Live-blogging Doctor Who: The Poisoned Sky
Posted 3 August 2008 in Doctor Who by Catriona
This week’s live-blogging brought to you by half a bottle of wine and some Nurofen—not, I might add, ingested simultaneously.
I’ve also decided that it would be more practical to start each live-blogging episode—rather than my default pattern of live-blogging ABC New’s weather forecast—with a picture from Nick’s extensive collection of Doctor Who memorabilia.
(I suppose it’s not that extensive, by comparison with some collections that I’ve seen. But there are some odd items in there, as you’ll see in future weeks.)
Tonight, his pride and joy, and the lord and master of our living room:
It always worries me slightly when I have to pick him up by the head in order to dust. Still, at least he doesn’t shriek “Exterminate!”, unlike the bottle opener.
I can’t help but feel that the family photograph in the background—my great-grandmother, although it doesn’t really matter—is rather incongruous.
We’re still a couple of minutes out from the episode, by the way.
Nick fancies watching Freezing—since we’re now up to the before Doctor Who ads—but I think that’s only because it’s got Alex Kingston in it.
Aha! And here we go, with a recap of last week’s episode.
Martha! Hey, Martha! Why don’t you stay a while? And lovely Ross! Hurray!
And we even get a recap of the Sontaran haka that caused so much controversy (well, sort of) in last week’s comment thread.
Poor Donna’s grandfather.
NICK: Okay, at the very least, the sonic screwdriver should be able to shatter glass.
That’s a good point: don’t soundwaves shatter glass? And then at least Donna’s grandfather wouldn’t be choking.
Well of course Donna’s going with the Doctor. Oh, Donna’s grandfather should be a companion; he’s such a lovely, lovely man.
Nick’s impressed that Martha’s password is more than four letters. I bet it’s a non-sequential alpha-numeric password, too. Am I supposed to be thinking about that?
Ah, Sontaran sexism. Honestly, I’ve said this before, but if they’re a clone race, why would they be so misogynistic? Sure, they don’t need women for replication, but do they even have women?
Oh, the Doctor gives Donna a TARDIS key, but Nick thinks the moment is awkwardly delivered.
Whoops, the Sontarans have the TARDIS. And now this strange little megalomaniac Rattigan has gone to inform his students of “planetfall.”
Does he mean the death of the Earth, or is he using the term “planetfall” to mean something else?
Ha, the Doctor knows Martha isn’t what she seems. He’s not daft, that one. (Ooh, understatement.)
Jodrel Banks? They’re rubbish, aren’t they? Didn’t they completely fail to spot the Vogon Constructor Fleet?
Another Rose flash!
The Sontarans are like trolls. And like roast potatoes. But I maintain that Ross is nothing like a pink weasel.
“Belittle” jokes to a Sontaran. Isn’t that a little racist? But Nick thinks that the Doctor has always been a little contemptuous of Sontarans, above and beyond their tendency to kill people. More Sontaran haka, but it seems that the Doctor has no more patience with it than some viewers.
Now, why is the Doctor speaking to Donna in code? Surely no one can actually get into the TARDIS? We’ve seen Daleks trying to break into it, and failing. No one can blow it up. It’s essentially indestructible. So does it matter if the Sontarans know that Donna’s in there? Ah, hang on: that’s just started to make sense to me.
Every time I see Luke Rattigan, I realise that the Sontarans aren’t the only ones in this episode with a Napoleon complex.
NICK: I think Rattigan thinks he’s acting in a completely different episode from everyone else.
Why didn’t it occur to Rattigan that maybe these people didn’t want to leave Earth and move to an entirely different planet? I like the fact that he constructed a breeding programme. Poor boy. But isn’t he a millionaire? He probably doesn’t need a breeding programme to pull girls.
I do feel for Donna in this scene: having the Doctor suggest a way in which she could help and communicate with him and then not being able to put that into practice must be devastatingly frustrating. The more I see of Donna the more I like her as a companion.
Donna’s mother, on the other hand, I could live without. She gets more and more unpleasant as the programme goes on.
Ooh, DefCon One! Nick always accuses me of going to that in arguments. Unfairly, I might add.
And why would nuclear weaponry be a good idea? Well, why is it ever a good idea?
Nick also worries that not all the nuclear-capable countries are on the same side of the planet, so would they all be able to use their weapons? He’s also not certain that they can launch nuclear missiles into orbit, but that’s another story.
Uh oh, Sontarans on the march. Oh, no, lovely Ross! Don’t say he’s in the line of fire! Dammit, not lovely Ross!
No, not Ross! Oh, damn, he’s dead. Poor, poor, lovely Ross. And stop calling him Greyhound 40, you horrible man! Ah, I see that the Doctor agrees with me.
The Sontarans aren’t very sporting fighters—should they really be shooting people in the back? I thought they were meant to be the ultimate soldiers. Oh, well: apparently this isn’t war—this is sport.
NICK: No, this is Sparta!
Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge Stewart! That’s exactly who we need. And maybe Benton: he can’t really still be a Sergeant by now. But we certainly don’t need Yates: he always was annoying.
