The Sontaron Stratagem/The Poison Sky: Ranking - 193

   The Sontaron Stratagem/Poison Sky

(Series 4, Dr 10 with Martha, 26/4/2008-3/5/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Helen Raynor, director: Douglas MacKinnon) 

'Directions: Turn Left into Zygon avenue. Avoid the bumps! Next head onto Mondas Way. Be on the look out for Cyber-men-at-work. Stay in the New Earth gridlocked traffic for approximately seventy-two of your Earth years. Head onto Skaro Road and exterminate as many sleeping policeman as you can. Be careful to avoid the Ice (Warriors) on the road at Mars. Next, take a right past the milky way to Earth in the 1970s. Or is the 1980s? Anyway, watch out for The Doctor driving Bessie at dangerous speeds. Then wipe those stinking Rutans out of the sky on behalf of our glorious empire. Sontar-ha!' (what the Sontaron sat nav should have said).  

Ranking: 193

 

 With the episodes for series four filling up fast and Russell T preparing for his big exit, he was running out of time to tick the box marked ‘bringing back things from the classic series and doing them in new ways’. ‘Stratagem’ has a lot thrown at it: the first appearance of The Sontarons since 1985, the first appearance of UNIT since 1989 and the first appearance of Martha since last year’s ‘Last Of The Timelords’. Throw in a re-appearance of Donna’s family, a millionaire wannabe collaborator, a nuclear attack, a major sub-plot about cloning and an ecological moral and it’s fair to say this two parter is a little…busy. Just as he did with his mammoth shopping list from last year (‘The Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks’) Russell gives the job over to his right-hand woman Helene Raynor, the unsung hero of the first two seasons who helped edit and shape Russell’s own stories into a finished product. By now she’s as steeped in Who folklore as anybody and has had a crash-course in pacing and juggling plot elements so we end up with a well-paced story where lots seem to be happening and a clever denouement where, rather than kicking their heels as per usual, everyone is phoning The Doctor up for advice at once. What’s really odd about this story, though, is that despite mixing so many ideas new and old we end up, perhaps fittingly, with a ‘clone’ story that, more by accident than design (Raynor still wasn’t that up in folklore yet) ends up almost exactly like another ‘busy’ story, ‘The Invasion’. There’s UNIT – check! – fighting an enemy (Sontarons standing, well stomping in for The Cybermen) – check! – with a millionaire accomplice the Doctor can talk to – check! – and a plan to infiltrate Earth using a technological gadget pretty much everyone uses but very people actually understand how they work (only instead of transistor radios we’ve got satnavs). All we’re missing are the hiding away in the sewers. Luckily ‘The Invasion’ is one of those stories worth doing again with a modern setting and it makes sense that we should get a showdown between the two most ‘militaristic’ forces in classic Dr Who, The Sontarons and UNIT (it seems odd, in retrospect, that even though the potato-headed ones’ first two adventures are right in the heart of the UNIT era they were the ‘anomalies’, the adventures away from a contemporary setting and into time and space). Unfortunately with so much else going on we don’t really get the showdown and full-on battle a script like this would seem to dictate: we’re too busy coping with the soppy brat, the cloning sub-plot, the choking car gas and ‘evil Martha’, plot elements that keep getting in the way of what should be the one straightforward punch-up in the show’s history. Delaying is part of the art of storytelling in Dr Who, holding plot elements back from coalescing until a big finale, but somehow we never quite get that: instead ‘Stratagem’ is a story of exquisite build-up that never leads to the pay-off it deserves.  

