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Doctor Who: The Sontaran Stratagem

Finally, they're back!

Ugly, brutish and thick, they take militarism and macho posturing to dizzying new heights. Cheer as they stomp about in their redesigned uniforms! Boo as they wave their weapons in the faces of innocent bystanders! Swoon as the Doctor runs rings around them! Gasp as they bring planet earth to the brink of disaster!

Welcome back, UNIT, it's been a long time.

They may be a little less homespun these days, but UNIT still display the very same xenophobic incompetence that we've all come to know, love and expect. From the moment they frog-marched en masse back onto our screens like a herd of baby elephants, forgoing a surreptitious recce in favour of some good old fashioned jackbooted grandstanding, UNIT hardly put a foot right. And I loved it; it just wouldn't have been the same if they'd somehow got their act together in the intervening years. They even managed to make Torchwood look co-ordinated.

When UNIT finally take control of the factory of evil they send their cockiest private (marvel at his arrogant swagger!) down into the bowels of the complex, where he and his panicky mate start mucking around with alien technology that they can't possibly comprehend. Just what are UNIT teaching these idiots in basic training? Obviously it's the very same nonsense they doled out back in the 70s (or was it the 80s?). Observe how Privates Gray and Harris react when they encounter an alien species - they mercilessly take the piss out of it! They must have at least suspected that it was an alien creature, they work for UNIT after all, not a crack squad sent in to disrupt children's fancy dress parties, and they've just been flummoxed by a weird (and thoroughly disturbing) inhuman clone, so what the hell were they thinking?

Colonel Mace is so wet he makes Sgt. Benton look like Errol Flynn...

God help them if this had been a peaceful first contact situation - they might have started an interstellar war. But it's hardly surprising when you look at the doofus that's leading this motley crew: it's one of the Double-Take Brothers from The Harry Enfield Show! Such gravitas! Such presence! Such a funny mouth. At least Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart looked as if he meant business, even in his more ridiculous moments (cf. confusing Cromer with chroma key), whereas Colonel Mace is so wet he makes Sgt. Benton look like Errol Flynn.

This incarnation of UNIT don't even operate on a 24-hour basis. When that poor journalist with the funny name tried to spill the beans about ATMOS she was put through to an answer phone. What happens if the Slitheen attempt to invade the Home Counties after 5:30pm? We'd be f**ked!

But the definitive proof that a 21st century UNIT can change it's acronym but it can't change its spots is encapsulated by that pitiful image of a poor grunt trying to shoot a catalytic converter off the back of a jeep at point blank range.

And missing.

So, that's UNIT back to basics, what about the Sontarans?

Christopher Ryan was an absolute hoot as General Staal. As much as I adore Linx and Styre, this articulation of the turd-heads (an insult that will be saved for Torchwood, I guess) took the much maligned B-division baddies and it gave them some teeth (literally). I don't think I've ever seen a villain enjoy himself quite as much as Staal does as he prepares to unleash murder and mayhem on an unsuspecting populace, even if his plans do feel familiarly preposterous. His witty repartee with the dim-witted soldiers was a joy to behold and my favourite moment of this season so far has to be Staal's semi-surprised stagger as the Doctor temporarily disables his transmat beam. And while it's becoming increasingly difficult not to imagine him roaring "You did it beautifully, Tubbs!", it's hard not to love him. And full-marks to the production team for giving us a ruthless warlike race that mills around in what looks suspiciously like a pink-themed nightclub. Now that's what I call cultural relativism.

I'm happy to report that Tennant thrilled me this week. His visit to the Rattigan Academy was simply delightful, and at one point he successfully channeled Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy at the same time! If that doesn't deserve a Cymru BAFTA, nothing does. His verbal sparring with Luke (a genuinely frightening child prodigy) was inspired and his disarming treatment of Staal evoked such warm memories from my childhood, I almost cried.

I'm surprised they didn't chuck in a clip of Donna meeting Martha from a couple of minutes ago...

However, as much as I enjoyed The Sontaran Stratagem, it isn't perfect by any means. Donna's flashbacks were so flagrantly self-indulgent I'm surprised that they didn't go the whole hog by chucking in a clip of her meeting Martha from a couple of minutes ago; Tennant's air-sucking shenanigans almost sabotaged the UNIT-dating joke; the Sontarans chanting was bizarre (try to imagine the Daleks screaming 'Here We Go! Here We Go! Here We Go!' as they enter battle); and the fake farewell between Donna and the Doctor was contrived beyond belief, although Catherine Tate continues to impress the hell out of me.  She's helped by a strangely subdued return for Martha Jones who never really gets going, although I'm guessing she'll come to the fore as the evil doppleganger next week.

But what's really did my nut in was the shameful way in which the Doctor was symbolically castrated by yet another deadlock. In the 70s we got Tom Baker staring wildly at the audience before proclaiming, "even the sonic screwdriver won't get me out of this one!" but now we have to suffer the ignomy of those bloody deadlocks instead. If the sonic is a lazy get-out-of-jail card for the Doctor, then the deadlock is an even lazier get-out-of-jail card for the scriptwriter.

And everyone is at it, even shitty old cars are double-deadlocked. Does this mean that bricks will simply bounce off the windows? I bloody hope so, because if they don't the Sontarans plan is seriously flawed. Assuming anyone bothers to try, of course...

Next Week: it's Kirsty Wark's turn to sacrifice credibility for verisimilitude.

Potato Crisp

Doctor Who:  The Sontaran Stratagem

Well, that about wraps it up for what the Wikipedia gamefully describes as the UNIT dating controversy (controversy?!?  It's hardly the Kennedy assassination, which as we know was carried out by young Kiwi tabloid journalist James Stevens).  If the Doctor says they happened "in the Seventies...or was it the Eighties?" that's good enough for me, because actually they did happen in the Seventies and the Eighties and so along with Sarah-Jane’s recently revealed date of birth, our lords Lance and Lars can quite happily publish another edition of Ahistory integrating that sticky special UNIT section into the main text.  Pheeuw.  Glad that’s sorted out, because really in relation to inflating the importance of the unimportant that’s the big one.  Now if only someone would admit that C-19 is a code number for Torchwood, everything will be hunky-dory.  Except that wouldn’t be so much a kiss to the past as a full on shag.

