Sontar Ha! Sontar Ho! Sontar Hum!
Summary
Some snotty little geek (who I shall henceforth call “Rat Boy”) has himself a little cult, and he gets an investigative reporter killed in her car when her navigation system, ATMOS, kills her.
Martha Jones, now a UNIT doctor, calls the Doctor back just as UNIT’s CO, Colonel Mace, raids the ATMOS. The problem: ATMOS, an amazing device which reduces all carbon dioxide emissions to zero might be alien. Plus, a whole bunch of people died simultaneously in their ATMOS cars from an unknown poison.
The workers at the factory are hypnotized, and UNIT is infiltrated when some of its soldiers are captured and hypnotized too. They, in turn, capture Martha and she is cloned.
Rat Boy “invented” ATMOS and so the Doctor investigates his academy, where he comes face-to-face (well, face-to-tummy) with the real adversary: General Stall of the Sontaran fleet.
The Doctor escapes as they put into play their fiendish plan: ATMOS starts belching poison from millions of cars, worldwide. The gas will posion all the humans and turn the planet into a clone incubator for the need breeding of Sontarans.
UNIT wants to nuke the Sontarans, but Martha clone stops them. UNIT attacks the factory. Donna gets taken aboard the Sontaran ship and helps the Doctor confront the Sontarans, then he burns off the gas in the atmosphere. Rat Boy, having learned he was just a patsy, first has a nice lie down and good cry, then sacrifices his life to save the Doctor.
Martha doesn’t want to go on more adventures with the Doctor, but the TARDIS has other ideas.
Analysis
Do you ever get the feeling that the current production company of Doctor really don’t like the military? The Second, Third and Fourth Doctors all had a certain ambivalent relationship with UNIT, but it never approached the levels of the outright derision shown towards them in the new series. In this, the first “real” UNIT story (UNIT’s appearances in other episodes have been cameos, at best) of the revival series, the Doctor does, at least, seem to show a slight warming towards them by the end.
Still, the portrayal of them is extremely trigger-happy and nothing but a caricature of the military. The Sontarans, themselves a caricature of the military, came off better than the humans in UNIT. Despite that, at one point UNIT really redeem themselves by demonstrating that the Doctor grossly underestimates them.
I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about the Sontarans as a villain. In the Time Warrior, a single Sontaran, cut off from his support is a good setting for Sontarans. Even in the distant past, he’s not in a position of power and subsequently has to take a more pragmatic approach to his goals. That makes him not so much of a caricature.
Again, in the Sontaran Experiment, the lone Sontaran worked well in the setting. It was only when they brought in the Fleet commander at the end that the ludicrous nature of the Sontarans was exposed. The didn’t invade because they didn’t have a full report? I think not.
In the Invasion of Time, and even worse in the Two Doctors, the Sontarans just played military thugs- generic baddies with no particular distinguishing characteristics. (Well, save for the fact that their costumes got increasingly bad.)
In these new episodes, the Sontarans are finally here in force, and, ignoring the continuity gaffs between this Sontaran invasion and the first Sontaran expedition to Earth in the time of Space Station Nerva, and they’ve never looked so good. Absolute kudos to the costuming and makeup teams on this one.
The problem is, with overwhelming firepower and technology, they seemed to have to develop this ridiculously complicated ATMOS system. What? They couldn’t just bomb the planet with gas bombs to accomplish the same thing?
Why would Sontarans, those standup, face the enemy and die face-on for the glory of Sontar, resort to subterfuge? It’s totally out of character. Sontarans would surely consider it to be a coward’s way to fight.
I had some other thoughts on the episode, but I lost them in a power failure incident, and these are the ones that stand out after several weeks.
In the end, it wasn’t a bad couple of episodes, but I’d have rather them brought back the Rutans.