Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 410: The Sontaran Experiment, Episode Two
I really like the idea of Sarah watching our Sontaran friend emerging from his spaceship, and removing his helmet, while thinking that it’s Lynx. As she rightly says here, it can’t be him, because she saw him blown up during her first trip in the TARDIS, but it creates such a great moment of surprise, and it’s a shame again that the title of the episode somewhat gives the game away. But then the cliffhanger is already ruined to some extent by the fact that the Sontaran mask has been redesigned since their first appearance a year earlier.
There’s nothing wrong with this new mask – indeed, it’s quite well done once again – but it just doesn’t have the same impact as the last one did. It looks more like a mask than before, and that takes away from the effect a little bit. It also somewhat spoils the idea that the Sontarans are all identical (which is something done so nicely when we’re put in contact with the general via video phone), and Sarah’s assertion that he’s so similar comes across a bit silly. This was the main topic of conversation during our earlier commentary for the episode, where both Alex and me lament the difference in the mask.
Thankfully, though, Styre is just as ruthless as Lynx – if not more so. There’s a lovely moment here where he spits at Sarah with ‘You are nothing, do you understand? You are a mistake and therefore must be eliminated’. He’s very brutal, perhaps more than we’re used to in the series – it seems to be another sign of the programme moving into slightly darker territory with the introduction of a new producer.
The biggest cause for disappointment for all of us watching on the commentary from 2009 was Styre’s pet robot. The spaceship crew all live in fear of this machine (more because of what happens after it’s captured you, in fairness), but it’s just a bit… well… pathetic, isn’t it? The moment when the Doctor manages to disables the machine and I tell my assembled friends that the moment was ad-libbed on location, because the robot prop collapsed during the middle of a take, and they decided to incorporate the footage into the story. Perhaps unsurprisingly everyone simply replied that it seemed likely! I told them that I’d been joking, but the general consensus seemed to be that the prop probably did fall apart more than once during the filming!
Perhaps the thing that people know most about this story is that Tom Baker injured himself during the filming, and broke his collar bone. Of all the places to do so – the middle of Dartmoor is probably about the furthest away from a hospital that he could have been! I don’t think it impacts on his performance greatly, but if you know what you’re looking for, it’s quite obvious which scenes have been filmed after the accident, because his arm is always held in the same position! If anything, it makes the final shot of him departing in the middle of the transmit ring all the more unusual, because he’s able to use his arms freely again, having held it static for such a long time!
Ultimately, I think The Sontaran Experiment has just suffered from that age old issue – I’ve spent a while expecting to not really enjoy it all that much, and so no matter what it did, I was never going to be impressed. It’s not a bad story, by any means, but it’s neither here nor there, and it’s simply failed to really capture my imagination.
It’s been a bit of an odd experience over these last six episodes, listening to commentaries featuring myself on them, among a few friends. I’m most surprised by just how little we actually say in the recordings – I don’t know how I ever really thought that they would be of much interest to anyone. I know my plan at the time was to write them up and do something with them, but I can’t imagine that being very popular! I’m really glad that we’d done it, though, because it’s been a really interesting experiment to copare my thoughts from five years ago with what I think now.
It’s strange just how much I’d forgotten about these stories in the last five years – I couldn’t have told you how The Ark in Space ended, for example – and even stranger to see just how much I’d missed first time around. I’m still most stunned by my earlier assertion that the lighting on Nerva was rubbish, considering how much I loved it this time around! I suppose it brings to mind some of the Eleventh Doctor’s final words, where he talks about the way we all change, right the way throughout our lives. If anything, it makes me keen to repeat this ‘complete marathon’ experience a few years on from now, using The 50 Year Diary as my chronicle of what I thought here and now: I’d love to see how my opinions on Doctor Who stories change in the future…
