Who Reviews The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood by S. F. Cambridge

 

Starring Matt Smith as The Doctor, Karen Gillan as Amy & Arthur Darvill as Rory

 

The Doctor: “Restricted access. No unauthorized personnel”

Amy: “That is breaking and entering!”

The Doctor: “What did I break? Sonic-ing and entering, totally different” 

Set in the Welsh village of Cwmtaff, Dr Nasreen Chaudhry helped by Tony Mack and her team of scientists are drilling into the earth’s core in search of the minerals that have appeared in their small village which are turning their grass blue. 

After a successful day, they are replaced on the night shift by Tony’s son in law Mo who after an uneventful few hours is surprised by what appears to be an earthquake as a hole forms in the ground of the mine. 

He investigates and gets pulled underground by a mysterious force.

Nasreen and Tony arrive for their shift in the morning and find Mo gone!

The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive in the village later that day en route to Rio and thoroughly annoyed that the TARDIS has brought them to the wrong time and place yet again! 

( The Doctor : “You didn't always take me where I wanted to go.”

Idris : “No, but I always took you where you needed to go”

The Doctor’s wife, Series 6 ) 

As they look across the valley, Amy spots two figures waving at them from the opposite hillside. It is Amy and Rory from ten years in their future, coming back to revisit past glories. (This is a key point we must remember during this episode) The Doctor discovers the blue grass and exclaims that the ground doesn’t “feel right” 

He and Amy head towards the mine and Rory comes across Ambrose and her son Elliot, Mo’s wife and child. They ask him for his help as some of their relatives who were dead in their graves, seem to have gone missing as though they were taken from under the earth. 

Whilst he is helping them investigate their dilemma, The Doctor and Rory come across Nasreen and Tony and there is another earthquake which sees the ground opening up again, taking Amy beneath its surface. 

The Doctor discovers that the drilling into the earth’s core has awoken something up that has been sleeping beneath the surface for many years and now transport pods are heading for the surface. 

Having to break the bad news that Amy is gone to Rory and promising to save her and Mo, the Doctor enlists the help of the villagers just as the village is encased in an energy field, stopping anything from entering or leaving the village as the beings from the earth’s core that the Doctor has identified as Silurian, come to the surface. 

The Doctor: “It’s a transport. Three of them. Thirty kilometres down. Major speed looks about 150 kilometres now. Should be here in… ooh, quite soon. Twelve minutes. Whatever bio programmed the Earth is on its way up. Now!” 

Amy and Mo are being held prisoner below the earth and Mo is experimented on, whilst Elliot gets caught and is held in some kind of suspended animation. The Doctor and Rory manage to capture one of the Silurian’s which looks like a human reptile and decide to trade her for Mo, Amy and Elliot. Unfortunately, the Silurian attacks Tony, poisoning his blood so that he will slowly die and when the Doctor and Nasreen use the TARDIS to go below to talk to the alien race and set up a trade and a peace treaty, Ambrose kills the hostage when she refuses to help save Tony’s life.

Below the surface The Doctor finds an entire civilisation of Silurian’s waking up thinking they are under attack from the drilling and they start planning a war to take back the earth which they claim was their planet to start with, from the humans by wiping them out. 

Amy and Rory are united, along with Mo, Ambrose and Elliot and whilst the peace treaty cannot go ahead at that time due to the death of the Silurian hostage, it is decided that the race will go back into hibernation for longer and try and live harmoniously with the humans another time when they think the human race is ready to accept an alien race and share the planet. 

Tony and Nasreen agree to go into hibernation with the Silurian’s so that they can cure Tony and they can live a happy life together in some other time. 

As the Doctor, Amy and Rory leave, they find the TARDIS by the crack in the wall that started in Amy’s bedroom as a child that now seems to be following them around much like the words “Bad Wolf” did in previous episodes with David Tennant and Billie Piper. The Doctor considers it an explosion and places his hand inside the crack, pulling out some debris which he later reveals is a piece of the TARDIS itself, concluding that the TARDIS must have exploded somehow which has caused the cracks in time. 

As they are about to leave, an angry Silurian catches up with them and shoots Rory, killing him. As Amy cries over his dead body and pleads with The Doctor to help him, he pulls her away and forces her into the TARDIS knowing what is about to happen as she begs him to save her husband, trying her hardest to get back to him for fear of leaving him behind. 

Flashback to the Byzantium when the crack in the wall took the lives of anyone who got close to its light and wiped them from history as though they had never existed. 

Rory has gone and erased form Amy’s mind and when they land back in the village and look outside, Amy sees only herself waving at her from afar and all memories of Rory have now gone. 

The Doctor: “If the time-energy catches up with you you’ll never have been born. It’ll erase every moment of your existence. You will never have lived at all.” 

Seeing as the Hungry Earth & Cold Blood are parts 1 & 2 of the same story, I thought it best to review them together. It’s not one of my favourites although towards the end when Rory “died” as he seemed to do a lot during his time as a companion, I did actually gasp out a loud and anguished “NO!” at the T.V as he is by far one of my favourite companions and I felt cheated by his death as his story had really only just begun having not been explained very much at all. 

Without any spoilers I will say that it all turns out ok in the end and this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Mr. Williams – Pond and I’m glad to say that his life and death from now on become an integral part of the show making him one very interesting character indeed. 

We also see within these episodes the indication of a future ally of The Doctors known as Madame Vastra. A Silurian detective whose life was saved by The Doctor at some point in time, so that she went on to become very well respected in her field during the Victorian era along with her human wife, Jenny, showing that at some point, both Silurian’s and humans do eventually learn to get along and co exist on earth.