What a stonking episode!  This was clearly Helen Raynor’s best ever script, perfectly paced, with all of the problems of Daleks Take, sorry In Manhattan cleared up.  That episode didn’t gel because the audience were too far ahead of the Doctor – we already knew it was the Daleks and had an inclining about what they were up to and essentially watched the timelord spending forty-five minutes getting up to speed.  This episode worked as a proper detective story, as the Doctor stumbled into the Sontaran’s ship refreshingly early which meant that the mystery rightly became what their stratagem was for him and us.  And no visible goal posts.

Now if only someone would admit that C-19 is a code number for Torchwood, everything will be hunky-dory.

If said stratagem wasn't entirely original – it’s another alien something pretending to be an ordinary something which has invaded the ordinary lives of the ordinary population – it did lead to a half decent if over extended cliffhanger which can’t be dealt with too quickly presumably.  Unless the Doctor suddenly reveals that his lungs are bigger on the inside and he breaths in all the gas – or he turns the Tardis into a catalytic converter or something.  It’s worth adding to the chorus of hackles which suggest granddad could be saved with a well aimed brick, but for that matter, was the lock on the car door deadlock sealed, or is it a dodgy Watchdog-bating make of car which can’t be opened using sonic devices?

There aren’t many other series that would run the alien invasion, evil twin and boy genius stories together in the same episode and unlike, say New Earth, which also attempted a similar conflation of ideas (evil medicine, mind swap) it actually worked because none of them seemed randomly placed and all were logically connected.  Into the mix there’s the companion’s return home, the revisit of a recent in the memory companion (which is something the television series has never done) and the already mentioned venerable organisation.  All in forty-four minutes.  With this much creativity, it's almost as though someone's been snorting the Ritalin, Elizabeth Wurtzel-style.  I’m surprised there weren’t clowns as well.

Has someone been snorting the Ritalin, Elizabeth Wurtzel-style.

Instead we had the Sontarans back and probably the best they’ve ever been.  It’s an interesting new strategy, reinventing one of the ‘classic’ alien races by doing nothing to them other than designing and producing some decent prosthetics so that the person behind the mask has more than his lips and voice to act with (Christopher Ryan stonking and stomping performance was perhaps the best we’ve seen from a long line of men to assume the potato head) and giving them some decent characterisation.  The key, as writer Raynor says in her commentary, was to acknowledge they had ‘small man syndrome’ and run with it.  So we’re making fun of them rather a lot, but also introducing some pathos in that they’re built for war but weren’t actually ‘allowed’ the participate in the big one.

Raynor wasn’t afraid to mess about with some of the tropes of the new series, particularly in relation to the Doctor.  That scene in which he got the wrong end of a very big stick about Donna’s trip home was a perfect antidote to similar slightly forced scenes and the expectation of a massive explosion from a jeep with the accompanied by the launch at the floor followed by a pfft from the sat-nav may well have been one of the funniest moment this series.  You could argue that the timelord’s visit to Rattigan saw Tennant channeling the favourite Baker, but the character is at his best when we can see that he’s the sum of his parts and would the Fourth Doctor have been so bold as to take down a Sontaran using a shuttlecock?

I hear she’s always been scorching on stage

Catherine continues to provide a multi-dimensional performance.  By now, all of the apparent baggage has melted away and I actually think she’s giving the best filmed performance we’ve ever seen from her (I hear she’s always been scorching on stage).  She was about the best thing about Planet of the Ood and it’s a testament to what she’s doing that the trip home feels so fresh even though it’s a scene we’ve seen at least twice since the show returned from its multi-medium sabbatical.  The chemistry with Bernard Cribbins is divine and you can believe that they’re relatives enjoying their giddy secret about who the Doctor is and were she’s been. 

Whilst we're here, might as well note that Donna was as the epicentre of the arc-clue additions.  The Doctor mentioned the Medusa cascade during his thank you speech, but also more curiously registered an interesting kind of surprise as Donna piloted the Tardis.  It wasn’t so much what he said, that he couldn’t believe she was working the controls, as to how he said it, as though she, in truth, shouldn’t have that kind of knowledge.  Connected with whatever’s supposed to be on her back, perhaps?  I really hope that it’s not revealed that she’s under some kind of alien influence or been lying all of this time about who she actually is, Turlough with a double X chromosome, a tool of The Trickster or whatever.

Turlough with a double X chromosome 

Martha’s back too of course, her eyes still sparking.  Freema’s received some rather mean spirited notices for this episode, but I really can’t see what the problem is.  She’s as good as she’s ever been, it’s just the character thats changed.  Like Sarah-Jane, we’re watching an ex-companion dealing with the after-Tardis-life and this is a perfectly logical extension – she’s become a scientific adviser, a professional albeit with less authority than the Doctor.  The potential misstep of having the character tied down and being experimented on again was nicely twinkled with the introduction of evil Martha, a figure who offers some of us the perfect opportunity to nip over to the dark side (or the bathroom).  Again.  And again.

We’ll hopefully see more of UNIT in action next week, five rounds rapid and all that.  It was very strange not to see The Brigadier in there somewhere, but it’s clearly a case of trying to strike a balance between the old and new elements and with everything else going on, to have yet another returning character would have been messy – and it wouldn’t have been fair to bring back such an icon simply for a cameo.  In any case, according to the good book, he's still retired in 2009 when this episode is set.  It is a shame that Bessie couldn’t have been dragged in from whichever Doctor Who exhibition she's currently parked in, with a nice ‘WHO 10’ already attached to the front.  But for story reasons, the Doctor had to be stuck in a jeep with a satnav so it kind of makes sense, and the interplay with young Ross Jenkins just about recalled similar scenes between the Third and Alistair.

