(A quick note before we begin: "Legend Of The Aquatic Silurians" is pointedly not the name of the episode in question. The titlular antagonists are referred to by what is, for better or worse, their canonical Doctor Who monster name. For reasons I'll lay out as we get into things, I refuse to use that name for them. Hence the title replace. If you're going to look into the episode somehow, you're not going to find it by the name listed here. Okay, on with the show.)
I thought I'd be angrier at the episode than I ended up being. The fact that I'm not is kind of telling in how much my interest in the show has waned since November 2021.
 |
| Am I not turtley enough for the Turtle Club? |
It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work.
Chief among my objections is the choice of antagonist to begin with. This was the reason for most of my apprehension going in, and boy howdy did the episode not disappoint on that front. This is an issue that is kind of a minority one in Doctor Who discourse, and sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who feels strongly about it. Fine. I'll say it. The "canonical name" for these legacy Doctor Who antagonists from the 70's is utterly insensitive and pejorative, and should be addressed and retired from both a canonical and real-world perspective. In their original 1972 appearance, the name was literally just something a random panicked Englishman babbled after a fearful encounter with the species, and it just kept getting repeated over that serial with no attempt at clarification or correction from the species. Come 1984 and Warriors Of The Deep, and since that's the name we know these legacy Doctor Who monsters, that's what the Silurians in the story refer to them as. The story goes out of its way to call them this name; hell, at one point a man who hasn't heard anyone refer to them by that name yet calls them that. All because Hey, You At Home Know These Monsters By That Name!
This is not solely a problem of Chibnall and cowriter Ella Road. This has been a consistent ethical failure among Doctor Who writers for half a century. Giving a quick scroll through TARDIS Wiki, there have been some attempts here and there at different classifications for these legacy Doctor Who antagonists. All of them have bounced off because Hey That's The Name You At Home Know The Monsters By! There's a damn Titan comic where Peter Capaldi, my Doctor Who, calls them by that name, and I wince in horror at that thought. So many otherwise talented Doctor Who writers didn't even hesistate to think otherwise about this offensive fucking name. The only other legacy Doctor Who antagonists to have a similar thing happen, where a name a random guy coins for them is parroted back by the Doctor and co. to become the Canon Name We All Know Them By, are the Ice Warriors. At the very least that name isn't a clear fucking monsterizing insult, and there are stories where they came to self-adopt the moniker with some pride. In a lot of ways, the two species are alike. Both are reptilian, and both are said to operate in an honorable fashion. Whereas the Ice Warriors are kind of just Doctor Who's version of the Klingons, things get messier when you dig into the Aquatic Silurians.
It's all in the respectful name I gave them. They're related to the Silurians, a clear case of 1972 trying to recapture something of that original Doctor Who antagonist but with the ocean and the Navy. The Silurians, you may recall, are some of the more interesting Doctor Who antagonists. What with being lizard people who ruled planet Earth before us and feel they have a right to it back, and all the dispute and nuanced ideological conflict that comes through that. Both 1970's Doctor Who And The Silurians and 2010's Hungry Earth/Cold Blood (written by Chibnall, I'll remind you) deal with the various factions and beliefs of both humans and Silurians as they try to come to an understanding on whether or not they can live in harmony, things eventually ending in tragedy as there's no chance for utopian understanding this time. Ignoring the quality of those stories for the moment, they are very much about this debate and the nuances and struggles and beliefs of the people on all sides of it. What about the Aquatic Silurians, then?
Oh they're just EVIL TURTLE MEN LMAO HAHA!!! The original 1972 story has some feeble shaking of an olive branch that goes nowhere. Warriors Of The Deep manages to be more offensive, the Doctor struggling to shake the olive branch only for the Silurians to reject any idea of honor for a scheme where they make humanity blow themselves up while trying to claim their honor is intact for setting it up. The Aquatic Silurians in this story are their mostly silent muscle lackies, walking around in makeshift samurai armor killing humans in laser battles because that's apparently what Doctor Who is. Everyone dies, and the Doctor sadly says that there should have been another way. That is the legacy of televised Aquatic Silurians that Chibnall and Road are picking up from, and they had a chance to address literally anything about the concept. They had the chance to create that mythical other way, and create a better story.
