The Hungry Earth- no, no! I said to pierce the heavens with your drill…
Think I’m almost back on the schedule I attempt to keep myself on for these (‘schedule’ here meaning ‘posted before the day the next one is airing’). I mean, I at least rewatched this and took notes to type up later on Monday. Amazing what having your internet out for a couple days can do.
Believe in Kamina me who believes in you spoilers!
Cwmtaff, Wales? Hey, if anyone reading this is familiar with the Welsh language, can you please tell me how to pronounce ‘cwm-‘? I keep seeing it since I’ve started watching more BBC shows, and it confuses me every time. (‘Quimm’ I’m thinking?)
What are they drilling for that they need to go down 21km below the surface?
And yet again, no one in this universe appears to have ever seen a horror movie.
Or ever had a safety lecture in a science class. Stop touching mysterious glowing shit with your hands, people, especially when you’re not even wearing gloves!
’Behold, Rio!’
Seriously, does he know how to fly that Tardis? I mean, I realize he probably skipped actually getting his license due to a combination of rebelliousness and the Gallifreyan DMV being more of a hopeless mess than any we have here (what with everyone being able to go ‘oh, this line is really long, I’ll just pop back a few hours to when they’re less busy’), but I’d have thought he’d be the type to at least teach himself how to fly.
’Why are those people waving at us?’
‘Can’t be. It is! It’s you two!’
‘Noo…we’re here. How can we be up there?’
‘Ten years in your future, come to relive past glories, I’d imagine. Humans. You’re so nostalgic.’
They’re crossing their own timeline on purpose? Or did they just pick up the Doctor’s habit of poorly scheduling visits to places?
Guys, just string her engagement ring onto her necklace! The danger of it slipping off is greatly reduced, and she still gets to wear it. Everybody’s happy!
He keeps the ring box on the flight console…? (The console has a spot built-in for it…?) O_o
The fact that they come up with all this backstory for Rory without asking him for, or him offering any proof of his identity is astounding. Over here, it’d be more like, ‘Who are you? Oh yeah? Let’s see some ID then, buddy.’
’That is breaking and entering!’
Just a slight change from happily picking locks with your hairpin on Starship UK, eh Amy?
’It’s a family plot, see? My Aunt Gladys died six years ago, my husband, Alun, died a few weeks back. We lived in a house two doors down. Not many of us left up here now.’
‘Mum, he doesn’t care about that. He wants to know about the dead bodies.’
‘*sigh* Yes, sorry. Well, they always wanted to be buried in the same plot-together. But when we went to bury Uncle Alun, Gladys wasn’t there. Gone! Body, coffin, everything.’
Husband…uncle…what? Methinks I’m detecting some continuity failure in this sector, captain…
’Oh, please! Have you always been this disgusting?’
‘No. That’s recent.’
You can ask around, Amy! He used to lick things to find out what they were. This may actually be an improvement.
’The Ministry of Drills, Earth, and Science’
It’s led by a lovely man named Simon, but people tend to forget what it’s for whenever they see the spokeswoman, Yoko. =D
God, it’s like a game of reverse-whack-a-mole-instead of waiting for things to pop up out of holes in the ground to hit them, whatever-it-is is trying to get them to fall down through the holes.
Don’t they have a rope/chain/cable anywhere for Amy to hold onto or be anchored to something with? There has to be one lying around somewhere with all that construction equipment…
She is still so bizarrely calm in these situations that would have most other people screaming their heads off. I’d still like to know what her aunt sent her to four psychiatrists for when she was a kid. It can’t just have been because of an ‘imaginary friend’.
Wait, they didn’t feel the ground shaking at all in the cemetery?
Elliot is exactly what the Doctor was like as a kid, isn’t he?
’So if you shut the drill down, why can I still hear drilling?’
*
‘Cos while you’ve been drilling down, somebody else has been drilling up.’
Oh snap.
You know, Nasreen and her team may have started off doing stupid shit (albeit unknowingly), but they’re quick learners if they’re listening to what the Doctor is telling them this soon.
Night-/heat-vision goggles? Okay.
’Where’s Mo? What happened to him?’
