From MadCap's Couch - "Doctor Who: The Sontaran Stratagem"

"Rose? I told you never to call me at this number!"

SONTAR! HA!

. . .sorry, we'll get to that later.

The Sontarans aren't exactly one of my favorite monsters from Doctor Who. I don't dislike them, far from it, they just aren't something that comes to mind when I think of Doctor Who. They have a cool design and they make a good counterpart against the Doctor's more pacifistic nature with their far more militaristic one. Like a lot of aliens reintroduced from Classic Who, the Sontarans were given a big push for Series 4, showing up very prominently in the advertisements and so on.

. . .which kinds of makes it all the more baffling that these are, to date, the only focus episodes the Sontarans have gotten as opposed to the Daleks or the Cybermen or even the Weeping Angels who have gotten several to date. Maybe that lack of profile is why they don't sit as firmly in my mind, given that particular factoid.

To begin with the beginning - we have a reporter being thrown out of a mansion that looks suspiciously like the royal place in France from The Girl in the Fireplace, but it isn't. It's actually an estate house in a place called Margam Country Park, and it's been used in Doctor Who, Torchwood, and the Sarah Jane Adventures as a filming location. This will be used as a filming location in both the Matt Smith and the Peter Capaldi eras of the show, so that's pretty neat.

I don't know, is it racist to assume that all the manor houses in England look the same?

Regardless, a reporter is being thrown out by a bunch of people in orange track suits. This definitely not a cult is definitely not led by Luke Rattigan - a Mark Zuckerberg knock off. Jo Nakashima, the journalist, apparently has some details on the ATMOS system that we very briefly glimpsed a blink and you'll miss it cameo of in Partners in Crime. After she leaves, Rattigan contacts an unseen party who he recommends termination of her, too. The unseen party agrees.

Jo, meanwhile, gets the GPS from Hell treatment. She can't disable ATMOS, and she attempts to send a message to UNIT's Colonel Mace. ATMOS overtakes her car, locks her into it, and sends her into the river...the GPS voice creepily telling her that "this is your final destination".

Counterbalance, Donna is trying to fly the TARDIS...much to the Doctor's exasperation as he guides her. At one point, Donna sarcastically mentions putting a dent in the 1980's. The Doctor mentions that someone did. Given that Russell T. Davies was scared of making references to Classic Who until around Series 3 and even then barely did so anyway...I have to assume he was referencing the episode I linked when he put this into the script. Otherwise, Helen Raynor did, which I find unlikely. Either way...

ROSE TYLER CAUSED THE NEAR-DEATH OF EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON EARTH IN 1987. THAT'S AROUND 5 BILLION PEOPLE! 5 BILLION PEOPLE IS NOT A "DENT", RUSSELL! FUCK YOU!

. . .and I only spat in italics a little bit!

. . .and only lost half my brain cells this time!

Regardless, a phone begins to ring...a familiar one to anyone who has been following my reviews. The Doctor picks it up, and on the other end is one Martha Jones! She tells the Doctor that she's bringing him back to Earth!

"A redhead?"
"I'm sure it won't become a habit..."

After the credits, the TARDIS lands in an alley where an expectant Martha is waiting. After some tension, the Doctor and Martha share a warm hug. He does ask about the family, but soon the inevitable comes...Donna comes out, and Donna and Martha square off. Or, so you might think given previous companion meet ups in the new series. However, unlike then when all it did was serve to show how awesome Sarah Jane Smith was and how absolutely shit Rose Tyler is, Donna and Martha get along famously from the start. Donna calls the Doctor a "prawn" for not realizing Martha's engagement ring - it seems that Martha has fully gotten over the Doctor by getting engaged to Lucifer...although there's another side to that, but we'll get into that when we reach The End of Time.

The script is flipped on the Doctor yet again, with both Martha and Donna ribbing on the Doctor much to his exasperation.

Just after this, in comes UNIT with their guns and all. It appears that the Doctor and Donna have been called in right in the middle of a raid on an ATMOS factory. As Martha gets in, now a full doctor herself, Donna asks the Doctor offhandedly if this is what he does to the people who travel with him - turn them into soldiers. Tellingly, the Doctor doesn't answer.

The unseen party from before discusses the UNIT soldiers, calling them the playthings of children.

