The Sontaran Stratagem: Every Car on Earth

A returning companion, a returning classic monster, and a plot built entirely out of satnavs. “The Sontaran Stratagem” is a solid, workmanlike first half. It hasn’t got the ambition of the season’s best, but it moves briskly, it brings Martha Jones back in a way that respects where she was left, and it lands a properly uncomfortable argument about the Doctor and the military. Also the Sontarans are enormous fun, which covers a multitude of sins.

Martha Jones, UNIT Officer

Martha walked out of the TARDIS on her own terms at the end of Last of the Time Lords, and the show has been sensible about what she did next. She’s finished her training, she’s a doctor, she’s engaged, she’s working as UNIT’s medical officer, and it’s she who summons the Doctor on her own authority because something on Earth needs him. I’ll admit I was braced for a lovesick Martha and didn’t get one, which made me very happy.

The Martha who left was hollowed out by a year of walking a conquered planet and by loving a man who wouldn’t look at her. The Martha who comes back is composed, senior and completely over it. Freema Agyeman plays the reunion with real warmth and zero yearning, and the show is smart enough not to reopen the wound.

Best gag in the episode is Donna and Martha meeting, with the Doctor visibly bracing for a catastrophe that never arrives. The two of them get on immediately and start comparing notes about him, which is his worst nightmare, and it’s a small scene that does a lot of work.

There’s a nastier thread under her return though. The Sontarans take a copy of her, a clone grown in a tank with her memories, walking around UNIT wearing her face and carrying her clearance. It’s a well-worn science-fiction idea, but the episode gets one really good chill out of it: Martha’s own body suspended in a growth vat while a duplicate carries on with her shift, and not a single person in the building noticing. She’s one of the most capable people they have and she’s been replaced, just like that.

Donna and the Doctor together are worth a line too, because it’s the first episode where I really felt them settle into being a double act. She keeps puncturing his speeches, he keeps letting her, and neither of them pretends to be the sensible one. After the mess of the last few companions, a pairing that just enjoys arguing is a relief, and Tate is funnier here than she’s been so far because she’s got somebody to bounce off.

ATMOS

The threat is a nicely mundane one. ATMOS is a device fitted to four hundred million cars worldwide, a satnav that also cuts exhaust emissions to precisely zero. It’s cheap, it’s everywhere, it’s in every vehicle on the road, and as the Doctor points out with the weariness of a man who’s seen this a hundred times, nothing that good is free.

Two things are wrong with it. The satnavs have started driving people into rivers and killing anyone who looks too closely at the company, which gives the first act a decent thriller pulse. And the emissions system is doing rather more than filtering. There’s something properly modern about the paranoia, a piece of consumer technology that hundreds of millions of people installed willingly, quietly turned into a global weapon by the company that supplied it. The show doesn’t labour the point, but it’s there, and it’s the sort of idea I’d have happily watched a whole episode on.

The opening death is the best-directed thing in the episode, a man alone in his car with the doors locked by a system he trusts completely, driven calmly towards a river while he hammers on the glass. No monster, no ray gun, no warning, just a machine following its instructions. It’s exactly the small domestic horror this show does better than almost anyone, and it sets up the threat far more effectively than the fleet-in-orbit spectacle that turns up later. If you want another take on the same episode, this fan write-up from the weekend it aired is a good read.

Pacing is where it wobbles. The investigation section in the middle spends a lot of time with people walking down corridors and explaining things to each other, and I checked the clock more than once. It’s a first half, and it feels like one: lots of setting up chess pieces and not a lot of playing with them yet. I forgave it mostly because I knew a second part was coming, and because the pieces are so much fun to look at.

Sontarans and a Clever Boy

The Sontarans themselves are a delight. Squat, potato-headed clone warriors who bellow “Sontar-Ha!” in unison, who genuinely can’t conceive of a fight not being glorious, and who keep a very obvious weak spot at the back of the neck. General Staal, “the undefeated”, is played with tremendous relish, and the writing gets the joke exactly right. They aren’t stupid, they’re so completely governed by their warrior code that it can be used against them. A species that can’t resist a duel is a species you can manipulate.

Their human collaborator is Luke Rattigan, a teenage genius with a private academy full of gifted students and an ego the size of a small country. He’s an effective creation, a boy so convinced of his own brilliance and so starved of actual respect that a race of alien soldiers telling him he’s special is enough to buy his entire planet. Insufferable, sure, but there’s real pathos underneath because the Sontarans obviously despise him and he can’t see it.

His academy is a good detail as well, a school of brilliant teenagers he personally assembled and can’t relate to for thirty consecutive seconds. Rattigan wants to be worshipped by people he’s already decided are beneath him, and that’s precisely the lever the Sontarans use to pick him up and carry him about. I’ve known a few people like that, though thankfully none with an army.

Soldiers

The most interesting thread is the Doctor and UNIT, and it’s properly prickly. He works with them and he does not like them. He bristles at the guns, at the salutes, at Colonel Mace calling him “sir”, at the whole apparatus of an organisation that solves problems by shooting them. Mace, to his credit, pushes back. These people are defending their planet, and the Doctor’s disdain for how they do it is easy to hold when you can leave whenever you like.

There’s no neat resolution offered, and the episode is better for it. Given what we watched him do to the Family in The Family of Blood, his squeamishness about soldiers is a rather more complicated position than he’d like it to be, and the show knows it.

Meanwhile Donna goes home, and it’s the warmest material in the hour. She sees her mother, who is as deflating as ever, and her grandfather Wilf, who is thrilled. Since Partners in Crime the show has quietly been building the Nobles into the most grounded family the series has had, and after the shouting of The Runaway Bride it’s nice to see her somewhere she’s loved. Which makes the cliffhanger land. The ATMOS devices activate worldwide, gas pours out of four hundred million exhausts at once, and Wilf is sitting in a locked car in his own driveway with the fumes rising, somewhere in there is a Martha who isn’t Martha, and an entire Sontaran fleet is in orbit, delighted.

Rating: 3/5. Sturdy rather than inspired, with some clunky dialogue and a middle section that marks time. But the Sontarans are a joy, Martha’s return is handled with care, and the cliffhanger is a good one.