Some of these elements work better than the others too it has to be said. First up, what’s happened to UNIT? They used to be Dr Who’s family, well, unit – the Human face of soldiers who, more stories than not, understood that aliens could be benevolent and that they were there to protect the Earth from harm, not go on the attack. This lot aren’t family but strangers, just nasty boy soldiers, without an ounce of compassion who couldn’t organise a piss up in a Guinness factory after defeating the Cybermen there. Even The Doctor bemoans that Captain Mace is a poor substitute for the Brigadier (even though he pretty much does everything the Brig would do ironically:  so much so I do wonder if they tried to get Nicholas Courtney out of retirement for this gig originally. We don’t know, but we do know that they had to re-write a Sarah Jane Adventure ‘The Enemy Of the Bane’ later in the year to take his appearance down from the full story to one scene). They’ve also been forcibly renamed: one of the promotional ‘tricks’ when Dr Who came back was a fake website discussing The Doctor’s past appearances, credited as usual to ‘The United Nations Intelligence Taskforce’. The UN went ballistic: how dare the BBC associate them with a fictional armed forces that fought aliens. People might get the wrong idea! They were confused when it was pointed out to them that the moniker had been used since 1968 and never been a problem but, to show goodwill, the website was changed so that ‘UNIT’ could stand for anything. This time Russell makes the ‘UN’ part stand for ‘Unified’, which rather messes up the neatness of the acronym but is as good a replacement as any (older fans know what it really stands for anyway). Whatever the name though Raynor, on Russell’s orders, doesn’t quite know how to pitch them: much as he might love the Pertwee era the showrunner always admitted to being uneasy that the Doctor, a force for peace for most of the modern series, should ever have thrown his lot in with the armed forces. It was a problem writers at the time shared too (especially Malcolm Hulke, who was forever trying to make The Doctor question where his alliances really were). So the writers try and do the same here, having The Doctor criticise and belittle the military mind, but that’s the wrong ‘fit’ for this story: if you’re an ‘oldie’ who’s fond of the UNIT and know that they were there as the last defence against a vulnerable Earth then this modern lot are a pale facsimile who just don’t ‘get’ it at all. While if you’re a ‘newbie’ UNIT are just a plastic substitute for ‘Torchwood’ without the emotions (mind you, did any TV series ever have a cast as full of emotions like Torchwood?!) This lot need sorting out – goodness knows how Kate Lethbridge Stewart got UNIT in line before their next appearance (in ‘The Power Of Three’) but they work far better then.

One of the ways this story tries to ‘comment’ on the idea of an army is what they do to Martha, only they mess this element up to. Now I’m one of those fans who was really pleased to see her again – Martha is my favourite ‘modern’ companion until Bill comes along and the end of her story in season three was a bit rushed (my theory is the original plan was to have her along for the ride for series four too, until Catherine Tate made it clear how much she wanted to come back). But she’s in the wrong story. Martha’s whole arc has been about how she’s moved on from mooning over The Doctor and become an independent woman. Great, perfect, just how it should be! But somehow that ‘independence’ has meant her joining… Torchwood (she does all the ‘physical jobs’ in season two their Doctor Owen would be doing, had he not become a walking zombie who can’t interact with objects and technically dead on the paperwork). But Owen was perfect for Torchwood – self-obsessed and arrogant (like all the characters barring Tosh), with the confidence to defy orders when necessary. Martha is his polar opposite: her strength is her empathy and kindness, all the things they tries to give to Gwen before toughening her up. Martha does a good job of not becoming ‘one of them’ though, she manages to concentrate on the smaller pictures of the individuals hurt while letting the others get on with saving the universe. So having her join UNIT ought to be more of the same, only Russell decides this is a good opportunity to tell us how the armed forces change people instead, so Martha becomes hard and tough instead, obeying orders instantly even when she’s ‘normal’. The idea is that Donna is meant to be alarmed, to see that travelling with The Doctor isn’t always sweetness and light, that his companions can end up soldiers who don’t know how to stop fighting. Except that this element is muddled by the fact that Martha and Donna actually get on: you’re all primed for another Rose-Sarah Jane catfight that doesn’t come, as instead the pair gang up on The Doctor and tease him mercilessly, which is great fun but rather at odds with the idea of Martha being a hard-nosed soldier now. The sad truth, too, is that Freema Agyeman is a lot happier playing sweet and kind than she is grumpy and mean and her performance is easily her weakest across her sixteen episodes. The last-minute decision to have flashes of Rose everywhere this season (not just ‘Partners In Crime’  and ‘Midnight’) also meant the audience were talking about her (poor Martha’s overshadowed by Rose again – and she was only on screen for a second!) which doesn’t do either character any favours. Frustratingly they bang on about Martha being engaged to Tom (from ‘Last Of The Timelords’) in this story, which is odd in itself given the plot arc about Martha being independent and not needing anyone (she’s swapped one Doctor for another). Which is worse when he’s never mentioned again and Martha appears to be dating Mickey Smith by ‘The End Of Time’ out of nowhere (though it’s really a chance to combine two goodbyes in one in Russell T’s big farewell. Given actor Tom Ellis’ other famous role of the period, perhaps Miranda Hart took him back?) And then they throw in the ‘cloning’ plot, with Martha an evil Sontaron version of herself, although we don’t quite know where this starts and don’t notice a difference until episode two when the camera keeps giving close-ups of her solemn face, though presumably it was earlier. So has being with UNIT turned Martha into a monster? Or was it this week’s monsters?

