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

 

 Despite their small number of appearances in the original series (four) and their even smaller stature the Sontarons are big in the DW 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 DW, though, the joke is that they don’t look like natural warriors at all, tending to be shorter and stouter than the rest 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 aline 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. There’s a lot of dramatic tension to get out of that in the old series, particularly the idea of a clone race who are unstoppable in numbers rather than as individuals, and a lot of comedy too from their straightforward nature, something that modern Who has leant towards in their growing number of appearances (mostly, I suspect, because of how naturally funny an actor Dan Starkey is, the go-to Sontaron of the 21^st century). This is their first appearance in modern Who 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 DW budgets could only dream of. Unlike the modern Cybermen the Sontarons look really good too, with better masks than before but the same classic joke that their heads actually fill their big round space helmets. The Sontarons have everything this story…except a real reason for being there. The main plot centres around one of those annoying millionaire yuppy brats DW like putting on screen every few series and car sat navs gone wonky; both worthy plots and very DW plots in their own right but neither seem like an obvious fit for the opportunistic and straightforward Sontarons, being too subtle and sly. During the course of the story the gas is kind of explained as ‘clone-feed’, the thing needed by the Sontarons to create lots of little Sontarons for battle, but its 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? I mean, how do Sontarons even know about cars? There weren’t any in their other invasions of Earth (‘The Time Warrior’ came too early and ‘Sontaron experiment’ too late, while we didn’t see any in the countryside of Spain in ‘The Two Doctors’ – equally Timelords didn’t have cars in ‘Invasion Of Time’) and they’re not the sort of alien race to do meticulous research like the Kraals or the Silurians. 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. The sat nav plot is a good one though (sat navs suddenly arrived out of nowhere a few years before this story went out and led to us trusting our lives to new technology we couldn’t explain, something so outside our natural day to day knowledge it could quite plausibly be the work of aliens – therefore as logical a thing for the modern DW series to build a plot around as holiday camps and airports in the 1960s, plastic in the 1970s and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s), it just doesn’t belong in a story with the Sontarons. Similarly 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. There are though 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 (I suspect these are RTD 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); Christopher Ryan’s General Straal is a worthy Sontaron leader, every bit as well written and well played as the great Sontaron leaders before him (certainly it’s a lot better than his first appearance as a sort of space slug in ‘Mindwarp’) and basically any scene with David Tennant shines brightly (whose on top manic shouty pouty form in this one). Like Helen Raynor’s other DW work though (‘Daleks In Manhattan’) it’s a script that wastes a decent monster by putting them in a setting that makes no sense and then having to build up a plot around it which also makes no sense if you stop and think about it and a second two parter which loses its way badly in the second half after a promising start. All that said, though, this is still a good little story with some great little moments - it just lacks the greatness of DW at its best. Sontar-h/A minus!

+ DW’s latest stately home used for location filming 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, 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.

- 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 are 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. What’s worse is that they’re in the process of doing the same to Martha, whose become hard and cold, not to mention brainwashed into taking orders. Where’s the Brigadier? Or Bambera? This lot need sorting out – goodness knows how Kate Lethbridge Stewart got UNIT in line before their next appearance.