The Sontaran Experiment Part One

The one where the Doctor, Sarah and Harry meet some people on the abandoned Earth...

Rather like the TARDIS in The Ice Warriors and Castrovalva, Sarah Jane materialises upside down. It's a silly, slapstick moment, but it's not quite as ignominious as the Doctor landing arse-up in a pile of junk in Survival, a moment I've always winced at.

The barren, deserted expanse of Dartmoor lends this story plenty of scale and completely sells the fact this is supposed to be an abandoned Earth thousands of years after its devastation by solar flares. You can see for miles in every direction, and there's nothing to see but hill, sky and heath. When you look at the location of Hound Tor on Google Maps, you can see how remote the place is, a good 13 miles away from the nearest significant conurbation of Newton Abbot. A perfect Doctor Who location, and much better than the staple quarry.

When Sarah and Harry make their way back to the Doctor at the transmat site, Elisabeth Sladen does one of her magical little "things" when she pulls the brim of her woolly hat down over her face to amuse/ bemuse the Doctor. I've no idea whether this was scripted or ad-libbed, but either way it's lovely, and adds such a natural warmth to the characters. Sladen does things like this every now and then - such as the "Your shoes need repairing" line in Pyramids of Mars, or the occasional pulling of the tongue - which contribute heavily to the reason why Sarah Jane Smith continues to be so well loved, and why the Baker/ Sladen relationship remains one of the best ever.

It soon becomes obvious that there are people living on this abandoned Earth, stalking our heroes in the heath, but it's not long until trouble rears its head when Harry tumbles into a pit. This pit was meant as a trap to capture a wandering robotic machine which stalks the heathland. Except this robotic machine is truly awful, designed to look a bit like a giant metal insect, complete with inexplicable mandibles. It glides along the rough moorland terrain effortlessly. It's so obviously on rails (which you never see) and the whole contraption is laughably out of place. I imagine it was designed with the idea in mind that it hovers just above the ground (it doesn't look unlike the probe droid seen on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back), but at no point does it convince me that it's anything other than a very unwieldy BBC prop operated just off camera by a couple of struggling location managers!

Having lost both the Doctor (kidnapped by space soldiers with South African accents) and Harry (who's wandered off in the direction of Hound Tor), Sarah teams up with demented wanderer Roth (a marvellously jumpy, agitated performance by Peter Rutherford) to try and reunite with her friends.

The Doctor is quizzed by Vural, Erak and Krans (unexpectedly played by Glyn Jones, writer of The Space Museum), a bunch of Galsec colonists who came to Earth after receiving a distress signal from what they thought was a missing Galsec freighter. As soon as the nine of them stepped off their ship, it was vaporised. But by who? It's interesting that this story continues the thread started in the previous story, with the Nerva station having become something of a myth, a "lost colony" that nobody really believes exists. In the meantime, the Galsec colonists have expanded across the galaxy and developed their own empire, something built on in the audio story Wirrn Dawn.

Sarah's pal Roth distracts the Doctor's captors so that she can help him escape (her bright yellow and orange outfit is not well suited to camouflage!), but it's not long before the Doctor, very stupidly, falls down the same pit Harry fell down (the irony being that the Doctor had just ridiculed Harry for falling down a "whacking great subsidence"). It's just an excuse by writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin to split the Doctor and Sarah up again so that Sarah and Roth can get captured by the silly robot thing and get taken as prisoners to what Roth describes as the "alien in the rocks".

Harry watches on as we glimpse a Sontaran scout ship, and then the alien itself emerges, and removes its helmet to reveal the pudgy "toadface" beneath. "Linx!" gasps Sarah, which is exactly what you'd expect her to say having only ever met one Sontaran, in Season 11's The Time Warrior. The fact he's credited as Styre rather gives the game away to viewers at home, but then the "surprise reveal" has been spoiled from the start by the fact the story's called The Sontaran Experiment. It would have been a corking cliffhanger if the story had kept the working title of The Destructors, and the reveal of Styre at the end would have had more shock value.

First broadcast: February 22nd, 1975

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Rodney Bennett's stunning use of the windswept Dartmoor location.
The Bad: That awful robot machine thing, which was not designed with the conditions of the story in mind at all.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 05

NEXT TIME: Part Two...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part Two

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-sontaran-experiment.html

The Sontaran Experiment is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Sontaran-Experiment-DVD/dp/B000GRU8QS