Talking of which…mercifully The Sontarons are something this story gets very much right.  When the trailer for series three came out a lot of fans got very excited at the sight of marching Judoon in helmets, figuring they had to be Sontarons and then were a bit disappointed when they weren’t. After seeing such an outpouring of love having The Sontarons (property of the BBC, unlike the Daleks and Cybermen and a few others, so easy to negotiate the rights for) in the series proper was an obvious thing to do. Despite their small number of appearances in the original series (four) and their even smaller stature, the Sontarons are big in the Dr Who world for lots of good reasons. Whereas the Daleks are ruthless xenophobes, the Cybermen creepy adaptable survivalists, the Ice Warriors noble strategists and The Master a madman in a suit, the Sontarons are more like the sort of monster race seen in other scifi series, a relentless army always up for a fight who see the rest of the universe as being beneath them. This being Dr Who, though, the joke is that they don’t look like natural warriors at all, tending to be shorter and stouter than most and looking like the kind of kid the playground bully picked on rather than the bully themselves (it helps that they have an impressive arsenal of weapons. Who would win in a massive DW alien fight? Well, probably the Daleks but I’m putting the Sontarons through to at least the semi-finals). They think they’re civilised because they’re so technologically adept but the joke, at least in their first appearance ‘The Time Warrior’, is that by using the technology and progress purely for fighting then they’re no better than the barbaric cultures of Britain’s Medieval past. Thankfully all those past elements are kept and, while I’ll go to my grave criticising the changes made to the Cybermen, Silurians and Sea Devils, The Sontaron re-design from Neil Gorton really suits them, so convincing that Catherine Tate admits to working with them for two days without realising that they were actors (though, admittedly, this sort of thing happens to Catherine rather a lot – she’s one of the few Dr Who companions more scatterbrained in real life than their characters). It helps that the prosthetics whizzkid remembered them from his own childhood, remembering the Medieval setting of ‘warrior’ and his anticipation that, rather than an alien, they would turn out to be a ‘black knight’ (more of this when they start riding horses in ‘War Of the Sontarons’). The suit of armour emphasises their stomping, the helmet keeps the ‘old’ gag that their head is the same shape as their helmets for a whole new generation and they even have the delightful addition of a war ‘hakka’ chant which really suits their character. For while other monsters ‘play’ at war like football (throwing in a few nasty tackles when the ball is in someone else’s court) – with the exception of The Ice Warriors of course, who play it like Ice Hockey - and The Doctor plays it more like cricket (by the book), The Sontarons are rugby players, short and squat with cauliflower ears who are happy to pummel the opposition to the floor in an outright fight. It helps that they’re well cast: while no one can compare to Kevin Lindsay a returning Christopher Ryan is much more comfortable than he was playing Kiv in ‘Mindwarp’ and a young lad fresh out of drama school getting his big break, Dan Starkey, is already stealing the show so hard he’ll be the show’s go to Sontaron for decades to come. A third, playing a Sontaron extra, is Christopher Reynolds, who appeared in Dr Who a full forty years earlier as one of the children in ‘The Mind Robber’. This is the Sontarons’ first appearance in modern Who when it actually has a budget  and we see a lot of their culture on screen that had only been talked about before: the actual cloning process and the sort of mass army the old Dr Who budgets could only dream of, while in retrospect they’re pretty neatly in the middle between the humourless foes of old and the comedy heroes of the future.