They did not.
The Aquatic Silurians in this story are literal evil turtle men. The lead antagonist one is unsealed from a statue by Madame Ching and proceeds to wreak havoc and kill civilians with a superpowered cutlass. (Chibnall sure does like the idea of ancient evil antagonists being sealed up and then released: look at the Dalek in Resolution, or Swarm/Azure in Flux, or countless other examples.) The leader's plan is literally just "hey let's kill all of humanity ourselves and take over the planet WAHAHAHAHA!". There's no nuance, no diplomacy, no inner glimpse into a complex ideology for the Doctor and friends to debate and appeal to. They are just evil turtle men to be swashbuckled, killed, and eventually blown up in a big dumb pirate ship romp. I speak confidently and proudly from the bottom of my heart, as I always have here, when I say FUCK. THAT. SHIT. If you want some amoral generic monsters for Doctor Who and friends to blow up, you can make something up. If you want to cherrypick from the past for a nostalgic legacy antagonist, there are all sorts you can pick from that don't stink of ethical fuckery. Picking these turtle people, with the legacy that they have and the repeated ignorance they've been handled with, and making them even more generic evil monsters to be killed than they were in either of their prior appearance? I rankle at it.
I have to, of course, address the one table scrap of self-awareness Chibnall and Road attempt to have with the problematic nature of the Aquatic Silurians. The Doctor, immediately upon encountering the leader, calls him by the monster name. He responds by calling her a "Land Parasite". The Doctor then has a line about name-calling (you fucking started it) before asking what the Aquatic Silurian would like to be called... and the monster just scoffs before revealing his floating pirate ship and leaping off to commit EVIL SCHEMES OF EVIL. You were right on the doorstep of confronting this sin, and you just flinch at the last minute. Worse, the leader continually calls humanity "Land Crawlers" over the course of the episode, a clear case of mirroring that pejorative name for humanity with the pejorative name we know his species as in the real world. Let me be clear here. The solution to the 50 year-old dilemma of othering this species with a horrific name is not to make their leader a generic mustache twirler who also spouts a pejorative name for us to even shit out. That doesn't make us better, it just makes him look worse. And then one of the pirate guys stabs him to death after he's beat in a sword fight, and the Doctor gets her usual "you didn't have to kill him because killing is bad!" spiel.
You're wrong, Doctor, but not for the reason you think. They did have to kill him... because nobody could imagine a better fate for him. They couldn't imagine him as a character of his own with actual grievance and ideological drive for his extremist goal, they couldn't imagine you as a diplomat attempting to make things better with words instead of swordfights, they couldn't even imagine a better name for him than calling him a literal god damned DEVIL. There should have been a better way, but nobody working on this goddamned franchise seems to be able to EVER ENVISION ONE IN 50 FUCKING YEARS' WORTH OF STORIES. All because we needed a fluffy dumb pirate adventure before Chibnall leaves and Jodie Whittaker regenerates. Oh, look at that. I found the anger. I haven't even brought up a lot of shit, like the re-iteration of the Thasmin subplot with its trite "oh nooo I'm a lonely goddess Yaz I can't fall in love with yoooou" nonsense. You know, exactly where such a subplot had to go because, again, can't imagine a better way beyond 2006 when the show was good. Chibnall's also sticking his thumb in the eye of one of my pet classic eras by bringing Ace back in the final episode along with Tegan Jovanka. I am unswayed by your nostalgic pandering to my emotions.
This was dire, I disliked it, and better things are possible with the Aquatic Silurians. We are talking about the man who shook up the very concept of the Doctor's origin with the Timeless Child reveal, he can't come up with a better fucking name for some turtle monsters he saw on TV when he was 12? I sincerely hope that one day some creative mind gets their foot into the sandbox of Doctor Who and has the imagination and drive to steer against the worn path of legacy in making the Aquatic Silurians a bunch of generic evil turtle monsters. I never thought for a second it would be Chibnall, but he got so close and flinched that it aggravated me in the end. At the very least, I don't have to think about him or this show for another six months.
Back to the zombies next time, everyone, and an entire new set of terrors and angers I've uncovered... but that's a story for another time.
No comments:
Post a Comment