Author: Simon Fernandes

“Hooray!”

I honestly never thought I’d be in the position to assess an ‘era’ of Doctor Who again. And that, more than anything else, is reason to give Russell T Davies an enormous amount of credit.

Doctor Who has never had a ‘showrunner’ as such before; actually, such an exalted position is still relatively rare on British TV. If you want to credit anyone with starting the trend, it has to be the Americans – notably J Michael Straczynski, whose single minded determination to do Babylon 5 the way he wanted set a trend that would be followed by the likes of Joss Whedon with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Still, Doctor Who has had kinds of showrunners before. They used to be called ‘producers’. Each producer, usually working in tandem with a script editor, produced his/her own distinct vision of the show. When John Nathan-Turner took over for his unchallenged nine year reign of terror, things became a bit more complicated, and the show’s style changed several times according to who was script editing. Thus, we had incomprehensible hard science under Christopher Bidmead, masses of unbelievably gratuitous violence under Eric Saward, and a sub-Tolkien ‘story arc’ from Andrew Cartmel (years before J M Straczynski had one!).

Russell T Davies was neither producer nor script editor. His rather ill-defined job title was ‘executive producer’. But in practice, he was the one man behind getting the show back on our screens and making it the astonishing success it has become. To put it another way, he’s the one responsible for the people who used to call me a sad geek asking me respectfully what I thought of each episode as it went out. He’s the man who made the Doctor trendy again.

One of the factors so vital in his success was the fact that, as we discovered, the BBC and the country as a whole are stuffed full of fans, previously terrified to come out of the closet (or police box). So the new regime at the BBC gave RTD a budget the likes of which the series had never seen, and the creative freedom to more or less do what he liked. They wanted six episodes, he said thirteen. So they went with thirteen. He even masterminded the extremely clever marketing that trailed the show, and planned out that first season in exhaustive detail before even hiring writers. While the writers filled out the dialogue and plot complications, he even went in and ‘fine tuned’ scripts (isn’t that usually the script editor’s job?). In short, he undertook and enormous amount of work for what was, basically, a labour of love.

And the fans who were now working as writers and producers helped him do it. Phil Collinson (allegedly the basis for the character of Stuart in Queer As Folk) took on a producing job the likes of which he could never have been prepared for. Longtime fan writers such as Robert Shearman, Paul Cornell and, most significantly, Steven Moffat were brought aboard. RTD couldn’t have picked a better crew.

He made a lot of very good decisions in planning the first season, too. Ditching the old four-part 25 minute episode stories was probably the most significant, possibly vying with his determination to see the show back in its traditional Saturday early evening slot, watched – and tailored for – a family audience rather than for the hardcore fans. Not that the hardcore fans were ignored. From the start – the one with the Autons, remember – it was clear that this wasn’t a ‘reboot’, but a continuation of the old show. Just with more money. And better acting. And bigger effects.

Like most fans, I was pleased to hear that a serious actor had been cast as the Doctor. Christopher Eccleston turned out to be a far better choice than I’d imagined; though I respected him as an actor, I expected a very serious, dour, Northern performance. Northern it certainly was, but he displayed a gift for comedy and eccentricity I’d never seen before, that was perfect for the part. Here was a Doctor with all the necessary gravitas, who could still gurn like Sylvester McCoy and leap manically about like Tom Baker. Fantastic!

Like most fans, I was horrified to hear that a low-rent pop star had been cast as the Doctor’s companion. And like most fans, I was proved very, very wrong. Billie Piper turned out to be a fine actress as Rose Tyler, and a surprisingly hard act to follow.

Not that mistakes weren’t made. While Russell made a great showrunner, I had serious issues with his skill as a screenwriter – at least for this kind of thing. His Virgin New Adventure novel Damaged Goods was a clue – interesting setting, great characters, terrific, witty dialogue – and a plot that bordered on the incomprehensible and seemed to go nowhere. It’s worth remembering that even Queer As Folk. the show he was justly lauded for writing never had a proper ‘ending’ to either one of its series.

While Rose was a steady enough season opener, it’s notable that in that first season, the real standouts were the scripts by anyone but Russell – in fact, his The Long Game was probably the weakest story of the season. And while the slam bang season finale was jaw droppingly spectacular, it showcased Russell’s problem with writing himself into a corner and using a magical deus ex machina to get out of it.