Colonel Mace is introduced, giving the Doctor a salute (much to his chagrin) and being coerced into giving Donna one when she rightly tags him for being a tool. We also get a reference to the UNIT dating controversy and get the tidbit that the Doctor never officially resigned his position as UNIT's unpaid scientific advisor, a position he first gained in Spearhead from Space way back in 1970...by the year of broadcast, anyway. 

Getting back to the plot, the deal is this - the raid on the ATMOS factory is because of 52 deaths that occurred simultaneously in different time zones all around the world...and all of them were in cars outfitted with ATMOS. They were poisoned, but the autopsies revealed no poisons in the system. ATMOS being their only lead, UNIT moved into action.

This is UNIT's first appearance since World War Three, having
been oddly absent since then...curious...

The Doctor gets an ATMOS system to examine, a system that apparently reduces the carbon emissions of any vehicle they're installed in to 0. Donna suggests that, if this is alien, that maybe this alien wants to help. The Doctor, being a bit more cynical, notes that there are 800 million cars on the Earth, and that controlling them would mean controlling 800 million weapons.

A pair of UNIT soldiers in the basement find two workers standing at a door, claiming it to be out of bounds. The unseen party declares its intention to enter the fray, allowing them entry. In the room, the soldiers find a pod of some kind that is smoking and boiling. When they fiddle with it, something hits it...from the inside! They open it up, finding a noxious green liquid as a fetus-like creature lashes out at them before returning to the liquid again. Someone is growing a human body...

An armored Sontaran congratulates the soldiers on their deductive skills and, when one belittles him, blasts his kneecap with his baton. Their guns are useless and their radio signals are being blocked, meaning that they can't fight back and can't get help. The two workers come in, preparing to take the men away, and one of them asks who he is. The Sontaran introduces himself as Staal of the Tenth Sontaran Battle Fleet, otherwise known as "Staal the Undefeated" and he takes off his helmet to reveal his face...which terrifies the men instead of subduing them with laughter.

The Doctor expresses some issues with Colonel Mace carrying a gun and he leaves. Freema Agyeman gives a great performance and a very impassioned speech about how it's different for humanity than it is for the Doctor, he can leave while they have to stay and fight. She hopes to stay inside and change UNIT from the inside, so that maybe she can help make them better. The Doctor says that is more like the Martha Jones that he knows.

Donna, meanwhile, has gone to Personnel and found the Sick Days folder...namely the empty Sick Days folder. No one has called in sick, ever. Martha and Donna head off to start checking the workers at the factory while Mace drops some exposition on Luke Rattigan. Boy genius...basically every stereotype you can think of.

"We come from France!"

Martha tells Donna about what happened to her family, how the Master captured and tortured her family and that they're still working through that trauma. After learning from Donna that she didn't tell her mother or her grandfather, Martha doesn't want her to make the same mistake. The Doctor is like fire, she says...and the people closest to them will get burned.

Staal sends his newly-conditioned soldiers out and returns to his ship, promising the final days of Planet Earth...not the first time we'll hear that phrase in this stretch, although it's the least stupid of them.

The Doctor gets a UNIT soldier, Ross Jenkins, as his attaché for the trip to see Luke Rattigan, and prepares to pull Donna into the mix...and she declares that she wants to leave and go back to her family. He attempts to dazzle her with visions of places he wanted to take her...and suddenly he gets that she's just popping back to visit her family. She rightly calls him a bit of a dunce for this, but given the overbearing nature of drama in the Russell T. Davies era, it's a fair mistake to make.

Martha interviews one of the workers who speaks in a creepily hypnotized voice, has an incredibly rapid heartbeat, and claims that he works twenty-four hours a day.

CLEARLY, there's nothing suspicious going on here.

Afterwards, everyone goes off in their separate directions - Donna getting a ride with the Doctor and Ross back to her neighborhood while Martha gets pulled by two soldiers to see Colonel Mace...and a pull back shows that they are the two that were taken in by Staal.

Donna heads down her street and we get clips of the previous few episodes interposed with the ordinary life on her street up until Donna finds Wilf outside their home and, overcome, runs to him and they embrace joyously.

Back at the factory, Martha is introduced to the noxious green liquid and her screams are heard down the hallway.

Donna and Wilf talk about her adventures and Wilf asks her if she's safe with the Doctor. Donna tells him that she trusts the Doctor with her life. Sylvia walks in and goes on her usual tirades, making Donna decide not to tell her about what has happened to her and where she's been, having been discussing it with Wilf before.

