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)
Ranking: 196
If ever there was a sign that Dr Who was getting darker and more adult under Phillip Hinchcliffe’s reign as producer then it’s ‘The Sontaron’ Experiment’. Here’s something you wouldn’t get in any other series: a lightweight ‘filler’ two-parter (the first since ‘The Rescue’ ten years earlier), deliberately conceived as a budget saving device and a simple story between two relative coleuses which the writers end up making about that oh so fluffy of subjects, torture. This is a tale about the bare-bones of survival, struggle and instinct, a barren tale without much humour (and most of it black) that plays out against the backdrop of a barren Dartmoor landscape (specifically Hound Tor) in the far future when Earth is largely deserted and everything is dead. Usually DW writers tend to be optimistic 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. In a series that’s still largely utopian, designed to give you warm fuzzy feelings that humanity will get its act together sometime if only we can get rid of the obstacles in our way first, it’s the series’ biggest apocalyptic dystopian moment that claims everything as we know it will be long dead within 10,000 years (albeit the sort of dystopia with plants and bracken that still looks like quite a nice day out: apparently solar flares kill off all animal life but don’t touch the vegetables). It’s a tale of power struggles and the lengths aliens will go to in order to win a war when Humans are irritating unnecessary life-forms who just get in the way.
It’s sheer grimness is still
a surprise, even after a story about a killer wasp that laid eggs inside you,
because of where it’s coming from. Bob Holmes, new to the script editor seat
and finding it something of a trial by fire, had already completely re-written
‘The Ark In Space, was facing similar re-writes on ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’
and coping with the usual problems inherent in a Terry Nation script (that it
tended to be more a collection of ideas rather than a finished work). Even for
a workaholic like Holmes it became clear that something was going to have to
give and that was the gritty two part story he planned to write himself using
his own Sontaron creations, the series’ cheapie to offset the costs of the
Nerva set. While Holmes really wanted to find new writers, for such a looming
deadline like this he needed a safe pair of hands and got in touch with his old
friend Terrance Dicks for ideas. For some strange reason rather than offer his
own services or an old proven friend like Malcolm Hulke he nominated ‘The
Bristol Boys’, Bob Baker and Dave Martin. To this day I don’t know if it was a
serious recommendation or a joke: take nothing away from them, they’re an
excellent pair of writers who understood the series better than anyone, but
they’d given Terrance no end of problems with imaginative first drafts that
happily broke the season’s budget within the first episode, a dozen characters
where one would do and four episodes that have enough going on in them for six.
They seem like the last people who should be doing a grim low budget two parter
to a tight deadline. Just look at the colourful, more child-friendly fare they brought
to the Who table: K9, orange-coloured Axons, big giant hands in nuclear power
stations, marmalade blobby Gell Guards, a universe of antimatter, Bandrils, that
sort of thing.
To be fair to them,
though, they excel at being given a specific story and deliver a story bleaker
than even Holmes himself would have written and which is perfect for the
changes producer Phillip Hinchcliffe wanted for Dr Who, moving away from the
karmic moral ‘family’ feel of the Barry Letts years and onto a place where the
universe was suddenly a stranger lonelier place, less cosy or safe. It’s a
story inspired not by glorious tales of adventure and exploration but by
Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, by Dr Mengele’s experiments on prisoners to try
and identify just where the limit of human suffering was before people died. It
sounds an unlikely inspiration for a Dr Who story and yet it sort of fits: if
the 1960s stories were about the fear of what world war the planet was going to
sleepwalk into next (and what the children of the day were going to do about
it) then this feels like the next step, the grim realisation that the cold war
wasn’t going anywhere soon and that, in a modern global connected world, an
outbreak of war and Humans getting in each other’s way was as inevitable as
breathing. This is very much a 1970s view of the world, with all the 1960s hippie
hopefulness removed - along with ‘Ark’
Dr Who’s first ‘punk’ story (and just two after the glam rock peak of ‘Robot’ which suddenly feels a lifetime ago, not five-six
weeks). This was the 30th
anniversary of the end of World War Two and the discovery of these camps (many
of them first heard by the public at large at the Nuremburg Trials also
‘celebrating’ their 30th anniversary) and stories were still coming
out from survivors about the things that happened in them. Like every
anniversary it made people think about what the planet had learned – or hadn’t.
