In 2020, Dr. Nasreen Chaudry leads the deepest mining operation in human history, but she unwittingly awakens some old friends of the Doctor's. Retaliating, they capture Amy Pond and two others, and the Doctor finds more than he bargained for, as an ancient civilization awakens in "The Hungry Earth", the eighth episode of the 2010 series of Doctor Who.

 Following a cold open so predictable that it could only be Doctor Who, the Doctor, Rory and Amy find themselves in a small Welsh village, where Dr. Chaudry (Meera Syal) and Tom Mack (Robert Pugh) oversee a drilling procedure that burrows 21 kilometers (13 miles) into the Earth. But one of their workers, Mo Northover (Alun Raglan), has gone missing, and there's a mysterious hole in the floor of the drilling station. As the drill operations restart, an earthquake causes large, steamy cracks to open in the ground. While trying to help Tom escape, Amy is pulled through one of the cracks and into the Earth.

Accessing the drilling station's computers, the Doctor discovers that something is headed up towards the surface. He leads Rory, Nasreen, Tom, his daughter Ambrose (Nia Roberts) and her son Elliot (Samuel Davies) to the local church, but Elliot is captured and Tom is struck by the long, venomous tongue of one of the attackers. Noticing that they are cold-blooded, the Doctor recognizes them - Silurians, the first sentient species on Earth and in hibernation under the surface of the planet for 300 million years. One of the attacking party (Neve McIntosh) is captured and reveals that the Silurians construed the drilling operation as an invasion; threatened, the Silurians are mobilizing for war to reclaim the planet as their own. The Doctor scoffs at this, saying that there aren't enough of them to challenge the human race - but when he descends to try and broker peace and rescue Amy, Elliot and Mo, he finds a huge Silurian civilization under the Earth, awakened and preparing for war.

Action and special effects give way to some brilliant acting in "The Hungry Earth", led by Matt Smith's best performance of he Doctor to date, and ably backed up by Meera Syal and Neve McIntosh. Syal goes from the typical Doctor Who human scientist to barely-controlled enthusiasm at temporarily joining the TARDIS crew, even snapping the Doctor's suspenders as they lie on the floor of the TARDIS.  The Doctor's interrogation scene with McIntosh's Alaya is the absolute highlight of "The Hungry Earth". Smith simply owns the role of the Doctor, his hooded eyes burning as he warns her not to insult his intelligence. He gets the same look when he tells Ambrose not to use weapons in their fight against the Silurians. "I'm asking nicely," he says, as his eyes tell a different story, "put them away." It's so good, it's actually unsettling.

Neve McIntosh has the honor of playing the first on-screen Silurian since the ones we saw in 1984's "Warriors of the Deep". In keeping with the times, the new Silurians have well-defined (if very human-ish) faces (as opposed to the Bug-Eyed Alien masks of old). It's a good change, because now there's more to the Silurians than being typical monsters from under the Earth - we can see Alaya's pride and determination when she promises to "wipe the vermin from the surface and reclaim our planet". It's more than just the modern prosthetics that help - as she purrs that she knows which one of the humans will kill her, McIntosh takes her Alaya beyond Monster of the Week status and into something much better, much more powerful. It's disappointing that apart from a few throwaway lines, the Doctor's history with the Silurians is not expanded upon, but "The Hungry Earth" is such a good reintroduction to the Silurians that it's hard to complain too much.

There remains some of the awkwardness between Amy and Rory (she's still skeptical that they're together in ten years' time? I thought we dealt with this last week! And the week before!), but since she's absent for most of the episode, we're spared three consecutive weeks of them blundering through their engagement. Apart from a few scenes that lag, "The Hungry Earth" is a stellar episode of Doctor Who; it's got pace, it's got a story, it's got acting, and it's got a cliffhanger that is devoid of traps, certain death, or an uncomfortably extreme close-up of the Doctor's face. Things are looking good.