March 18: "The Poison Sky"

So I remembered not being terribly impressed by this story, the first few times I watched it.  This time around, though, I found myself reasonably entertained.  It's not the greatest story out there, and it's not even necessarily anything more than an average tale, but then again it's not trying to be clever or inventive.  No, what "The Sontaran Stratagem" / "The Poison Sky" wants to do is tell a fun action story that reintroduces the Sontarans, and at that it succeeds quite well.

Yes, there are some problems with "The Poison Sky" in particular.  Luke Rattigan went from annoying to downright distasteful in this second part -- it's incredibly hard to have any sympathy for him even before he starts pulling guns on his students.  You sort of get the impression that they want this to be like Tobias Vaughn getting his revenge on the Cybermen in The Invasion ("They destroyed my dream", if you remember), but Ryan Sampson is no Kevin Stoney.  Not that that stops the episode from trying really hard to make you care about Rattigan and his fate.  Oh, and speaking of strange things like this... why do the script and episode really want us to care about the death of Martha's clone?  It's like they flip a switch from having her doing covert things for the Sontarans to suddenly being a real person dying in front of us.  (Well, actually, dying in front of the real Martha, which makes it even stranger.)  Never mind that she's been working for the enemy -- because she looks like someone we like, we should care.  (Under this logic, some viewers are going to be very upset rewatching this episode and seeing Dan Starkey die just because he looks like Strax.)  And some minor quibbles: it feels odd that the Sontarans are so vulnerable to bullets -- though admittedly, there's nothing in any of their previous appearances, to the best of my knowledge, to suggest they're not -- because you'd think that armor they're wearing would do something.  And I wonder about a device that ignites the toxic gases in the atmosphere but not anything anywhere else.  Or did a huge number of wildfires spring up in the American West (say) that we just don't hear about?

Commander Skorr and his troops. ("The Poison Sky") ©BBC

So those are the problems.  But, balanced against this, we've got some great scenes in "The Poison Sky". It's great how the Doctor immediately works out that Martha is a clone, so that we don't have to worry too much about "oh no, there's a traitor in their midst" and can get on with business as usual.  The Doctor gets to be nice and moral, objecting to guns ("If I see one more gun," he says as he casually disarms Luke and throws the gun away without missing a beat) and insisting that he give the Sontarans a choice between death and retreat, even though he knows they'll choose death.  And while there aren't quite as many little jokes in this episode, there are still fun moments such as Donna sneaking out of the TARDIS to knock out a Sontaran guard, or her continual mispronunciations of the word "Sontaran", with emphasis on the first syllable instead of the second.  (And this is an in-joke as well, reflecting conversations between Kevin Lindsay and director Alan Bromly about the pronunciation during the first Sontaran story, The Time Warrior.)  It's also really lovely how Wilf is firmly on the Doctor's side, telling Donna to go with him over Sylvia's objections -- it's a nice change from family members being firmly anti-Doctor.

But ultimately this is a relatively uncomplicated action story, and while it's not doing anything spectacular, it's telling its tale in a largely entertaining way.  As I said, it's not perfect (even if he's meant to be a prat, what were they thinking by including a character like Rattigan?), but it's definitely an improvement over Raynor's last tale.

And an interesting cliffhanger (the TARDIS suddenly takes off, with Martha still inside with the Doctor and Donna), and a very intriguing trailer for next time, as we meet... the Doctor's daughter?