There had just been an outcry, too, that even a supposedly benevolent
government policy that seemed as un-Nazi like as they came (the first winter
fuel allowances to pensioners, who tended to need more warmth) was based on
Mengele’s research into how much cold a human body could comfortably withstand,
which made even those who benefitted from it feel a bit ill. Memories of prison
camps were everywhere and the bits that didn’t end up in Davros and ‘Genesis Of
The Daleks’ wind up here instead, in another story that takes something in the
real world and exaggerates it through the eyes of aliens. The fact that a story
like this has Sontarons in it – the butt of the jokes in so many modern Who
stories – makes this story one of the biggest surprises to viewers navigating
their way round classic Who ‘backwards’ and most spend it waiting for a
punchline that doesn’t come. This is the very definition of a Dr Who story that’s
a tragedy and unlike some stories that juggle the comedy alongside it, this isn’t
one of them: it’s uber bleak all the way through. Although that said at the
time, with the Sontarons on their second appearance and already revealed to be
a brutal ruthless militaristic race (and arguably the closest to the Nazis
after The Daleks), it made a lot of sense.
That said, it’s probably
not quite what Holmes expected when he talked about a story that was ‘bleak’.
He was very protective of his Sontaron creations and even though they’d only
been on telly once (in ‘The Time
Warrior’) Bob had gone to a great deal of trouble to flesh out the race and
learn everything about them. Despite the pressures of the deadlines he
subjected Baker and Martin to lengthy discussions about what they could and
couldn’t do in great loving detail, something they put up with for the first
day but, so legend has it, they burst out laughing and refused to listen to any
more when Holmes got onto a discussion about how they went to the toilet and
how they had sex despite clones. Even so, I don’t think the two writers were
listening that hard: The Sontarons would never, ever stoop to Nazi tactics.
They’re a noble race who believe in giving the races they conquer a chance to
die in battle and indeed rather relish the challenge of a revolt. They’re not
interested in race, ideology, power, taking over The Earth or anything like
that: all they live for is the chance to wipe out their ‘real’ enemy The Rutans
(who won’t appear until ‘The Horror Of Fang
Rock’ and still never in a story with The Sontarons). The only interest
they have in the Earth is strategic, to make it a base to be closer to their
enemy. Which makes their plan to experiment on Humans and see all the ways they
break, as a prelude to invading a largely empty planet, the single most
uncharacteristic thing we ever see them do (yes, even with the ‘being a patsy
to sheets of tinfoil’ in ‘The Invasion Of
Time’ or ‘nursing a child with their milk’ the way Strax does in ‘A Good Man Goes To War’). They’re not a race
that believe in experiments – they’re a race that think they have all the
answers and who like to stomp in feet first. It’s as if they took on Lynx’s
words from ‘Time Warrior’ rather than his actions, believing all his talk of
ruthlessness, even though in his first appearance he rarely gets his hands
dirty (he got the Humans to do it all, like the camp commandant who handed out
orders to others; here Styre seems to enjoy it). There’s also one major flaw in
both the Mengele method and the Sontaron experiments: Humans differ. The point
where one breaks is different to another. For instance my temperature gauge is
faulty so I can probably cope with more extremes than most people, but deprive
me of sleep and subject me to torture by Spice Girls and I’ll be a moping wreck
in minutes. The only thing that makes any sense at all is that, as a clone race
themselves, the Sontarons assume Humans are the same (they are quite oblivious
to differences in Humans and think they’re ‘all the same’, hence the jokes
about getting the genders muddled up), but even they must see it’s obvious that
these Humans react in different ways, some giving in, some fighting back, some
blubbering, some trying to collaborate with them, some being flippant. It’s not
a very good experiment: there’s no ‘control’ subject to work with and Styre seems
to be mostly making it up as he goes along. The Sontarons also, frankly, don’t
need to do any of this: 99.9% of the Earth is deserted (and of course the
people there are in London, even if they’re curious astronauts looking for a
missing ship rather than locals) and is basically a pile of rocks with some
bracken (in fact it looks just like Dartmoor always does in October: funny
that). Why don’t they just take the other bits, or wipe the last few pitiful
Humans out?