He was also still learning about the publicity/fan gossip process. It would have been superb if the Ninth Doctor’s regeneration after only one season had come as a total surprise, but a combination of flubs by the production office, the BBC, and Eccleston himself ensured this was not to be. Still, it was a learning experience, and later ‘surprises’ were handled better; though the Daleks v Cybermen match up at the end of season two wasn’t entirely a surprise.

We also saw the introduction of ‘soap opera’ style relatives and friends to ‘ground the series in the real world’. In fact, for the first couple of years it rarely got away from the real world, due to Russell’s worry about unconvincing alien planets – like the ones we were all used to already. Thankfully, after a couple of years he stopped worrying about that, and started to tax the Mill’s CGI effects often beyond their ability to convince.

But, undoubtedly the most important factor was the casting of the Tenth Doctor. David Tennant’s fanboy enthusiasm and undoubted good looks took a show that was already successful and propelled it into the stratosphere. I’m not saying that a good actor can’t play the Doctor without being a fan, but Tennant’s instinct for how the character worked was incredibly useful. A combination more of Tom Baker and Peter Davison than anything else, he was initially a bit hard to take after Christopher Eccleston’s intensity – he often seemed to be revelling in his delight at playing the part he’d gone into acting to get. Thankfully, he ditched the smugness and dialled down the manicness after his first season, maturing tremendously to give nuanced performances like those witnessed in School Reunion and Human Nature. At this point, I didn’t think we could ever have a better Doctor.

After the end of his increasingly irritating ‘relationship’ with Rose, companions came and went, some good, some not so good. Noel Clarke improved immensely after his first, cartoonish stab at playing Mickey, and was pretty easy on the eye for those of us that fancy blokes. John Barrowman was so over the top he was in orbit as Captain Jack, but fair’s fair – that’s exactly what the character demanded. Freema Agyeman tried hard but made little impression as Martha, but then Catherine Tate – whose comedy show I can’t stand, incidentally – knocked our socks off as Donna Noble. With all the self-righteousness of Sarah, the mouthiness of Tegan, and none of the simpering looks at the Doctor of Rose or Martha, I’d venture to say she made the most perfect companion since the show returned.

As a showrunner, Russell was already good, but as a writer, he seemed to improve a lot. The absolute nadir of his writing was the execrable and plot hole filled New Earth, but this was immediately followed by Tooth and Claw, an excellent little episode that showed his writing to be at its best when not trying to overdo the spectacle. The nicely wacky Gridlock and taut claustrophobic Midnight went on to prove this.

One noticeable lack was Russell’s failure at creating any really memorable new aliens. It’s significant that in each series, the overarching baddies were derived from the classic show – the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Daleks, the Master, Davros and the Daleks, and finally, the Master and the Time Lords. While some of Russell’s creations were fairly memorable, none really seemed to be crying out for a return visit. No matter how much he tried to convince us that the Slitheen were great, I don’t think anyone really bought into that.

The final thing Russell got perfectly, absolutely right was the manner of his departure. As head of one of the BBC’s most successful drama series, he orchestrated the reports of his own and David Tennant’s departure with great aplomb, giving us more of a surprise than some of the show’s plotlines had! And his decision to, effectively, take the show off the air for a year, was what Sir Humphrey Appleby would have disdainfully referred to as ‘courageous’, yet has made the specials, and the show’s return, more hotly anticipated than ever.

In future, fan books will probably be written about ‘The RTD Years’ – much as they have been for every producer of the show since 1963. He’s hotly divided the fans like no producer since John Nathan-Turner. And I’ve been the first one to bang on, sometimes unfairly, about the weaknesses of his plotting. But the bottom line is this – he is almost single handedly responsible for getting Doctor Who back on the air, he got it a decent budget, a proper time slot, real actors and dragged it into relevancy in the 21st century. Sure, he wasn’t perfect, but come on – I think doing all that probably makes him the most important ‘showrunner’ since Verity Lambert. Steve Moffat has some very big, Welsh shoes to fill.

“I don’t want to go…”

And so, at last, the RTD era is over. My thoughts on his tenure as show runner will follow soon, but what of The End of Time – fitting end of an era?

