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Doctor Who: The Sontaran Stratagem

Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones with a Sontaran in Doctor Who
  • Posted at 7:01pm
  • 26 April 2008
  • by WilliamGallagher-RT

OK, so, yes: watching Doctor Who is a collective experience, sure it is. We're all there on Saturday nights and that's a great thing, whatever. But stuff what I said about that - this week I got a preview DVD! I only mentioned preview discs to you before as an aside and now here I was, the gold-dust parcel in my hands: tell me honestly, what would you do?

I borrowed headphones, got a bowl of chilli con carne from the BBC canteen and tried very hard to watch quietly. Sixty pairs of eyes burnt into my back as I spent a lunch hour laughing aloud and jumping with surprise.

And I did every bit of that all over again tonight, watching the episode air. I think it says an enormous amount that I've seen it twice and enjoyed it immensely both times: still laughing, still jumping, still very much agog at the cliffhanger. Hand on heart, the only difference is that I've learnt not to eat chilli. I became a walking advert for this episode all week because it is just so very good - and especially because I'd really doubted it could be.

I rate Helen Raynor's writing - especially her tremendous Torchwood episode, To the Last Man, this year - but she'd lumbered herself with a shopping list of items to cover: Sontarans, Martha, Unit... The list isn't endless but it's long, and Doctor Who has failed before when it's tried to wedge in too many things. Yet The Sontaran Stratagem is a storm; it scoops up all these elements with such gusto that you only realise afterwards how hard the story must have been to write.

You must suspect Russell T Davies's hand in moments of severe Doctor Who anoraksia: there was an aside about Martha's thorax that was a nod to a similar observation about women made by Linx, the first Sontaran we saw in The Time Warrior in 1973. He'd said how women's hair is finer than men's, how their thorax is of a different construction. You'd remember this too if you'd been a schoolboy then, just discovering girls - it was a very confusing time.

Anyway.

I would say that the odds are against my getting another preview DVD: you don't get that lucky twice. And that's fine, I crave watching part two next Saturday night. Only, I didn't ask for that DVD, I just mentioned it to you. Did you have something to do with it? Can I talk to you about how much I'd like £1 million and an apartment in New York City?

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