Unfortunately the way the Sontarons are used isn’t so strong. Take that title, ‘stratagem’ – that’s the last thing the Sontarons should be doing. If this was ‘the Sontaron Invasion’ it would make much more sense! The Sontarons are an army of clones, unafraid to lose men because they can be easily replaced. While many lazy reviewers yawned and said that this episode was jumping on the ‘cloning’ bandwagon, they failed to recognise that Dr Who, while not quite inventing the idea of using it first in science-fiction, was very much hanging out the driver’s cabin and using it early. That’s why we get a plot about using the Earth as a cloning centre and that rather odd idea of Martha being cloned in the first place and disrupting the Human plans of retaliation. Except…That’s not very heroic is it? Sontarons don’t skulk they invade and being a cloned race means that if they lose a few men then never mind. Admittedly they had similar ideas in ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ (where they tried to find out human weaknesses in preparation for a full-scale invasion) but that’s an aberration explained away, in my imagination at least, by Styre being on work experience or patted on the head and given a deliberately simple mission even he couldn’t mess up (until the 4^th Doctor arrives anyway). This is slightly different: a full-scale invasion in order to better fight the Rutans (still no sight of them in battle against each other? Even with the bigger effects budget modern Who has? Boo…) for which they need…Earth. To clone Sontarons that they can obviously already do perfectly fine. Why? It was established in ‘The Time warrior’ how different Earth is to Sontar (not that the planet had a name back then), with much weaker gravity for one thing. While Sontarons are a hardy bunch. Why not just take over a planet nearer the Rutans and have a big ol’ fight with the chance to die gloriously in battle? As for cloning Martha as a sneaky pre-emptive tactical attack, that seems dangerously like being un-honourable. The Sontarons have everything this story…except a real reason for being there. It’s as if someone told Helen Raynor The Sontarons had the same back story as The Cybermen and were survivalists looking to divide and conquer.