One of Russell’s problems as the man in charge has been this compulsion to consistently outdo himself in every series. The overstuffed silliness of Journey’s End, which tried to include every character and situation from Russell’s run, was however going to be hard to top. After the serious, intelligent writing of Waters of Mars, though, I had high hopes that the Tenth Doctor’s swansong might be a little more sophisticated than Russell’s usual season finale tales of sound and fury. Sadly, this wasn’t to be, but while unbalanced dramatically and suffering from a somewhat incomprehensible plot, The End of Time was a fairly enjoyable romp.

On the positive side, I was utterly relieved that we didn’t have to have the Daleks again. Don’t get me wrong, I like them every bit as much as any fan, but their near-constant presence since the series returned has become something of an irritant. A Dalek story used to be a special occasion; now it’s just something that crops up at least two episodes a season, predictable as clockwork.

So the villain was to be the Master. If you were reading this blog back in the season three days, you’ll know that I love John Simm’s Master for his sheer, barking insanity – the only thing that makes the character’s motivations and overly complex scheming make sense. Simm didn’t disappoint here, taking the character to new levels of nuttiness. When he was Harold Saxon, he had to at least maintain a veneer of sanity to get to the position of Prime Minister. Shorn of high office and hanging around with the homeless, he could let it all hang out. Even the other tramps thought he was scarily mental, especially when they found that he’d eaten the cooks in that burger van inexplicably parked in the middle of a wasteland.

And as in the past, the Master must have laid the groundwork for his incredibly elaborate resurrection plan while still working on his previous global domination scheme. It’s always occurred to me that having so many complicated back up plans going on at once means that he always expects to be thwarted. Either that or he just likes to keep busy.

As Timothy Dalton’s portentous voiceover informed us of ‘the final days of Earth’, it was hard to see how the scruffily mad Master was going to achieve this, but Russell was actually quite clever at putting the pieces in place. The odd coincidences surrounding Wilf, the presence of yet another sinister businessman in Joshua Naismith (who can’t stand still without posing with his arms crossed), and finally the mysterious Immortality Gate all seemed to be good ingredients for a nice, apocalyptic finale. Only that peculiar failsafe power system that required one person to remain locked in a room smacked of ‘that’ll be useful as a contrived plot device later on’. You know, like that bit in Event Horizon where Sam Neill points out the explosives that can separate the ship in two, then just forgets about it till it’s needed for the plot.

Part one took a bit of time to nicely establish characters and set up situations. Wilf’s quest to find the Doctor was entertaining – I chuckled at ‘the silver cloak’ – and it was lovely to see June Whitfield acting up a storm. I actually hoped we’d see bit more of her, but her part amounted to little more than a showy cameo, which made it seem rather like unnecessary padding. It was nice to see Catherine Tate back as Donna, and even nicer that Russell didn’t succumb to the temptation of undoing her previous tragic fate. But, oh, Bernard Cribbins! Given a more substantial role as the Doctor’s companion this time, he managed to make every scene he was in little short of magical. That first scene with Wilf and the Doctor chatting in the cafe was one of the highlights not just of this story but of the new series as a whole, up there with Sylvester McCoy’s similar cafe scene in Remembrance of the Daleks.

Which brings us neatly to Mr Tennant himself. Whatever you may think of the story as a whole, this undoubtedly one of the finest performances from an actor who’s really grown into the part. His first series found him so smug and manic I wanted to thump him half the time, but this story showed just how much his performance as the Doctor has matured. That cafe scene, with him just holding back tears as he talked about his oncoming death with another old man was just one of many moments that, calculatedly or not, brought a lump to my throat. And his interplay with the Master was far better than their previous encounter, where they hardly had any scenes together. The scene in part two where they were talking very softly to each other about their childhoods, faces mere millimetres apart, had one of us in my house crying out, ‘oh, just kiss, for God’s sake!’.

OK, the Master’s plan was, ultimately, very very silly. But still in keeping with John Simm’s interpretation of him being nuttier than squirrel shit. Everyone on the planet being played by John Simm must have been hell to shoot, but was well done; however, it was never clear whether every version of him was aware of what every other version of him was seeing. Presumably not, as he kept having to give orders to other versions of himself. And it was fun to see ‘Barack Obama’ changing into the Master – confirming every Republican’s worst fears – though perhaps the show ought to steer clear of political comments like ‘he’s found a solution to the recession’! And just why did he continue standing at that podium throughout the crisis?

