Raynor performed this disservice towards the Daleks as writer in the series 3 entry The Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, and has made an even less convincing reprisal for the Sontarans in the two parter concluding with tonight’s The Poison Sky (following on from last week’s Sontaran Stratagem). I can only conclude that former series script editor Raynor got this particular gig because of favourable numbers for the awful Manhattan debacle, but a Dalek plotline is a gilt-edged gift to a Who script-writer, and should go to the best of the best as a reward for innovation and invention elsewhere in the series. Anyway, some matters pertaining to the two-part Sontaran saga were presumably beyond Raynor’s control or ambit, such as the fact that this particular iteration of Sontarans are amongst the most short-arsed bipedal villains ever to threaten Earth. The casting of diminutive Christopher Ryan as General Staal seems to have triggered an equity alert for the vertically-challenged, and this did nothing to increase the general sense of alien menace. In addition, the old mistake of voice-miscasting for the ancillary Sontarans lent an unintentionally comic note to the proceedings, as the dulcet tones of Surrey accountants issued from the well-done potato-head make-up. After a fair bit of tedious Donna-and-her-mum sparring (and the usual excellent contribution of Bernard Cribbins as Donna’s grandfather), the Doctor sends Donna to baby-sit the Tardis in safety, only to find that she has been teleported with it to the Sontaran war-base in Earth’s atmosphere. Stranded, and with an imminent countdown to nuclear disaster ticking away, our Gallifrean hero strides past those stiff-shirted UNIT types and contacts Sontaran HQ for a bit of jaunty badinage, baiting and miscellaneous attempts to get a message to the stranded Donna. At this point, we get a flash of Billy Piper trying to contact the Doctor, but without any sound. Let’s be grateful for the latter fact, and for how brief her appearance was, and let’s enjoy whatever respite (may it be protracted) that RTD gives us from the insufferable Rose before her scheduled return later in the series. Back at the UNIT headquarters, all current hope of seeing the excellent Nicholas Courtney reprise his role as Alistair Lethbridge-Stuart vanishes in two puffs of dialogue that reveal the ageing brigadier to be stranded in Peru. Meanwhile the Martha Jones clone is casting arch-looks at the nuclear-strike switches, but not really doing anything meaningful beyond reporting the Doctor’s plans to her Sontaran masters. Over at Luke Rattigan’s Koresh-style brainwashing factory, the future Adams and Eves are showing clear signs of dissent, unimpressed with the boy genius’s plans to start the human race up again on some (as it turns out, fictitious) planet called Castor 36, an opportunity promised to the nasty little collaborator by Sontarans seeking his help in murdering 6 billion people. The potentially interesting SFX potential of the super-smog itself was dispersed in a series of matte-painting style tableaux – nicely done in themselves, but lacking the support of street-level smog mayhem. Anyway, we’ll let the Doctor get away with it (he may not be a cinema-goer, after all)…except that he then says it again but VERY LOUDLY. Tennant’s time-lord is getting very shouty these days, and he’s not quite as chilling as some of his predecessors when he does it. Donna manages to contact the Doctor, who guides her through the basics of defeating Sontarans (hit the back of the neck – is there no Sontaran technological remedy for this?) and through the war-station, where she is tasked to re-establish the teleport links. Out and about in gas-masks with UNIT, Tennant throws in a pretty funny reference to the excellent Empty Child Ecclestone story, before UNIT’s Captain Scarlet-style Cloudbase platform blows a bit of the local gas away. Some good SFX finally show up when the Doctor uses a kind of cosmic firework to burn the deadly Sontaran clone-gas off the planet’s atmosphere, which clears itself like a (very big) lit fart. By now the savant Rattigan has been abandoned by his doubtful followers, but redeems his genocidal tendencies in an act of self-sacrifice that saves the Doctor and the Earth from a more standard military-style Sontaran invasion. And then it’s all over, thank God. Martha Jones, having bonded with her repentant clone and watched the doppelganger die (to the usual strains of lush and overbearing music) ends up on board for a few more episodes, as the Tardis is hijacked before she can make a poignant exit. The Poison Sky was a very poor showing for the canon, a gaseous soup of recycled elements from the last three series, with poor characterisation and plotting. Also, I’m not sure how I feel about UNIT having tech quite that ‘sci-fi’, or about these battles for Earth being fought in the public gaze, since the show will later require extra gallons of post-modern irony to cover the fact – and Who is already over-saturated with it. Perhaps a future episode will come up with a Men In Black-style ‘memory zapper’, so the traumatised denizens of Earth can get back to worrying about terrorists again. If it erases the memory of this Sontaran adventure, my own sunglasses will be staying in my pocket for the event. Check out Simon Brew’s review of last week’s The Sontaran Stratagem.
title: “Doctor Who Series 4 Episode 5 Review The Poison Sky” ShowToc: true date: “2025-07-01” author: “Theodora Conklin”
And that was the Brigadier they teased us with for a moment there, wasn’t it? Even if they then fobbed him off by dropping him in Peru (which is, presumably, where the dart landed on the map adorning the wall of the Doctor Who production office), it was right that talk of UNIT didn’t take place without mention of its most famous employee. Elsewhere, the plot continued to muddle. The Atmos SatNav system was busy choking the world – and providing a platform for some far better effects work than they mustered last week – while Martha The Clone was rumbled in double-quick time by the Doctor (the same Doctor who couldn’t work out how to smash glass a few minutes earlier). With the child genius character clearly then there to simply sacrifice himself at the end, it was down to the Sontarans to provide the thrills and spills. And to be fair, when The Poison Sky ratcheted up the action, it pulled few punches. Granted, this was gloss over the plot and story problems, but it was good gloss: a fine, old-fashioned shoot-out with futuristic weapons is usually good value, and it didn’t disappoint here. The Sontarans never really managed to feel as menacing as they had done in the past, but give them a few guns, and a few lines about how good war is and stuff, and they seemed content enough. In all, though, it still wasn’t a great two-parter. But the real excitement surely came with the preview for next week’s episode. Since the Doctor dropped in a line back in season two (if memory serves) about him once having a kid, this has been a plotline awaiting further exploration. Next week? With the help of Peter Davison’s real-life daughter, that wait is over. Bring it on… Read Martin Anderson’s take on the episode here.