But Styre is on a mission
and Sontarons always follow orders (though quite why they have such a
hierarchy, given they all have the same mind, is anybody’s guess. I wonder if
that ever made Holmes’ notes?) Throughout the course of this story Humans are chained
up, burned, starved, dehydrated, waterboarded, have heavy ‘gravity bars’
dropped on them and made to hallucinate (poor Sarah sees some unconvincing
snakes, some actually very convincing oozing quicksand and a ridiculous shot of
some rocks I think is meant to suggest a rockfall but does make you wonder if
Sarah is having flashbacks to some hated geology lessons). 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 in a Dr Who story,
only its all of humanity that are the prisoners, all our religious and
political differences gone. Which is both a very backwards way of doing the
usual Dr Who thing of trying to make us pull together as a species and a very
odd thing to put on for a supposedly child-friendly series on a Saturday
teatime. I’m amazed Mary Whitehouse wasn’t outside picketing the BBC for this
story alone (she seemed to miss this one altogether. Maybe she hadn’t noticed
it was a two-parter?)
Now, torture is such an
inevitable a part of life that it’s bound to be an inevitable part of any
scifi/fantasy/was/action franchise eventually too, so it was always going to
turn up sooner or later in a format as elastic as Dr Who’s. There are fans who
like this sort of thing and hold up the Phillip Hinchcliffe eras and season
twelve in particular as the zenith of Dr Who. They see it as the point when Dr
Who got ‘real’, urban and gritty and powerful without daft side trips to Lands
of Fiction and punting barges round Cambridge. I can see what they mean –
especially at the time, when season eleven had been a bit more fantastical and
whimsical – but I can’t say I’m one of them. There are many many things that Dr
Who does brilliantly, this is one of them – but not my favourite thing it does.
Torture just isn’t entertainment, even in a Dr Who setting. ‘Vengeance On Varos’, a future 6th
Doctor 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. It makes for difficult viewing, especially when poor
astronaut Roth escapes but is taken back again, knowing what is in store for
him and whimpering. Even if you’re too young to realise why the gravity bar is
going to hurt (when it looks like the flimsy prop it is) or understand what it
means to be properly hungry or thirsty there’s the terrifying ,moment in
episode one where even plucky Sarah begins to crack up, stranded on an alien
planet having lost first The Doctor, then Harry, looking around her at the
bleak wilderness (like the time you lost your mum at the shops and couldn’t get
home). For all the daft way the Sontarons go about things these are visceral
fears about abandonment, betrayal and having your morality and humanity crushed
in order to survive that this story taps into, all the things the real Nazis
knew to exploit all too well. There are very few of the series’ customary light
touches and though there is humour here it’s the gallows kind (bar the
wonderful opening shot of spoor Sarah, upside down in a hole with her legs in
the air where the transmit has deposited her and the Doctor’s rant about harry
being so stupid as to fall down a very obvious hole, mere seconds before he
falls down another one!)
All that said, if you
have to see torture on daytime television then this is the way to go about it.
None of its gratuitous (it all fits the story) and there’s no blood or sawn-off
limbs or gore, just good acting from people who convey pain without us having
to actually see it. The bleak setting of the wilds of Dartmoor is perfect. For it
wasn’t just the Sontarons experimenting; this is the first time Dr Who have
ever done an entire story on location (to make things easier logistically with
the studio bound ‘Ark In Space’, using the
same director and most of the same crew) and even now it remains the only Dr
Who story entirely made on location (no CSO post-production – as they couldn’t
do it without locked off studio cameras back then - no model shots, no stock
footage, no establishing shots, nothing). There are no corridors to run
down, no ventilation shafts to escape
through, nothing but the characters and their wits. The idea to shoot outside
was Bob’s idea but the decision to choose Dartmoor was Baker/Martin’s: they
knew it well so could picture it when writing, knew it offered the range the
episodes needed and wasn’t ridiculously far from London, while other TV series
they’d worked on had filmed here so they knew it was possible to get permission.