But the end of part one had the not entirely unexpected reveal that the Master wasn’t the main bad guy after all – it was (gasp!) the Time Lords! At this point I began to think that perhaps Russell should perhaps have kept the threat a bit more low key. As Timothy Dalton impressively proclaimed through a mouthful of spit that he was going to ‘bring about the end of time itself’, I wondered how exactly such a danger could be visualised. I wasn’t to wonder for long, as apparently it’s best demonstrated by showing Gallifrey pop into existence next to Earth. Impressive though that looked, I couldn’t help noticing that Gallifrey was at least four times the size of Earth, which made me wonder why visiting humans such as Leela were never crushed by its presumably heavy gravity.

The trouble with piling threat upon threat like this was that once the Time Lords actually appeared, they actually had very little time to do, in effect, not much. Oh sure, they changed the human race back to themselves, and kept muttering doomy pronouncements like HP Lovecraft’s Elder Gods, but what did they actually do? Timothy Dalton’s President (who seemed to be referred to as Rassilon at one point) played with a silly gauntlet that looked suspiciously like that one out of Torchwood for a couple of minutes, then the Master charged in and saved the day! It was a nice bit of circular logic for the Time Lords to have, effectively, created the Master by driving him nuts just to save themselves, but that smacked rather too much of fanwank – answering a question that never really needed to be asked. And ultimately, left the Doctor without much of a role in saving the day.

So what did the Doctor save? Well, that was, for me, the most interesting aspect of an all over the place story. With so many apocalyptic events looming, the Tenth Doctor finally died to save just one man. While this was nicely unexpected, it could have been telegraphed slightly less by Wilf’s selfless but silly decision to climb into the convenient Booth of Doom.

Still, as the Doctor writhed in the grasp of alien radiation, his face hidden, I very much expected that when he finally turned to camera, it would be Matt Smith we’d be looking at. But it wasn’t, and that’s where the narrative seemed to really go to pieces. I can appreciate that his extended tour of all of his friends’ fates (yet again) had the poignant feel of a terminally ill man putting all his affairs in order. But we just saw all that lot gathered together at the end of the last season, and it really undercut the pace of the narrative for the Doctor to spend the better part of fifteen minutes popping by to say hello. So Martha and Mickey got married? Whuh? And while mostly going around conveniently saving his old friends’ lives, apparently the most he could contribute to Captain Jack was to give him the opportunity of a shag, something he probably wouldn’t have had much trouble with anyway. Still, it was nice to see Russell Tovey popping up again as Midshipman Alonso Frame from Voyage of the Damned, especially in light of all those comments RTD made about wanting Tovey as the next Doctor.

All of this made us wonder whether the Doctor might actually get away without regenerating at all, as it was beginning to seem like it would never happen. But happen it finally did, albeit with less drama than if it had occurred when the Doctor appeared to be seriously injured. It’s unusual for a regeneration to happen with no one to witness it – Troughton to Pertwee, I suppose, and McCoy to McGann. Oh, and McGann to Eccleston. All right, not that unusual then. But a first in the new series. And yes, Tennant’s final line was heartbreaking, and for that moment I didn’t want him to go either. But change finally happened, in the most unnecessarily pyrotechnic regeneration ever. While I like the ‘shooting out energy’ effect of recent regenerations, surely the near total destruction of the TARDIS interior was a bit excessive? Lucky that never happened on other occasions; Ben and Polly might have been burnt to death, or the Pharos Project telescope might have fallen over.

And so, here was the new boy! I like Matt Smith, having seen him act his socks off in a number of other productions, but when I heard of his casting as the Doctor, my main misgiving was ‘he’s actually not too different from David Tennant, is he?’ And so it proved, at least initially. It’s impossible to judge a new Doctor after a couple of minutes – after all, Colin Baker looked like he might be good – but Matt’s post regenerative confusion seemed rather too similar to Tennant’s back in 2006. He even commented that he was ‘still not ginger’! But I liked the energy of his performance, and his self-mockingly aghast ‘I’m a girl?’ And I trust Steve Moffat, so I think he’ll be good.

