Harry -
As we kicked off the DoctorDonna season, I was interested to see what my reaction would be when we got around to this two-parter.
"The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky" had an asterisk stuck to it virtually from the moment it was announced. Helen Raynor was the writer who gave us "Daleks in Manhattan" the season before -- a story that ranks very low among Whovians, us included. There were a lot of things that went wrong with that one, but Raynor bore the brunt of it. There's a section in The Writer's Tale where Russell T. Davies recounts the night when that story was first broadcast and received instant condemnation online. Really nasty stuff, as only a fandom could deliver. Raynor was shaken by the experience, but to his credit RTD backed her up and asked her back for another story. At the time I remember being wary of another story coming from this writer. When it first aired, I remember not being overly impressed, but not feeling as negative as I had over the Dalek story.
That's why I was looking forward to watching it again a decade later. Do you remember any of the buildup to this story?
Sarah -
I have to admit that don’t remember much about the anticipation of this story. While "Daleks in Manhattan" is my all-time, least-favorite Doctor Who story, "The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky" is a solid story. It’s not the best of the season, but it’s far from the worst.
Perhaps the story’s biggest weakness is its lack of originality. There are few tropes left unturned in this two-parter, but I still enjoyed it because a good trope never bothers me!
Harry -
I seem to say this a lot, but this one felt like a Pertwee-era throwback. Once again, we see a collision of alien invaders and rogue technology, with an action-heavy TARDIS team coming to the rescue. And UNIT!
Sarah -
I think you’re right. It’s very Pertwee-ish and that’s probably what I like about it.
The story begins with journalist Jo Nakashima being thrown out of the Rattigan Academy. She drives away in her car, which is fitted with ATMOS (Atmospheric Omission System), a device that reduces carbon emissions and includes a GPS. Jo is suspicious of ATMOS, which has been developed at the Rattigan Academy, founded by Luke Rattigan. While she’s trying to contact UNIT, Jo’s car drives itself into a river, where it sinks with her inside.
Harry -
I wonder how many GPS-skeptics watched that and went "I knew it!"
Sarah -
Right? This is not the first Doctor Who story to take a common item and make it terrifying. This trope will reach its zenith in the Steven Moffat era, but RTD has a strong record of making us question technology. It’s hard to believe this story predates the smartphone era, but a GPS system was definitely a fancy thing to have in 2008. And who wouldn’t want a device that reduces carbon emissions? That said, I was really happy not to have a GPS after watching this story.
Harry -
I'll stick with paper maps and/or my uncanny sense of direction, and I don't care who knows it.
Sarah -
If we’re not already knee-deep in tropes, bring on Rattigan. (Some signaling going on with that name? I just referred to him as Ratt in my notes.) Oh, look, another stupid human who thinks he’s going to partner up with aliens and come out ahead. He’s Tobias Vaughn all over again -- but without the charisma.
Harry -
I remember HATING Rattigan the first time around. So obnoxious and condescending. The only redeeming thing about him were his cool Pumas.
But this time around, with the Doctor's helpful observations, I saw the struggling smart kid beneath the bratty exterior. Still, he was woefully over his head with the aliens and all-too-willing to sell out the planet to chase his own utopian visions. So yeah, I still hated him.
Sarah -
He’s one of those characters with whom you can almost empathize when they get their comeuppance, which is definitely on its way.
Harry -
Amid all of this scene-setting, RTD and Raynor treat us to a fantastic mid-season reunion. A phone rings inside the TARDIS, and it's Martha. She calls the Doctor back to contemporary Earth, and the TARDIS lands outside the ATMOS factory. No sooner have the Doctor and Martha welcomed each other, and Donna and the Martha immediately struck up a companions friendship, than the scene is interrupted by a UNIT raid.
Sarah -
Martha and Donna immediate becoming besties is flat out my favorite thing in this story. The Doctor almost looks disappointed that they’re not fighting over him. Big Finish should develop a Donna and Martha series. I would be all over that.
