The Sontaran Experiment: When Doctor Who Phones It In
Tom Baker’s collarbone was broken. The mask was deflating. The plot was MIA. Welcome to Doctor Who’s most literal filler episode.
Plot Summary
The only way to thwart a Sontaran invasion is for the Doctor to win a fistfight.
Notable for:
First 2-parter since The Rescue
First Philip Hinchcliffe production
Return of the Sontaran(s)
Kevin Lindsay had health/breathing problems in this one when wearing the Sontaran mask and gear.
Tom Baker broke his collarbone on the shoot at Dartmoor. There was heavy use of his stunt double subsequently, especially for any running, jumping, and fighting scenes.
Shot entirely on location in Dartmoor National Park.
Sarah loses her rain pants at some point.
Bob Holmes apparently had fully thought out the Sontarans as a species. He briefed Bob Baker and Dave Martin on them, giving an insane amount of detail, right down to the way they reproduce (apparently through the hole in their neck somehow?), to which Bob Baker stopped him, declaring TMI.
One of the “making of” featurettes on the Blu-ray declares the year of this episode to be 10,324. (The Doctor says, “No one's set foot here for thousands of years,” and guesses that the people on Nerva have been frozen for “ten thousand years”)
Bob Baker says they wanted to hit home the idea that this was London with the statue of Lord Nelson sticking out of the ground, making it more like Planet of the Apes. No budget for that, but they do a CGI version of that in the featurette.
Pete commentary:
The Sontaran Experiment is pretty ambitious considering it’s only 2 episodes. They’re trying to simultaneously:
Bring the Sontarans back in an interesting way
Allude to the horrors of Nazi experiments
Do “Planet of the Apes” but more optimistically
Have an epic battle scene
Include a convincing robot
And do it all on location!
On a high level, the plot makes less sense than most. Why would the Sontarans want to invade Earth when it’s been razed and depopulated? The Doctor makes a reference to a “buffer zone,” so perhaps the invasion is broader—essentially an attack on human territory, which Vural declares is an empire. Is this the second or third great and bountiful human empire? Or something else? Perhaps Vural is exaggerating.
Why is Styre alone? Surely the Sontarans could have sent an entire team if this is important. Perhaps they’re stretched thinner than ever and decided the human empire would be easy pickings since they’ve had a rough number of centuries. Perhaps the Sontarans have had a rougher time the past 8,000 years and have very little to show for their once-glorious empire: virtually no territory, little intel, but just enough resources to mount an invasion of a supposedly weaker species to get a slightly better foothold in the galaxy.
In any case, hard to believe data on human physiology wouldn’t be common knowledge.
Harry is laying on the “old thing” line pretty thick. It’s a little forced, but it’s part of the banter between Sarah and Harry, which is becoming pretty delightful at this point. The two of them complement each other well and are believably platonic.
Why the hell would Harry suggest Sarah is “imagining things,” given everything they’ve seen so far? This trope perhaps wasn’t so tired in 1975, but man alive does it feel cliche today. Good thing the story doesn’t depend on it.
Harry gets to mime a force field, which is inadvertently hilarious. It’s what you did in those days.
You see an excellent example of Tom Baker forming his Doctor in the way he talks to the robot: basically talking to it almost the same way he’d talk to a child, gently showing his comfort and authority in encountering something threatening and strange. Whereas a human (or his companion) might react with fear and caution, he just talks it down and in this case lulls it enough to take advantage of it. Which doesn’t make sense for a robot, but the whole idea works!
The robot is very ‘70s, but honestly not the worst. It could have used larger mandibles, though — it’s ultimately doesn’t look very threatening. Also, the way it moves, you can tell it’s on a track. It’s a shame there was no way to have it believably walk, which of course would make much more sense for difficult terrain.
Kevin Lindsay is once again excellent as a merciless Sontaran, someone who executes on a horrific plan with cold efficiency but is provoked into anger rather easily. In this way, the Sontarans might actually be better Nazi cyphers than the Daleks.