Ultimately, The End of Time was more of a reasonably serviceable story than the celebration of an era Russell T Davies clearly wanted it to be. The trouble with his approach of making every season finale top the last meant that it really had nowhere to go, and on occasion it seemed to be trying very much too hard. And the story structure was all over the place, making it hard to maintain the level of emotional involvement that might have been nicer to wind up the Tenth Doctor’s tenure. That said, Tennant was undeniably great, as were John Simm and Bernard Cribbins, and from the online trailer, the new era looks rather good. Roll on Series 5/1/32, or whatever you want to call it. And whatever we thought of this particular story, a definite salute to Russell T Davies for bringing back the show we loved, and doing it so well that it’s now one of the most popular shows on British television. Well done, sir.

“The Laws of Time are mine. And they will obey me!”

Now that was good. I was rather disappointed with the previous two specials; The Next Doctor, once one got past the striking images of Cybermen in Victorian London, had a flimsy and predictable plot, and Planet of the Dead seemed an empty, overambitious romp with some gaping plot holes.

Waters of Mars, conversely, may be one of Russell T Davies’ best scripts ever. Shorn of his desire to play to the crowds by having Cybermen fight Daleks, or having a reunion of every companion since 2005, he turned out an economical, chilling script that worked on several different levels.

First, and most obviously, it was an effective little horror story, playing on some of Who’s staple strengths. A relentless, thoroughly alien adversary that takes over and changes your very body is straight out of Philip Hinchcliffe’s darker stories – The Ark in Space being the prime example. And the ‘base under siege’ scenario is a formula that’s worked in any number of Who stories – not to mention classic horror films like Night of the Living Dead and most of the work of John Carpenter. Indeed, there were scenes reminiscent of a number of horror films. The basic premise is not dissimilar to Carpenter’s far inferior Ghosts of Mars, and the bit when Roman was infected by a single drop of water recalled nothing so much as Brendan Gleeson’s infection with a single drop of blood in 28 Days Later. Ratcheting up the tension with his customary expertise was the reliably superb Graeme Harper, who could show John Carpenter a thing or two about direction these days.

The possessing aliens were genuinely imaginative and unnerving. The possibility of running water on the surface of Mars has a plausible scientific background, and the possessed humans, bodies shedding a horrifying amount of water, were just scary enough for a show on at 7 in the evening. Like Russell’s other horror classic Midnight, their nature and motivations were left deliberately unclear, and were more disturbing for it. All we got were disquietingly ominous hints, with the viewer’s imagination left to fill in the rest.

At the other end of the scale from ‘scary’, I was a little dubious about the inclusion of an intentionally ‘cute’ robot. Not that I have anything against cute robots per se – as a Star Wars fan that would make me something of a hypocrite. But it did seem that Russell was trying to have his cake and eat it by both including a cute robot and having the Doctor make contemptuous remarks about cute robots. Still, younger kids will probably love it, as will the merchandise manufacturers. For me, I found the robot’s operator, young Roman, far more cute.

So, on one level, Waters of Mars was very much a thrilling, family friendly slice of horror in the style of old school Who. If it had had a decent budget and more convincing effects. But what definitely wasn’t old school – and will, I suspect, be the part that excites and divides the fans – was the parallel thread exploring how the Doctor squares his increasingly omnipotent power with a sense of morality.

This is what made the episode truly dark, and made it one of the most audacious scripts Russell has written. The Doctor’s a difficult character to deconstruct, as ultimately he’s the hero of the show and necessarily its moral compass. To show him as both fallible morally and arrogant to boot is nearly unprecedented.

I say ‘nearly’, because the show has touched on the idea before. In the very first story, William Hartnell seemed prepared to bash in a caveman’s head  to help himself escape. Patrick Troughton’s deliberate misdirection of the archaeological team in Tomb of the Cybermen always struck me as a bit suspect, too. He plainly knew what was down there; if he wanted to avoid bloodshed why not just tell people? Then we saw Jon Pertwee confronting his own ingrained prejudice towards the Ice Warriors in The Curse of Peladon. And most famously, Tom Baker agonised over the decision of whether or not to commit genocide against his deadliest enemies in Genesis of the Daleks – a moral debate slightly undercut in light of the knowledge that Sylvester McCoy will later blithely blow up the Daleks’ entire planet.

