The Sontaran Stratagem, The Poison Sky, The Doctor's Daughter & The Unicorn and the Wasp

The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky

Sontar HA!

Helen Raynor gets asked back to write another two-part adventure, this time with the responsibility of bringing back both UNIT and the Sontarans. Throw Martha into the mix too, a teenage brainiac, oh and a second Martha, and you have… a bit of a mess really.

I’m not sure what this story is.  Is it trying to pay homage to the classic series? At points it feels like it is. It’s certainly better than Raynor’s first Doctor Who tale, but it still fails to hit the mark in my opinion. It begins at the end of ‘Planet of the Ood’ when the Doctor gets a call from Martha, who says ‘I’m bringing you back to Earth’. It’s a dreadful DREADFUL line. Martha is written differently, rather like she was in ‘Last of the Time Lords’, in this one. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem to be in Martha’s character, she’s just not believable.

The Sontarans are rather good. We have Christopher Ryan who appeared as Kiv in ‘Mindwarp’ as their leader Starl, and he is fantastic, the makeup and mask work is also superb. Dan Starkey takes the role of Commander Skorr and makes a great Sontaran, but all the other Sontarans (and we see more than we have every seen before) are helmeted. So we just see two potato heads.

There is some nice moments with Donna’s mother and her grandfather, Wilfred Mott (Bernard Cribbens) when Donna goes back to see them. In contrast to Martha’s and Rose’s first absences, Donna’s mother has hardly noticed she’s been away.

It’s the plot and the resolution the principally lets the story down, along with Martha and her double, which I mostly put down to the writing, although I think we see that Freema Ageymann is not as versatile as she needs to be too. The Sontarans are using a device connected to half the world’s cars to convert the atmosphere so they can turn Earth into a cloning planet. They have a device which stops guns, which is good for them I guess as they appear to go down pretty easily when shot.

Then the Doctor finds a device which sets the gassy clouds alight without burning anything else thus destroying the Sontarans plans. Then Luke Rattigen (played by Ryan Samson, an American boy genius and a VERY annoying character) manages to rig the transmat so that he switches places with the Doctor in the Sontaran space ship and presses the destruct button. Meh, sorry but meh. That’s all I can say to those plot points. Add the doppelganger of Martha, it seems like a plot written for a different alien race and then adapted to try and fit in for Sontarans. Poorly.

4.5/10

The Doctor’s Daughter

Georgia Moffat

Woah. Wham bam that’s the quickest moving start to a story ever. The Doctor, Donna and Martha are whisked away to a far off planet. The TARDIS has detected the Doctor’s DNA there or something, the explanation is retconned into the end of the episode and makes no sense at all. Anyways the TARDIS speeds to this planet, where the Doctor and co. bump into some humans, a sample is taken from the Doctor and a sort of clone warrior is grown in 2.1 seconds flat, and the Doctor’s daughter is born.

The Hath.

The humans are fighting the Hath, a sort of fish race with a bottle of liquid attached to their mouths. They looked pretty good I thought. We have a runaround 45-minute episode where the humans and Hath all try to get to the ‘source’ first which they think is a weapon. They have apparently forgotten why they came to the planet in the first place, and appear to have been locked in war for years. Turns out it was only seven days. The source is in fact a terra forming device.

Anyways. There is a focus on killing and the fact that the Doctor never would. Which is quite nice I guess. Catherine Tate is great as Donna, who is proving an excellent foil for Tennant, and as the Doctor’s daughter Jenny, Georgia Moffat (daughter of Peter Davison) couldn’t have been more perfectly cast. And they brought her back to life at the end too just for the hell of it.

and... RUN!

Martha, on the other hand, is surplus to requirements and as she leaves at the end of the tale I have no idea why they put her in this one. She does have her own storyline but it all could have easily been covered with a bit of plot-restructuring.  The sets are underground tunnels, so sort of stock-standard I guess, but they are pretty good. The plot makes no rightly sense at all, despite the war and how quickly they can grow new generations of humans. So it’s another mixed bag. Donna works well with Doctor as I said, and with Jenny. That’s the highlight and here we can really see that the decision to bring Catherine Tate back as the companion was in fact an inspired choice.

6.5/10

The Unicorn and the Wasp

Fenella Woolgar as Agatha Christie.

