The Sontaran Stratagem & The Poison Sky by: Helen Raynor and directed by: Douglas Mackinnon

 

“The Sontaran Stratagem” and “The Poison Sky” stars David Tennant as the Doctor, Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, and Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones with Rupert Holliday-Evans as Colonel Mace, Christian Cooke as Ross Jenkins, Jacqueline King as Sylvia Noble, Bernard Cribbins as Wilfred Mott, Ryan Sampson as Luke Rattigan, Christopher Ryan as General Staal, and Dan Starkey as Commander Skorr.  They were written by: Helen Raynor and directed by: Douglas Mackinnon with Nikki Smith as Script Editor, Susie Liggat as Producer, and Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner as Executive Producers.  They were originally broadcast on Saturdays 26 April to 3 May 2008 on BBC One.

 

The Sontarans as Doctor Who aliens are a joke in several ways.  Throughout their appearances in the classic series they became more ineffective as villains with costumes that almost immediately stray away from their roots as nasty, brutish, and short, with The Invasion of Time, A Fix with Sontarans, and The Two Doctors portraying them as especially a joke.  This is something the revival would eventually run with under Steven Moffat, writing them as outwardly incompetent for comedic effect in episodes such as “The Time of the Doctor” and “A Good Man Goes to War”.  Only their initial appearances in The Time Warrior and The Sontaran Experiment had attempted to keep them a joke, but a joke of a very different sort.  Robert Holmes created the Sontarans as a comment on war and imperialism, both its futility and the extreme harm of the single-mindedness that leads to the fall of empires.  They are a species locked in an eternal stalemate with the Rutans and this is something Russell T. Davies wished to keep when reviving them for the fourth series of his Doctor Who revival, allocating their appearance to be the series’ first two-part story once again in the hands of ex-script editor and writer Helen Raynor, with the additional request for a return from Martha Jones, UNIT, and a story involving some sort of pollution solution being false.  The two-part production was assigned to new director Douglas Mackinnon who would go on to be a prolific director of both Doctor Who and British television in general as the fifth production block of nine for this series.  While episode production is often allocated approximately a month per episode, this two-parter was filmed efficiently between location and studio footage over the course of five weeks, with insert footage added less than a month before broadcast of Billie Piper as Rose Tyler (essentially a repeat of a clip shot for a later episode).

 

“The Sontaran Stratagem” as an episode, despite the large issues with Raynor’s previous efforts in “Daleks in Manhattan” and “Evolution of the Daleks”, is quite enjoyable.  The plan of the Sontarans here have allied themselves with young genius Luke Rattigan, played by Ryan Sampson, to develop a GPS and green energy system, ATMOS, for a brighter tomorrow.  Rattigan as a character is a foil to the Sontarans, too intelligent for his own good, essentially Elon Musk but less fascist to create a product that somebody else actually developed with impossible plans revealed in the second episode “The Poison Sky”.  Sampson plays Rattigan as a queer-coded sniveling pansy archetype with delusions of war (and some potentially harmful ASD coding as well), but as a villain Raynor’s script in this first episode excels at making him a foil for the Sontaran characters.  Christopher Ryan and Dan Starkey play our main Sontarans as General Staal and Commander Skorr, respectively, Raynor continuing the Sontaran naming trend of s-names.  “The Sontaran Stratagem” actually excels at putting the Sontarans front and center for much of the episode, appearing in full with a reveal of under their helmets at about halfway through the episode, quite soon after the Doctor can investigate Rattigan’s academy for geniuses.  Much is made about the Sontarans as warriors who must always face their enemy and Raynor has added a militaristic chant to their culture for victory, something that goes a long way to extend Robert Holmes’ original militaristic metaphor from The Time Warrior.  What doesn’t quite work in this first episode about this plan is that much of the episode plays investigating ATMOS and the academy before the halfway point as something that the audience should be along with the Doctor as sinister but not alien, while the pre-credits sequence shows the death of a journalist when the ATMOS in her vehicle is taken over all before cutting to the TARDIS for a second pre-credits sequence.  Only the second sequence was needed, as it establishes the Doctor and Donna happily traveling and being called to Earth by Martha Jones which is perfectly intriguing to the audience which genuinely would want to see Freema Agyeman back as Martha.

