I am – Hercules!!

Generally strong notices for the second part of the latest Sontaran story, which aired a short while ago.

As usual, we begin with “Doctor Dan”:

DOCTOR WHO 4.5 – "The Poison Sky" (Part 2 of 2)

Writer: Helen Raynor
Director: Douglas Mackinnon

Cast: David Tennant (The Doctor), Catherine Tate (Donna Noble), Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones), Christopher Ryan (General Staal), Rupert Holliday Evans ( Col on el Mace), Dan Starkey (Commander Skorr), Bernard Cribbins (Wilfred Mott), Jacqueline King (Sylvia Noble), Ryan Sampson (Luke Rattigan), Clive Standen (Prvt. Harris), Wesley Theobald (Prvt. Gray), Christian Cooke (Ross Jenkins), Meryl Fernandes (Female Student), Leeshon Alexander (Male Student), Bridget Hodson (Captain Price), Kirsty Wark (Herself) & Lachele Carl (US Newsreader)

With Earth's skies poisoned, The Doctor tries to defeat the Sontarans, as Martha's clone manipulates UNIT and Donna is transported to the Sontaran spaceship...

"This isn't war! This is sport!"
-- Commander Skorr (Dan Starkey)

As second parts go, The Poison Sky made for an effective climax of last week's events, although it failed to make the subplot with Luke Rattigan (Ryan Sampson) develop into anything interesting or believable. As an egotistical American child prodigy, his role in helping the Sontarans implement ATMOS in the world's cars was fine, but this episode's attempt to give him a megalomaniacal agenda of his own (to repopulate Earth with his Academy's child genius' after "planetfall") just didn’t work.

Fortunately, everything else about Helen Raynor's script worked well, with some crowd-pleasing moments and a good sense of mounting jeopardy. The skies above Earth have been poisoned, although death only occurs in people when the atmosphere reaches 80% toxicity (quite a flaw for genius Rattigan to have made, but necessary to give The Doctor a fighting chance to revert the damage, of course!) Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) has been cloned, and "Martha Clones" now works undercover as the Sontaran "operative", curiously deactivating the world's nuclear defences – despite the fact even The Doctor (David Tennant) knows the planet's nukes wouldn't dent the Sontaran ship! So quite why she bothers throwing this spanner in the works is unclear, rendering Martha Clones' role somewhat unnecessary.

Donna (Catherine Tate) returns to help The Doctor after her Gramps (Bernard Cribbins) is saved from inside his poisoned car by her mother Sylvia (Jacqueline King) smashing the windscreen with a lump hammer. Unfortunately, The Doctor doesn't seem to be treating Donna with kid gloves (unlike Rose and Martha), and orders her to hideout in the TARDIS where the gas can't reach. Soon after, Sontaran-controlled UNIT soldiers attach beacons to the TARDIS and General Staal (Christopher Ryan) teleports the TARDIS aboard his ship – relishing the capture of a Time Lord's vessel.

The Doctor tries to prevent UNIT engaging the Sontarans in battle, even after they arrive at the ATMOS factory with Commander Skorr ( Dan St arkey), as they can neutralize conventional weapons. Using a phone, he also has to direct a frightened Donna out of the TARDIS to disengage the locked-down teleportation so he can rescue her and retrieve the TARDIS, while working out a way to clear the skies of the ATMOS poison. Phew!

Despite a few niggling problems, The Poison Sky generally provides the expected thrills and spills, and it's always a pleasure whenever a story has The Doctor at the centre of the action. He's been quite passive this season (particularly in Partners In Crime and Planet Of The Ood), so seeing him in the thick of things, plausibly thwarting the Sontaran plan is great fun. It was also nice to see his moral side come out, as he amusingly grumbles about the presence of guns, and eventually decides on a suicide mission purely because it would give the Sontarans a choice in their fate.

In fact, the emphasis on The Doctor pushes both companions even further into the background. The real Martha is absent until her inevitable rescue, the evil "Martha Clones" sadly doesn't have much bearing on events, and Donna's role is once again fairly minor. Catherine Tate gets more agreeable as the weeks pass by, although having her cry in nearly every episode is getting a bit tiresome. Still, her reactions to events are being written more realistically (nervous and scared in the TARDIS) and she's certainly offering audiences something different with The Doctor/companion dynamic.

Overall, The Poison Sky marked the end of a two-part episode that was very enjoyable and contained enough incident and amusements to keep you glued. It didn't fit together as snugly as it could have (with Rattigan being quite pointless, Martha wasted, and Donna underused), but it was still far from boring and the sweep of the episode pushed things along nicely. It was a strong revival for the Sontarans, blessed with great writing for Tennant's Doctor, several exciting moments, and a few welcome in-jokes for old fans to grin at.

The Good

-- David Tennant on top form, and it always helps when The Doctor's role is kept central, humorously written and his actions/solutions credible.

