What Lies Beneath
The redesign of the Silurians in the most recent series of Doctor Who was both perplexing and inane. Instead of weird orange reptiles with a third eye and puckered mouths, we got busty women with green bumps on their faces. Oh, the extras wore monstrous battle masks to avoid having to make up a dozen actors. Basically, though, they looked like generic reptile people as seen in every sci-fi show ever. Except less convincing.
As it turns out, the prosthetics team did a sculpt that closely resembled the original 1970 Silurians, except tastefully updated. They were going to go with that until the writer, Chris Chibnall, stepped in and vetoed it. Why he had that power as a mere writer, I don’t know. I can see why he did it; his script presents several distinct Silurians, and the masks would make them all look like the same, all like monsters.
That might help the point of the story, though. They’re alien, and therefore very difficult to empathize with — yet for the humans, and for the audience, it’s worth a try anyway. Despite the difficulty, they’re not necessarily all bad and it may be possible to work with them. Or not. It’s all about stretching the imagination to accept that one’s self is not the center of the universe.
I think making them more human essentially takes out the barrier. All we have to hold against them then is their behavior, rather than our preconceptions. Good thing then that they’ve got irrational zealots as emissaries, or the story would have gone nowhere.
I realize this is the opposite of what I was saying around and before the broadcast of the episodes, as I could understand the mentality of wanting to make the Silurians more like characters than creatures. In retrospect I’m not sure that the method was constructive. If anything it undermines the intended message.