Harry -
How about UNIT! Oh, it was a thrill to see a 21st century UNIT roll into action. Very butch, with heavy vehicles and waves of troopers in black uniform swarming all over the facility and a mobile command centre overseeing the assault. Long gone are the days when Benton and three other grunts would charge an alien menace by themselves.
Sarah -
If they still had Benton, UNIT wouldn’t need all that gear to fight the aliens. There’s something to be said for homespun.
Harry -
With the Brigadier in Peru, the UNIT operation is headed by Colonel Mace, a very by-the-book officer who greets the Doctor with a salute. The Doctor cringes at this, but Donna happily requests a salute of her own. Throughout the story, the Doctor and Mace will keep up some back and forth heckling over each other's ideologies. One of the things that felt overdone in this story was the Doctor repeatedly whinging about salutes and guns. He's right of course, but his "OH DON'T SALUTE" and "WHAT DID I SAY ABOUT GUNS" lines were repetitive. Mace, meanwhile was unable to break from the military code ingrained in his own personality. The story bounced along at such a rapid pace that there was no room to explore his character more fully, nor for he and the Doctor to reach more than a superficial understanding of one another.
Sarah -
While the Doctor is faffing about with Mace, Donna puts her temp skills to work and discovers that there has never been a sick day at the ATMOS factory. Things are getting curiouser and curiouser.
Harry -
I love how Donna's HR knowledge comes in handy throughout this season. It turns out there's a lot of weird stuff going down at the ATMOS facility. The Doctor discovers that while ATMOS is carbon-friendly, it is also capable of turning 800 million cars into weapons at the disposal of whomever controls the ATMOS devices. We the viewers also discover -- through the explorations of two UNIT soldiers -- that there's some kind of homunculus being grown inside a bubbling tank down in the basement.
The soldiers' presence triggers an alarm. The aliens behind the scheme decide to show themselves. Their leader beams down to confront the soldiers, and we are given our first glimpse of RTD's 21st century Sontarans in the person of General Staal.
Sarah -
Christopher “Mike Thecoolperson” Ryan is back, UNIT b*tches! Twenty-two years after his triumph in Mindwarp, Lord Kiv is here to give us Sontaran realness. I wouldn’t call it pulling for the baddies, but this Trial of Time Lord fan girl will always have her biases.
Harry -
Ryan's Doctor Who resume spans the classic era to the Tennant years, but he's always been submerged under layers of alien makeup. Hopefully he'll get to play a human someday... unless he prefers wild aliens.
Sarah -
Still, Staal and I can never be friends because he’s used the UNIT soldiers to lure our dear Martha Jones to the basement where she’s cloned onto the creature in the tank!
Harry -
Sontarans doing Sontaran things. I did like how the New Who Sontarans were given fresh uniforms and the quickest of backstories without getting bogged down in details. One of the weaknesses of the Classic Who Sontarans was that, considering they are a clone race, their appearance and voices kept changing from story to story. And I'm almost positive that they were made to look like giants in one of the classic stories.
Here, they really play up their militaristic imperatives. Staal can barely contain his lust for war.
Sarah -
Meanwhile, after a chat with Martha in which she reveals that her family suffered because she didn’t tell them about her relationship with the Doctor, Donna decides she needs to check in on Wilf and Sylvia. When she tells the Doctor she’s going home, he goes into a long spiel thanking her for traveling with him and telling her how much their time together meant to him. Enjoying the moment, Donna lets him wind himself up before he realizes that she’s only planning to go home for a visit. Tennant and Tate play this scene perfectly.
Harry -
"You dumbo." That was brilliantly done.
Sarah -
While Donna pops off, the Doctor heads to the Rattigan Academy with Ross, a UNIT private.
Harry -
At this point in the RTD era, I'm not going to bother wondering why yet another companion mum got painted as a negative character. Wilf and Donna are thick as thieves and she tells him all about space, aliens, and her adventures with the Doctor, while Sylvia is a big ball of misery in the background. Whatever.