-- Catherine Tate. She didn't do much, but she did it well. Donna's growing on me every week. And a special mention to Bernard Cribbins as her Gramps – who is already my favourite companion family-member. I hope he gets in the TARDIS soon, though...

-- Christopher Ryan as General Staal – once again, it was his pitch-perfect bad-guy voice that really sold his character to me.

-- The special effects for the flaming atmosphere and Sontaran ship were great, and the make-up for the Sontarans was superb. The Valiant was also pretty good in some shots.

The Bad

-- I was hoping Luke Rattigan's role would develop after a lacklustre introduction last week, but Rattigan and his Academy of teenage prodigies were this adventure's weak element. And Ryan Sampson's performance was too broad and silly for my taste.

-- It was a shame General Staal wasn't more instrumental in the story, as he was once again confined to his spaceship and only shared one small scene with The Doctor. A great character, brilliantly performed by Christopher Ryan, but not given much to do!

-- Martha Jones was badly used throughout this episode. You could have written Martha out of the two-parter entirely and it wouldn't have affected the story too much. The clone thing was especially pointless, for the most part.

The Geeky

-- The Doctor mentions that this poison gas doesn’t affect him as badly as humans, giving us another bit of information about Time Lord physiology.

-- Did you catch the subliminal flash of Rose Tyler on the TARDIS view-screen, shouting something in silence?

-- In the scene where he's given weapons training in a gas mask, The Doctor jokes to Colonel Mace "are you my mummy?", which was the phrase the gas-mask-faced little boy in season 1's "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" continually said to chilling effect.

-- UNIT airborne aircraft carrier Valiant makes a return from season 3's "The Sound Of Drums"/"Last Of The Time Lords."

-- Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is mentioned as being "stranded in Peru ". This is the first time the popular Who accomplice has been mentioned in the revived series. Mace refers to him as "Sir Alistair", meaning he's been knighted in the interim.

-- The Sontarans' ongoing war with the Rutans in mentioned. The Rutans are blobby green jellyfish from Ruta 3 who can shape-shift and impersonate creatures they have killed. The only story to feature a Rutan was 1977's Horror Of Fang Rock.

-- Catherine Tate claims she thought all the Sontarans were animatronic, rather than played by actors, until one took their helmet off!

Rating: 3.5 / 5

NEXT WEEK: We meet The Doctor's daughter, played by Georgia Moffett (the real life daughter of Peter Davison, who played The Fifth Doctor)...

“The Manic” says:

In the words of Bill S. Preston: WOAH!

Geekgasm after geekgasm rocked the living room of The Manic! The Sontarans invading and kicking ass! The drama of the Earth choking in the fumes of ATMOS! The SHIELD Helicarrier--er, I mean the Valiant descending from the skies! And, continuing on the Marvel comics theme of this series, the skies catching fire just like in the classic Fantastic Four Galactus story! Colonel Mace actually turning out to be a worthy sucessor to the Brigadier! Nice rousing speech before UNIT literally lowers the boom on the sons of Sontar. Then he shows his true badass nature by popping a cap in gappy Sontaran's gappy features. Coolness! I was punching the air and resisting the urge to yell 'action by HAVOC!' When the UNIT soldiers starting turning it round on the Sontarans.

Then there's the Doctor-- David Tennant has really grown into the role this season and he is comparable now to Tom Baker at the height of his powers. I like the cut of his jib. I like the way he handles business-- I particularly love that he's found his own voice for the role while still very subtly including mannerisms from the earlier Doctors. He's great! You don't need me to tell you that! But right now I'm crossing my fingers and hoping he will do season five. Really, really hoping.

Catherine Tate as Donna is fast becoming one of my favourite companions in Nu Who. Back of the neck-- HA! I just really believe in her performances as Donna. I absolutely feel her joy and wonder and horror at everything, I really do.

Luke Rattigan, like Colonel Mace, seemed a one dimensional character in the first episode but he surprised me too in this one. That scene where his acolytes desert him and his pathological arrogance disolves like a soluable asprin into gibbering abandonment--priceless acting.

Honourable mention to for Christopher Ryan as General Staal for playing one of the best alien villains the series has so far created and the best Sontaran character since Kevin Lindsay's Commander Lynx.

And the Rose cameo! Without looking at any spoilers I kind of had a feeling that Rose would be popping up somewhere in tonight's episode. Next week's episode..oohhh, I don't even want to go into how awesome that looks. Series 4-- best season ever?

“Seresecros” says:

Episode 5: "The Poison Sky"

Doctor Who has never been good at following up on a good opening. Too often in the past, we’ve been set up and then let down by lacklustre resolutions and lazy deus ex-machinas. This episode was slightly different, in that the super-handy world saving device came into play but didn’t feel forced in the least. After the Sontarans released their strangely ineffective gas into the atmosphere (seriously, couldn’t they have made it a little bit more potent? Would’ve saved on a lot of effort in the long-run) they follow up by taking over the factory where the Doctor, UNIT, and the Marclone are all in residence. This episode may have had a little bit of padding at the sides, but all in all managed to deliver a satisfying conclusion to a two-parter which already is one of the more successful story arcs of the entire series so far.

