Doctor Who – Recap & Review – The Hungry Earth

photo: bbc

Doctor Who
The Hungry Earth

Original Air Date: Jun 12, 2010

Brittany Frederick – Staff Writer
brittanyfrederick
@thetwocentscorp.com

Our newest installment of Doctor Who finds us in the reasonably near future: Wales in 2015, where some genius is about to attempt the deepest drilling into the Earth in history. Of course, because this is Doctor Who, you know that means something nasty lies beneath.

It opens the show by eating some poor hapless guy who doesn’t even get the dignity of a name, and thus begins the carnage.

Unlike last week’s mind-and-space-bending episode that I couldn’t even figure out enough to recap, this one has a relatively straightforward narrative. Eleven, Amy and Rory land the TARDIS in the wrong place – apparently Amy was promised a beach and they’re in a graveyard instead – and are square in the middle of the “big mining thing,” which of course Eleven really wants to go poke at. Amy goes with, while Rory goes back to the TARDIS because he’s worried about Amy’s engagement ring being lost and wants to put it somewhere safe. It is never, ever good to separate from the group, kids. The moment he walks out, he’s confronted by a woman named Ambrose and her son, and she thinks he’s a cop. As someone this has actually happened to, I can tell you how awkward that is.

Ambrose tells Rory about how her aunt’s body has gone missing, but the grave hasn’t even been touched. He is confused. Likewise, Amy wonders why she and Eleven are breaking and entering into the Big Mining Thing. He starts asking a few questions, but is alarmed by the big hole in the ground that ate the guy. The ground starts moving, which is hilarious because that’s exactly when my area decides to have a 4.0 earthquake. Amy falls into a hole and is sucked under by the time the aftershocks stop. This makes Eleven cranky as he explains that the earth has feelings too, and is bioprogrammed to attack when someone shoves a big drill into it. “While you’ve been drilling down,” he explains, “somebody else has been drilling up.” Not to mention putting a big invisible bubble over the area so they can’t get out either.

Everyone goes to hide in the church, which is where we find out that Ambrose is married to the poor guy who got eaten and is the daughter of the old guy running the project. Wow, awkward. The Doctor tells everyone to shut the heck up and do as he says, which involves covering the entire area with any kind of sensor he can find so they know where this thing comes up and where it’s headed. He can then use his sonic screwdriver to send a pulse through the network and temporarily (that being the key word) incapacitate whatever it is. If it’s a giant ugly earthworm, I’m going to laugh.

Unfortunately, all the equipment blows up when everything loses power, leaving them all in the dark and defenseless. In true horror movie cliché fashion, the little kid is left out on his own too, and he gets snatched. In the resulting melee, the good guys capture one of the strange alien things while we’re reminded that Amy is still trapped in some sort of box.

Eleven goes to have a chat with the strange lizard alien. She claims the drilling was considered an attack on her people and they’re so insulted, they want to take the planet back from humankind. Insert angry cliches here. Eleven has decided he’s going to go down to where she’s from, have a chat with her bosses, and just maybe try to free his missing friends. He – and the scientist chick from earlier who won’t leave – get into the TARDIS, which immediately goes wonky. However, it does its job of getting them where they need to go…which apparently involves people getting dissected and other creepy gross things no one wants to think about and a whole lot more lizards than one expected.

And guess what? It’s another unprefaced two-parter. Again.

So hopefully next week we’ll get some answers. Until then, Whovians, sound off below.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine