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Doctor Who, S04 E04: The Sontaran Strategem

This week: The Doctor confronts the most evil potato-headed villains of them all when the Sontarans return after a 23-year Who break. Also, Martha Jones is back!

Four episodes in to the excellent new series of Doctor Who, and we’ve reached the first two-parter. It begins with a feisty journalist (we know she’s feisty because, well, all journalists in Who are at least a bit feisty) being bodily thrown out of an establishment called The Rattigan Academy by a bunch of jumpsuited goons. Their leader is a smug, slightly geeky, slightly hot-if-he-wasn’t-so-short young man called Luke Rattigan. The Feisty Journalist announces her intention to expose “Atmos”, but Rattigan just laughs and says she has no proof of her claims, which she doesn’t. She stomps off to her car and we discover that Atmos is some sort of sat-nav system, which the frustrated hack can’t disable in her own car. As she drives, she calls none other than international alien military investigation organisation UNIT, last mentioned in Torchwood and first mentioned in Doctor Who about forty years ago. But like all journalists who urgently need to contact someone important, she gets put through to voice mail. But then - oh noes! - the Atmos device takes control of her car, forcing car off the road and into a river.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Donna are up in space somewhere, and the Doctor is teaching Donna to drive the Tardis when a mysterious mobile rings. It’s Martha! And, she tells the Doctor, she’s “bringing you back to earth.” Huzzah! The Tardis touches down (wobbles down? Aparates?) and there’s a nice reunion scene between the Doctor and his former companion before Donna, slightly nervously, emerges from the Tardis. Martha looks wistful and a bit sad, but Donna makes me like her even more when she proves herself to be a “girl’s girl” and greets Martha warmly (unlike when Rose met Sarah Jane), and the two women seem to bond. It turns out that Martha is engaged to that nice Doctor who helped her save the world at the end of the last series.

We knew from Torchwood that the Doctor had got Martha a job at UNIT. She apparently rushed through her final year or so of medical training, because she’s already a Doctor herself. We also see that she’s a slightly scary full-on military leader. Both the Doctor and Donna are slightly taken aback when she starts commanding an army unit to raid the Atmos factory, and the Doctor isn’t impressed by the guns aimed at the workers or the military atmosphere in general. Martha assures him that she’s not a fan of the crazy army stuff either, but (a) the Doctor got her the job, after all, so he can’t get too snotty about it and (b) she plans to “change it from the inside.” Good luck with changing the structure of an international military organisation, Martha! Anyway, it appears that Atmos is a device which makes a car totally carbon neutral as well as acting as a sat-nav system, and is now used in almost half the cars in the whole world. The device is, of course, the invention of young Luke Rattigan, a former child genius who is now so rich he’s built his own freaky goon-filled school. The Doctor decides to pay a visit.

Having been ignored by the commander of the joint, Colonel Mace, Donna uses her office skillz to go through the files and discovers that no Atmos employee has taken sick leave over the last year - and we soon discover that they all work 24 hours a day. Something ain’t right. The two women wander off through the plastic sheets that are de rigeur in all Doctor Who “industrial” sets. Martha asks Donna about her family, and Donna admits she hasn’t contacted them since she went off in the Tardis. What happened to that phone the 9th Doctor gave Rose? Martha, not unkindly, warns Donna that life with the Doctor can be dangerous, and that as a result of her own adventures, her family suffered horribly. Donna broods.

Two of the UNIT soldiers have discovered a room guarded by two of Atmos’s strangely zombie-like workers. They push their way in and find a strange bath of green goo. The reason my sister Busta J and I called the Sontarans Googles the last time they appeared in 1985 was not because we were magically anticipating a hugely successful search engine for a medium that didn’t exist yet, but because when they were cut disgusting green goo came out, so I was nervous as soon as I saw that bath. And rightly so, because a horrible half-formed humanoid creature looms out of it for a moment before falling back into the goo. A short squat creature with a Smash-alien-like helmet and a hilariously haughty voice appears. One of the soldiers is cocky and the other quite sensible, so you know the cocky one is going to be the first to get zapped by a Sontaran, and so it goes. The latter dramatically removes his helmet to reveal his baked-potato-esque head.

The Doctor is about to leave for Rattigan Academy with a soldier escort when Donna arrives and tells the Doctor she has to go home. He’s really sad and starts making this big farewell speech before realising that she’s just going for a quick visit and is going to come back later. It’s a really sweet, funny moment. Donna goes home and there’s another lovely scene when she rejoins her grandad, the ever-awesome Bernard Cribbins. I love Bernard Cribbins. They bond over tea while Donna’s mum grumbles in the background.

The Doctor and his soldier pal arrive at Rattigan Academy, whose cocky young owner is rattled by an encounter with someone who’s actually smarter than he is. We get the impression that this has never really happened before. The Doctor is utterly unfazed by Rattigan and his temper, and also seems to understand how lonely it is for Rattigan, although the latter doesn’t want his sympathy. The Doctor notices a fancy sculpture thing in Rattigan’s vast playroom and, to Rattigan’s shock, uses it to pay a quick visit to…Sontaran HQ. Yikes! The Legion of Mr Potato Heads are now on the alert, and one of them follows the Doctor back to Rattigan Academy before the latter disables the device with, you’ve guessed it, the bloody sonic screwdriver. I think it’s their ridiculous last-days-of-the-Raj voices and manner, but I find the Sontarans kind of hilarious. This one gives a typically pompous speech before the Doctor disables him with a well-hit tennis ball and he and the soldier escape. But oh noes, they’re getting into their army jeep, which, like all government vehicles, uses Atmos! Of course, as soon as the Sontaran general has repaired the teleporter (he is unimpressed by the sonic screwdriver), he and Rattigan prepare to send the Doctor to a watery grave. The quick thinking Doctor defeats the Atmos by ordering the jeep to go into the river, because apparently the device is set up to do the opposite of what it’s told rather than, I dunno, just drive into the river regardless of what the driver says. Foolish Sontaran technology.

Where’s Martha when all this is going on? She’s been captured by the two soldiers from earlier on, who have been hypnotised into becoming Sontaran slaves and tied to some sort of fiendish device. And what’s this creature emerging from a nearby goo bath? It’s a clone! Evil!Martha! Somehow, the cloning technology can also clone Martha’s memories, so the clone isn’t going to give itself away by not recognising anyone. Noooo! Evil!Martha puts on Good!Martha’s clothes and heads back to the other UNIT commanders, smiling evilly. The fiend. The Doctor rings Martha’s phone and tells her to warn UNIT what’s going on, but as she is evil, we know she won’t.

Meanwhile, Rattigan is observing the Sontarans in battle preparation mode. As the self-proclaimed greatest soldiers in the universe, they’re still pissed off that they weren’t invited to the Time War. No, really. Anyway, now they’re going to use the Atmos devices to wipe out anyone sitting in one of the 400,000 Atmos-equipped cars with a poison gas, allowing them to rule our planet with an iron (or potato) fist. The Doctor arrives at Donna’s house and examines the Atmos device in her mum’s car. Grandad Wilf gets in the car to drive it…round the corner? I dunno, and after the Doctor’s recent experience I’m surprised he didn’t say, “Um, perhaps we should just push it?” Anyway, the car goes into lockdown and starts filling with gas, with Bernard Cribbins trapped inside! Horrible (yet strangely attractive) Luke Rattigan joins in a Sontaran war dance and Evil!Martha is still striding around, looking sexily evil, and all the cars in the world start emitting deadly fumes. The Doctor can only watch helplessly as Wilf succumbs to the gas and, I swear to God, if they kill off Bernard Cribbins I will never watch Doctor Who again. Oh, all right, I will, but only for you, dear readers.

Next week: The Doctor finds a way to look good while defeating the Sontarans and saving Good!Martha.