Especially when you throw in the element of satnavs: tampering with technology to terraform Earth. During the course of the story the gas the satnavs emit is kind of explained as ‘clone-feed’, the thing needed by the Sontarons to create lots of little Sontarons for battle, but it’s never really explained what this gas does or why Earth is the best place to develop it. And why put it in a car instead of just gassing the planet? It’s all such a Cybermen thing to do. They have no interest in Humans, their lives or their vehicles, so how do they even know about them? (Especially given that of their four appearances one took place in the Middle Ages with horse and cart, one was in the far future without any vehicles at all, one was set on Gallifrey and one was in the outskirts of Seville that didn’t have any cars either on screen). They’re not a monster inclined to research, like the Cybermen or Kraals. Realistically they’d dismiss vehicles as some puny weak Human device because their legs aren’t strong enough; utilising them to kill Humans by gassing them is more something a sneaky, under-handed species like The Zygons or The Great Intelligence would do. So how did they ever come up with this plan? Which is a shame because, had it been a Cyber plan, it would have been a great one. Part of classic Dr Who’s remit, especially when Bob Holmes gets going in the 1970s, is to make the ordinary extraordinary, to take a  piece of technology that Humans don’t quite understand and which suddenly seem to be everywhere and make it ‘alien’. Satnavs are perfect for this and even more so back in 2008 when they were semi ‘new’ and not yet perfected, leading to stories every other week in the papers about a driver put in danger when their satnavs led them into a canal or onto a railway line because somebody updating the technology goofed somewhere (a lot of American fans were confused by this so it’s worth pointing out British roads are very different; most of them are old, very few of them are straight and the vast majority are tiny lanes rather than main roads so these aren’t major mistakes but minor ones). Putting your life into the hands of technology and your trust in an artificial voice that’s in that eerie halfway point between not being quite Human and not being fully artificial, is exactly the sort of thing Holmes would be writing about if he were alive in 2008, as logical a thing for the modern series to build a plot around as holiday camps and airports in the 1960s, plastic in the 1970s and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Not least because they went from being nowhere to being in almost every car almost overnight. It’s certainly an improvement by Raynor, who was handed a potential subplot about chimneys pumping poison out into the atmosphere but figured a lot of children in modern high rise buildings (such as the Tylers) with central heating wouldn’t have a chimney and so wouldn’t be scared in quite the same way. Unfortunately even there the plot comes apart slightly: millionaire whizzkid Luke Rattigan’s invention really is quite incredible, bordering on impossible. How else can you explain a tiny device which, when clicked into your car, has the power to over-ride the window and door controls, can overpower the engine and dismantle the brakes? With that sort of technology his allies should be dismantling nuclear missiles and enemy spaceships without leading the comfort of their Sontaron sofas.  

Ah yes, Luke Rattigan. The public schoolboy who thinks he’s superior to everyone and gets a deserved comeuppance, is a true DW villain, ignorant of the beauty and possibilities of the world in his quest for more of the money and power that kept him secluded and lonely – it’s just that he’s the wrong collaborator to work with The Sontarons. They’re a universe apart, in so many ways, yet both similarly stubborn, arrogant and undiplomatic. How this union lasted beyond the opening credits without one betraying the other is beyond me. However I happen to be (re)writing this review the same week that Elon Musk is having his spectacular falling out with Donald Trump and suddenly it’s all clear to me. The arrogance of money! The brains that can invent stuff but are too thick to see that bullying people won’t make them like you! The ignorance and obliviousness that allow people to take advantage of you! Rattigan’s followers, all bright youngsters dressed in funny robes, even look like Musk’s DOGE team of teenagers busy meddling in political affairs they don’t understand (I’m amazed one isn’t called ‘Big Balls’). All while working for a squat grumpy fellow egotist with an itchy trigger finger bald head (most of Trump’s hair is a combover). We even have a plot that revolves around killer cars that nobody wants but people feel pressurised into driving. While we all know that Musk threw humanity under a bus for power, which then got removed when his ally didn’t need him anymore. It would be as tragic story, all done out of arrogance that he was ‘special’, were Rattigan not so responsible for his own downfall and had he not burned all his bridges on his way letting a monster take over. Even Rattigan’s tantrum ‘but I’m cleverer than you!’ is almost exactly the tweet spat going on between the two. It’s a quite scary bit of fortune-telling, even though at the time of transmission Rattigan just seemed like a less believable re-write of Sarah Jane’s adopted son Luke: both share the same intelligence and specialist knowledge but the same obliviousness where it comes to people and emotions. He’s also no substitute for Tobias Vaughan in ‘enemy collaborator’ stakes and is so obviously painted from the first as the ‘fall guy’ it’s no surprise to anyone but him when things start going wrong. Even so, it gives the script a useful conclusion, with Rattigan ‘solving’ things and blowing up The Sontarons so The Doctor doesn’t have to, a worthy end to a story about the dangers of working with the military (and the one place where this story improves on ‘The Invasion’).