Oh dear, Rattigan. It’s annoying when you realise that your war-mongering allies don’t actually want to help you achieve a Utopian society on another planet. But at least you’re not dead.
Donna as the Doctor’s secret weapon: I can believe that. She’s tough, Donna. She’s up for anything. But I don’t mind her being legitimately scared. I’d be bloody terrified.
The aspect of the show where the Doctor is constantly irritated by Donna’s belittling of herself is another aspect that I like—it’s understated at this point in the season, but persistent, and builds up to something intriguing.
Gas masks for the UNIT soldiers? I wonder what they could possibly be planning? And the Doctor definitely knows that Martha is not what she seems.
DOCTOR: Are you my Mummy?
That’s hands down my favourite joke of the season. Maybe of all four seasons. No: it doesn’t beat “Rose, I’m trying to resonate concrete.”
Ooh, the UNIT chappy is giving a St Crispin’s Day speech. Still better than the one in Independence Day.
(Do I mean St Crispin’s Day? I haven’t got time to look it up. But I always confuse it with St Swithin’s Day, for some reason.)
Now, using the Valiant to clear away the smog is a clever idea. I do hope that smug Sontaran is killed fairly soon, though. He’s starting to annoy me with his constant harping on the glory of battle.
The Martha clone’s not very clever, is she? Why does she go to the basement with the Doctor?
Why can’t you wear a T-shirt reading “clone” in front of Captain Jack? He doesn’t exactly need encouragement. And what kind of missing adventure could they possibly have had to make the Doctor think of that?
Ah, that Sontaran’s dead. I don’t really support shooting people in the chest, but he really was an annoying walking-potato, troll person.
Clone feed? Oh, ew. I don’t really like the idea of the entire planet being turned into a clone-breeding planet. Plus, as Nick says, surely Earth is a fairly long way away from the Sontaran empire? If it weren’t, surely it would have been over-run years ago.
The coat Martha’s wearing, is that the one the Doctor got from Janis Joplin? Actually, looking at the length of that coat on Martha, it would have been far too long for Janis Joplin, wouldn’t it?
I feel rather sorry for Rattigan in these scenes. He’s so thoroughly ineffective: even when he’s holding a gun, people just walk straight past him, as though he isn’t even there.
Set fire to the atmosphere? Oh, here we go. I’m sorry—I’m devoted to this programme, but this is really rather silly. Wouldn’t this kill absolutely everyone on the planet?
NICK: Right. Watch the Doctor destroy the avian population of the Earth.
And the way he’s saying “please, please, please”—it’s as though he saying, “Don’t kill everybody, mad experiment.”
I’m not sure why that UNIT woman kisses her superior officer. Relief, I suppose.
And now the Doctor’s making a grand sacrifice. But he can’t just send the machine up in the transport on its own, because that’s not the Doctor’s way. Even though this wouldn’t be genocide, which we’ve seen him baulk at time and time again—and we’ve never seen him commit yet, although we’ve heard about it. So he has to give them a chance.
I know Sontarans don’t fear death, but surely they should have some sense of self-preservation. Random death—and more haka!—doesn’t necessarily make you an effective soldier, surely? And is a waste of training, perhaps?
But that’s all right—Rattigan has made his sacrifice, instead. All those bodies on the Doctor’s conscience: this new version of Doctor Who has been a violent one, hasn’t it? Not as violent as some individual episodes of the original series, like “The Horror of Fang Rock,” but with more overall deaths, I think.
Hey, Donna’s grandfather! You should ask the Doctor if you can go, too. It breaks my heart, it really does: his desperation for something he’s never going to experience except by proxy.
No, stay in the TARDIS, Martha!
Oh, it seems she doesn’t have a choice. That’s interesting. And at least one more episode with Martha in it! Hurray!
Next week: “The Doctor’s Daughter.” With, quite literally, the Doctor’s daughter: Peter Davison’s pretty daughter.
Share your thoughts [13]
1
Leigh wrote at Aug 3, 11:01 am
Star watch, the Unit woman who kisses her superior officer, I just notices that I think she is the evil woman from Hellboy.
Oh and did you hear in confidential that an idea on the reason that the key scene was clumsy was because Donna had so completely invaded the Doctors life that he had almost forgotten he hadn’t done it already?
2
Catriona wrote at Aug 3, 11:05 am
I think you might be right on the Hellboy front. I thought she looked a little familiar, but figured it was just “Hey, it’s that guy” syndrome.
Yes, I heard that, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. It wasn’t really in the “hey, don’t you have a key?” aspect that I thought it was clumsy—it was in the line readings. I actually really liked Catherine Tate’s off-the-cuff re-writing of the lines when she was talking about that scene: that was much funnier.
3
Nick Caldwell wrote at Aug 3, 11:08 am
Actually, I just thought the acting and staging of the scene was a bit awkward! The way that Tate replayed it in her Confidential interview seemed like a more natural performance.
And you’re right, the female captain was indeed Biddy Hodson, who played Ilsa in Hellboy. Good catch.