Wtf? Okay, I’m thinking that the ‘Alun’ that Ambrose mentioned earlier, and ‘Mo’ here were two separate characters that got combined in the final version of the script, but the script editors/continuity people fell asleep on the job. Between her switching whether it was her husband or uncle dying/being buried earlier, and the fact that Elliot asks about getting his dad back from whatever also took Amy, that’s the only explanation I can come up with. Hopefully this isn’t going to be a regular thing. Already don’t know if the thing with the Doctor having his jacket back on when he leaves Amy in the forest in Flesh and Stone was a timey-wimey thing or a continuity error, and now we have this? :’(
Oh, Ambrose is gonna slip that little stun gun thing into her pocket when he’s not looking, isn’t she?
’Lovely place to grow up around here.’
‘Suppose. I want to live in a city one day. Soon as I’m old enough, I’ll be off.’
‘I was the same where I grew up.’
‘Did you get away?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you ever miss it?’
‘……So much.’
Told you Elliot was Doctor Junior. And weren’t four and a half seasons of Time War angst enough?
No! Don’t let him go for the headphones, you’ve only got one minute!
’Can’t you sonic it?’
‘It doesn’t do wood.’
‘That is rubbish!’
‘OI! Don’t diss the Sonic!’
I agree on not dissing the Sonic, but you do have to admit that it’s ineffectiveness on wood is highly inconvenient at times.
Oh, don’t eat the kid, spooky-shadow-thing! We like him…
Despite his poor timing, Elliot’s a brave kid. He’s not a screamer, at least.
A mother is screaming because her child has just been taken, possibly killed and/or eaten, by an unknown monster, and I’m more concerned about the headphones she’s holding. I am a horrible person. (Seriously, though-what kind of headphones are those? They have flashing lights and they beep! I haven’t seen ones that do that before!)
Damn, that thing has a long tongue.
Holy crap, the Doctor gets to deal with an entire group of mostly-level-headed and reasonable people. The abnormality of this is almost scarier than the lizard-person running around attacking people in the ‘haunted’ cemetery. (I know it’s not really haunted, but I couldn’t think of a better adjective.)
Finally! I have been waiting since the first season five trailer to find out why he puts on sunglasses during what appears to clearly be nighttime.
’Cold blood. I know who they are~.’
I find it hard to believe he didn’t know sooner than that. Just how many different alien races have been hanging out beneath the Earth’s surface?
The Doctor and Rory’s kidnapping ‘abilities’ just make me lol.
Amy’s in a…box?
’I’m the Doctor. I’ve come to talk. I’m going to remove your mask. You are beautiful. Remnant of a bygone age on planet Earth. And by the way, lovely mode of travel! Geothermal currents projecting you up through a network of tunnels. *mwah* Gorgeous! Mind if I sit?’
Is he trying to flirt with her, or is he just fangirling at inappropriate times like usual?
Don’t know about the UK, but this conversation sounds to me an awful lot like one that Native Americans could have had with the descendants of colonists over here in the US. Except if Alaya’s 300 million years off from when Silurians were the dominant species on the planet, they probably didn’t have humans ‘take’ the land from them in quite the same way.
’And what if they come back? Shouldn’t we be examining this creature? Dissecting it? Finding its weak points?’
1) Way to not listen to a damn thing the Doctor just said there, Tony.
2) Wtf is dissecting her gonna tell you? Alaya isn’t a pet store iguana or gecko, and I highly doubt you’re a herpetologist (not the least because this is a geological project to begin with). The only one of you who might possibly benefit from such a thing would be the Doctor, and there’s no way in hell he’d do it, so please enlighten me as to what the revelation that ‘ooh, the squishy bits inside her look kinda different than the squishy bits inside me’ is really going to help you with?
And just so you know, I’m joining Nasreen in the applause here. (I ♥ her and her pink shoelaces.)
Alaya: You had to come and see me.
Rory: We are gonna keep you safe.
Ambrose: Your tribe are gonna give us back our people in exchange for you.
Alaya: No. Shall I tell you what’s really going to happen, apes? One of you will kill me! My death shall ignite a war, and every stinking ape shall be wiped from the surface of my beloved planet.
Tony: We won’t allow that to happen.
Alaya: I know apes better than you know yourselves! I know which one of you will kill me. Do you?
No, that’s not creepy at all. She maybe does know humans better than we know ourselves though, because I can’t figure out who of those three is most likely to kill her. For Ambrose, it’d be to get her husband and her son back. For Tony, it’d be for his son (/son-in-law? not sure) and grandson. Then for Rory, it’d be for his fiancée. Ambrose and Tony have more to gain based solely on numbers, but that isn’t really a fair way to judge this sort of thing.
So… Silurians are poisonous then? He should probably have Rory, who he would know is a nurse by now, look at that.