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, famously, broke his collar bone after
slipping over on the wet grass in the scene where he confronts Styre and had to
be airlifted to hospital still in costume, which really confused the nurses; luckily
it was towards the end of filming and, trooper that he is, Baker returned to do
the last scenes in a sling which was covered up by his scarf. Even so, he was
worried that at this early stage before any of his episodes had gone out the
BBC might yet replace him). Every prop you see (even the funky orange Sontaron
TV and the bulky spaceship) is really physically there, not a special effect,
to add to the ‘real’ feeling (sadly an idea to have Nelson’s Column sticking
out of the ground – a shot they actually do for ‘In
the Forest Of the Night’ forty years later, though the idea came from the
Statue of Liberty in ‘Planet Of the Apes’ – was dropped for cost but would have
done a lot to sell the idea we’re in a future London where vegetation has
reclaimed everything). Filming in this
bleak desolate spot in a typical rainy Autumn also helped bring the cast and
crew closer together, as they bonded in the way prisoners do. Especially back
at the pub where everyone was staying, where a Dr Who team took on the local darts
team each night, with costume designer Barbara Kidd surprising everyone by
being a champion player in the making). The guest cast are all excellent,
especially Glyn Jones, the writer of my favourite Who story (ranking spoilers) ‘The Space Museum’ who had gone back to his
day-job of acting – he was the only writer in Dr Who to play more than a cameo
role in front of the camera till Mark
Gatiss and Toby Whithouse as late as 2017’s
‘Twice Upon A Time’. Baker and Martin (or
perhaps Holmes in the editing stage) are particularly good at writing for not
just what’s said but what’s left unsaid, especially given that they hadn’t
written for any of this trio before. These three get on each other’s nerves but
you also never doubt for a second they would risk life and limb for each other,
in a way the Sontarons, happy to abandon each other, never would. Sarah sees
straight through The Doctor’s polite way of getting rid of her and Harry
(although given the scrapes they’ve got into lately I’d never let them out of
my sight!); Sarah knows that Harry is panicked even though he’s doing his
typical thing of trying to stay calm and rational; The Doctor knows Sarah is
really much more shaken by her torture than she lets on. The best scene of the
story by far, in the middle of fifty minutes of people trying to put a brave face
on things, is when The Doctor discovers a tortured Sarah and blows his top,
giving Styre hell despite the risk to himself (so far the danger has been an
abstract one but now it’s affected someone The Doctor loves). It’s one of Tom
Baker’s earliest flashes of anger beneath the comedy and one of his best.
The star award goes to Kevin
Lindsay though, who went through hell in this story, risking his already
declining health and all creature comforts to play his second Sontaron. He did
the part against doctor’s advice for a weakened heart, dying aged fifty-one a
mere six weeks after this story went out on air (he adored Dr Who and
especially Lis Sladen, who’s husband Brian Miller was one of his best friends
after years working in Watford rep together). Realising he was too weak to get
out of the costume each time, Lindsay stayed up on the rocks to eat a packed
lunch, at one point forgetting he was in costume and saying ‘morning’ to a
passer by walking her dog, who ran reportedly ran off screaming! he manages to
make Styre both obviously part of the same race as Lynx yet very different too.
Lynx was a lone wolf fully in command, but Styre is eager to please, perhaps a
junior desperate for promotion (while both could hardly be more different than
his other Who appearance as benevolent timelord K’anpo in ‘Planet Of the
Spiders’). Maybe the cloning went a bit wrong with Styre: perhaps The Marshall
gave him orders to a backward planet to keep him out of harm’s way? Lynx was a
clever, formidable opponent who likely came top of Sontaron secondary school
but Styre is much thicker and more easily confused. Plus he has five fingers on
one hand and a very different head (the first a mistake by the costume
department, the second deliberate to make things easier on poor actor Kevin
Lindsay who had a heart condition and got very sick filming ‘Time Warrior’ but wanted to come back
for a rematch in a part he loved). All very odd behaviour for a clone race
(perhaps the machine went wrong?) and despite Sarah claiming that ‘they look
identical!’ (to be fair, she is under quite a lot of stress at the time).
