bored with endless shots of London. Not everyone lives in a city (or even in London). One of the strengths of old DW is that it showed so many different aspects of life in Britain. There were villages, fields, countryside, stately homes, cities, power stations, roads ... the Davies stuff has focussed on the more urban aspects of that, while the Moffatt stuff is looking in other directions. Very welcome it is, too.

Really? When I saw the city-scape at the end of the programme I was reminded of the Crystal Cave that was found in 2000. This is from a heavily mined area of Mexico and only at 400 ft.

Interestingly the cave is dangerous to humans because the extreme humidity means there is a high risk of water vapour condensing on the surface of your warm lungs. Would a cold-blooded animal have the same problem I wonder?


Some Google Images