’*snaps Eleven’s suspenders* Where are we?’
Can you imagine Nasreen, Amy, and River all in a room together? Mwahaha…
You may not understand this if you don’t live around the same area as I do (don’t know where all this place has stores or if they’re all decorated the same), but 21+km below the surface reminds me of the Rainforest Café at Southcenter Mall.
They dissected him while he was conscious? Oh, fuck, man… *bad District 9 memories*
’Looking for a small tribal settlement, maybe…a dozen homo reptilia? Maybe less!’
‘One small tribe? Maybe a dozen?’
‘Ah. *camera pans out to show a vast underground city* Maybe more than a dozen. Maybe more like an entire civilization living beneath the Earth.’
He really ought to work on his estimation skills. Or at least not saying things like ‘oh, it’s probably just a ___’.
Next time: more fixed/in-flux events in time and space, and what’s possibly the start of a human-Silurian war? Both good things to watch, sounds like it’ll be a lot more interesting than this week was.
Feel like I can’t judge this episode properly without seeing part two, like how it was with the Weeping Angel episodes. Honestly, I’m not sure I can really judge it at all this time. It wasn’t bad by any means (well, any means that weren’t the continuity-please, Santa, let that be over for part two), but it felt like it was just an hour-long set-up for a story, as opposed to the first half of a story, if that makes sense. I like the new characters and all, but plot-wise, not a lot happened. The Silurians mistook the drilling for an attack, started kidnapping humans, and want to go to war. That’s it.
I absolutely love Nasreen. Elliot’s a cool kid, very Doctor-like. Alaya seems like kind of a bitch, but it’s understandable and she’s an interesting bitch, anyway. Ambrose and her dad Tony…nothing particular unique or interesting about them, but they seem like good people.
Really, I don’t have that much to say about this episode. Other than setting up the next part of the story, all it’s done is confirm just how shitty the special effects are on V. It’s like the difference in the quality of the graphics between the original Final Fantasy VII game and the Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children movie. Only problem is, V doesn’t have the FFVII game’s excuse of coming out a decade earlier and having the technology improve that much in those years for the FFVII movie, which kinda makes it physically painful to look at. And I don’t know what the difference in budgets is for Doctor Who on BBC and V on ABC, but for DW to supposedly always be so ‘low-budget’ and still come out with feature-film-quality effects, while V makes N64/PS1 graphics look cutting-edge…I don’t even know.
Believe in Kamina me who believes in you spoilers!
Cwmtaff, Wales? Hey, if anyone reading this is familiar with the Welsh language, can you please tell me how to pronounce ‘cwm-‘? I keep seeing it since I’ve started watching more BBC shows, and it confuses me every time. (‘Quimm’ I’m thinking?)
What are they drilling for that they need to go down 21km below the surface?
And yet again, no one in this universe appears to have ever seen a horror movie.
Or ever had a safety lecture in a science class. Stop touching mysterious glowing shit with your hands, people, especially when you’re not even wearing gloves!
’Behold, Rio!’
Seriously, does he know how to fly that Tardis? I mean, I realize he probably skipped actually getting his license due to a combination of rebelliousness and the Gallifreyan DMV being more of a hopeless mess than any we have here (what with everyone being able to go ‘oh, this line is really long, I’ll just pop back a few hours to when they’re less busy’), but I’d have thought he’d be the type to at least teach himself how to fly.
’Why are those people waving at us?’
‘Can’t be. It is! It’s you two!’
‘Noo…we’re here. How can we be up there?’
‘Ten years in your future, come to relive past glories, I’d imagine. Humans. You’re so nostalgic.’
They’re crossing their own timeline on purpose? Or did they just pick up the Doctor’s habit of poorly scheduling visits to places?
Guys, just string her engagement ring onto her necklace! The danger of it slipping off is greatly reduced, and she still gets to wear it. Everybody’s happy!
He keeps the ring box on the flight console…? (The console has a spot built-in for it…?) O_o
The fact that they come up with all this backstory for Rory without asking him for, or him offering any proof of his identity is astounding. Over here, it’d be more like, ‘Who are you? Oh yeah? Let’s see some ID then, buddy.’
’That is breaking and entering!’
Just a slight change from happily picking locks with your hairpin on Starship UK, eh Amy?
’It’s a family plot, see? My Aunt Gladys died six years ago, my husband, Alun, died a few weeks back. We lived in a house two doors down. Not many of us left up here now.’
‘Mum, he doesn’t care about that. He wants to know about the dead bodies.’