My first episode reviews always turn into a few random thoughts and that’s largely because they're essentially giving half an opinion.  The first three episode of The Twin Dilemma are just rubbish, but the final part has that powerful scene between Colin and his mentor which dwarfs his entire era in terms of its emotional reality (honestly).  Which goes to show you never can what will come next.  On this occasion, I’m very optimistic that The Poison Sky will be as good as this.  The Sontaran Stratagem I mean.  Not The Twin Dilemma.   I'd hate to think Luke's got a sibling.  He was about the only real disappointment, a mirror universe edition of Wesley Crusher selling his own people out to the Whoniverse's own Klingons, Ryan Sampson’s sometimes pleasingly arch portrayal undermined by a slightly wayward accent.  Exactly why is he supposed to be American though? Are we suddenly trying to offer payback for the well-worn Hollywood villainy shorthand?

Next week:  I go blind and Terrance Dicks receives a royalty cheque as we’re given a status report on the Sontaran’s battle with the Rutans.

How to fix the Sontarans

Doctor Who: The Sontaran Stratagem

Timing is everything.  Comedy, drama, coincidence and chance all rely on perfect timing.  The Sontaran Stratagem's timing couldn’t have been more unfortunately perfect if it tried.  A story about using cars as weapons, airing on a day when the Grangemouth refinery is closed down due to strike action and the nation is warned of a potential fuel crisis. 

It rather makes David Tennant’s line about the converters using up all the oil quicker by encouraging more motorists out onto the roads seem perfectly chosen, anyway.

But then, in a way it’s appropriate.  The UNIT stories of the 70s aired to a country of strikes and energy shortages, incidents that coloured the show’s storylines for almost the entire Pertwee era.  Thirty five years on, and while the technobabble may be more advanced, the situation isn’t.

And wasn’t it great to see that, after all this time, with their new shiny black combat suits, their red berets, advanced automatic weapons and massed legions of troops, that the fighting men and women of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce can’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo at two paces?  Did you see that squaddie trying to hit the poison gas emitter on the exhaust pipe?  I’m a better shot than that, and I’m barely able to complete Call of Duty 4 on easy mode.  Although, given UNIT's apparent shoot to kill policy is still in effect, it’s just as well, really.

In many ways, this episode felt like a throwback, and I don’t just mean because of the presence of UNIT and the Sontarans.  Donna’s return home to see the folks aside, so much of this felt like your typical old-school episode of Doctor Who.  There was something reassuringly retro about it all - the direction, the pacing, the concepts behind it, and done in an affectionate way, rather than a tiresome Saward-esque greatest hits package.  Even the dialogue seemed littered with nods to the show’s history - the zapped private echoing Ian’s “I can’t feel my legs”.

Actually, the dialogue was one fo the best things in this.  Now that the writers (well, specifically every writer except Russell T Davies) have started writing Donna as a character in her own right rather than an extension of Catherine Tate’s sketch show, Tate’s performances have grown in confidence and stature, and Helen Raynor served her particularly well.  Her hitting the personnel files with a temp’s eye for office management was a nice touch, befitting the character and giving her a small but important role in advancing the plot amid all the technobabble and soldiery.   

Her by-play with the Doctor is fun to watch too - this screwball comedy vibe that kept being mentioned in all the press gubbins when Tate was cast is now becoming evident in the best possible ways.  Anyone who saw Tate and Tennant last year at the recording of Chain Reaction knows how well they spark off each other and we’re now seeing the best of that on screen.

Tennant, too, was on particularly good form in The Sontaran Stratagem, with the most Doctorish of his performances so far.  And by Doctorish, I mean you believe in the authority, the knowledge and energy of him rather than just lifting character traits from his predecessors.

That said, there were times when he seemed to be channelling Tom Baker during proceedings - nowhere more so than when confronting the Generic Evil Teen Genius.  Sympathising with Rattigan yet putting him in his place, correcting poor grammar, and KOing a Sontaran with a squash ball... transplant all that to late Hinchcliffe/early Williams era and it’d have passed without a blink from the audience.

Freema was less impressive though.  In fact, this performance wasn’t so much phoned in as sent on a time-delayed e-mail while she was on her holidays.  Three episodes of Torchwood seem to have knocked the stuffing from her as an actress - not exactly surprising - and she’s got one of the charm or feisty appeal of last year.  Hopefully it’s a temporary aberration - seeing Martha return was one of the things that I looked forward to going into The Sontaran Stratagem, yet it turned out to be one of the least memorable aspects.

Sontarans were never a-listers. - they weren’t the ones you’d stick front row for An Audience with Doctor Who

The Sontarans were far more memorable even if, by their return, we’re starting to scrape well into the b-list of classic series monsters.  I mean, the Macra were fair enough in Gridlock - even most of the mums and dads watching with their kids won’t have remembered them.  But the Sontarans were never a-listers. They weren’t the ones you’d stick front row for An Audience with Doctor Who.  They were the ones you shove half way up the seating, sitting with the Monk and the folk who won their tickets in a TV Times competition.

But here, in their reworked, fun-sized version, they felt fresh and interesting again - especially when you consider what they were like last time we saw them.  Christopher Ryan as Mike the Cool Sontaran was a measured performance in alien menace and I’m desperately hoping for a face-off between him and Col. Mace next time out.  Not sure about the redesigned body armour though.  Less a baked spud in tinfoil and more a miniature version of Boba Fett.  Or Baby Fett, as it’d be in this case.

For all that retro feel to the episode, that cliffhanger was weak - it just cried out for a close-up of the Doctor among all the poison gas, looking round desperately, as the music crashed in.  Few of the two-parters have got that midpoint cliffhanger right, even after ten attempts.  And there was just one too many coincidences in the story - the entire Noble/Mott family having remembering their encounters with the Doctor one by one, the satnavs not being removed from every government vehicle the moment the company were under investigation.  But then, as I said earlier, coincidence is all a matter of timing - in this case, fitting everything important into 44 minutes...

Oh, and I’ll ignore the music - not easy without earplugs, mind you - after Murray went all the way up to about 20 when Donna was walking home.  Once again, a soundtrack that comes with a noise abatement order.

