Trivia / Doctor Who S7 E2 "Doctor Who and the Silurians"

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• Executive Meddling: The story was meant to end with the Doctor disappointed that the Silurians' knowledge was lost to time. Barry Letts' changed it so he would instead be contemptful of UNIT’s genocide of them.
• First Appearance: Of the Silurians.
• Referenced by...: The serial's premise inspired the Silurian hypothesis, a scientific thought experiment positing that if an advanced civilization once existed and then vanished on any planet before humans came into existence, then finding concrete evidence of its existence would be next to impossible.
• Science Marches On: Very much a mixed bag, as the reason the Silurians went into hibernation — the Moon crashing into Earth, them panicking and it taking up orbit around the Earth instead — has since become a discredited theory, since when we checked Moon rocks with Earth rocks, it proved that they all came from the same place, proving that the Moon was created by the Earth being struck by a large impactor, ejecting the rock that became the Moon. Discussion of plate tectonics, however, works with what's accepted in the scientific community.
• Uncredited Role: While this is the first Doctor Who story to credit Barry Letts as producer, it actually started out under his predecessor, Derrick Sherwin, who was moved over to work on Paul Temple early in production. Letts couldn't come in to replace Sherwin immediately, so Trevor Ray, who normally acted as assistant script editor for the show (a role he also never got any on-screen credit for) filled the role in the interim.
• Working Title: The Monsters.

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