The Doctor and Donna go back in time and find themselves at a party with Agatha Christie, and very quickly embroiled in a murder mystery! That was probably not that of a twist, right? This story is enormous fun and one I completely enjoyed. It sees some great guest appearances from Christopher Benjamin in his third Doctor Who tale, his last being ‘The Talons of Weng Chiang’. Felicity Kendall also guest stars meaning the principle two characters from ‘The Good Life’ have now appeared in Doctor Who. It would be fair to say this was the more successful of the two appearances (Richard Briers appeared in ‘Paradise Towers’).

There’s not a lot to say. It was an awful lot of fun from start to finish, and includes a very funny and brilliant played scene by David Tennant and Catherine Tate when the Doctor has been poisoned and he’s trying to flush the poison out. The confrontation scene when the truth is revealed has a lovely lot of twists to it and is superbly played by all this was a wonderful ensemble piece. Especially well played was Agatha Christie herself, Fenella Woolgar.

The Doctor fights the poison - best scene of the episode!

Well done to Gareth Roberts who wrote this one, the idea of a wasp morphing into a human may seem a bit silly, but quite frankly the odd dose of silly does no-one any harm at all.

8.5/10

The Talons of Weng-Chiang

Tom Baker and Trevor Baxter

What can you say when you watch a story which fulfills all your hopes and expectations and leaves you thinking ‘wow’? Well, that’s my response to ‘The Talons of Weng Chiang’, written by Robert Holmes to fill a gap when Robert Stuart Banks was unable to complete work on a different story called ‘The Foe from the Future’. Incidentally, I had an adventure called ‘Future Foe’, I wonder if the ideas were the same. In my first incarnation I met Peter O’Feild, who already knew me, but I was meeting for the first time. If only I had known what a scoundrel and nasty pasty he was!

Chang and Mr Sin.

Victorian England was the perfect setting for a Doctor Who story, the Doctor often comes across as a Sherlock-Holmes type and with references to Jack the Ripper, a wonderful set of costumes to call on and one of the best and tightest Who directors in David Maloney, what could go wrong? Well, only the giant rat which did indeed look too cuddly, as producer Phillip Hinchcliffe remarked on the DVD. But we can forgive them that, otherwise it is a seamless piece of vibrant, exciting, at times dark, at times funny, television.

Before singing its praises any more though, one piece of conjecture marks this story, the casting of John Bennet as Li’sen Chang, a Chinese performer  of magic and key to the story. The make-up was very well done to make him look Chinese, but today you simply couldn’t get away with casting a white man in a different part. I’d like to say it’s all a part of acting, but is it? I mean an actor is ACTING, stretching their range to play a different race or culture, is it wrong? I can see arguments on both sides, and Doctor Who is littered with examples – Kevin Stoney in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, Various characters in ‘The Crusade’, Patrick Troughton as Mexican Salamander in ‘The Enemy of the World’. All had a bit of cosmetics to make them look different.

The Doctor, Jago and Leela in Weng Chiang's lair.

Around the time of this series, ‘Gangsters’, a progressive and different series penned by Philip Martin, was also going to air in the UK. It featured a swagger of Indian and Asian actors who struggled with the parts they had save a couple of standout performances. They were the basis of the series, they had been searched for. David Maloney needed actors for six episodes at short notice, and at the time it could be argued that there simply wasn’t the depth of non-white actors that there is today in the UK. Nevertheless it’s not a great look for the programme, despite John Bennet giving a great performance.

Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter

John Bennet in the Opium den as Chang

Along with the Doctor and Leela – and in no story has the Eliza Doolittle/Professor Higgins relationship been stronger and more apparent – Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter step into the fray as Jago and Litefoot. The former runs a theatre, the other is a pathologist. Both are somewhat timeless characters, with their own range of Audio Adventures out there produced by Big Finish. A wonderful double act, and both great characters in their own right. Michael Spice, who provided the voice of Morbius, dons a mask and prosthestiques to portray the mastermind behind it all, Weng Chiang – properly known as Magnus Greel. The use of Deep Roy as Mr Sin, a creature from the far future created from the cerebral cortex of a pig, is also chilling and well done.