It’s a form of karmic justice actually quite rare for Russell’s first run of Who. For instance, Sylvia Noble is crueller than ever to her daughter in this story. There are hints that she’s not so much angry with Donna as worried about her, especially after she ‘disappeared’ (actually having adventures in the Tardis) but you can see why her daughter doesn’t pick up on this. Part of this story, indeed part of this season’s arc, is about Donna being so much more important than she believes she is, until by season’s end she’s the single most important person in the universe. But Donna never gets that showdown with her mum, never has that moment of softness where Sylvia admits how it was all a front. In an episode about army generals giving orders that do people harm, it’s an obvious parallel to make. What’s more, Donna won’t ever have that and even after her mum knows the ‘truth’ it’s one she can never speak out (for…reasons. See ‘Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’). Admittedly that’s closer to real life, but it’s so outside the realms of how television and especially Dr Who normally works that it’s unfathomable that Donna never gets the chance to prove her worth here, where her mum can see it. This is a strong story for Donna though: you feel for her throughout this story even more than normal, her fright that her family might be in danger and she won’t be able to stop it, her return as semi-conquering hero still treated like dirt, her worry when Martha talks about how being with The Doctor changed her, Donna’s loneliness when she goes back to the Tardis and gets cut from everyone, left to do the Doctor’s donkeywork against The Sontarons while afraid and with her confidence as whacked as hard as the Sontaron she hits with the Tardis hammer (a last minute script substitute for a shoe, the hammer hastily written into the beginning of the script – and then never seen again). It’s a strong story for Wilf too, replacing dad Geoff at a late stage of the first script when the actor fell ill, filling in a nice lot of character details. Though the oldest in the family and a former soldier himself, Sylvia infantilises him too – but he gets ‘quiet victories’, sneaking away to eat pork pies against her diet when she’s not looking and rooting for his beloved grand-daughter. It’s the family that works best in this story, even though it’s meant to be about the army and while there’s lots of Atmos plot, but it’s the Atmosphere that works best. The best scene is where all of this come together, as a terrified Donna rings Wilf up Sylvia and Wilf to effectively say goodbye, where mum gets cross and Gramps gets sad, before asking how one man can possibly ‘save’ everyone (even though in the end it’s Luke acting off a Doctory idea).  

There’s a number of injokes too, such as the cute line about The Doctor not remembering when the UNIT stories took place (the 1970s! or was it the 1980s?), given that no two writers could ever decide when those stories were set. There’s a classic bit of Dr Who budget cutting when the money ran out before the Atmos device in the jeep could be blown up, but as it was so essential to the plot it got kept in – and turned into a comedy moment when the jeep doesn’t go bang as expected. Very clever! And another great injoke where The Doctor is handed a gas mask and pretend to be ‘The Empty Child’ (in the middle of a nuclear evacuation. Priorities Doctor!) Perhaps the best of all is the subtlest: when Robert Holmes invented the Sontarons he thought they should be pronounced ‘Sontar-Ons’ with the emphasis on the last syllable. But Kevin Lindsay, playing the first two Sontarons seen on screen, thought it sounded odd and pronounced it ‘Son-Tar-On’. The director intervened and Lindsay barked back ‘but I am one, I know how to say my own species name!’ Here Donna pronounces it the Holmes way and everyone keeps correcting her that she’s wrong (though technically she’s the only one saying it right!) There’s also a more obvious injoke, that Kirsty Wark now seems to be doing Trinity Well’s job commenting on the news!
One other problem is that this story isn’t ‘about’ anything. Well, there’s a theme of trust and betrayal and the moral debate about whether someone with the moral compass of The Doctor should ever rely on weapons, but these are small fry by Dr Who standards. A lot of people say that about the past Sontaron stories too, but they actually had a lot to say: ‘The Time Warrior’ is about the cycle of aggression with different technology but the same drive across time, ‘The Invasion Of Time’ asks big questions about the suitability of people in power and how far you can go bad to do good and ‘The Two Doctors’ did its best to turn every fan vegetarian.  There’s none of that in ‘Stratagem’. And yet there nearly was: Russell’s original plan was to make this story an ecological plea, to make us re-think whether we need as many cars on the road when we’re endangering our planet (a moral that, as a lifelong pedestrian, I would happily get behind). The first draft had lots of references to how the Sontarons were damaging our fragile ozone layer and set the sky alight – until somebody pointed out to Russell that the hole in the ozone wasn’t a very big problem anymore. It’s a very Dr Who story actually: twenty years of drip-feeding alarm and protests into the public conscious meant that it became in industry’s best interests to start manufacturing aerosols that were ‘good for the environment’ and the politicians realised it was a vote winner. So laws were changed and while the problem isn’t gone the hole is shrinking and back where it was somewhere around the time ‘The Two Doctors’ was on air. That’s a Dr Who story waiting to happen, a ‘Peladon’ tale of how countries really can get their act together and work as a team, but alas there wasn’t room for that story as well.    