4
Tim wrote at Aug 3, 11:54 am
I said my bit about the nuclear program last week.
I think ‘planetfall’ is meant to be analogous to ‘landfall’.
The supposedly deadly Sontarans turned out to be lousy shots once UNIT started fighting back. And their armour was surprisingly useless. Also, I would have preferred to see Colonel Mace pop Skorr in the probic vent, but that would probably be a bit too gritty for many viewers.
Why did the Doctor make such a deal to Donna about her being in a phone box when he was just going to call her anyway, rather than having her call him?
Setting fire to the atmosphere was ridiculous. Not much less ridiculous that some of the other things this Doctor has done, though.
5
Catriona wrote at Aug 3, 01:08 pm
You’re right about planetfall; that was made clear later in the episode. And it makes sense that Rattigan would be thinking in terms of his future Utopia not of the death of the Earth. But it did initially strike me as a potentially ambiguous phrase.
As far as the Sontarans being lousy shots, I’m just going to default to my standard quote from Red Dwarf:
LISTER: Why do we never meet anyone nice?
CAT: Why do we never meet anyone who can shoot straight?
I wonder, though, if it might not have to do with the endlessness of their war. If they’ve ultimately given up on any idea of the war coming to an end—and they don’t actually want it to come to an end, or they have no purpose—and they have an almost endless supply of cloned soldiers, maybe it does become all about the actual dying, rather than a striving for victory.
It could just be, though, that their attitude reminded me a little of the insistence in 300 that Spartans never retreat. They didn’t retreat from Thermopylae, sure, but they can’t have had a blanket ban on retreating at all—that’s just silly. There’s nothing cowardly about a strategic retreat to better ground, even for a hyper-militaristic society.
I think the Doctor’s signalling to Donna was just meant to mean “Hang tight, and I’ll give you a ring when I have a chance.” She just panicked a little because she was trapped and feeling useless.
6
Tim wrote at Aug 3, 01:17 pm
Fair enough re Donna. But the Doctor made such a big deal about the Sontarans being “the galaxy’s finest soldiers”, “you can’t fight Sontarans!” etc., that they really should have been much more impressive.
7
Catriona wrote at Aug 3, 08:52 pm
They killed poor Ross! Isn’t that impressive enough?
I do see your point, though. I did think the death of Skorr was a little . . . perfunctory, perhaps. Had he been shot in the probic vent, that would have been one thing. But he didn’t really make any effort to raise his weapon, and that doesn’t argue for ruthless military training.
If it had been, as I argued above, a matter of military training and the desire to win atrophying as a result of the long conflict with the Rutans, then you’re right: the Doctor wouldn’t have made such a fuss about their invincibility.
(The rubbishy armour seems to be something that comes up a lot: armour that’s great against energy weapons but no defense against Earth’s primitive projectile weapons. I’ve always wondered a bit about that.)
8
Tim wrote at Aug 3, 11:03 pm
Are we even sure Ross is dead? He looked stunned to me. I mean, the text clearly supposes the UNIT soldiers are being killed, but the visuals allow some wiggle room for the show to bring him back.
9
Matthew Smith wrote at Aug 4, 12:46 am
My impression of the burning atmosphere was that it was not a hot fire. Fire is simply a chemical chain reaction so the atmospheric restoration was a chemical chain reaction that destroyed the molecules in the gas from the atmos systems. It just happened to look like a giant flaming fireball. Having said that, the gas appeared to be heavy so I don’t see how it made it into the upper atmosphere.
I liked the idea of having killer cars but it didn’t fit with the premise, it should have been part of a Nestene / Autons kind of episode.10
Catriona wrote at Aug 4, 06:54 am
To what extent are modern cars made of plastic, though? Would it be sufficient for the Autons to control them in the way they, for example, controlled an inflatable armchair?
(Ah, 1970s. What joy you brought, with your wacky ideas about home decorating.)
I’d like Ross to come back, but I do think it was strongly implied that he was dead. Would the Sontarans stun their enemies? They seem a “the only good enemy is a dead enemy” kind of people to me.
11
Tim wrote at Aug 4, 08:23 am
A chemical reaction that propagates that rapidly across the entire atmosphere and produces that much light is likely to be producing a considerable amount of heat. Of course, it’s all sufficiently advanced, so the environmental effects can be ignored.
> They seem a “the only good enemy is a dead enemy” kind of people to me.
That’s what I meant by the supposition of the text.
12
Catriona wrote at Aug 4, 08:53 am
Matt’s other point also holds true: this gas was heavy enough and sitting close enough to the ground that it was choking terrestrial beings. (And, on that note, what happened to smaller mammals and birds? Surely, with their smaller body mass—except for, say, elephants and rhinoceroses—the gas would have become fatal for them at less than 80% density?)
How, then, can it burn off with a fire that was restricted to the atmosphere? Wouldn’t the fire have had to burn down to near ground level to ignite the majority of the gas? Or, once ignited in the atmosphere, wouldn’t the fire follow its source right down to ground level?
13
Tim wrote at Aug 4, 10:08 am
Clarketech, like I said.