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“I admire them; the bravery of idiots is bravery nonetheless.”

The potato-heads put their plan into operation, and Earth gets really gassy.

Plot Points – As the mysterious gas builds in density, Donna gets accidentally teleported to the Sontaran ship (along with the TARDIS) and U.N.I.T. calls in the Valiant to help battle the alien forces. Finally, the Doctor does something very clever and saves the day.

Doctor Who? – Finding the TARDIS gone, the Doctor says “I’m stuck. On Earth, like an ordinary person, like a human – how rubbish is that?” However, he may be play-acting for Evil Duplicate Martha’s benefit. Again, the Doctor is willing to die to give the aliens a chance to back off.

Hey, Hey, Donna – More bravery from Ms. Noble, and her reaction to the Doctor’s near-death – smacking him on the arm – is hilariously in character.

Martha, My Dear – The Doctor knows EDM is a fake right off the bat because of minor imperfections in the duplication and because “frankly, you smell.” We only get Real Martha again at the very end, but there’s a nice scene where she tries to help her dying doppelganger.

This Year’s Arc – Oh, lookee, it’s Rose on the viewscreen. And it looks like she’s trying to tell the Doctor something. ("What’s that, Rose? Timmy’s trapped in the well?") Gosh, you don’t think that’ll be important later, do you? Nah, me neither.

Too Cool – See The Sontaran Stratagem, plus “Are you my mummy?”

Dumb Stuff – For a warrior race, the Sontarans don’t know crap about marching in formation. In several corridor scenes where we see them moving en masse, they all mill around in a mushy line, showing no discipline at all. At the end of the episode, the Sontarans do their big war cry again but – in a cost-saving move worthy of the classic series – it’s the exact same footage as seen in “The Sontaran Stratagem.” (Note the relative positions of Staal at the beginning and end of the war-chant.) Why does the Sontaran spaceship have bricks and stone slab floors? Okay, fair enough that the Doctor can ignite the Sontaran clone-feed in the atmosphere, but why does only the stuff two or three hundred feet in the air seem to burn? The gas has been down on the ground choking the populace the entire time, so why doesn’t all that stuff burn as well?  At one point, when the Sontarans are making hash of U.N.I.T., Commander Skorr crows, “This isn’t war, it’s sport!” Well hardly—rendering your enemy’s weapons useless and leaving them defenseless against clearly superior firepower could scarcely be called sporting (here on Earth we call that “shooting fish in a barrel"). The Sontarans actually make a pretty poor showing here; even though the Doctor repeately harps that the aliens are not to be engaged, they pretty much seem to be depending on this one weapon (their bullet-jamming ray), and once U.N.I.T. finds a (ridiculously simple) way around it, they tend to fall like bowling pins.

Classic Who – The Doctor says that the Sontarans are locked in a centuries-old war with the Rutans, blobby glowing green aliens that appeared in only one classic series story, “Horror of Fang Rock” (15.1, 1977), though they were mentioned in the earlier Sontaran stories. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart finally gets name-checked (and apparently he’s been knighted in the meantime), and is said to be “trapped” in Peru.

Final Answer – Rare in the new series, Part 2 is almost exactly as good/bad as Part 1. “The Poison Sky” has no surprises, nothing innovative, nothing startling or particularly enthralling, but it carries on quite capably where “The Sontaran Stratagem” left off, with its worst offense being yet another instance of The Guy Who Screwed Up sacrificing his life to save the Doctor (see 3.7 “42,” and about a billion other movies/TV shows); just how many times are they going to use this same cliché to save the Doctor’s bacon? There’s plenty of action, most of it fairly colorful, and the conclusion does actually feature the Doctor being clever and figuring a way to destroy the baddies based on information we’ve been given earlier in the story (rather than pulling something out of thin air and/or using some magical new function of the TARDIS). I love the idea that Rattigan’s cabal of students basically tell him to piss off, and then leaves, even though he’s got a gun on them (although Ryan Sampson’s “I’m cleverer than you!” delivery borders on the embarrassing; I’m told that Sampson is doing an impression of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, but I’ll have to take that on faith). I can’t decide if it’s Good Writing or Bad Writing to have U.N.I.T. be all ineffectual and buffoonish in the first episode and all sleek and ass-kicking in this one, but at least they get to shine a little bit after a poor showing in “TSS.” Donna is fun (“Back of the neck!”), Martha is wasted, Tennant does his same angry-shouty-face, and Christopher Ryan is a blast once again. So it’s all pretty standard stuff, but as I said last week, somehow it works. Go figure.

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