That’s a lot to juggle, then, and ‘Stratagem’ drops as many balls as it catches. Like ‘Daleks In Manhattan’, it’s a decent script with a decent monster that just doesn’t work paired together, putting them in a setting that makes no sense and then having to build up a plot around that’s bananas if you stop and think about it. However at least this time the plot is so involving and the action so pacy that you don’t notice the plotholes as much. ‘Stratagem’ does a good job of bringing things to a climax midway through episode two, with the clever device (surely a Raynorism) of having the companions all phone The Doctor up at the same time while he’s already trying to cope with a missile attack. It really brings home just how many people rely on him and how much is resting on The Doctor’s shoulders. David tenant gives another typically bravura performance, running the whole range of emotions effortlessly, cycling from joy, despair, comedy, anger and frustration in quick succession. There are a lot of strong and memorable moments in this story: the cliffhanger when Wilf is trapped in a car with a Sontaron-activated sat nav taking it over and gassing him, with no Doctor around to help; the quieter moments when returning companion Martha gets to compare notes with Donna about how being in the Tardis changed her life, which makes both of them uncomfortable (she’s a lot tougher than she ever was as a regular, scaring Donna with what might happen to her, while Martha is a little spooked how easily someone else can fall into her shoes and be swept away by the adventure of it all); Donna’s attempts to go back to normal with her family and sensing how much she’s changed and how little they have. Especially Donna’s childhood nickname ‘The Little General’, which makes such a point about Donna learning to give orders from her mother, shouting at things she’s afraid of and how The Doctor’s learned to take this part of her character away a little – and her fears after meeting Martha that it might come back (Really of course The Doctor heals the character flaws, which are different in polar opposites Martha and Donna, creating independence in one and kindness in the other; I suspect these are Russell T additions these scenes, saying a lot in a few words that other writers of drama series would never think to include but which make his character seem real); Donna’s lonely wander through the Sontaron spaceship. It’s just that these little moments don’t quite coalesce into a full story, which needs to be either an episode longer or have one plot element less. The result is a story that isn’t the greatest journey in the world but neither is it the car-crash it might have been. Sontar-h/A minus!
Oh and p.s. be warned: presumably 02 didn’t know that Dr Who had used the name when they launched their ‘Atmos’ mobile phone, with a tagline in one advert about technology that was ‘out of this world’ for good measure. As far as I know it doesn’t gas the recipient, but I’m sure I can’t be the only fan who decided to skip that make…

POSITIVES + The way this story looks. Dr Who’s latest stately home used for location filming and standing in for Rattigan’s estate is Margram Country Park in Port Talbot, an adapted monastery now owned by the council and open to the public. It’s gorgeous and exactly the sort of place a dude like Rattigan would hang out, half traditional and half modern, not because he appreciates how beautiful it is but because he wants people to appreciate that he can afford it. I suspect Elon Musk’s house is pretty close to this. Probably a lot of Conservative MP’s houses too. Most of the episode then takes place in a disused shampoo/air conditioner factory in Pontypool which, ironically given they’re a bald race, works well as the Sontaron base too.