Shot in part in a theatre, in part at night of the streets of London, and of course in the studio, this story moves well, with parts five and six a little separate from the first four. Lovely touches of the period throughout, costuming is excellent, it’s a thing of beauty really. Interactions between Litefoot and Leela also very very amusing at times as she ducks into a roast with her hands! All in all, about as good as it gets.

10/10

Inferno

I quite simply loved this story. This is the first Doctor Who story to use parallel dimensions, a concept that often appears in many science fiction stories, so it’s interesting that it took nearly seven years for the production team to go down this route. This story also brings to a close Jon Pertwee’s first season as the Doctor, seasons now reduced to 25 episode, and with all the long stories in season 7 of seven episodes, Jon Pertwee only has four stories to his name after a full year as the Doctor.

Olaf Pooley and Sheila Dunn

But a fine start it has been, with four very solid stories, two of them excellent in fact. I started this marathon back in February and ‘Inferno’ definitely rates as my favourite story to date. It’s a piece full of atmosphere, sometimes apocalyptic, great characterisations by the actors, thoughtful and gripping story-telling by the writer Don Houghton, great stunts, fantastic location shooting, and one that simply doesn’t let up for the full seven episodes.

Benton the Primord. All good... except those teeth!

So I will start with the negatives. The Primords – I like them, mostly because they are not a unified group with a goal trying to conquer anyone, rather simply the effects of touching the ooze from deep inside the Earth. However, the teeth are a bit silly really, especially one shot of Seargeant Benton in Episode Six I think, when he looks right at the camera. The teeth don’t seem to fit the mouth, and are bright white. The audio of them snarling is also rather out of place, doesn’t seem properly mixed. There are a few other tiny details but all in all this story holds up to pretty tight screening.

Nick Courtney

They couldn’t have picked a more perfect location. The HAVOC stunt team did a brilliant job of falling off silos but the most amazing thing is the stuff shot on top of the silos, a good fifty feet or more above the ground. Not only did Douglas Camfield get his cameramen up there, but Jon Pertwee and Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier went up there too, with only a rudimentary handrail between them and the quick way down! In making a TV programme today, I doubt whether they would be allowed to film in a location like that!

It makes for an exciting story, following on from ‘The Ambassadors of Death’ in using a lot of stunt work and action sequences far becoming the hallmark of this era of Doctor Who. One thing quite unique to this story though is the use of the parallel dimension, and I think it’s one of the best examples of a parallel dimension story there is. With the UNIT team now regulars in the series, it was great that only the Doctor visited the parallel dimension, allowing us an alternative Brigadier (Brigade Leader), Liz Shaw and Sergeant Benton. Interestingly enough, other characters in the story, not regulars but guest cast, didn’t have a very different character to the one on normal Earth.

The guest cast is fantastic with Sheila Dunn as Petra Williams, Christopher Benjamin as Sir Keith Gold and Olaf Pooley as Professor Stahlman. The alternative Earth provides a reality where the royals were executed and perhaps England is living under some sort of fascist or communist regime. It’s unclear which one exactly, but this world seems to suit Stahlman more than the normal Earth. We also have the character Greg Sutton, played by Derek Newark, who appeared in ‘An Unearthly Child’ as the leader of the cavemen. This character is similar in both dimensions.

Courtney and Caroline John in the alternate Universe.

Howere Nicholas Courtney, Caroline John and John Levene get to play sadistic and brutal versions of themselves in the parallel dimension. They do a brilliant job, only Liz Shaw’s character has any sort of change in thinking. We see the whole world destroyed as well just as the Doctor escapes. With the end of the world nigh, and our group of characters desperately fleeing the Primords but trying to get to the TARDIS console, episodes five and six are like nothing ever seen in Doctor Who. The atmosphere created is apocalyptic in the extreme. It’s simply brilliantly-pitched television.

Oh, and Jon Pertwee of course!

Jon Pertwee has his best outing yet. He has a charm that is coupled with a self-righteous indignation, and those factors seem to be the hallmark of his Doctor. Caroline John is fantastic as both Lizes in this story. I’ve learnt by starting the next story that it’s her final story. They could have at least let her go out with a goodbye scene, if not another story especially for the character. She’s worked very well with Pertwee’s Doctor, and shown that the Doctor’s companions do not need to be stupid. ‘The Ambassadors of Death’ is another where she is clever, resourceful and more than the usual companion. Sad to see her go so quickly.

So for the first time, I am rating a story

10/10