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“I don’t have a commanding officer.”

Martha makes a phone call, and the Doctor comes running. An old foe returns to have another go at Earth, and Sontaran General Staal remembers to pack his angry eyes.

Plot Points – The Doctor is recalled to Earth by none other than last season’s companion, Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), who (after her time in Torchwood) has hooked up with U.N.I.T., the old “secret” organization that was a staple of the classic series. Something’s fishy about ATMOS, a new emissions system that has become standard issue in most motor vehicles, and it doesn’t take long to for the Doctor to realize that the war-like Sontarans are behind the plot – but the question is, why are they doing something sneaky rather than just launching a full-out assault, as is their usual method?

Doctor Who? – The Doctor’s aversion to guns was an occasional element of the classic series (though, as with many things, there was very little consistency; note how the Doctor, in “The Visitation,” shoots out a lock with a gun and then proudly states, “I never miss”), and it seems a bit overplayed here, though I suppose we can chalk it up to it being an idiosyncrasy of this particular regeneration. After all, in “The Invasion of Time,” the Doctor himself built a Great Big Gun in order to destroy the Sontarans. His lack of patience with any kind of military protocol, however, is perfectly in character.

Hey, Hey, Donna  – Ms. Noble is taking TARDIS flying lessons at the beginning of the episode (look for this to be important later in the series, I’d wager), and declares herself “Super-Temp” when she realizes the ATMOS workers never take sick days. And her response to the U.N.I.T. commander – “I’ll have a salute” – is one of my favorite bits of dialogue so far this series. She and Martha hit it off straight away, even though the Doctor was afraid they’d fight.

Martha, My Dear – She’s back! Martha! Martha! Martha! Unfortunately, for about half this story, what we have instead is Evil Duplicate Martha, but I suppose you have to make do. She definitely seems to be over her infatuation with the Doctor, and is in fact engaged to the hunky doctor we saw in “Last of the Time Lords” (3.13).

This Year’s Arc – The Doctor names off a bunch of planets he wanted to take Donna to visit; I’m guessing at least some of those are going to be important, the The Medusa Cascade having been mentioned in several previous episodes.

Too Cool – Although their newfangled armor seems a bit Bat-generic, the masks/makeup used to depict the Sontarans is absolutely superb, which is especially nice given the rather dire state of the masks used in their last two classic series appearances.

Weird Science – Okay, so the Sontarans have a beam that makes the bullets expand so they won’t fit down the shaft of the gun, but there’s also a chemical process involved in gunfire, and it seems like any attempt to shoot would cause the jammed weapons to explode, rather than just giving a disappointing “click.” Unless the implication is supposed to be that the bullets never even leave the clip.

Dumb Stuff –  General Staal is always saying “A good warrior does this, a good warrior does that,” but wouldn’t a good warrior refrain from explaining how/why their gun jamming device works? This is valuable information that the enemy could (and ultimately does) use.  Donna has been a companion for exactly three episodes, isn’t it a little soon for a “walk down memory lane” clip montage? Did they just need to pad the episode out by a few more minutes?  The classic Sontarans were not exactly basketball players, but going to such great lengths to make them seem short and squat (none of the actors were over five feet tall) seems an odd decision. The ATMOS device would not be programmed to do the opposite of what the driver says, it would simply ignore them (though the disappointing “pop” of its self-destruction is a nice touch). And of course there’s far too much hand-wringing and shouting about grandpa being stuck in the car at the cliffhanger – in “Army of Ghosts” (2.12) the Doctor used the sonic screwdriver to shatter glass, so why doesn’t he do it here? (And no, the glass is not “deadlocked.”) I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that the glass will get shattered in the first moments of next week’s episode, but they make far too much of it here to invoke anything like “suspense.” And funny how much fake Martha’s umbilical cord looks like the Ood brain stem.

Classic Who – Okay, there’s a ton of stuff here referencing the old series, so I’m just going to quickly outline the two biggies. U.N.I.T. (originally United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, here revised to Unified Intelligence Taskforce) was a paramilitary organization usually led by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (played by the excellent Nicholas Courtney), who were tasked with investigating strange and possibly alien occurrences. Introduced in the Patrick Troughten era, they became a regular feature during the Jon Pertwee years, when the Doctor was stranded on Earth, and they became his “family.” They’ve been used in the new series before (1.4 “Aliens of London” being the first time), but never in their full-on glory as here. Much fan-debate has always surrounded the dating of the U.N.I.T. stories (because of highly inconsistent information given in various episodes), making the Doctor’s comment that he used to work with them “in the ‘70s… or was it the ‘80s?” the most uber-geeky “in” joke the new series has ever indulged in. Mostly created by the great Robert Holmes, the Sontarans appeared four times in the classic series, first with Jon Pertwee (“The Time Warrior” 11.1, 1973), twice with Tom Baker (“The Sontaran Experiment,” 12.3, 1974 and “The Invasion of Time” 15.6, 1978), and finally in the Colin Baker/Patrick Troughten team-up “The Two Doctors” (22.4, 1985). They are a warrior clone race engaged in a centuries-long battle with an alien race called the Rutans. Their goofy war cry – Sontar HA! indeed – is brand new, however.

Final Answer – Basically a faithful recreation of the Jon Pertwee era – including many over-utilized elements of that time frame, which included almost weekly alien invasions and a fair share of evil duplicates – “The Sontaran Stratagem” is a conscious (some might say self-conscious) attempt to recreate a specific period in Who history. There are many trite elements (not the least of which is the Wesley Crusher-esque Boy Genius, doing some bizarre accent that I think is supposed to be “American”), far too much of Donna’s screechy mum (seriously: three companions, three annoying, nagging mothers – Russell, are there some issues you need to work through?), and yes, it’s another story about a widespread commercial product being alien-engineered for Nefarious Purposes. But somehow, this works. It’s mostly down to the tight pacing of director Douglas MacKinnon, but there are other pleasures as well: the secondary characters are deftly handled, with just a splash of characterization to make them seem less like generic cannon fodder (“Don’t call Ross a grunt, he’s nice, we like Ross”), the production once again seems very Big (we never saw so many Sontaran troops in the old series), and Christopher Ryan (formerly a Young One) gives a wonderfully theatrical and bombastic performance as the Sontaran commander. It’s pulpy, lowbrow stuff, but well-played and entertaining.

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