The Sontaron Experiment: Ranking - 196

 The Sontaron Experiment

(Season 12, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane and Harry, 22/2/1975-1/3/1975, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, writers: Bob Baker and Dave Martin, director: Rodney Bennett) 

'Well Marshall, the great Sontaron masterplan ordered by the Grand Strategic Council of getting a puny Earthling to watch and rank all Doctor Who episodes in order is complete and about 4/11ths of the way to being uploaded for your perusal. Based on first evidence of Human limitations we will be subjecting all future earthlings to viewings of 'the Timeless Child' 'Orphan 55' 'Voyage Of the Damned' 'The Paul McGann TV Movie and 'Time and the Rani' in a continuous loop until their brains rot.  Sontar-hahahahaha!'

Ranking: 196

 

 In their other stories Bob Baker and Dave Martin tended to bring the more child-friendly fare to the Who table: K9, orange-coloured Axons, big giant hands in nuclear power stations, that sort of thing. This little two-parter, though, is one of the most gruesome in the DW canon and makes the universe suddenly seem a far less cosy or safe. Usually DW writers tend to be optomistic about the future, give or take the bureaucracy and the odd (and I mean odd) leaders, but here Earth 10,000 years in the future has been ravaged and left a deserted wilderness except for a few straggling astronauts who are incredibly unlucky to end up back on this planet just in time for an invasion. For some reason the Sontarons still fancy a go at colonising the Earth even though it’s basically a pile of rocks and rather than invade en masse they’ve been busy conducting experiments into the Human body and discovering all sorts of nasty details about how fragile they are in preparation for their full plan. Throughout the course of this story Humans are chained up, tortured, starved, waterboarded, deprived of sleep and attacked by weapons. The only thing they aren’t put through is listening to The Spice Sontarons, the girl group from the future: ‘If you wanna be my lover you gotta kill all my friends the fight against the Rutans never ends…’ It’s like Guantanamo Bay, only it’s the whole planet wide and we’re all the prisoners and – what with ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ next up in transmission order – suggests that the production team had been paying a little too much attention to the 1970s trials of convicted Nazis for their ideas for comfort. The result is quite different to every other Sontaron appearance, particularly now they’re mostly used as comic relief, but you can also see where it came from: in Robert Holmes’ hands Lynx talked a lot about being merciless and his low opinion of humanity during ‘The Time Warrior’ but actually the people who did most of the fighting were either Humans or timelords; for this story Baker and martin pick up on his words rather than his actions. It’s pretty different to most other DW stories too. Now torture is a part of life and war and action series and is an inevitable part of any scifi/fantasy/was/action franchise eventually, it was always going to turn up sooner or later in a format as elastic as DW’s. There are fans who like this sort of thing and hold up the Phillip Hinchcliffe eras and season 12 in particular as the zenith of DW. I can’t say I’m one of them; there are many many things that DW does brilliantly and horror is not my favourite of them and while few stories are really that horrible given the teatime slot and family viewing tag, this one does get a little too grim for comfort at times. ‘Vengeance On Varos’, a future story that spoofs viewer’s enjoyment of violence on TV, had stories like this one in mind when it showed families taking sadistic delight in watching pain and suffering. All that said, if you have to see torture on daytime television this is the way to go about it. None of its gratuitous and there’s no blood or sawn-off limbs, just good acting; also it’s not done for sport but for character: it’s exactly how the Sontarons think as, of all the alien races in Who they’re the most naturally warlike and committed to vitory at all costs. And it’s not just the Sontarons who are coming up with cruel experiments either: this is a two parter entirely shot entirely on location (still the only DW to have no shooting on a studio set whatsoever) during gruelling filming in the wilds of Dartmoor, which gives it a feel quite unlike other DW stories. The bleakness of the rolling hills is the perfect setting, adding a feeling of danger and desperation you would never have got on a studio set (though plenty of hazards in real life too; Tom Baker fell and broke his collarbone and had to be airlifted to hospital while still in costume which really confused the nurses in the days before his stories had been transmitted; the scarf hid the brace he was put in for the rest of the shoot). The acting is first rate with Kevin Lindsay also going through hell and risking his already declining health to play his second Sontaron, General Styre. This also leads into another of my favourite bits of DW trivia: as walking down the hill to the catering van or taking off the layers of make-up was too much of a strain for his heart Lindsay sat on his own during breaks reading the paper on a stool. A dogwalker passed by, the Sontaron forgot he was in costume and nodded ‘morning’ and she ran off screaming. Elsewhere the astronauts are great too, particularly Glyn Jones who (ranking spoilers) wrote my favourite ever DW story and is here doing his only turn in the series as an actor – he was the only person in DW to write/speak lines in front and behind the camera in DW till Mark Gatiss in the modern series. Given that this story only has fifty minutes to play with it covers a lot of ground too, with perhaps more jeapordy per minute than any other story of the 1970s. The conclusion, when the Sontaron gets what’s coming to him after a rare Tom Baker tussle, is hugely satisfying even if it comes too late for most of the poor Humans. A great, if bleak, script pushes this one up several notches too. Indeed the only thing that’s less than stellar is the rather flimsy Sontaron robot, which seems a little too basic for both the might of the Sontaron empire and filming on a bleak Dartmoor hill. By and large, though the experiment pays off, when everything is said and done, though, while it’s a very well made bit of television it’s still a well made bit of television about torture. Which is a bit uncomfortable to watch. Sort of the point I guess. Not the sort of story I can truly say I love then, even if I still admire it a lot.

+ The Sontaron’s spaceship is a brilliantly inventive design, quite different to the usual flying saucer shapes and looks like a golf-ball. Honestly, that’s probably the most aerodynamic design an alien race could have, losing all the square edges and taking all the short cuts (Sontarons are nothing if not efficient and practical – no superfluous flashing lights and bossters for them) and adds to the classic gag in the first Sontaron story about their heads being as round as their helmets.

- The Sontarons become the first alien race in DW to use what we would nowadays views as a video or a skype call rather than a radio or a walkie-talkie. What’s wrong with that you might ask? Well, they’re the one DW race that doesn’t need one. The Sontraons are a clone race. They don’t need to see what each other look like because they all look the same. Just to rub it in Kevin Lindsay plays both Sontarons in this story in exactly the same way…