Now that the second episode of the two-parter has aired it's time to do a full review. See Doctor Who - The Hungry Earth for the prior episode.
It was quite a foreshadowing to have Rory spending so much of the first part standing inside a grave, eh? But I'm getting ahead of meself. Oh, and another foreshadowing was Moe and Elliot reading a book about monsters with claws, and how the story ends with setting Elliot up to become an author telling stories of a race of beings living underground.
In retrospect it was pretty obvious that Elliot's Mom would be Alaya's killer. She had the biggest motive - her husband and son both taken, and her father poisoned and appearing to be dying, hence she wanted to protect her family.
Symbology: Wearing dark sunglasses at night in order to see better - that's rather odd, right? But it connects with the season-long meme of seeing and vision into the places that one doesn't normally look at. The glasses appear symbolic of seeing the normally unseen.
Of course the Doctor would have glasses with extradimensional capability. I always thought that when the 10th Doctor pulled out those glasses that there was an unstated extra capability to them. In other words, the Doctor wouldn't have glasses made of glass but his glasses would have much more capability, right? So of course his dark sunglasses he wears at night would also be more than their surface appearance, right? It's so cool they made it more obvious than the unstated thing of the 10th Doctor.
All through this episode pair he's asking the humans to be the best they can be. In every Silurian encounter, for some reason the Doctor took a stance that the Silurians had just as much right to the planet as the humans, and to negotiate with the Silurians, despite the apparent danger they pose to humans. Rather interesting. In any case it's way interesting how in this episode pair the Doctor is being an inspiration for the humans he's with, rather than a savior.
It's more than odd that these Silurians look like humans wearing lizard suits. Their faces and bodies shouldn't look human, they shouldn't have breasts, they shouldn't have human-style legs with knees. Lizards have differently shaped legs with different knee structures, so the Silurian bodies should have lizard style legs rather than human style legs. Yeah sure it's for simplicity of the filming crew but really, this just isn't right.
Another thing that isn't right - this is a race which put themselves in suspension 300 million years ago. In Geological time the earth's crust has changed quite a bit over the last 300 million years. How does the 40km down they are relate to surface features during such a long period of time? Wouldn't they have been sucked into a subduction zone and destroyed in the magma?
"This is the story of the Doctor and the terrible losses he suffered" .. uh, foreshadowing? There wasn't any loss he suffered during this episode except for Rory, but the Silurians wouldn't know of the loss of Rory. The episode begins with narration from the Silurian leader about how 1000 years later they woke up and were finally able to live in harmony with the humans.
Symbology: The Silurians are lizard people, and I see them as representing the lizard brain we all carry inside us. The lizard brain is related to fight/flight/battle. I'm seeing these episodes relating symbology of the unconscious unseen stuff (the Silurians live underground, representing the unconscious/unseen) coming out and threatening death and destruction.
"You've not got any celery have you" ... interesting reference back to the 5th Doctor.
Symbology: The story of how the Silurians thought the Moon was another planet about to destroy the Earth, and they took extreme measures to hide from the Apocalypse mistakenly believing the arrival of that beautiful Moon was impending destruction. Seems symbolic of the people today who are seeing destruction of the society from climate or peak oil threats, eh?
Just why is there a spare TV screen in the basement of this unused church? MAKES NO SENSE!!!!! YAAAAAH!!!!!
There's several scenes where there are debates about who has authority to speak for their race ... and to an extent the people who step up to speak for their race do so because they happen to be there at the moment where someone is required to speak up. Authority sometimes comes from being at the right place at the right time, eh?
Symbology: "If we work together, this planet could create greatness .." In symbolic terms, this is the subconscious talking with the conscious preferring for the two to work together. Great things can be achieved when a person comes to terms with the ugly stuff in their subconscious.
Symbology: The Doctor is seeing the best of both the Silurians and Humans. He's speaking to the best of both holding the possibility/intent that both races will act their Best. But in both cases they failed to live up to the Best that the Doctor sees they could possibly act.
Now we get to the last 10 minutes - it's a very intense last 10 minutes. Oh, poor Rory.
Symbology: That the Doctor doesn't know about the cracks - this is the stuff which the Doctor has refused to see. Hence it is representative of stuff in the Doctor's subconscious junk. Symbology: He reaches into the crack into his subconscious and pulls out what would probably be one of his worst fears, the destruction of the TARDIS.
For that matter at the crack is where Amy experiences what would be the worst thing she can experience, the Death of Rory.
Symbology: The forgetting of things. In the Beast Below they depicted forgetfulness machines, and now in this episode they're depicting Amy forgetting the Love of her Life. Woah.. But there were a few remants of Rory still remaining, the wedding ring being the obvious one.
When the Silurians were scanning Amy it appeared they stopped at her stomach. I asked in the prior entry whether she's pregnant, maybe she is, and maybe that's another remnant of Rory. There's that curious scene where she sees herself on the other hill, and thought she saw someone. "You boys and your locks..." why did she use the word "boys". Mebbe she still has some memory.