True, it was his human companions who changed his minds what a turnaround.

Well I was hoping that the smilie would be enough to show that I was pulling a joke, in that if this was a real case I think it would be discussed for years about a human killing a silurian!!!

That's the point - she managed to lose any bargaining power she had and was no closer to saving her family. So whatever the provocation, she was pretty dumb to do what she did.

God, some of you are harsh with Ambrose. Yes, she'd been told that they needed Alaya as a hostage to exchange for her husband and son, and that argument made sense, and she accepted it and left Alaya alone despite her provocations.

What changed was that she discovered that her father had been badly hurt and might be dying (indeed, Alaya seemed surprised he hadn't died already). The Doctor was no longer on hand to help, and the only tactic that had any slight chance of success was to seek Alaya's help. It was unlikely to be given freely so naturally she was prepared to use force to try to compel her help. She could never have expected that she was endangering Alaya's life as she was only using a stun gun. While there's room for criticism of Ambrose's actions, they were motivated by love and were a tactic born of desperation. Waiting for the Doctor's plan to succeed was a poor option, as her father might not have survived long enough.

The idea of there being a moral equivalence with the Silurian sisters is bizarre, as is the notion that Ambrose's actions sabotaged the negotiations. The sisters never showed the slightest interest in peace. Alaya actively sought to provoke her captors to kill her in order to provoke a war, and her sister murdered a member of her own race who sought peace. Nor did the sister have the added cause for anxiety that Ambrose did as an excuse for her actions; she had every reason to hope that the Doctor's plan would result in her sister being returned safe, and no other member of her family was in imminent danger from the humans.

Alaya's death came after her sister had already begun her coup, so while it added to her hatred for humanity Alaya's survival wouldn't have stopped her. The Silurian elder, while clearly dismayed by Alaya's death, clearly wasn't necessarily giving up on peace as a result. So her actions in the end made less difference than some credit them with.

Yes, and that's why it's hard to be the best of humanity, why it's hard to be a hero, and why the Doctor didn't rebuke Ambrose too much at the end. To do what's right for humanity meant to risk your own family, and to what you thought was right for your family meant risking the whole of humanity.

Yes, I can sympathise with Ambrose, I can't say I wouldn't do the same thing in her situation. But Alaya had shown no willingness to cooperate or to be threatened - using the stun gun served no purpose other than anger.

I felt that the Doctor was trying to point out a regrettable self-destructive streak wherere humans do have a tendency to act "in the moment" and in the context of their immediate situation without thinking of the wider implications and the fact that such actions could backfire. I am not sure there is a single one of us here who has not been in exactly that situation to a greater or lesser extent than Amrbose, perhaps not with such wide implications always but they key thing is it is not a condemnation of us as individuals but only of those regrettable tendencies which we display.

Well apart from the fact that you can only be be charged for the murder or manslaughter of a human.

You can't murder a horse, a sheep, a turtle or a silurian.


Good point, the negotiations broke down not because of Alaya's death, but because her sister had launched a coup d'état, stormed the conference room and placed everyone under arrest, including the silurian leader. How could negotiations continue under those circumstances? If Ambrose had turned up with a live Alaya what would have happened? Most likely Ambrose and her family would have been executed and the war would have gone ahead. By activating the drill Ambrose was able to provide a distraction that enabled them to escape, so far from dooming them all, she saved them

Since the episode was called 'Cold Blood', I'm confident I know which way the writer was pointing us. And, yes, I appreciate it has a double meaning.


That was completely unforeseeable and is not relevant. If a doctor tells me that, with surgery, I have a 90% chance of surviving an illness, I opt for the surgery but ultimately still die of the illness then should people condemn me for wasting NHS money on unnecessary surgery?

But the only other option was to do nothing and watch her father die. It's no wonder Ambrose decided to try threatening Alaya, even though there was little or no chance of success.

If it was towards suggest that Ambrose's actions were cold-blooded, then they were anything but. But maybe that isn't the way you feel the writer was pointing?


Quite right; the fact that Ambrose's actions didn't cause the breakdown of negotiations doesn't affect her character, since she had every reason to suppose that that would have been the result. I was just countering some posters who thought that she actually had caused the breakdown of the negotiations.