Classic Doctor Who 12x03 "The Sontaran Experiment" eps 1-2 full reaction
Added 2023-04-06 06:05:06 +0000 UTCComments
As I watched this era so young it was introducing me to concepts for the first time, often uncomfortable ones. In this case it introduced the idea of sadism, and not even sadism just for pleasure but as someone doing their job. Torture and inflicting of suffering for the sake of filling out a form and filing a report. When much later in my age and education I was learning about the reality of the Catholic Churches Inquisition, it was this episode which helped me understand the concept of someone doing terrible things for no more reason than its their job to, and a zeal for the thing they think is good they are doing (for the Sontarans thats war, for the Church is was religion). Who did this a lot to me as a kid, terrified me, even gave me nightmares at times, but it fascinated me with the very concepts, all new to me, it was presenting and informed my thinking when I Iater encountered real world versions of what had being dramatised in sci-fi.
BobBob
2023-04-16 13:52:30 +0000 UTCIt's an odd little story, this one -- the only two-parter in the entire decade of the 1970s, and also shot entirely on location with no sets of any kind, just the natural heaths and rock formations of Dartmoor. It came about because of the new production team's desire to move away from stories longer than four episodes, which had a tendency to become excessively padded. Here, they took a block of episodes that would normally have been a single six-part story, and divided it up into two linked stories -- this one, using up the six-parter's entire location filming allocation, and 'The Ark in Space', which was entirely studio-bound. From this point on, there would never be more than one story in a season longer than four episodes. Sarah says that Styre is 'identical' to Linx from 'The Time Warrior' -- but of course, he actually looks quite different. They went to the effort of bringing back the same actor, Kevin Lindsay, to play the Sontaran, but unfortunately he suffered from a heart condition which had caused problems with the heavy original mask and costume, so a more lightweight version had to be constructed for this story. (Between his two Sontaran appearances, incidentally, Lindsay had showed his versatility by appearing as the Tibetan monk, Cho-je, in 'Planet of the Spiders'.) Sadly, he died of a heart attack just a few weeks after 'The Sontaran Experiment' was broadcast, but his legacy as the original Sontaran lives on even today.
Steven Cooper
2023-04-06 12:32:17 +0000 UTC