‘*sigh* Yes, sorry. Well, they always wanted to be buried in the same plot-together. But when we went to bury Uncle Alun, Gladys wasn’t there. Gone! Body, coffin, everything.’
Husband…uncle…what? Methinks I’m detecting some continuity failure in this sector, captain…
’Oh, please! Have you always been this disgusting?’
‘No. That’s recent.’
You can ask around, Amy! He used to lick things to find out what they were. This may actually be an improvement.
’The Ministry of Drills, Earth, and Science’
It’s led by a lovely man named Simon, but people tend to forget what it’s for whenever they see the spokeswoman, Yoko. =D
God, it’s like a game of reverse-whack-a-mole-instead of waiting for things to pop up out of holes in the ground to hit them, whatever-it-is is trying to get them to fall down through the holes.
Don’t they have a rope/chain/cable anywhere for Amy to hold onto or be anchored to something with? There has to be one lying around somewhere with all that construction equipment…
She is still so bizarrely calm in these situations that would have most other people screaming their heads off. I’d still like to know what her aunt sent her to four psychiatrists for when she was a kid. It can’t just have been because of an ‘imaginary friend’.
Wait, they didn’t feel the ground shaking at all in the cemetery?
Elliot is exactly what the Doctor was like as a kid, isn’t he?
’So if you shut the drill down, why can I still hear drilling?’
*
‘Cos while you’ve been drilling down, somebody else has been drilling up.’
Oh snap.
You know, Nasreen and her team may have started off doing stupid shit (albeit unknowingly), but they’re quick learners if they’re listening to what the Doctor is telling them this soon.
Night-/heat-vision goggles? Okay.
’Where’s Mo? What happened to him?’
Wtf? Okay, I’m thinking that the ‘Alun’ that Ambrose mentioned earlier, and ‘Mo’ here were two separate characters that got combined in the final version of the script, but the script editors/continuity people fell asleep on the job. Between her switching whether it was her husband or uncle dying/being buried earlier, and the fact that Elliot asks about getting his dad back from whatever also took Amy, that’s the only explanation I can come up with. Hopefully this isn’t going to be a regular thing. Already don’t know if the thing with the Doctor having his jacket back on when he leaves Amy in the forest in Flesh and Stone was a timey-wimey thing or a continuity error, and now we have this? :’(
Oh, Ambrose is gonna slip that little stun gun thing into her pocket when he’s not looking, isn’t she?
’Lovely place to grow up around here.’
‘Suppose. I want to live in a city one day. Soon as I’m old enough, I’ll be off.’
‘I was the same where I grew up.’
‘Did you get away?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you ever miss it?’
‘……So much.’
Told you Elliot was Doctor Junior. And weren’t four and a half seasons of Time War angst enough?
No! Don’t let him go for the headphones, you’ve only got one minute!
’Can’t you sonic it?’
‘It doesn’t do wood.’
‘That is rubbish!’
‘OI! Don’t diss the Sonic!’
I agree on not dissing the Sonic, but you do have to admit that it’s ineffectiveness on wood is highly inconvenient at times.
Oh, don’t eat the kid, spooky-shadow-thing! We like him…
Despite his poor timing, Elliot’s a brave kid. He’s not a screamer, at least.
A mother is screaming because her child has just been taken, possibly killed and/or eaten, by an unknown monster, and I’m more concerned about the headphones she’s holding. I am a horrible person. (Seriously, though-what kind of headphones are those? They have flashing lights and they beep! I haven’t seen ones that do that before!)
Damn, that thing has a long tongue.
Holy crap, the Doctor gets to deal with an entire group of mostly-level-headed and reasonable people. The abnormality of this is almost scarier than the lizard-person running around attacking people in the ‘haunted’ cemetery. (I know it’s not really haunted, but I couldn’t think of a better adjective.)
Finally! I have been waiting since the first season five trailer to find out why he puts on sunglasses during what appears to clearly be nighttime.
’Cold blood. I know who they are~.’
I find it hard to believe he didn’t know sooner than that. Just how many different alien races have been hanging out beneath the Earth’s surface?
The Doctor and Rory’s kidnapping ‘abilities’ just make me lol.
Amy’s in a…box?
’I’m the Doctor. I’ve come to talk. I’m going to remove your mask. You are beautiful. Remnant of a bygone age on planet Earth. And by the way, lovely mode of travel! Geothermal currents projecting you up through a network of tunnels. *mwah* Gorgeous! Mind if I sit?’
