Howling:The Silurian Ark

The Silurian Ark is among my favourite of Doctor Who's spaceships.A space-ark with dinosaurs on board.... made by the Silurians. Nice looking too. I'm glad the Doctor and co. saved it and took it to a planet for the dinos to roam free. 83.223.121.252talk to me 18:09, December 6, 2012 (UTC)

Ummm, do you have anything to ask about? Because general appreciation for an aspect of an episode is not really what this forum is for. Imamadmad ☎  22:22, December 6, 2012 (UTC)

I'll ask it for him/her then, no point in getting a thread wasted since someone would open another one in the future anyway:

1. Space-faring Silurians...really? A small population escaped earth and the rest decided to just hibernate within a planet being crashed by a giant space object.

2. Ship's signature thingy...so any targeting missile from any enemy can be easily negated by throwing the signature signal thingy out the ship or launch it into space....

3. Bloodline operation thingy...it's like nothing we've seen from the Silurians; not only is the technology odd and seems unrelated to the Silurian technology we have seen, it's also kind of stupid considering that it's an ark, essentially a survival escape ship; you pretty much expect some of the people on the ship to die when its venturing into unknown space, programming a ship to return to a supposingly devastated planet when there are no relatives would certainly mean doom. If the passengers on the ship were all relatives, then there wasn't even a breeding population of Silurians, it would have been more like a suicide ship.

4. Homo...this bothered me since Moffat brought back Silurians; we know the name is a translation but how could the Tardis possibly translate some reptilian creature as something under the genus Homo? --222.167.191.105talk to me 18:39, December 8, 2012 (UTC)

1. No comment.

2. That's definitely a weak point in the story. They needed a technobabble explanation but they ought to have come up with better technobabble than that. If I had to explain it in retrospect for a future episode, I'd be inclined to say that those missiles had, on that occasion, been targeted on the "signature thingy" but the trick wouldn't work on missiles that had been targeted more sensibly. It's not good, though.

3. Another weak point.

4. This bothers everyone who knows anything at all about taxonomy (even if they're not familiar with the word "taxonomy"). It's crass. The only way I can think of to excuse the error would be to rely on the fact that the translation is telepathic & say that the TARDIS was making the name understandable to all the scientific illiterates who happened to be around at the time. That's pretty weak, too.

All of these seem to be the consequences of attempting science fiction without knowledge of basic science. TV (& film) does that too much. Someone in the DW team needs to develop the habit of checking the facts fairly early in the production process, preferably as soon as the script has been selected as a possible candidate for acceptance -- before the BBC is committed to using it.

1 & 3 could perhaps be "explained away" by giving some information about the history of the Silurians. 1 would be easier to deal with than 3. You could say that the Silurians had only enough spaceflight capability to launch that one ship. The combination of launching the ship, carrying as much of their ecosystem & population as they could put aboard, with most of the Silurian population going into hibernation on Earth could then be portrayed as a "belt & braces" approach. (For US fans, "braces" = "suspenders".) That actually makes sense if you're trying to preserve a species; you adopt as many different, independent methods as possible in order to maximise the chance that at least one will be successful.

Unfortunately, such a "belt & braces" approach requires you to make the gene pool as diverse as possible in each & every group of potential survivors. That only makes problem 3 even worse. It's not that the group of relatives on the ship wouldn't be a breeding population. It might be. However, the lack of genetic diversity would cause problems after a few generations -- possibly very severe problems.

However, you need to bear in mind that, if you exclude recent population movements ("recent" = the last few centuries), the non-African human population is descended from a fairly small group of individuals. There are districts in Africa that have greater genetic diversity than the whole of the non-African human population. --2.96.26.96talk to me 13:50, December 9, 2012 (UTC)