But by and large, The Sontaran Stratagem was a fun and likeable addition to what has been an ever-improving season of Doctor Who. Given what a pig's ear (all puns aside) Helen Raynor made of last year's returning monster two-parter, the tedious Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks double feature, here she managed to pull off something I thought impossible to now - fix the Sontarans.

Your Final Homespun Destination

Doctor Who: The Sontaran Stratagem

You know, I have a love-hate relationship with technology. I'm sure those Sontarans put the mockers on my viewing of this episode. The Sky box crashed after failing to record the episode tonight. When satellite boxes fail I'd definitely class myself as one of the many Britons who have a prevailing pessimistic disposition towards technology. And Doctor Who has always enjoyed fuelling this disillusionment with its own take on the perils of new technologies and the fear of new ideas. Just look at what the new series has already managed to blemish; mobile phone networks, bluetooth attachments, power stations, computers; and now the much maligned Sat-Nav, the evils of cloning and catalytic converters.

Luke Rattigan, an unfortunate 'boy genius' SF cliche, is someone we should be scared of.

In fact, The Sontaran Stratagem is honestly so in love with the relative merits, both good and bad, of new technology its like it's taken it out on a date and then thrown a drink over its head for not getting down on one knee to propose. Here, we are talking about technological might and the abuses of power and how innovations can offer individuals considerable influence in the course of human affairs. The Rattigan Academy, with Ryan Sampson's Luke Rattigan coming on all Bill Gates to a bunch of red robed genius kids, is pretty much about how technology develops autonomously. It feeds on itself and becomes irresistible to consumers who simply don't consider the responsibility that goes hand in hand with new developments. Luke Rattigan, an unfortunate 'boy genius' SF cliche, is someone we should be scared of.  He's essentially practicising a form of eugenics and his Academy is pure Robert Klark Graham, the American millionaire who tried to collect sperm from Nobel laureates and breed an entire generation of geniuses, and that other pariah William Shockley, a giant of Silicon Valley and one of Graham's 'offspring'.  Trouble is, Ryan Sampson plays it just like so many other cliched child geniuses in film and television (yes, I'm looking at you Sarah Jane Adventures) and Helen Raynor's writing doesn't even begin to barely address these ideas that it seems such a wasted opportunity.

That's the problem with these two-parters though. They are murder to write. It's difficult to pull off the necessary action, spectacle, subtexts and character development especially when most of the formula here is already feeling a tad stale. We've had the companion returning home in Aliens Of London and TheLazarus Experiment , we've had the phobias about technology and we've had alien invasions galore so this does feel like a retread. The plus here is that we do get the 'evil doppelganger' of Martha and that's a new one for the series. It's perfectly enjoyable for 45 minutes and a good, pacy set-up for the second part. There are some very delightful and well written scenes - Donna having a go at flying the TARDIS and 'denting the 1980s', which this story literally does in its retro Pertwee UNIT vibe and Saward like obsession with the military; the faux 'I'm going home' exchange between her and the Doctor which is one of the best played scenes from Tate and Tennant; and the whole reunion with Wilf and Sylvia which again relies on some affecting interplay between Tate and the wonderful Bernard Cribbins and would have been even better if they'd decided not to treat the audience like imbeciles and flashed us back through Donna's Greatest Hits. Tate's playing of Donna gets better with each episode and I really loved the warmth between her and Tennant. Freema is not as good as she was in Torchwood's Reset and this confident and strident version of Martha suffers slightly with some poor line delivery but it is still good to see her back in the series and the sub-plot of her cloning will hopefully give her an opportunity to stretch her acting muscles.

...he corrects Rattigan's grammar and wields a squash racket to whallop Staal's probic vent 

Tennant is much better in this story, almost teetering into the manic performances of his early episodes, and his barbed attitude towards Colonel Mace (Rupert Holliday-Evans is a poor man's Brigadier, it has to be said) and UNIT's emergence from its 'homespun' origins and the later rather smashing scene where he corrects Rattigan's grammar and wields a squash racket to whallop Staal's probic vent (shades of the satsuma bowling in The Christmas Invasion) finally prove that he isn't on auto-pilot this series. The script is littered with funny lines and good character moments for the Doctor, Donna and Martha but it doesn't serve the other human characters that well. Plenty of continuity references too and perhaps a cheeky answer to that thorny question of dating the UNIT stories with that "Back in the seventies. Or was it the eighties? It was all a bit more . . . homespun back then" line and more mentions of the Time War and the Medusa Cascade. Personally, I feel that the 'homespun' UNIT of Lethbridge-Stewart, Benton and Yates is in no danger of being eclipsed by Mace and his rather anodyne sidekicks of Ross, Gray and Harris, especially with their 'Homeworld Security' agenda of roughing up Polish factory workers, much to Donna's chagrin. It's a Bush 'New World Order' version of UNIT already hinted at in Torchwood and if they carry on like this I suspect the Doctor will resign his position.

...it's safe to say that the school playgrounds of Britain will soon be ringing with Sontaran chants.

However, Helen Raynor does triumphantly reposition the Sontarans rightfully amongst the best of the returning classic series monsters. She manages to create a memorable foe in General Staal and feeds him with the kind of dialogue we haven't heard Sontarans utter since The Time Warrior or The Sontaran Experiment. Christopher Ryan seizes the opportunity and makes Staal into a wonderfully erudite, bombastic military leader completely fixated on war. And the redesign of the costumes and prosthetics does work effectively to enhance Ryan's performance and obliterates the rather feeble efforts of The Two Doctors. Couple that with the rather lovely CGI effects for the warship and the scout vessels nipping around it and it's safe to say that the school playgrounds of Britain will soon be ringing with Sontaran chants.