It would have been better to viscerally feel the tortures that Styre is inflicting on his victims. For the most part they’re simply chained up and have sci-fi items placed on them here and there. You have to sanitize for family audiences, obviously, but they could have tiptoed a little further to the edge. Of course, Eric Saward would later go way over that edge in Attack of the Cybermen. The new series finds a better balance in episodes like The Waters of Mars, Flux, and The Doctor’s Wife.
The accents of all the Earth astronauts are inadvertently hilarious. They all sound like they’re a bunch of blokes, just down from the pub, who happened upon some spacesuits and thought it would be a jolly good laugh to put them on and prance around the countryside in them.
Sarah thinking Styre is Linx is a pretty cool moment. Lis Sladen shows why she’s the best of the best—her worry at the recognition of a merciless, pitiless monster is perfect. It also leads to some nice exposition about what the Sontarans are: a clone race.
That said, there are some problems with costuming. Honestly, Styre doesn’t look that much like Linx: the mask has seen better days and doesn’t appear to have the same flexibility as the previous one. Also, do Sontarans have 5 fingers or 3? Styer appears to have 5, which is obviously a production oversight. Headcanon: maybe this is flexible. Sontarans may have certain features that are customizable about their appearance, so they are basically the same but can get slight variations for mission-specific stuff. In this case, they may have given Styre five fingers so he could manipulate captured human equipment better.
It makes sense that the robot is impervious to the Earth soldiers’ blasters — they’re only playing laser tag! Still a few years away from Star Wars.
How does Harry know there’s a Sontaran at the beginning of ep 2 when he’s talking to the prisoner? He hasn’t interacted with Styre yet. Even if he’d seen him, how would he know he’s a Sontaran?
The Doctor got off pretty lucky for attacking Styre directly. This doesn’t make a ton of sense. The Doctor doesn’t seem to have an edge or much of a plan. He believes he has a chance to win (or at least not get killed) because Sontarans aren’t used to Earth gravity. I guess, but the Doctor isn’t a warrior per se, even if he knows Venusian aikido (though he’s more of a brawler here). Sontarans are supposed to be bred for combat. It’s kind of like if I, a guy who does decently in my dads’ basketball league, tried to play 1-on-1 with Lebron James. Or even Nic Claxton. I don’t mind that the Doctor does it, but I would have liked to have seen some kind of “ace in the hole” plot device that allows him to do better than we’d expect. It all comes down to having believably formidable bad guys. Earthshock, as a counterexample does this well—the Doctor can’t do a thing to the Cyber Leader, except for he has Adric’s badge.
The messaging is a little off-target, too: The Doctor using violence as a solution? That said, it’s clear he’s just using it to distract Styre long enough for Harry to steal the thingee from Styre’s ship. So, ultimately it’s about outsmarting him, which is of course more in line with Doctor Who.
Lis Sladen, in the commentary, said she believes companions should scream more in modern Who.
What did Pete’s family think?
Grace had a physical reaction to Styre’s appearance, and thought he was “more ugly” than Linx. She compared them as roast potatoes vs. peeled potatoes.
She thought it could have been longer.
Four Questions to Doomsday - Pete
Why did the Randomizer take us here? It’s obviously on a violent streak. Both here and in Earthshock, the Doctor does physical battle with the big bad. In Horror of Fang Rock, he lets Leela do it. And of course the Rutan-Sontaran connection—it’s clearly going for Sontaran bingo. The Sontaran Stratagem Next?
What if the evil plot had succeeded? Say Styre shoots the Doctor instead of fighting him. He dies/regenerates and Styre stops Harry before he can do anything to the ship. All the astronauts are killed, captured, or kept at bay before Styre can contact the Marshal, who commences the invasion. Earth (and perhaps considerable Terran empire territory) is captured, and humanity is weakened before it can ever become the fourth and bountiful empire. With the Doctor captured, The Invasion of Time happens earlier.
Where's the Clara splinter? She’s a human secret agent who succeeded in wiping out the entire Sontaran intelligence database. They’ve got no data on other species, including humans, meaning they have to gather manually and re-invent their intel system from scratch.
Dalek, Ogron, Professor Hayter, Viscount Banger, Fixed Point in Time, Lady Cassandra, or Zarbi? Ultimately a nothingburger that’s made passable through the performances of the leads and Kevin Lindsay. Professor Hayter.