The Sontaran Experiment

Doctor Who's modest ambitions have always given it a certain charm; I suppose it comes from the show's ever limited resources. A programme which started out with a handful of cheap actors, a couple of sets and a not exactly considerable special effects resource not only had little choice but to be inventive, but could also only surprise and delight from this point on.

Take the opening of "The Trial of a Time Lord" for example, which we, as fans of Doctor Who, are staggered by. Not just because it's an awesome bit of special effects but because Doctor Who has suddenly surprised us at being able to afford it. How many of us had watched Star Wars with impressed but nonchalant eyes before 1986? This was like a ten second Star Wars out-take, and one the story shamelessly wheeled out again and again over the next fourteen weeks. We watched, agog, secretly wondering how JNT scraped the cash together.

Locations have always been another one of those luxuries that we expect and take for granted in other shows; but encountered in a Doctor Who story, it's always something special. You view in the knowledge that this cost them a lot more to make; every second is precious, because over twenty six years we were trained to learn that you only got so much per story. When it ran out, as per "The Green Death", the rest of the plot had to be played out in front of a blue cloth, even if it really couldn't be done this way convincingly.

"The Sontaran Experiment" boasts two whole episodes of location work, a first for the show at this point. Unfortunately it's all on videotape, so there is no lush and expensive "Spearhead from Space"-type feature film feel to it. But it does give the serial a freshness that quite befits it's setting, a sterilised post-Solar Flare fried Earth. As in "The Mysterious Planet", the coup of getting two whole episodes out in the sticks is exhibited so proudly, that nobody even thinks that the production will have to do any more to thoroughly convince the viewer this is post-apocalyptic Earth. There is no evidence of charred or baron soil, changes in the climate, a dark or stormy sky. It's Doctor Who, but filmed in a big field.

The best thing about this story in fact is the Spacemen from the Galsec Colony. It's rather nice that, having been told and convinced in the "Ark in Space" story that Earth is deserted, we now find out that in fact some humans survived and are thriving; all of a sudden we have to change our perception of the story and, along with the Nerva Beacon "myth", a much wider, less truth-dependent Universal picture emerges. It's a Robert Holmes trait that it's surprising to find in a Bob'n'Dave script, and it's a shame more writer's hadn't the intelligence to recognise that continuity we are given doesn't necessarily have to be true.

"The Sontaran Experiment" isn't wholly convincing, because it has modest ambitions. It's so pleased with its glamorous location budget that it doesn't think it has to do any more to tell us this is a scorched, abandoned world. Then again, maybe it doesn't. As humble, non-expectant viewers we are used to suspending our imagination and only too happy to do away with CSO and studio flats as well. To us, the breezy field really can be a devastated world, such were Doctor Who's powers of persuasion.