The Sontaran Experiment (1975) Review

And the Doctor gently caressed his balls and said:
"Don't worry, you'll soon be full of life again."

The Sontaran Experiment has its good parts, but is mostly very forgettable.

PLOT

The Doctor, Sarah and Harry travel to future Earth to repair the transmat terminal for space station Nerva, only to discover heinous experiments being carried out on human astronauts by a lone Sontaran soldier...

ANALYSIS

The early scenes at the T-Mat terminal are great, actually. The chemistry between the actors is already as strong as it can ever get and there's a sense of great danger when we see them being knocked out one by one and the ravaged astronauts only add to it. The cherry on the cake is the cliffhanger. The Sontaran spaceship is still familiar in the viewers' minds and it's like "oh crap. These guys again."

Unfortunately, it all falls apart in the second half. The entire story has a grey, dull feel to it, mostly because the setting is entirely grey and dull, some desolate rocky plains. There's nothing to soothe the eye. It's as cheap as Doctor Who gets.

While I do understand why Kevin Lindsay couldn't be asked to wear his original costume, the new one still looks unforgivably bad. The mask's eyeholes don't match up to Lindsay's eyes at all. And the fingers raise so many needless questions. His torturing of the Galsec colonists was also really, really tame, even for Doctor Who. I mean, it just looked silly when I watched him wander around the giant rocks to the few prisoners he had and made them hold up weights and stuff.

CHARACTERS

Tom Baker surprised me in this story. When the Doctor discovers Sarah at the hands of Styre(the Sontaran), he doesn't just insult the guy, he doesn't try to guilt him or attack him. He snarls at him like a mad dog, possibly the most human reaction the Doctor has ever given to a threat. I'm liking Tom much more than I expected to(and poor old Peter Capaldi is slowly sinking in my top Doctors list...), which is more than fantastic, given how many more stories of him I have to watch.

Ian Marter also comes into his own as Harry. He's still really a more modern version of Jamie(he even says the familiar "Eh?" at one point), but there's a clumsy, unique charm to his character. His rapport with Tom and Elisabeth is great.

Unfortunately, Sarah Jane gets really underused here(mostly spending time in Styre's captivity), but that's okay, not every story has to be feminist.

Kevin Lindsay's performance as Styre is pretty much the same as the one he gave for Linx, except the script calls for him to act more like a machine than a creature(all the references to his "programming"), which I suppose in some ways is more appropriate for a lowly Major.

The guest cast were all forgettable, angry loonies, minus the terrified Galsec colonist whom Sarah Jane befriended. I thought his performance was great, it really implied a lot of horrible things(none of which made their way to the screen any other way, of course).

NOTES

*Like Linx, Styre has some bizarre need to keep his helmet on until the cliffhanger and then never wear it again.

*So why does he have more fingers(it's also notable he has a more typical gun rather than the stick that Linx was forced to use)?

*The sonic screwdriver gets a LOT of work in this story. I mean, new series levels of lot. I'm still really confused as to why Letts and Dicks thought it was overused when it only appeared a few times per season in pretty much every other season. This is really the first time the sonic has become a big thing.

BEST QUOTE

"I shall kill you all now... but first I have more important tasks to perform!" This HAD to be a joke.

CONCLUSION

It's what people think it is, a bit of harmless filler.