The main theme here is that trickery. More than once, Helen Raynor’s witty and intelligent script (never thought I’d say that) leads the audience into something which seems to make no sense, only to turn on us and reveal that this was the point all along. Case in point? The Rattigan Academy . When it was introduced last episode it seemed as if it were being shoehorned into the episode for little reason apart from using up extra running time. How wrong we were – it turns out that this is what we were meant to believe all along, so when the inhabitants of the academy (dressed, distractingly, in Star Trek red-shirts – I honestly expected a massacre to happen) turned against Rattigan and moved on, it gave the skittish imp a reason to sacrifice himself at the end. Which he did, in another moment that tricked the viewers, as we expected the Doctor to find an escape from nowhere when, in fact, there was none. Rattigan’s kiss-off “Sontaran – HA!” didn’t seem cheesy either, something Dr Who has been terribly guilty of in the past.

And speaking of, this episode was reasonably Martha-free. Freema Agyeman has had a short thrift with Torchwood and Dr Who since her return, never getting much to do – possibly for the best, but still. Her impression of an emotionless clone was unsurprisingly accurate, as that’s what she played for most of the third season, but she still did a reasonable job of acting when she was called to, at the end. Her whole clone subplot seemed like a bit of a waste of time though, really, and far more interesting was Donna, who went from useless idiot who can’t work out how to break a car window to mallet-wielding Sontaran beater. The scene where she thwacks out a Sontaran guard with a rubber mallet alone gets this episode an A-rating. It helps that she’s surrounded by a family that you can actually care about. Rose’s family was annoying, Martha’s family hysterical, but Donna has Bernard Cribbins for a grand-dad, who puts in another tremendously affecting performance this episode, waving Donna off at the end in a realistic and emotional manner that tugs at the ol’ heart-strings no end.

There were a lot of little moments here amongst the madness which made the episode damn entertaining, from the casual sexism of the Sontarans to the return of the big skyjet thing from the end of Series 3. Whilst this episode brought in a lot of continuity from episodes past, it also managed to put in a few touches that hint towards the future. I don’t know if anyone else saw this – but was that Rose who appeared on Donna’s computer screen moments before the Doctor spoke to the Sontarans? If so, then the ending of the episode suddenly makes much more sense. Going back to this episode though, there were a fair few moments that seemed out of place. Ross, who was so well introduced last week, snuffs it pretty casually this episode, with only Tennant seeming to care about his death. Likewise, the whole point of the Sontarans infiltrating the military base was to protect their Martha clone, but we never got told why they needed to clone her in the first place. The infiltration scenes thus came off as an excuse for the BBC to execute another (admittedly impressive) battle sequence. The Sontaran weapons, though – awful special effects. Much better was watching the Doctor ‘fix’ the Earth’s atmosphere, and the Sontaran spaceship, equipped with a… well I’ll say it – a pretty damn phallic laser cannon.

“The Poison Sky”, against all odds, was a witty, intelligent, and entertaining episode, packed with fun moments and great character development for everyone involved apart from Martha (naturally). We had some superb acting from Tennant and Tate, as well as several members of the supporting cast, and to top it off the episode ends with a small cliffhanger which may or may not have been caused by Rose. Sadly, Martha IS back in the Tardis, but you can’t have everything, can you?

Episode Rating: A.

Other Points of Interest:

The brigadier is still alive...?

Did anyone else nothing that in the scene where the parts of the world with nuclear capability launched nuclear missiles at the Sontarans, North Korea was amongst them? Topical!

I was worried we wouldn’t get to see the Sontarans get their comeuppance – no such worries! They got hella killed! Those lovable baked potatoes got shot here, there, and everywhere!

Next week: A father-daughter reunion.

“Palimpsest” says:

Hi again Herc - another brief overview of tonight's DOCTOR WHO, which has just aired in the UK.

After last week's slightly awkward opening half of a two-parter featuring classic series villains the Sontarans, this time New Who really lets rip. The Doc is battling against a planet-shrouding fog that the Sontarans are deploying on earth via alien-tech satnav systems. except this is all too subtle for the usually gung-ho Sontarans. So what are they really up to?

World-troubling cheekiness, that's what.

Without giving a point-by-point plot rerun or over-spoiling things, The Poison Sky delivers: some nifty action, full-on laser battles on Earth, some awesome effects (by UK TV standards - the faintest of praise, I know), a couple of well-worked-in moral dilemmas, nods to MOONRAKER and THE FOG amongst others, some well-realised minor characters, and a nicely surprising climax.

In short, another strong episode in what's been a mostly very satisfactory series so far. Next week, The Doctor meets...his daughter?!

Thanks Herc