 

The interplay between the Doctor, Donna, and Martha is wonderful, gone is the catty relationship of romantic rivals in “School Reunion” as Raynor plays Donna and Martha becoming fast friends.  Assisted by the amazing chemistry between Tennant, Tate, and Agyeman, the audience also gets this sense that this TARDIS team genuinely would be a winner.  Included in the episode is UNIT as an organization, represented by Colonel Mace, played by Rupert Holliday-Evans, who is a nice addition, but the interplay between the Doctor and UNIT doesn’t actually work as well as Raynor seems to think it is.  The Doctor takes a completely pacifist route to operations, only begrudgingly working with UNIT in this episode despite the ATMOS factory under investigation being a situation tailor made for UNIT.  This is also commentary on the Doctor making Martha a soldier due to the trauma of “The Sound of Drums” and “Last of the Time Lords”, which doesn’t work because Martha is an army doctor, not a soldier.  The episode tries to frame her as the latter without actually doing such, something made worse in the second episode where her character is largely sidelined as she is cloned by the Sontarans as part of their plan.  The cloning aspect is actually a stroke of genius overall, even if using Martha as the cloned victim stops her from really being in the second episode: the Sontarans are a species of clones and this is the first time the production could actually portray this with special effects (though I personally prefer the black armor on the Sontarans, the blue just doesn’t look right and I can’t really place why).  What does work, however, is the reflection on family, Donna being convinced to go home for a visit allowing some wonderful performances from Jacqueline King and Bernard Cribbins as Sylvia and Wilfred, leading to the cliffhanger and their interactions with the Doctor working wonderfully.  It’s a way the cliffhanger can have stakes as Wilfred is the one in danger as well as the rest of the world, adding a personal connection to our characters and the audience.  “The Sontaran Stratagem” is also just quite a good piece of setup for a story.  7/10.

 

“The Poison Sky” is where things fall apart and don’t quite work as well as the episode would have them hope.  It’s an episode where the plot feels scraped too thin for a second forty-five minute episode, as the cliffhanger is the Sontaran plan going into motion but the plan sets up.  Helen Raynor’s script splits the TARDIS team in three ways: Martha in the clone bath, Donna on the TARDIS, and the Doctor with UNIT, and the largest issue here is that these plots don’t ever quite gel in terms of focus.  The story is a race against the clock as the ATMOS are activated as terraforming devices so the Sontarans can use the Earth for a new cloning planet, as well as some interesting baggage of the Sontarans, alien soldiers, being annoyed at not being allowed to fight in the Last Great Time War, though like the best aspects of the Time War it is left unexplained and off-screen overall.  While the Sontarans do invade the factory for a sequence where UNIT foolishly sends in soldiers to their deaths (including Private Ross Jenkins who had been bonding with the Doctor throughout the serial), they actually just stay in their ships throughout the episode.  This is subtly used to add to the general commentary of the Sontarans as war leading to mindless death and the one-track mind of war being the only goal.

 

The Sontarans aren’t actually all that effective at war because they all attempt to be generals, sitting back while watching the world burn, but being destroyed by a simple press of a button.  Now, Raynor fails slightly on the simple solution to the episode, attempting to build it up as a solution where the Doctor cannot win and Rattigan has to make a last minute “heroic” sacrifice tot blow the Sontarans sky high, throwing their catchphrase against them.  One of the large issues with this is that Rattigan doesn’t get enough time to be developed as a complex human villain, he's still a sniveling nerd.  There is exactly one scene of him revealing his plan to take his brilliant students away to another planet (which he then finds from the Sontarans was a lie) which they turn on him.  The issue is that we don’t actually see the student characters outside of this single scene or Rattigan outside of the Sontarans to build up who he is as a human.  Sampson’s performance is also just too over the top that it doesn’t quite work in this second half in particular, the breakdown being almost laughable.  The Sontarans are somehow more reserved than Rattigan which doesn’t feel as if it’s meant to be seen as this over the top.  It’s also just an episode that takes far too long to get to the obvious conclusion of Donna sneaking onto the Sontaran ship (a very tense and well directed sequence, the best of the episode due to Catherine Tate), the Martha clone realizing who she is a clone of and discovering morality (an interesting performance from an underused Freema Agyeman), and the Doctor teleporting to the ship to reverse the poisonous gas emanating from the ATMOS vehicles so the day is saved.  There’s also a slight misuse of mentioning Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart but not bringing in Nicholas Courtney for a brief cameo, which is partially what’s holding back the UNIT/military commentary as the Doctor is distasteful.  The Brigadier (or another pre-established UNIT character) needed to be here to make the more militarized UNIT feel more authentic.  “The Poison Sky” just feels like an episode that could have surpassed “The Sontaran Stratagem” if there weren’t integral pieces missing.  4/10.

 

Overall, “The Sontaran Stratagem” and “The Poison Sky” are certainly an improvement from Helen Raynor, though they are also the last two episodes she would write for the series, most likely forever due to her transphobic beliefs.  The first half is quite strong with character development and an interesting extrapolation of Robert Holmes’ original vision for the Sontarans, but the second half doesn’t take enough time to develop any of its threads making it feel underdeveloped.  The use of UNIT could be interesting, and the return of Martha Jones is the highlight as the three person TARDIS team works incredibly well for this two part story, but some of the elements are missing or buried too deep to be interesting.  David Tennant as the Doctor is also portrayed as close to his most pacifist self, something that will come to a head in the next episode to the weakest results for this fourth series, but the seeds are here and they make the Doctor’s character feel out of character without another human presence that knew UNIT before the modern day as Raynor’s scripts imply a change has taken place.  Douglas Mackinnon’s direction is also excellent, even on a limited schedule.  5.5/10.