The cliffhanger goes on for far too long and I'm sure most viewers would have been urging the Doctor or Donna to simply smash the car windows in with a blunt instrument of some description to rescue poor Wilf as a catalytic converter goes rogue. Douglas Mackinnon directs in a suitably epic manner but with a little less confidence than some of the more seasoned directors on the show and I did feel that the episode's lighting wasn't up to the usual standard and there was an over reliance on the more gharish schemes you would associate with Sarah Jane Adventures. The overall impression is of a rather gaudy, fast paced comic strip. With this more or less just the sum of its better parts, the story is now having to rely on an equally strong or better second part if Helen Raynor wishes to avoid the disappointment of her previous efforts with the Daleks. 

The Spoils of War

The Doctor Who News Page reports that unofficial overnight figures show that The Sontaran Stratagem got 6.4 million viewers (a 35.2% share) and won its timeslot against Rutan Weekend Television's edifying spectacle Animals Do The Funniest Things (which got 3.3 million).

Isn't it Crowded in Here?

Welcome to all the newcomers - I certainly need a jolt of enthusiasm.

Doctor Who:  The Sontaran Stratagem

To paraphrase Swift, I can take or leave Sontarans, although I heartily love Linx, Styre, Staal, and so forth.  It's an unfortunate thing as they are a cloned race of millions, but the more Sontarans enter the equation, the more I start drifting and thinking improbable thoughts such as whether I'll be retired before Blake's 7 appears on Sky One. Take Staal.  Christopher Ryan did a really nice job of establishing his character, particularly in the otherwise overlong scene when he confronted the UNIT soldiers in the cloning area.  The "soldier to soldier" nature of the conversation, especially his almost courteous explanation of why he had paralysed them, was very much in keeping with the Sontarans of the past, but stick him in a spaceship with a load of his mates and he's lost in the middle of a space haka.  But it was good to see them back, even if it does make you wonder how interesting The Sontaran Stratagem would be if it had involved a new monster.

I suppose it's hard to knock the formula in a formulaic drama, but another suspicious organisation run by aliens?  ATMOS have done the old Cybus trick of dominating the marketplace for a product that no-one can live without, only this time it's done under the pretence of helping the environment.  I can't help thinking kids are going to be terribly confused by the message sent out by this story.  Everytime mummy or daddy mention recycling, or use diesel instead of petrol, the kids are going to be convinced an alien invasion is on the cards.  I mean look what happened when they saw John Paul in The Rise of the Cybermen - 0.5% of kids never used a bluetooth earpiece again.   When the story is as formulaic as this I find it almost impossible to give much of a shit about following it, but that's not to say there weren't moments of interest.

Maybe he finally got around to reading Paul Cornell's article about the authoritarian nature of his third incarnation

Why has the Doctor developed such a dislike of UNIT nowadays?  Is he just embarrassed about his past?  He huffed and puffed about not liking people who carry guns, but I remember a time when he'd laugh alongside UNIT soldiers while gunning down an Ogron with barely a pause before his next mouthful of Stilton.  Maybe he finally got around to reading Paul Cornell's article about the authoritarian nature of his third incarnation, and thought that he should change his ways.  Or perhaps he's just missing the Brigadier - unlike Russell T Davies.  I found Donna's concern about UNIT much more convincing, and she actually tore the allegorical references away and just came out and mentioned Guantanamo Bay.  Any concerns I had about Catherine Tate have evaporated over the last two episodes, and she was again one of the better things about this episode, particularly when puncturing the Doctor's high opinion of himself.  Mind you, I couldn't quite understand why Donna's trip home really needed flashbacks and Murray up to eleven.  She's only been in four episodes, and that's the second big emotional scene with Bernard Cribbins in four weeks.  When it gets really emotional in the final episode there'll be nowhere left to go.

"Oh Christ - there's another one!"

Poor old Martha looked very washed out in comparison.  After having her Torchwood guest star-spot overshadowed by a walking corpse, she'd obviously decided that imitation was her best chance.  She wasn't helped by horseshit lines such as "He's like fire.  Stand too close and people get burned" but everything about her looked tired, and even in the cloning scene her performance was lack-lustre compared to the similar strapped-to-a-table moment in Reset.  In fact, the appearance of the second Martha reminded me of when Mike and Bernie Winters played the Glasgow Empire.  Mike appeared nervously from behind the curtain and was welcomed by a wave of hostility.  Then Bernie appeared.  "Oh Christ!" came a yell from the audience "there's another one".  That was pretty much my reaction to Martha Two.  But at least she has a probic vent.

Anthony Newly singing The Laughing Gnome on horse tranquilisers

Freema may be a bit sickly, but she is of this earth, whereas Tennant seems to get weirder by the episode.  At times during the scene at the Rattigan Academy he was great, but he's so wayward that he'll randomly say lines like "You should face bullets with dignity" in a voice that sounds like Anthony Newly singing The Laughing Gnome on horse tranquilisers.  In fact, he shows all the signs of an actor who's trying to keep himself interested in the proceedings.  Parallels with the antics of Tom Baker at the equivalent point in his tenure probably wouldn't repay examination, but listen to the way Tennant's started pronouncing "Well".  He'll soon be getting tanked up at the Coach and Horses and marrying Catherine Tate before you can say Symphony.  And "intruder" window?  Do me a favour!

The Sontaran Stratagem was not quite boring, but never made it as far as interesting.  The snooker this evening was more entertaining, but lacked a decent in-joke about UNIT dating, so it's still too soon to abandon Doctor Who entirely.  But if Ronnie O'Sullivan ever reads Lance Parkin's AHistory then it could be the end of a beautiful friendship.

       

Meet the Authors: Tom Dickinson

I can't remember the first time I watched Doctor Who. It's been a constant part of my life since birth. I do have early memories, such as the third episode of Logopoils, not to mention the death of Adric in Earthshock, and I will always remember how as a child I... I...

...I can't do this. I can't lie like this.

Fine, the truth. My first episode of Doctor Who was Rose. That's right, Rose. See, as an American I was only ever dimly aware of Doctor Who during much of my childhood. And I wasn't alive when Peter Davison was the Doctor. When I was born, Sylvester McCoy was the Doctor. Not that I, or anyone around me, knew or cared about Doctor Who. Americans in general are only dimly aware of Doctor Who if at all. There are Who fans, and yes, it's contagious, but it isn't widespread and it certainly wasn't then.