The Doctor and Ross, meanwhile, are getting along well, cheerfully punning as they drive up to meet Luke Rattigan. In the lab, while Luke is less than impressed, the Doctor admires all the technology that Rattigan's people are working on - saying it would be ideal for moving to another planet. In Luke's...game room? Office? I'm not sure...the Doctor fast talks his way into explaining that, while Luke is clever and has achieved much, there's no way he invented ATMOS on his own. He then proceeds to point out and use a teleporter device that Luke has just sitting in said room.

. . .and this guy is supposed to be clever?

At least Ross listens when the Doctor tells him weapons are useless.
Step above the usual UNIT grunt.

The Doctor teleports onto a ship full of Sontarans, and promptly teleports out again when found out. When Staal follows him, the Doctor breaks the teleport and questions him. Ross gets the correct reaction - calling the Sontaran a potato, rather dismissively.  The Doctor points out the probic vent in the back of the Sontaran net and then uses a squash racket to knock a ball into it, allowing himself and Ross to escape. Staal recovers, repairing the teleport and returning to the ship with Luke.

ATMOS has been installed in 400 million cars, which is more than enough for "The Conversion". There's a joke about the Sontarans not understanding what "cool" means in the colloquial and they prepare for the final phase.

Martha meets Skorr, one of Staal's soldiers, who introduces her to the thing in the tank and tells her that, soon, it will be her.

Staal and Luke have a short scene where Luke looks at the grandeur of Earth and mentions the Doctor was in a UNIT jeep. Staal mentions some continuity about the Doctor, namely that he's an enemy of the Sontarans and a face changer. Most to the point, he mentions that the Doctor led the battle in the Last Great Time War and that the Sontarans - for one reason or another - weren't allowed to be part of it, much to their chagrin. Personally, I think the Time Lords were still a bit irrate about that time the Sontarans managed to break down their front gate and piss all over their lawn.

Yeah, we'll get to The Invasion of Time someday.

Staal gleefully declares that the Doctor will die in the ruins of his precious Earth.

Martha's clone is up and we get to see Freema Agyeman both naked (from the neck up, of course) and wet! Unfortunately, it's essentially ambiotic goo.

Ewwww.

"Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design..."

The Doctor and Ross almost get a Jo pulled on them, but the Doctor manages to mindscrew ATMOS into "self-destructing", letting the Sontarans and Luke believe he is dead. They advance the cause while the Doctor heads up to Donna's and begins examining cars. Wilf comes out, and they have an exchange about the last time they met, with Wilf completely mystified by the Doctor's alien nature.

Donna calls "Martha", the Doctor warning her about the Sontarans...and "Martha" doesn't pass along the message to Colonel Mace. Sylvia pops out, mentioning the last time she met the Doctor and retconning Wilf's absence from Donna's wedding as him having had Spanish flu. The Doctor activates the ATMOS system prematurely...and the Sontarans catch on and begin moving their plans ahead, activating the system in every car on Earth.

Wilf gets stuck in the car, deadlocked, as the Doctor tries to get him out...and the Doctor also realizes the bigger scope of all this: 400 million weapons just got activated and the gas is being dispersed. The Sontarans give their cries of "SONTAR HA! SONTAR HA! SONTAR HA!" (Luke even joining in the chanting and the slamming a fist into the hand that they're doing) as the Doctor realizes just how absolutely screwed they all are...and we cut to the credits.

A good episode capped off by some fantastic tension.
Kudos, Helen Raynor, Kudos!

The Sontaran Stratagem is a good episode. The Sontaran design is pretty good and they actually manage to make a credible threat in this episode after their absence since 1985's The Two Doctors. The effects for them are also significantly better than in any other story they've appeared in, particularly The Two Doctors, where they looked like deflating potatoes. Yes, like The Invasion of Time, I'm sure that The Two Doctors will gets it's day in the limelight on my couch.

Helen Raynor really does well when Russell isn't demanding that she insert absolutely batshit insane things into her scripts like last time. Also, to give her her due credit, she's been a script editor on several episodes in Series 1-4 that we've already covered and a few still to come. She's also notable as being the only script editor to work on Steven Moffat's work prior to his rise as showrunner.

It's a shame she never wrote anything else for Doctor Who, having a two-parter that was bad due to interference from Russell and a two-parter that is actually pretty good all things considered. She is also notable as the first woman to write a Dalek episode and a Sontaran episode. Also, did I just give my opinion on The Poison Sky? Probably.

Tune in next time to see if I follow through on that or if my opinion changes.