Re: The Poison Sky - spoilers

FunkyM wrote:
On May 4, 10:54 am, Elvis Gump <elvisgump...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ian Salsbury wrote:

Lots of plusses for me this week, the sontarans were magnificent IMO, looked
really good and were done properly. Some nice continuity references (
Lethbridge Stewart! ), Are you my Mummy, the flash of Rose`s face and why
did the camera pan to the hand in the jar? It fizzed along at just the right
pace, terrific fun...and I may be alone with this but I love the sontaran
dance!

I didn't like the 'trapped in Peru' line about the Brig. It made it
sound like he was still on active duty. If they wanted to mention him, I
think the Doctor could have compared how incompetent the Colonel was
acting next to Allister.

Yeah, the "trapped in Peru" line was a little weird... it kind of
suggested there's an 80 year old Brig out there who's come out of
retirement, unless UNIT just keeps tabs on its former commanders for
some reason...

I've wished to find him either in retirement or perhaps a Minister in Parliament. I sort of think of him getting strong-armed into the latter because of how important he was to the British government. I think of that great line from John le Carre's "The Russia House" where they might tell the Brigadier "You live in a democracy! You don't have a choice!" Does the British gov have a Defense Minister like we have a Secretary of Defense over in the US?

Courtney could have handled the role the Colonel did in this one easily, just a lot of standing around arguing with the Doctor and the one bit of action shooting the Sontarian at the end, which could have been done with a little more comic flair, but then they let the body count get so gruesome in this one they sort of murdered the possibility of lightheartedness.

I was also pissed that the Doctor is shown to be making really crap
rationales to the Colonel without really spelling it out or seeing the
Colonel be such an idiot to just sacrifice his soldiers with such a
stiff upper lip attitude.

Why can't they make the Colonel competent and beg the Doctor "I have to
do something! I can't just let my men sit on their hands!"

One kind of weird/annoying thing about the new series is how trusting
the British government/military seems to be of the Doctor, almost
treating him with a sort of hero worship (and especially when RTD
makes those almost messianic comparisons of the Doctor in several of
his episodes, but that's another matter)... it's like they're
overcompensating for all those times the Doctor and his companions
would land and be immediately be arrested/accused of something in the
old series.

The Doctor was with UNIT for a lot of years, but yeah these days there should probably be a few people that aren't too keen on having him around or trusting him. But then I've been living through the Bush decade of America where the government trusts no one, not even their shoes or shampoo on airplanes. I don't know how much of that paranoia has spread to the UK.

I also thought they should have not made Donna such a scardicat about
going out to flip the transporter switches. I'd like her better if she
was whacking the guard in his probic vent and then stomping and kicking
him going "TRY TO KILL MY GRANDDAD SUNSHINE!" They keep trying to soften
her when I think she'd be much better with a grittier, tougher edge.

She isn't a soldier or anything, it makes sense she'd be scared of
aliens in battle armor wielding lazer rifles.

Yeah, I guess that is a good point. I just like how she is unsentimental and rather prone to anger rather than fear. I expected her to be a little more put out that she was stranded on the Sontarian ship rather than afraid. She's so headstrong and sure of herself I would expect her to be reading through the TARDIS operator's manual trying to drive the thing.

Come to think of it, putting the TARDIS into that spinning flight mode and letting it do a whirling dervish around the inside of the Sontarian bridge probably would have made short work out of the potato heads. Just set the TARDIS up to puree and instant tater cream soup! Or would that be mashed potatoes?

Overall though, enjoyed it a lot as I am this whole series so far after the
so-so opener.
I thought the weakest part was the genius kid that changes his mind and
offs the Sontarians. He was such a cardboard cutout and to have made him
more plausible would have just taken editing a lot of the dashing about
and staring at the sky out and writing the Sontarians as really sneering
at him laughing at him that how could they trust someone who would
betray his whole race.

To go from that bat*** crazy to self-sacrifice was just a little too
pat. But then that's the problem with heroes like the Doctor where you
have such a hard time even showing him being heroic or self-sacrificing.
It's impossible to believe that the Doctor might be about to die when we
know Tennant will be around for the Xmas special, so the teary "I have
to give them a choice" bit falls flat.

Was expecting him to do it more for revenge purposes than out of
genuine self-sacrifice... would've made more sense considering the
level of megalomania the kid seemed to have going on.

Given his doing something clever line to Martha before he transmats up to the Sontarian ship, it might have been better that he thought he was so clever that he would blow the thing and escape.

It's a pity the kid playing the part has had his character killed off. I thought he wasn't terrible, just that his part was poorly conceived. It might have been nice to keep him around as a sort of wunderkind that mgiht have somehow escaped legal responsibility for the ATMOS thing and created some anti-hero sort of havoc in later seasons for an Earth story.

Still, it's an improvement over the previous 2-parters that have
featured the Cybermen and certainly much better than the one with the
Daleks in NYC.

Yeah, agreed. Overall this story was pretty good. The ending was a
little bit of an eyeroller, but they managed to keep the story
together for the most part.

I just got through watching the Confidential show and I have to say again how well I thought the make-up guys redid the makeup for the Sontarians. It seemed looking at the rewind back to Pertwee's era the makeup was perhaps better way back then and got worse and worse until the 1980s in the Colin Baker episode they looked like Mr Potato Head mated with Max Headroom.

The fact that he's smart enough to realize the Doctor is a worthy fellow
and wants Donna to live her life to the fullest and so on make him the
best family connection that any of the companions have had so far. It's
too bad we don't get more of him when we overdosed on Jackie Tyler.

That might be an interesting twist, we've never really seen the Doctor
with a companion who looks so much older than him (even if he's
actually several hundred years younger)

I suspect it would be novel for the actor that plays the granddad to get referred to by the Doctor as a 'young man' by the Doctor's standards.
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