The seeds of my Doctor Who fandom were planted when I read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at age 12. I became a great fan of Douglas Adams and it was through that fandom that I first heard of Doctor Who, but for one reason or another I never bothered to check it out. With the return of the series I heard an increasing level of buzz. I looked into the series and found out about it, and so I decided it was worth my time and got some episodes in 2007.

So, yes, my first episode was Rose. I can see you pointing and laughing at the new-series fan. Does it redeem me slightly that my second episode was An Unearthly Child? So I have never been strictly a new-series fan. And despite the short term of my fandom, I've made up for it in enthusiasm, and although I'm possibly the least expert person writing for this blog, apparently it's been decided that I'm capable of banging out a good review now and then.

When I'm not pretending to be a lifelong Doctor Who fan and writing reviews to that end, I can be found desperately trying to pass exams and doing other things that university students do. I live and study in Rhode Island, which used to be pretty British, though we were the first Americans to declare independence (nothing personal).

Anyhow, it's an honor and a privilege. Sorry, "honour."

Revenge of the Calamari

Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood

Any good ecologist can tell you that there are a number of things in any environment that require each other to survive and prosper.  I'm not just talking about things that happen to work disturbingly well together (chocolate and peanut butter, sex and violence, weed and oxycodone); I'm mostly thinking of those things that, without the other, they're bloody useless.  In the jargon of science, their mutualism is obligatory.  Would anyone actually bother going out of their way for Hardy without Laurel?  Chips without fish?  Antony without Cleopatra?  Starsky without Hutch?  Aiding without abetting?  Harold without Kumar?  Sturm without Drang?

No, of course not.  Don't be silly.

With this in mind, it seems obvious to me that a good script and good actors really aren't very useful without each other.  There's not much point in casting Dame Judy Dench for your movie if you're letting George Lucas write it,  and even Shakespeare would fall flat if it had no choice but to be performed by Eve Myles.

Fortunately, Planet of the Ood is just dripping with competent acting and scripting, proving that the two go together like chicken and waffles.  A fair slice of the credit for the episode's success has to go to Catherine Tate, who once again proves to be more than up to the task as long as she gets some proper roughage from the scriptwriters, which she does more often than not in Planet of the Ood.  Despite all the concern from the masses that she'd be a bellowing idiot for the whole of Series 4, she's shown she has the acting chops to pull off an actual range of emotions, and can actually move from emotion to emotion within the same scene.  A fine example I enjoyed is the back-and-forth in the TARDIS at the beginning of the programme, beginning with Donna's palpable excitement and nervousness about the whole "new planet" thing, and then her abrupt reaction to the cold.  (In a nod to the fans, she goes all practical and returns with an anorak.)  Then excitement again with "Blimey, a real, proper rocket!  Now that's what I call a spaceship!"

Her first encounter with an Ood is also well written and performed.  After the Doctor's admonishment at her reaction to Nyarlathotep sprawled in the snow ("Donna, don't!  Not now.  It's a he, not an it.  Gimme a hand."), she sheepishly pitches in to help, even becoming nurturing ("There you are, sweetheart.")

She even manages to remain respectable when delivering bollocksy lines like "You idiot!  They're born with their brains in their hands.  Don't you see?  That makes them peaceful.  They've got to be, because a creature like that would have to trust anyone it meets."  You try saying that with a straight face. 

I think the one significant Donna misfire in the epsiode was the whole "Why'dja say miss?  Do I look single?" line, which hearkens back to the shallow comedy-Donna we were threatened with back in the first half of The Runaway Bride.  Unsurprisingly, these attempts at introducing some broad (read "stupid") comedy to the program rarely seem to work, much like the whole joke with the novelty translator balls, which also fell flat. "After a stressful day, a little something for the gentlemen."  I'm not sure if this would seem less creepy if I didn't know for a fact that this scenario is playing out among tentacle-fetishists at anime conventions across the world all the time.  It does make one shudder at the depraved acts enslaved Ood are likely to be forced to engage in. It just doesn't seem right outside of Torchwood. 

Ayesha Dharker and Tim McInnery acquitted themselves reasonably well as the main villains in the episode, again abetted by some nice twists in the writing.  Although we were all, no doubt, expecting the redemption of Dharker's weasely marketing git Solana after the Doctor suggests that she can help, the writers don't go the obvious direction.  Just when we think she's gonna come around and switch sides, she promptly sells the Doctor and Donna out to the guards.  Shortly thereafter, of course, she tells the guards to "shoot to kill" and is promptly electrocuted by the insidious glowing juice-box of the nearest Ood.

We also got the nice contrast between Solana's polished PR spiel ("As you can see, the Ood are happy to serve, and we keep them in facilities of the highest standard.") and the Most Dangerous Game Ood-hunt going on outside.  "If your Ood is happy..." (cut in footage of a frothing, screaming clearly distressed Ood here) "...then you'll be happy, too."

Much seems to have been made of the fact that McInnery's corporate villain had no other motivation beyond a thirst for wealth and power.  Pardon me...but isn't this enough?  Greedy corporate bigwigs have been doing all sorts of unspeakable things in the name of profit for...well, as long as there have been greedy corporate bigwigs.  At least this was better than "being evil for the sake of being evil" that is so common in your more one-dimensional villains.

McInnery's portrayal comfortably accepts this more realistic characterization, comparing the Ood to livestock and writing off the whole (admittedly homocidal) batch of them for the the insurance money.  Nonetheless, there are elements of McInnery's performance that add a little depth and moral ambiguity to the standard greedy CEO model, most notably his consideration for Ood Sigma's loyalty ("No!  You've not turned.  Faithful to the last.  Go.  Join your people.  While you still can."), as well as at least some sense of stopping the spread of the "red eye" as a "public duty".  I also appreciated his matter-of-factness when faced with the task of shooting the Doctor and Donna: "Can't say I've ever shot anyone before.  Can't say I'm gonna like it."  The only misstep I noted was Halpen's happiness once they return to Warehouse 15.  His boyishly excited "We're gonna blow it up!" seems a little incongruous with the rest of the character.

