Saturday, August 10, 2002

 

Cora's comments on Doctor Who:

Yesterday I watched The Sontaran Experiment, a Doctor Who episode from 1975.

This is episode only two parts. And while fun enough, it feels a bit like a filler between two longer and more substantial stories (Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks). It's clear enough from the beginning that this adventure is only supposed to be a brief stop-over. Just a little trip down to a seemingly uninhabited Earth to repair a broken Transmat system (the Doctor Who equivalent to Star Trek's transporters). Strange that they still expected it to work (and even more amazing that it does) after 3000 years or however long the people on the ark in space were deep frozen.

The location used to represent the uninhabited Earth is very fitting. A desolated heath, no man-made structures visible anywhere - you really believe that this Earth 3000 years after humanity left. It's also a pleasant change from all the quarries seen in other episodes. I especially liked the Transmat station, large silver globes arranged as a circle. Definite echoes of Stonehenge there. The pit into which Harry stupidly falls looks rather fake, though.

Of course, Earth isn't as uninhabited as it seems at first. There is the stranded crew of a crashed spaceship. There is a rather unconvincing robot thing that roams the heath. And there is an egg-shaped structure in the rocks, from which an alien emerges at the end of part one. Talking of which, as a cliffhanger the emergence of the alien isn't very effective. Apparently, this is supposed to be a recurring foe - Sarah claims to recognize it in an "All aliens look the same" moment. Still, since I've never seen the story the Sontarans appeared in, the cliffhanger means very little to me. And their appearance shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, considering the story is called The Sontaran Experiment.

The make-up for the lone Sontaran is effective (despite the low budget, most Doctor Who aliens look convincing). And seeing its moon-like face deflating at the end is a nice effect. Unfortunately, the human crew of the crashed spaceship are not nearly as convincing as the Sontaran. A bunch of scruffy men in dirty overalls with hideous accents - suddenly I understood all those comments about regressive colonists in Ark in Space. And why do they threaten the Doctor with a machete? You'd figure people in the 30th century (or whenever it is supposed to be set) would have better weapons.

That aside, the premise of the story is interesting enough, aliens conducting grisly experiments on humans in preparation of an invasion. And what we get to see of the experiments - a man chained up and left to die of thirst and Sarah subjected to psychological torture - is chilling. Still, one wonders why the Sontarans would go to such trouble to conquer an uninhabited planet (and what do they want it for anyway?).

Unfortunately, after two episodes of the Doctor, Sarah, Harry, the spaceship crew, the Sontaran and the robot running about the heath, everything is wrapped up a little too quickly. The Doctor confronts the Sontaran, challenges him to a fight (he tells them that the spaceship crew are only members of a subhuman slave race and that he is the real thing - actually plausible considering how scruffy the crew look) and thoroughly beats him up. Meanwhile, Harry (who actually gets to do something useful for once) sabotages the Sontaran's egg-shaped base station which causes him to implode. Finally, the Doctor tells the Sontaran invasion fleet to back off - and they do! They stop an invasion of an uninhabited planet, because a single human beat up a single Sontaran? Yeah sure.

The logical problems of this conclusion wouldn't be quite so obvious, if the climatic fight between the Doctor and the Sontaran was a bit more dramatic. And there have been good physical fights in Doctor Who, e.g. the duel in The Deadly Assassin which takes up a whole episode. But here it takes the Doctor only a few minutes of not very convincing fighting to beat a member of a supposed warrior race. According to the BBC website, Tom Baker was injured during the filming of this episode and therefore couldn't do a longer and more convincing fight scene. But the disappointing five-minute fight still ruins the climax of the story.

posted by Cora link 02:16