But this is undoubtedly the most overt use of the idea as a central plot thread. We’ve known about ‘fixed points in history’ almost since the beginning, of course – witness the First Doctor telling Barbara “you can’t rewrite history; not one line!” in 1964’s The Aztecs. And last year we had the point underlined in The Fires of Pompeii, which also clarified that,as a Time Lord, the Doctor did have the power to do so. It’s an interesting, and consistent approach to show that there are points in our subjective future that are just as fixed.

Simply by having the ability to travel in time and alter such fixed points, the Doctor has power not far removed from that of a god. And the only check on that power – his own people – is long since gone.

It is, of course, with the best of intentions that the Doctor chooses to exercise that power – you know what they say about the road to hell and its construction methods. That point is neatly underlined as we see him grimly walking away from the base listening to its crew members die one by one. When he finally snaps and decides to act from the heart rather than the head, it’s a neat reversal of the ruthless morality often displayed by the Seventh Doctor – this is a man who wants to save individuals even at the expense of the bigger picture.

And, of course, he’s wrong. More wrong than he’s ever been before, in a dark turn that could only really be pulled off with a character so strongly established. As he piles transgression on transgression, at best he seems arrogant and hubristic; at worst he seems simply mad.

David Tennant perhaps chose to overplay the ‘close to madness’ feel of the dialogue in the scenes set at the base, but the later scene outside the TARDIS on Earth was played to perfection. The Doctor is all haughty arrogance, convinced of his moral superiority in his actions.

And as in The Runaway Bride, it takes a mere human to show him he’s wrong. Lindsay Duncan’s quiet, dignified performance in that scene with the Doctor was masterful, and the way Tennant just crumpled when he realised she had shouldered the responsibility that should have been his by ending her own life was heartbreaking.

This moral complexity and fallibility makes Waters of Mars the most interesting look at the Doctor yet, and undoubtedly one of Russell T Davies’ finest scripts. There were many other excellent aspects in an all-round excellent production, but this was the core of it for me.

“The Time Lord victorious… is wrong.”

“This is your final destination.”

OK, as usual of late a rather drunken weekend prevented me reviewing this on Sunday! Now I sit here with a stinking cold, and the muse is on me yet again.

“Is that how you spell ‘stratagem’?” asked my boyfriend as the title appeared. Yes it is, but I’m not sure it’s how you define one. The return of the Sontarans in a story Russell had defined as “military” got off to a low key start as apparently an episode of Torchwood with a lethal satnav system that can apparently take over your car and kill you. It seems churlish to quibble in a show that features a time travelling alien and a race of cloned militarists, but how exactly did it control purely mechanical bits like the gearstick and the handbrake? And the name “Atmospheric Omission System” seemed to be a misspelling of “emission”, though I suppose it did cause the “omission” of certain gasses from the exhaust. My guess is that they just wanted a snappy acronym, though.

In keeping with the story’s military flavour, it generally felt like it had strayed from an early Jon Pertwee season, with all the shallow action and gunplay that entails. It was nice to see UNIT back again properly, though the insistence that it now stands for “Unified Intelligence Taskforce” was immediately undermined by references to it having a remit from the UN. In light of recent history though, it’s just as well the connection with the UN was played down; else we might have seen a years long story in which weapons inspectors were sent to disarm the Sontarans while Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart composed strongly worded letters to them.

In light of his rather advanced age, it’s understandable that Nick Courtney wasn’t back as the Brig, though it’s a shame some advisory role couldn’t have been found for him. Rupert Holliday-Evans’ Colonel Mace seems a rather hollow replacement, just like all those interchangeable COs we saw whenever Courtney wasn’t available in the Tom Baker era. Still, he seems to be developing a good rapport with David Tennant’s Doctor, who seems unusually antagonistic towards an organisation he used to work for. Pertwee’s occasional spat with the Brig was nothing on Tennant’s cold contempt of anyone who carries a gun to keep the peace – a viewpoint that seems idealistic but rather naive for a man who happily manipulated the Daleks into blowing up their entire solar system.

The fanboys were kept happy with some nice continuity references that, as usual, were kept discreetly away from alienating the casual viewer. Best of these by far was the Doctor’s assertion that he used to work for UNIT “back in the 70s… or was it the 80s?”, nicely ripping the piss out of those fans with a pedantic obsession for noting the contradictions in dating UNIT stories.