Halpern's Lovecraftian transformation was fairly convincing.  First, peeling his head like an orange, then coughing up an entire serving of calamari.  I'm sort of surprised that with all those changes going on, including the repositioning of his eyes, the only symptom was hair loss.

We got the rarest of rarities in the New Doctor Who...an actual alien (not-Earth planet!)  Sure, perhaps they went a little overboard in the "how to make snow look alien" department.  A little too far in the "Arches National Park" direction with the panoramic ice-bridges and all that rot.  Nonetheless, I appreciate the attempt, and once the Doctor and Donna got off of the giant matte painting, the snowy industrial setting was, as others have observed, very Blake's 7, which totally works for me.  Just about anything Blake's 7 works for me.

Of course, not everything in the episode came off without a hitch.  There were definitely a few missteps.  One primary example was the entire Oodsong thing, which left me a little nonplussed... 

"The circle must be broken." "Why?" "So that we can sing."

Sing???  That's it?  They're not interested in liberty or equality or reparations or revenge or an end to the dull drudgery of workaday tidal waves?!  They just want a shot on Pop Idol?

The song itself didn't do a whole bloody lot for me, I have to admit.  It was a bit much that Donna couldn't bear it any longer after thirty seconds of bad retro-Renaissance caterwauling.  I think it might have been more effective for me if they didn't bother to try to play it for us viewers.  Maybe we could have imagined something that would have actually been convincingly alien and compelling.  And while the guards and the Ood are going all sharks-and-jets on each others' arses, once we can all "hear the song of the Ood", the soldiers all stop shooting and just look around as the Ood get all peaceful and join hands in big circle.  They put their guns down.  Hug each other.  That sort of thing.  I found the triteness of it all thoroughly cringeworthy.

(The other singing-Ood image I'm having difficulty getting out of my head now is the musical number from Daleks in Manhattan, but with an Ood playing the role of Tallulah: "You lured me in with your bright red eyes, your tentacles, your bewitching lies!  One and one and one is three...my bad, bad angel, you put the devil in me!  Well, not exactly the devil...I mean, he fancied himself the devil, but he was really just a big beast in a pit, orbiting a black hole... ")

The Ood biology was also sort of a weak point.  Despite the Doctor's insistence that Ood couldn't evolve to serve, the episode doen't give us much of an insight as to what exaclty Ood are evolved to do.  I can forgive Donna's assertion that the Ood "would have to trust anyone it meets" despite dragging half their brain around with an umbilical cord.  She's hardly a scientist, and the evidence seems to bear out that the Ood are disturbingly trusting indeed.  When the Doctor and Donna show up and tell the imprisoned Ood "Hey, we're on your side!" and open a can of tuna, the Ood're all "Well, hullo!  Have a butcher's at my unprotected brain."  With a self-preservation instinct this strong the Ood would have gone the way of the dodo as soon as they encountered a stiff breeze, much less a horde of hungry imperialists from Earth.

As much as I'd like to see herds of Ood running wild like wildebeasts, I'm not convinced that they were remotely plausible, and not just because they'd be dragging their brains around behind themselves on a string.  Why would an entire species evolve to share one huge, carnivorous, screaming brain with a sensitivity to hair-tonic cleverly tucked away beneath a glacier anyway?  You'd think at the least the chances of survival would be increased by, I don't know, maybe TWO huge, carnivorous, screaming brains.  There's just something about science fiction that makes me wish people would put more thought into the science.

I'm sure I could find other things to nitpick about in Planet of the Ood (The spurious chase with the grabby thing, some general hamfistedness, arbitrarily-sadistic-guy) but overall, a passable effort of Nu-Who.  That being said, I don't feel much interest in revisiting the Ood anytime soon, so I'm not looking forward to the 2009 bank-holiday special "Ood, Where's my car?"  Sontarans, on the other hand, could be worthwhile.

Meet The Authors: Frank Collins

Evenin'.

Thanks to the august individuals at BTS for allowing me to come out to play and a warm welcome to my new, fellow collaborators and you lot who can be bothered to read my ramblings.

Gawd, where to start? I'm as old, in fact slightly older, than the programme itself. By the time you've reached my age I'm afraid the most exciting thing you can look forward to is a pair of slippers and a mug of Horlicks whilst tightly screwing up your eyes in an attempt to force mental pictures of Fury From The Deep to the front of your mind. Depressing, but Fury From The Deep is still a cracker even if I'm not. However I find the mantle of old age does allow you to waft reasonably unmolested through the 'Cursed Earth' of The Doctor Who Forum as it gets its knickers in a twist about the wrong size TARDIS windows.

I've written a number of articles on design for various publications (my background, y'see) and, cross fingers, will have some Doctor Who stuff published shortly in DWAS' Celestial Toyroom. You may often find me posting regularly on The Doctor Who Form too. Well, it passes the time. I've been running my own blog Cathode Ray Tube since late last year and you'll find me droning on and on about shows like Ashes To Ashes, Battlestar Galactica and Torchwood, as well as Doctor Who - old and new - and films, plays, books, music. Everything from KPM library music to Goldfrapp, Hammer Horror to Dennis Potter. I love British television and cinema, especially the so called Golden Age of the 1960s and 1970s. If I do go off on a tangent about Powell & Pressburger, The Power Game or Big Breadwinner Hog just stroke my arm and go 'there, there, there!' whilst attempting a Frankie Howerd impression.

I do drink to excess on occasions and the gin bottle is never far from my side.  It's my age y'know.

Noble Slaves On Ice

Doctor Who: Planet Of The Ood

Slavery is bad, boys and girls. Globalisation is bad, boys and girls. Planet Of The Ood takes us back to the first principles of the classic series. Put a whacking great moral lesson in the middle of a bitter, bleak tale of science fiction imperialism and serve with fish-fingers and peas on Saturday.