NEGATIVES – The clone subplot as a whole isn’t working, but especially the way it’s done, with an effect that looked more retro than any 1970s Sontaron story even in 2008. Usually the one thing better about filming in the modern series compared to the old is how the monster ‘actors’  are treated, but not this time. Kevin Linsday, who’s weak heart problems were accelerated by being stuck in Sontaron costumes, would have looked on enviously at the modern prosthetics but pitied poor actor Ruari Mears who was in the odd looking ‘clone’ suit. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear and had to undergo a full body wax in order for the suit to fit. Even the cruel ‘Sontaron Experiment’ didn’t do this to anyone! Pity poor Freema, too, who had to be dunked in the tank of gloop and timed her entry wrong, accidentally taking a big mouthful and choking on the first take, then having to do it all over again.   

I’d also like to single out the Doctor’s ‘intruder window’ pun as the single gag of the entire series.

BEST QUOTE: Staal: ‘The bravery of idiots is bravery nonetheless’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS:  ’The Last Sontaron’ (2008) was the story that kick-started the second series of ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ and marks the only time a ‘classic’ monster was in the series in amongst the newbies like the Judoon and Slitheen. The story is an actual bona fide sequel to the main series and was broadcast roughly three months after ‘Stratagem’, with Kaagh The Slayer – the only Sontaron survivor from ‘Poison Sky’ -  intent on taking revenge out on Earth. He really is a most unlucky alien, given that his ship happens to land in a forest very near to Bannerman Road and the home of a former foe. Sarah Jane is astonished to come face to face with her third Sontaron after all this time and her reaction of horror, while her gang reckons he looks like a squat pushover by their standards, drives a lot of the story. Otherwise it’s a typical Sontaron story of vents, both the probic one at the back of the Sontaron’s neck and the ventilation shaft Luke and Maria crawl through to get help, in one of the simpler and more generic Sarah Jane stories. To be fair to writer Phil Ford, though, he had a mammoth task: Yasmin Paige left the series rather suddenly and she and her dad (the first ‘Alan’ in Dr Who!) had to be written out properly in a story that gave her all the good bits without killing her off (which wouldn’t have gone down well in a kiddies series, though the series comes very close to killing off Sarah herself more than once) while the series’ manifesto had to be hammered home to viewers who hadn’t seen series one. Treat it as a period light-hearted series opener (like ‘Smith and Jones’ or ‘Partners In Crime’) and there’s a lot to enjoy, while Anthony O’Donnell makes for an excellent Sontaron.  

A sort of crossover between Dr Who and ‘Gardener’s World’, ‘The Taking Of Chelsea 426’ (2009) is a 10^th Doctor from his ‘gap year’ when he travelled without a companion and visits the most unlikely places while trying to avoid certain death. One of them is the Chelsea Flower Festival: surely, you think, nothing can go wrong there – maybe a Krynoid or a Vervoid or two but nothing else. But this is the future, with an entire planet that’s a bit like the Eden project that Humans have created on Saturn. Who’s the last person you’d expect to take over this world? That’s right, the clod-hopping Sontarons. Did someone confuse them with real potatoes?! Memorable tag line from the back of the book: ‘The Doctor meets a deadly foe – and they’re not here to arrange flowers’. I’ll say! This is certainly a unique twist on the usual ’base under siege’ story as we’ve never had one on a plant-filed base before… David Llewellyn’s book is a real oddball: the premise is one of the silliest in the series and yet it’s treated with a sombre and serious tone in keeping with the run of stories towards the end of the 10^th Doctor’s run when he feels his time is running short and doubts his every move. The Saturn colony is well observed and The Sontarons come over better than they did on TV, while you even get to see them battling The Rutans at last, though as is the way with a lot of these books there’s not enough room for the plot to breathe and you can probably see where the book is going from the minute The Sontarons and their three green fingers turn up.  

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