Spuds Up

So. The Poison Sky. I said I wasn’t prepared to completely judge last week’s Sontaran Stratagem until I’d seen this week, and you know what? I’m still not completely sure. While there were some very good moments during the two-parter, there were also some disappointments and inconsistencies, and I can’t decide if either outweighs the other.

Let’s start with the good – Ross’ death. No, I don’t mean it like that – I was sorry to see him go, he made a good impression in the first episode – I say this because the manner it was played was brilliant. As the Sontarans basically kicked UNIT’s ass, his demise was a reminder of what a terrible price to pay every single human life is. I’ll miss him, and that’s a credit to Christian Cooke, who played him, for the energy he injected into someone who in truth we saw very little of.

While we’re on the subject of the Sontarans owning UNIT, though, I must say that the sudden turnaround after the Valiant turned up and Colonel Mace gave his mildly inspiring speech was stretching believability. For a race that had been established as pretty much invincible apart from the probic vent on the back of their necks, I found it hard to suspend my disbelief as suddenly the Sontarans were slaughtered left, right and centre by being shot in the front.  I don’t care how good that speech was, if the enemy has supercool armour that’s built up to help make fighting Sontarans complete idiocy, then you can’t kill them that easily. Frustrating, but I guess I can live with it, I thought at the time.

However, that wasn’t the only glaring mistake. The big Earth-save method, cleansing the atmosphere of the poison gas by igniting the atmosphere and therefore burning it off, should have not only incinerated the gas, but also used up essentially the world’s entire oxygen supply, razed buildings and destroyed planes, including the Valiant, and probably instantly killed billions of people. Now, that’s a pretty big thing to overlook. I often give Doctor Who some leeway when it comes to stretching the bounds of plausibility but that was just ridiculous.

Anyway, I seem to have abandoned covering the good, but there certainly was plenty, so I should pick up on it again. Again, I have to give Catherine Tate some credit for Donna in this episode. The SFX magazine review of the episode that went up immediately after the episode aired made an excellent point that though we’d seen previous companions do similar things, when Donna knocked out that Sontaran it was the first time that we really felt it was a hugely courageous thing to do. I wholeheartedly agree, in fact that was probably my favourite scene of the episode, so credit where it’s due.

That said, despite the good work of the companion this episode, the one thing that excited me most about the Poison Sky was that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment when the transmission from the Doctor to the Sontaran vessel was intercepted on the TARDIS monitor – for less than a second, an image of Rose screaming interrupted the communication. Woo! I’m less patient than ever waiting for her return.

In all, I guess I liked it – it was dramatic, thoughtful and exciting in spades – but I can’t love it. There were too many silly things that made no sense (I haven’t even covered them all), but I can just about put up with it and look ahead to next week, which looks…intriguing. I have confidence that the writing team will do it well, but I can’t escape the worry that the idea of the Doctor having a daughter smells faintly of shark-jumping. There, I said it. Now I know karma will ensure that episode 6 will be the best of the season…

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In other news, apologies for not getting a midweek blog up as I’d hoped. I’ll be posting again tomorrow with discussion on Pushing Daisies, and probably the London mayoral election too as a way to get away from television for a bit. Next week will be my last five days of school (ever, quite worryingly) so I’ll have time after then for a lot more of the CDB Desk.

I do want to say a quick thank you to those of you who’ve followed links on Facebook or the SFX forums, or even if you found this blog on Google (by the way, hands up – who the hell is searching for “is Catherine Tate alive”? For Pete’s sake!). I hugely appreciate the readership, and special thanks to those who take the time to comment and feedback as well.

Potato Head

I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to judge the Sontaran Stratagem, tonight’s Doctor Who episode, before having seen its conclusion next week. But hell, let’s do it anyway, starting with the titular villains. Not having seen the Sontarans before, I learned to like them very quickly. I think a lot of that was down to the voice – General Staal (or however we’re supposed to spell his name) in particular sounded like a grumpy 19th-century Duke stuck in a cramped space whilst trying to maintain his dignity and authority, and it worked perfectly. Thinking about it, such a sound should have undermined him and his race as threatening villains but I thought they pulled that particular aspect off very well. The scene in which the UNIT grunt got the height jokes out of the way was brilliantly played, both for the comedy and for the reaction of the Sontaran.

I do feel obliged to say that I liked Donna more this week. Her introduction to Colonel Mace was great – Tate delivered “I’ll ‘ave a salute, thanks” to much more laughter than any of her sketches have ever gotten out of me. She and her screen grandfather Wilfred have an excellent chemistry and that made her family scenes a great improvement on Martha’s frankly dull family last season. (The mum was a bit annoying though, you can see where Donna gets it from.)

Speaking of Martha, I was really interested early on in finding out how and why she’d become more of a soldier, and I was disappointed that more wasn’t made of it. For me, the scene in which she and the Doctor discussed it came too early to feel satisfying – there really needed to be more detail in between her intro and that resolutionary scene, so that we could see how exactly Martha works inside the organisation, what’s she like on giving orders and maybe actually fighting (though we might see that next episode, I suppose).

The cliffhanger felt very, very similar to those from the first parts of the seasons one and two finales, in which first the Daleks and then the Cybermen as well amassed their armies and started the invasion of Earth. “The army is coming!” is a powerful dramatic device but it’s starting to get a little worn – however different your enemies are they at least need to do it at different points in the episode rather than just the end of part one each time. Hopefully the fact that they’ve done this now rather than in the finale means that we’ll see something more original and small-scale at the end of the season, though considering how many companions we’re rumoured to be seeing again then I’m guessing that’s unlikely.

All in all, a flawed episode but a fun enough set up for part two, meaning that this is the first season so far since the relaunch of the show that I haven’t felt there was a real gem in the first four episodes. Shame, but RTD and the team have done enough over previous years to convince me to stick by them. After all, slightly disappointing by Who’s standards is pretty damn good by most others’.