Doctor Who gives us a treatise on Milton Friedman’s supply side economics when you look at the journey of the Ood out of their ‘slavery’ towards ‘ freedom’ as an analogy to the struggles against the impositions of the free market. The Ood are perhaps representative of the reformist, co-operative might against the golden strait-jacket of the IMF or the World Bank. They’re like the Danish and the Norwegians refusing to accept the way the Euro has ripped down the edifice of worker protection rules and taxes that support the welfare state. Chuck in a few pops at imperialism and it’s like we’re watching The Mutants all over again. Quite apt in the year of the 200th Anniversary of the abolition of slavery.

Donna as representative of those coffee guzzling, Primark wearing members of the audience...

Not that I’m against the series wearing its big leftist heart on its sleeve. It just seems so unfettered in Planet Of The Ood as if suddenly Russell the lion tamer has let one of the big cats out of the cage. It's quite radical for a contemporary family tea-time show to try and address the audience’s own complicity in the cloak and dagger world of global economics whereas in the Letts era, anti-imperialist, pro-environmental themes arrived like an over-frequent bus service. Is this a sign then that the new series is getting much bolder in the way it reflects contemporary affairs? I hope so but then again this was like being bludgeoned a little too aggressively by Davies anti-totalitarian, progressive politics that runs through his reworking of the series. Love the message but not quite sure the messenger was being that subtle in delivering it.

Subtlety is perhaps not something that could be employed, I suspect, when dealing with the emotive subject of slavery and, beyond the obvious visual symbols, – lines of Ood being whipped into submission – there is a more complex subtext bubbling away. The exchange between the Doctor and Donna about the Empire (obviously referring to both the British imperialist past and the USA’s imperialist agenda now) touches on Donna as representative of those coffee guzzling, Primark (other cheap clothes importers are available, readers) wearing members of the audience, clearly aware of the conditions under which their commodities were produced, who may well not want to hear the Doctor offering them 'holier than thou' cheap shots. And she goes on to argue that the Doctor could be accused of having human companions simply to provide him with a conscience. He's the 'Friends Of The Earth', 'Fairtrade' and 'Greenpeace' all rolled into one patronising moment and quite rightly Donna doesn't need lecturing when it is clear she recognises slavery on the Ood-Sphere for the wrong that it is and feels she may at last be in a position to actively do something about it.

It’s too ‘feel good’ a solution to free the Ood and it raises more questions generally about the Doctor’s actions in what must, eventually, lead to the toppling of an Empire.

It’s quite brave for an episode to feel the collar of the audience and suggest that in some ways we are all guilty of complicity in the way that the free market isn't fair on economies in China and India. The Empire is seen as a vast free market trading in Ood. These markets are about the flow of commodities in and out of galaxies without actually being of benefit to their respective economies. The money is being made outside of them. So, Halpern’s activities may well equate with the more dubious practices of the aforementioned IMF and the World Bank. And if indeed an Ood revolution has taken place, as we are told by the conclusion of the episode, and all the Ood are returning to the Ood Sphere, then the story rather overlooks the down-side of this. The Empire will go to hell and probably suffer economic collapse. With the Ood out of slavery, the Empire will surely seek a way to replace them? Doctor, is that a good thing? Do you want that on your conscience too? It’s too ‘feel good’ a solution to free the Ood and it raises more questions generally about the Doctor’s actions in what must, eventually, lead to the toppling of an Empire.

The other problem with this story, which isn’t quite as radically cheeky as Partners In Crime or emotionally gutsy as The Fires Of Pompeii, is the uneven tone. It’s clear that this is one of the first (if not the first) episodes in the filming block and Catherine Tate hasn’t quite got to grips with the character of Donna. The opening scene in the TARDIS and the subsequent landing are shrill in the same way that her flouncing around in a wedding dress was in The Runaway Bride but later she seems to get to grips again with the subtler acting requirements when confronting the dying Ood in the snow. She’s also rather good when she asks the Doctor to allow her to hear the telepathic (protest) song of the Ood and her emotional response connects the audience to the moral battle being played out. She also continues to counter the Doctor’s flippancy, no more fittingly than in their little spat about imperialism and markets I discussed earlier.

There are subtle touches of humour despite the bleak tone of the central message – the goofy Ood advertisement in the pre-credits, the handcuffs gag, the nod to The Simpsons – that are then complemented by some good, kinetic action set pieces (director Graeme Harper’s forte) and nostalgic references to The Sensorites as well as more mentions of missing bees and a note of foreshadowing for the Tenth Doctor in that ‘soon, your song will end’ coda. In keeping with the general themes of this series, once again we have a human being transformed into an alien, which now does seem like less of a coincidence and more of a continuing and developing idea.

Tim McInnerny is suitably oily and ruthless as the low-grade IMF lackey, Halpern, and the whole mutation into an Ood is a bit of simplistic poetic justice, whilst scientifically dubious, and again is as near the knuckle as Doctor Constantine’s possession in The Empty Child but perhaps not quite as effective. Still, it’ll have the kiddies freaking out over their baked beans. The notion of the Ood with their hind-brains is an interesting one but again don’t examine the evolutionary theory too closely. The hind-brain could be seen simply as another symbol of liberty and enlightenment and Halpern is transformed from ranting capitalist to a slave of the Ood holistic hive mind. Whilst the story opens up many questions, it is in itself reliant on some very SF, 'B' movie tropes – the giant brain, telepathy, the base under siege – and whilst Harper’s direction works wonders this does feel a little flat, quite 'trad' (in Doctor Who parlance), and even the ice planet environs verge on the unconvincing with some painfully obvious matte effects in certain shots. Murray Gold's music strikes out in a different direction and adds some strange sounding tonalities that pleasingly seem to have wandered in, along with the moral message, from the classic series too.

As an episode, it’s a strange mix of the traditional and the radical that doesn’t quite come off but at least they went back to the unanswered questions about the Ood’s origins that were left hanging in The Impossible Planet. How well they answered those questions is debatable but at least they tried.