The story itself is a
mix. On the one hand it’s the usual Dr Who thing of being captured, escaping
and being recaptured, with lots of repetitive scenes that don’t lead anywhere
except in circles. The decision to keep Styre back for the big reveal at the
end of the first cliffhanger, which would make sense in a longer story (even
though it’s not much of a reveal if you spotted the episode title) is a waste
when you only have fifty minutes to fill. Nobody learns anything from this
story the way they do in the best Dr Who stories (well, only to avoid a
Sontaron at all costs I suppose while Styre learns how puny Humans are, which
Lynx could have told him already) while parts of it look as flimsy as anything
in the series. For instance I don’t know what’s crazier: the fact that Baker
and Martin, on setting this story in the bleak rolling hills of Dartmoor with
the might of the Sontaron empire, decided to write in a robot or the fact that
they did it again with K9 in ‘The Invisible Enemy’ after seeing the problems it
caused here. I also have to imagine that this deadly stealth machine only makes
that weird loud beeping noise as some weird side effect of being on Earth
because otherwise it would be too silly for words (as is the way it still
somehow manages to creep up on people without them noticing). That rather settles
it: Styre isn’t a crack troop sent on a special investigation but a cracked
troopmember send on a special needs trip to get him out the way of the true
war: that’s the only way to explain the fact that his first-rate equipment consists
of the flimsiest robot seen in the series, which a strong wind could blow over,
with what looks like wonky shopping trolley wheels. Nobody really learns
anything, the way they do in the best Dr Who stories, except perhaps that
capture by Sontarons is inevitable in time.
All that said though,
there’s none of the usual padding here and the story really gets on with
things, separating our trio almost immediately in a more natural way than a lot
of stories manage. Given that this story only has fifty minutes to play with it
covers a lot of ground too, with perhaps more jeopardy per minute than any
other story of the 1970s. Dudley Simson’s incidental score is one of his best,
his Who score most like hiw work for ‘Blake’s 7’ brash and bold but also
knowing when to stop (there’s no music at all for the first ten minutes, to
emphasise how bleak and deserted everything is, till crashing back in when
Sarah sees her first Human). The conclusion, when the Sontaron gets what’s
coming to him after a rare Tom Baker tussle (actually Terry Walsh getting his
first gig as Tom Baker’s stunt double after years of playing Pertwee’s; it was
only by chance he was there after playing the dead astronaut Zake who slides to
his death down a hill in episode one) is hugely satisfying even if it comes too
late for most of the poor Humans and even though it seems unlikely an entire
Sontaron fleet would be called off because of one fight against one humanoid
(especially if Styre’s on a sort of glorified work experience). There are some
nice smart lines here, great little bit of characterisation and a plot that
doesn’t sell the premise short in the usual Baker/Martin way: the astronauts don’t
suddenly evolve into winged creatures that fly away (as per ‘The Mutants’) or use a recorder to
escape a world of antimatter (as per ‘The
Three Doctors’): instead good defeats evil just in the nick of time. Every
twist and turn feels like a natural part of the story, organically coming out
of the situation. There are no filler subplots (though one, about Styre taking
over Vulra and making him hurt the other Humans, was planned but removed by
Holmes). Not one scene, not one line, not one bit of bracken is wasted, with ‘The
Sontaron Experiment’ proof that you don’t need to go big to do Dr Who, that a
small cast and two short episodes is all you need to tell the basics. In short,
if you needed a basic script written in a hurry then this is the one: it was
all written to the tight deadlines (a monthish?) and done and dusted and filmed
within six days.
