ad4m22508: The Hungry Earth
Another episode that really could be far better than it is. Unfortunately, it’s held back by both budget and imagination.
Attempting to arrive in Rio, the Doctor has completely missed and instead winds up in the Welsh countryside in 2020. Happily for him, while he might have missed a festival, he’s arrived just in time to find the world’s most ambitious drilling project and it’s just passed twenty one kilometres. As you might have already guessed, success comes at a price – there’s something living beneath the earth and it’s really pissed off to be underneath the drill…
It starts off so promisingly with a really creepy idea – that the earth could open up and swallow you whole. Unfortunately, it goes downhill after that with a few clunky characters, some hokey horror elements and a really crap monster.
There are a few really good bits in here like the preparation for the attack, the way the monsters close off the village with a shield bubble, the villagers’ conversation with the captured monster-thing and the final, totally unexpected, cliffhanger.
It’s a shame that the rest of it is just so average. The characters don’t really have anything to do, Amy’s time on screen is spent channelling the spirit of Catherine Tate and Rory lacks any of the early charisma that made his interactions with the Doctor so enjoyable.
On the whole, while this isn’t a terrible episode, it’s definitely not a great one. It’s enjoyable, but you’ll have to completely switch off to make the most of it.
6/10
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Yeah its Doctor Who time again. The Doctor fu*ks up the steering of the TARDIS again and instead of landing in Rio turns up in Wales. Yay! Wales!
Prancing into the midst of a drilling project looking every bit “Mr Young Conservative 1972” the Doctor finds holes that eat people. At this point my brain started to dribble out my ear as I watched the Doctor invent some balls about dirt animated by energy fields, and wondering why the music and cinematography was so boring. Compare Midnight with this and even though much less happens its 10 times better.
Anywho cliche after cliche grind by with Meera Syal, doing very little and being a wonderful face actor, smelling the fart as things hit the fan. Which they do in surprisingly boring style. Long story short they end up in a church with a truly inconveniently sticky door. A kid gets swiped by the bad guys after the Doctor just ignores him saying hes off outside where the mysterious attackers are practically running rampant.
To be fair to the young man his was probably the most believable and professional acting done in the episode.
They manage to kidnap an alien attacker using a spatula and some febreeze, or some bollocks of that nature, sticking her into the back of a van, no not for that, but to keep her prisoner. Lucky she didn’t have an alien gun on her isn’t it? She could have gotten out. Lucky that.
The Doctor, flouncing forth like a man with a spastic colon hunting for a bog, happily ignores things like prior to the capture he only has very few minutes before all hell breaks loose; embarks on a plan whereby all the motion sensors in the town are placed in a protective ring. A job which would last about a day. But this happens off camera and by the rules of this shoddy Moffatt driven eye-rape that means it should be taken for granted.
The episode ends with Amy taken, the Kid taken, an old man stabbed in the neck after a vicious tongue related attack (I’ve been a victim of harsh tongue-ings and by God I couldn’t move for days) the Doctor looking like a particularly stressed ferret and an increasingly histerical bint of a woman who I predict will cause trouble.
4/10 God Damn you Moffatt!