Also in keeping with the classic Pertwee stories was the “stratagem” of keeping the bad guys hidden for the most part. Initially (if we hadn’t seen the somewhat spoilery title) we might have been looking at the creepy public school of Luke Rattigan as the villains. Reminiscent of 70s kids’ drama Codename Icarus, a public school seems a great place for a villain to hide in plain sight. Rattigan himself was a great character, a spoiled teenage genius whose decision to become a quisling seemed perfectly understandable given his attitude to the rest of humanity. It also helped that actor Ryan Sampson is rather easy on the eye! The scene with the Doctor correcting his grammar and his peevish attempt to do the same back was brilliantly played by Sampson and Tennant, with the even prettier Christian Cooke standing pointlessly around in the background as Private Jenkins. I hope he gets more to do in the next part, though the apparent requirement that most episodes should have at least one really pretty young man in them can be very distracting!

Eventually though, the true villains had to be revealed, and rather less than amazingly, it was the Sontarans. Now I have to be honest here and say I’ve never really understood why they were so popular. As militarist allegories go, both the Daleks and the Cybermen do it better, not to mention the Klingons. The Sontarans aren’t especially interesting to look at, and with the exception of their debut story The Time Warrior they’ve never really been involved in any of the show’s most interesting plots.

So it’s probably no fault of writer Helen Raynor that I was still unimpressed with them here. The rather cartoony design of their armoured spacesuits didn’t help; why are they suddenly bright blue? And while the make up was undeniably impressive, Christopher Ryan’s performance as General Staal seemed somewhat less so. Ramming the miltary allegory home with a sledgehammer, he delivered lines that put a soldierly connotation onto everything. Obvious though that was, it wouldn’t have been so bad if his voice hadn’t instantly called to mind Mike from The Young Ones. Still, in his favour, at least he isn’t a cockney Sontaran like Derek Deadman in The Invasion of Time.

The one thing the script did best concerning the Sontarans was to include their skill at cloning as part of the plot. We’ve always known that they reproduced this way, and it seems odd that this aspect of their technical skill was never really exploited in the classic series. Mind you, if all they’re doing is creating emotionless replicas of senior government and military figures I shall be very disappointed. At least, though, they’ve given us evil Martha.

Ah, Martha. Having spent most of last year failing to convince as a doctor, she now gets the chance to fail to convince as a soldier. The scenes of her barking orders at a troop of UNIT soldiers seemed rather forced, though to be fair, she played it brilliantly when she met Donna. In a nicely written scene overturning expectations formed by School Reunion, present and former companions didn’t fight. Instead they teamed up to laugh at the Doctor’s expense. Nicely done, Miss Raynor!

With first Martha then evil Martha taking up a lot of screen time, Donna seemed to have less to do this week than usual. It was, however, perfectly in keeping with her character that her office knowhow solved more mysteries than UNIT’s military might. And after her one to one with Martha, she got that cracking scene when she seemed to be leaving the Doctor, ony for him to open his hear to her before realising his mistake. Given my dislike of Catherine Tate as a comedienne, it’s telling that I’ve really warmed to her in Doctor Who; she’s a breath of fresh air in this era of companions who have to be consumed with sexual tension for the ascetic Time Lord.

And her family are less irritating than the last couple too. Granted, her mum is a paragon of the kind of middle class snobbery incarnated by Hyacinth Bucket, but her Grandad is Bernard Cribbins! It was great to see him back, and the scene where everyone realises they’ve already met was a corker, played to perfection by all concerned. Fitting then that the cliffhanger is nicely personalised by Grandad being stuck in a car filling with poisonous gas.

Less terrifying was the Sontarans prebattle stomping ritual, which gave you more the impression that they were about to embark on a game of rugby. But overall, a cliffhanger that works reasonably well, as the Earth’s atmosphere is choked with concentrated exhaust emissions. A message here, do you think? Shame UNIT didn’t bring Bessie back with them to undermine that.

The Sontaran Stratagem was generally, a fun but shallow romp. Its roots lie very much in the early Pertwee UNIT era, and it’s perfectly in keeping with the tone of the early 70s. But we’re not in the early 70s any more. Let’s hope The Poison Sky has a bit more substance to it. Somehow, I rather doubt it though.