Perhaps best of all, the
writers have done a lot of thinking about this world, trying to research with
flora would survive a ‘real’ solar flare (although I’m still not sure if the
plantlife would look entirely the way it does now, with the change to the atmospheric
conditions and alteration to rain cycles) and the effect of gravity on the
Sontarons (part of Homes’ research they really hooked onto was the idea that
Sontarons were used to higher gravity so stomp around on Earth. They add in the
detail, learned from real astronauts in space, that Styre would naturally tire
himself out on Earth with the lower gravity and that it would put a strain on
his heart. Ironically and unknowingly meaning that Linsday was the perfect
choice to convey this). I’m less sure about their idea of language though:
Baker and Martin figured that this far in the future Earth would have one language
and decided, for reasons known most to themselves, that it would probably devolve
into South African (something that fits
with their script for ‘The Mutants’
but nothing else). It’s a bit odd hearing everyone speak in Afrikaneer accents
(though no weirder than everyone speaking English in reality, at least this can
be explained by the Tardis telepathic circuits). It’s also led a few reviewers
to ponder if this story is an allegory for the British Empire and its treatment
of South Africa. Usually I’d be first in the queue to see a deeper meaning in a
script (especially after ‘The Mutants’
being about exactly that) but I’m not sure that’s the case here. We don’t hear
much about humans in the future and this lot are a few stragglers come to
search for a lost spaceship. They’re not necessarily the representatives of an
entire race (though they could, at a push, be from the ‘Africa’ ship that must
have set off alongside the ‘Scotland’ one in ‘The
Beast Below’). While it’s true they feel left behind and are ‘colonised’ by
a ‘more advanced power’ who wants to learn from them, they bump into Styre by
mistake rather than design and no longer think of themselves as Earthlings (and
seem cut off from the other spaceships too, given they think Nerva from ‘The Ark In Space’ is a myth). Equally there’s no
one specific moment in South Africa’s history when there were experiments carried
out on the local population; really this is a prisoner of war story more than
anything else (and while Africa fought on the allied side and would have ended
up prisoners of war alongside everyone else, they weren’t particularly singled
out).
Instead of being one of
those deep intellectual thoughtful Dr Who stories, then, this is a runaround
and nothing more, with Styre the closest to a mindless thug in power the series
had had so far and the usual light and shade reduced to a simple fight between
good and evil. It’s less dramatic than ‘The Ark In Space’ which it follows on (arguably
the first Dr Who ‘series arc’ that runs longer than an episode in any
meaningful way, unless you count Barbara’s gift from Nero being what pulls her
towards the Zarbi in ‘The Web Planet’),
ticking many of the same boxes without staying in the memory quite as long
(though being less daft all round than ‘Revenge Of
The Cybermen’ which rounds off the sort of trilogy). It’s a mid-tier piece,
without much meat on the bones but something there to chew on at least. It’s
also a way of doing the normal Dr Who things in an experimental way, all on
location and in half the time as usual. By and large the experiment pays off
with one of those stories where not much goes wrong and everyone gives their
all to make a strong and gripping bit of television. 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. The cynical part of me suspects that mankind’s
future really does look like this, scrabbling about for survival on the whim of
an alien who thinks we’re scum, rather than the utopia of other stories like,
say, ‘The Keeper Of Traken’ and we had to have a story like this somewhere. I’m
glad it was only the one though and that, like it’s monster, it’s not just
nasty and brutal but short. Not the sort of story I can truly say I love then
or look forward to rewatching, even if I still admire it.
POSITIVES + 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 those
square edges and taking all the short cuts (Sontarons are nothing if not
efficient and practical – no superfluous flashing lights and boosters for
them). It also adds to the classic gag in the first Sontaron story about their
heads being as round as their helmets.
NEGATIVES - The
Sontarons become the first alien race in Dr Who to use what we would nowadays
views as a video or a skype call rather than a radio or a walkie-talkie, around
thirty years before that was even vaguely a thing and which once seemed the
most futuristic and ‘space age’ thing about the whole story. What’s wrong with
that you might ask? Well, they’re the one Dr Who race that doesn’t need to see
what the person they’re talking to looks like. The Sontarons are a clone race.
They all look the same. Just to rub it in Kevin Lindsay plays both Sontarons in
this story in exactly the same way…
BEST QUOTE: Dr; ‘Piece
of the synestic locking mechanism from Nerva's rocket. Popped it in my pocket’.
Harry: ‘Fortuitous’. Dr: ‘Foresight. You never know when these bits and pieces
will come in handy. Never throw anything away, Harry. [He throws it
away.] Now, where's my five hundred year diary. I remember jotting
some notes on the Sontarons. It's a mistake to clutter one's pockets, Harry’.
Previous ‘The Ark In Space’ next ’Genesis Of
The Daleks’
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