Sarah -
It’s one of my least-favorite aspects of his era.
Harry -
The Doctor's confrontation with the Ratt having gone nowhere, and having escaped a near-fatal act of vehicular death by ATMOS, he joins the Nobles just in time for the part one cliffhanger. Their cover blown, the Sontarans trigger poison gas to pour out of every ATMOS-equipped vehicle on Earth. Wilf is trapped inside the family car just as he was moving it out of the street. The episode ends with a nice shot of a frustrated Doctor silhouetted against a sunlit sky filling with poison gas.
Wilf begins to choke on the fumes and Donna pounds on the side window in futility, when Sylvia appears out of nowhere with a firefighter's axe (!) and smashes the windshield open. I feel like I really need a firefighter's axe in the home now.
Sarah -
Sylvia saves the day while everyone else is running around in circles! That’s the woman you want around in an emergency.
Harry -
Crisis averted for the moment, but the Sontarans have only just begun their war footing. With their never-before-heard "Sontar Ha!" chants ringing out, they snatch the TARDIS and beam it up to their mother ship as war booty. The Pertwee-era throwback is now complete: the Doctor is stranded on Earth and must work with UNIT to repel an alien invasion.
Sarah -
When Ratt starts chanting "Sontar Ha!" along with the Sontarans, he looks like the lonely kid tagging along at the edge of the popular group. Trying to fit in with the aliens after all of his students walked out on him felt so sad this time around.
Harry -
In the Doctor's absence, UNIT has ramped things up at a ludicrous rate and are preparing to launch nuclear missiles from all over the Earth (including North Korea, hmmm...).
Clone Martha is the Sontarans' eyes and ears at UNIT HQ, but the Doctor knows she's not real. He's barely holding things together during the nuclear countdown as UNIT soldiers get massacred in the ATMOS factory and it is Donna who is forced to take the bravest action ever. Having been teleported into the Sontaran ship while inside the TARDIS, Donna must sneak outside, slip past an assortment of Sontarans and teleport the TARDIS back to Earth. I would crack for sure.
Sarah -
That’s our girl! She more than earned her TARDIS key in this story.
Harry -
UNIT counterpunches by bringing in the Valiant to clear the skies over London, setting up the final confrontation between the Doctor and Staal aboard the Sontaran ship.
Sarah -
The Valiant is quite the ship. UNIT really has come a long way.
Harry -
Normally, I'm not a fan of stories that are resolved by someone committing suicide to foil the enemy, but it kind of worked here. The character was Rattigan, whose utopian fantasy was shattered by Staal's revelation that they were all a pack of lies to enlist his cooperation in the betrayal of Earth. The Sontarans had no plans to aid him in creating a new human colony on a distant planet. Instead, they intended to purge the Earth of all life and turn it into a clone hatchery. Devastated beyond recovery, Rattigan rigged up a final teleport to switch places with the Doctor and blow himself up, taking all the aliens down with him.
Overall I'd say this two-parter has aged well over the years.
Sarah -
Who doesn’t love a redemption story? Heartstrings are pulled again when clone Martha dies, having met the real Martha, whose memories she has.
Harry -
That's another moment where I would have cracked. Imagine watching yourself die. How do you bounce back from that?
Sarah -
With order restored, Martha plans to head back to her life when the TARDIS door slams and she, Donna, and the Doctor are swept off to another adventure.
Harry -
This whirlwind season is really picking up now. Let's see where they land next.
Sarah -
Best Line: "Yeah, long time ago. Back in the 70's. Or was it the 80's? But it was all a bit more homespun back then."
Favorite Moment: Donna and Martha’s meeting
Lasting Image: the new Sontaran look
6/10
Harry -
Best Line: I'll stick with "You Dumbo." It captures that great kind of partnership where one person can insult the other but totally not mean it.
Favourite Moment: modern-day UNIT rolls into action
Lasting Image: pathetic Rattigan with the Sontarans
7/10
Our marathon continues with Story #193: The Doctor's Daughter...
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