Is he trying to flirt with her, or is he just fangirling at inappropriate times like usual?
Don’t know about the UK, but this conversation sounds to me an awful lot like one that Native Americans could have had with the descendants of colonists over here in the US. Except if Alaya’s 300 million years off from when Silurians were the dominant species on the planet, they probably didn’t have humans ‘take’ the land from them in quite the same way.
’And what if they come back? Shouldn’t we be examining this creature? Dissecting it? Finding its weak points?’
1) Way to not listen to a damn thing the Doctor just said there, Tony.
2) Wtf is dissecting her gonna tell you? Alaya isn’t a pet store iguana or gecko, and I highly doubt you’re a herpetologist (not the least because this is a geological project to begin with). The only one of you who might possibly benefit from such a thing would be the Doctor, and there’s no way in hell he’d do it, so please enlighten me as to what the revelation that ‘ooh, the squishy bits inside her look kinda different than the squishy bits inside me’ is really going to help you with?
And just so you know, I’m joining Nasreen in the applause here. (I ♥ her and her pink shoelaces.)
Alaya: You had to come and see me.
Rory: We are gonna keep you safe.
Ambrose: Your tribe are gonna give us back our people in exchange for you.
Alaya: No. Shall I tell you what’s really going to happen, apes? One of you will kill me! My death shall ignite a war, and every stinking ape shall be wiped from the surface of my beloved planet.
Tony: We won’t allow that to happen.
Alaya: I know apes better than you know yourselves! I know which one of you will kill me. Do you?
No, that’s not creepy at all. She maybe does know humans better than we know ourselves though, because I can’t figure out who of those three is most likely to kill her. For Ambrose, it’d be to get her husband and her son back. For Tony, it’d be for his son (/son-in-law? not sure) and grandson. Then for Rory, it’d be for his fiancée. Ambrose and Tony have more to gain based solely on numbers, but that isn’t really a fair way to judge this sort of thing.
So… Silurians are poisonous then? He should probably have Rory, who he would know is a nurse by now, look at that.
’*snaps Eleven’s suspenders* Where are we?’
Can you imagine Nasreen, Amy, and River all in a room together? Mwahaha…
You may not understand this if you don’t live around the same area as I do (don’t know where all this place has stores or if they’re all decorated the same), but 21+km below the surface reminds me of the Rainforest Café at Southcenter Mall.
They dissected him while he was conscious? Oh, fuck, man… *bad District 9 memories*
’Looking for a small tribal settlement, maybe…a dozen homo reptilia? Maybe less!’
‘One small tribe? Maybe a dozen?’
‘Ah. *camera pans out to show a vast underground city* Maybe more than a dozen. Maybe more like an entire civilization living beneath the Earth.’
He really ought to work on his estimation skills. Or at least not saying things like ‘oh, it’s probably just a ___’.
Next time: more fixed/in-flux events in time and space, and what’s possibly the start of a human-Silurian war? Both good things to watch, sounds like it’ll be a lot more interesting than this week was.
Feel like I can’t judge this episode properly without seeing part two, like how it was with the Weeping Angel episodes. Honestly, I’m not sure I can really judge it at all this time. It wasn’t bad by any means (well, any means that weren’t the continuity-please, Santa, let that be over for part two), but it felt like it was just an hour-long set-up for a story, as opposed to the first half of a story, if that makes sense. I like the new characters and all, but plot-wise, not a lot happened. The Silurians mistook the drilling for an attack, started kidnapping humans, and want to go to war. That’s it.
I absolutely love Nasreen. Elliot’s a cool kid, very Doctor-like. Alaya seems like kind of a bitch, but it’s understandable and she’s an interesting bitch, anyway. Ambrose and her dad Tony…nothing particular unique or interesting about them, but they seem like good people.
Really, I don’t have that much to say about this episode. Other than setting up the next part of the story, all it’s done is confirm just how shitty the special effects are on V. It’s like the difference in the quality of the graphics between the original Final Fantasy VII game and the Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children movie. Only problem is, V doesn’t have the FFVII game’s excuse of coming out a decade earlier and having the technology improve that much in those years for the FFVII movie, which kinda makes it physically painful to look at. And I don’t know what the difference in budgets is for Doctor Who on BBC and V on ABC, but for DW to supposedly always be so ‘low-budget’ and still come out with feature-film-quality effects, while V makes N64/PS1 graphics look cutting-edge…I don’t even know.
