Doctor Who 4x04 "The Sontaran Stratagem"

[kerravonsen]

Okay, I'm grinning over the silliest thing...

Yay! I was right! Donna's grandfather was the guy selling newspapers in "Voyage of the Damned".
But that whole scene was funny, how they'd all met the Doctor before and were all "but you know this guy? Why didn't you say anything?"

I was also quite amused at the whole "I'm going home" scene, where the Doctor blathers on with a Goodbye Speech and then he realizes he's being an idiot, and Donna just let him go on, and then calls him a dumbo. (grin)

I love General Staal. He's so "nobility of War" and all that. The way he compliments his enemies on their strategy. I like that. And "The greatest war in history and we weren't allowed to participate!" Ha! So gung-ho.
And so funny how the UNIT guy called him a potato-head. Because Sontarans do look like that.

No so impressed with the spoiled-brat genius. Because he's a spoiled brat, and the spoiled-brat genius is a cliche. (Hugs Charlie Eppes as a counterexample)

So, it's a cliffhanger, and it ends with the Doctor helpless and baffled, like a good cliffhanger. Yeah, I was thinking "Hmmm, we're about due for a two-parter, aren't we?" about halfway through the episode, so it didn't surprise me that it ended like that.

But if Donna's grandfather dies, I will be very cross.

Suspicious Mentions:
The Medusa Cascade got mentioned again ("Fifteenth broken moon of the Medusa Cascade") but I think that was about it.

---

Oddly enough, after overdosing on Torchwood this weekend, it strikes me how much more lighthearted Doctor Who is, in the sense of less emotionally harrowing, because you know things will come right in the end, unlike Torchwood, which in Season 2 went for the emotional jugular rather than the "ooh, now we can talk about naughty bits" of the first season.

Comments

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

But at the end, I was left wondering how General Staal squared the nobility of honourable warfare with what seemed to be a very sneaky plan to incapacitate the humans before they got round to any actual fighting? The spoiled-brat genius didn't seem to be their sort of ally, either, unless he was supposed to be proof that the humans weren't honourable enough to merit a proper military defeat.

[kerravonsen]

Yeah, the Doctor asked Staal straight out about "How come the sneaking around? That's not very honourable" and Staal avoided the question.
On the other hand, he is "Staal the Undefeated". Maybe he's always this sneaky.

BTW, I'm puzzled by your icon: what do you mean by "Still one place to go"? That is the Earth behind the TARDIS, yes?

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Yes, you can see Africa and Saudi Arabia behind it. The screencap came from the start of The Empty Child.

I wanted to make an icon quoting one of my favourite songs by the Doors, Soul Kitchen, and especially the line "Your brain seems bruised with numb surprise". I think I was planning to put it on a shot of the Ninth Doctor, as a post-Time War thing. But I eventually concluded that it was too much text to work very well, so decided to go for the next line: "Still one place to go", which seemed to fit as a description of the Doctor's attitude to Earth after the loss of Gallifrey.

And in my mind, if no one else's, it includes the previous line, like my current icon of Blake and Avon, in which Blake is labelled "someone good". gair correctly deduced that this was taken from Lou Reed's Perfect Day, and that, as well as a possible description of Blake, it implied the longer quote, "You made me forget myself, I thought I was someone else, someone good", as a possible description of Avon's relationship with Blake. I quite like icons where there's more than appears on the surface.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

Yes, "Torchwood" is much darker than "Doctor Who". But then "Torchwood" is intended solely for adults, whereas "Doctor Who" is aimed at least partially at children.

I've been very impressed by Season 4 so far. I think some of the reasons are that Donna is such a good companion, that the Doctor is behaving in a more thoroughly "Doctorly" fashion than he's done for some time, and that they seem to be making a particular effort to reach out to those with fond memories of "Old Who".

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

But if Donna's grandfather dies, I will be very cross.

So will I.

I hadn't seen Sontarans before so yesterday afternoon I finally watched 'The Sontaran Experiment' which I'd misguidedly bought on DVD. It wasn't as bad as I'd been told, and there was a good doco on it about Sontarans so I knew about them when I watched. I'd like to see 'The Time Warrior' now.