The Sontaran Experiment

Two episodes
Aired between 22nd February 1975 and 1st March 1975

Written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin
Produced by Phillip Hinchcliffe
Directed by Rodney Bennett

Synopsis

The Doctor materialises at the other end of the trans-mat beam onto a wild, rocky moor.  He is standing in a circle of rusting trans-mat refractors and it looks like the entire area is devoid of life.

Harry beams into the area and fades out again a couple of times.  The Doctor beings to look at the refractors to see if there's anything wrong with them.

Harry meanwhile frets that Sarah is missing.  Not to worry though, she's been beamed a little bit away into a ditch.  Harry helps her get out of it and they re-join the Doctor, remarking that this cannot be Earth.  The Doctor seems to think it is though and suggests they explore the area for signs of life whilst he fixes whatever's up with the beacon.

As Harry and Sarah Jane explore, Sarah thinks she hears something but Harry brushes it off as nothing and they continue.  But she did hear something after all though, perhaps the two men armed with a laser rifle that aim at the Doctor.  The rifelman's companion, Erak, tells him to wait whilst he reports in finding the Doctor.

The rifleman, Zake, agrees and Erak goes off through the moors.

Harry meanwhile trips down a big hole that looks like it was some kind of hunters trap.  The sides of the hole are a bit too steep for Harry and he agrees to stay put whilst Sarah goes back to get the Doctor.

Erak goes back to the men's encampment and tells of the Doctor's arrival to another, Krans.  Together, they go back to the Doctor.

Back with the Doctor, Zake is still observing him when a big robotic bug turns up and chases him halfway across the moors before Zake ends up running off a cliff.  The Doctor hears his screams and goes to investigate, finding the man dead.  Krans and Erak arrive on the scene and see the Doctor stooped over him, mistaking the Doctor for Zake's killer.  They stun him with their rifles before he can explain himself.  As they carry him away to their camp, another "spaceman" watches them from a nearby rocky outcropping.

Meanwhile, Harry encounters something that causes rocks to fall towards him.  Trying to escape their path, he finds a very narrow passageway through some rocks, to freedom.

Sarah Jane gets back to the trans-mat beacon and finds the Doctor gone.  She goes back to the hole and finds Harry missing from there too.  She's really confused and beings to climb down the hole and look for Harry when the other "spaceman" grabs her and pulls her into some bushes.  Seconds later, the robot bug glides past, beeping and whirring like it's looking for something.

Once it's gone, the man introduces himself as Roth.  He explains that he set the pit trap. trying to get the robot.  He tells her that the robot is a servant of an alien that lives among the rocks.  This alien supposedly captured him and his crew before and tortured them all/  He managed to get away though.  He's obviously lost the plot to the point where he's adamant he'd rather die than be captured again.  Sarah asks about the Doctor and Roth tells her that he's been captured/

Back at the Spacemen camp, Erak and Krans wake the Doctor and interrogate him, believing him to be the one responsible for kidnapping Roth and the rest of the crew.

The Doctor sets them straight and tries to explain that they were sent from Space Station Nerva.  Krans and Erak don't believe him, saying that they are the only survivors of the Earth Calamity, the lost colony of Nerva is nothing but a legend and even if it isn't, the men have just re-claimed Earth in the name of their colony, GalSec, and aren't about to give it over.

Around this point, the men's leader, Vural, returns having also escaped from the alien in the rocks.  He explains the rest are dead or being tortured.  The Doctor notices a strange button on Vural's suit and asks him about it.  The leader gets very shirty and threatens to kill the Doctor

Roth takes Sarah Jane to the GalSec campsite but won't enter it.  he explains that he saw Vural being set free by the alien in the rocks, meaning Vural is probably a traitor.

Meanwhile, the Doctor calms everyone down and asks how they came to be on this wasteland.

They explain that they were sent out locate a GalSec ship that had disappeared in the area.  They detected the ships distress signal from this planet and began to descend, but the call was a fake and they were hit with a rocket that severely damaged the ship and killed most of their crew, stranding them there. One by one, the crew have been taken ever since,

The Doctor re-iterates his promise to fix the beacon and let the Nerva station rescue them but they refuse.

Roth appears at this point and the surprised men chase after him as he runs off, leaving Sarah to come out of hiding and rescue the Doctor.  They eventually meet back up with Roth and together, he and Sarah update the Doctor on everything they know.  As they move through the landscape, they come upon the original landing site of the alien.  The Doctor recognises the scorch marks as belonging to a Tellurian Drive, meaning it's definitely alien because there is no Tellurian in this galaxy.

They go to Roth's hole and try to find out what's happened to Harry but the Doctor falls in it this time, just as the bug robot turns up and catches them unawares.  The bug robot shoots out ropes and ensnares Roth and Sarah Jane, taking them away and leaving the Doctor unconscious in the hole.

And what of Harry?  Well, the small hole he found led him to some rocky terrain where he comes across a large spherical spaceship.  He spends time watching it until the bug robot shows up with Roth and Sarah Jane in tow.  The spaceship opens and out comes a Sontaran!

To Sarah's horror, when it removes it's helmet, she sees that it's none other than Linx!  Except that it isn't really.  He explains that the Sontarans are a clone race.  This is Field Major Styre of the G3 Sontaran Military Survey Corps.

Whoever it is, Roth doesn't care.  He refuses to be tortured again and makes a run for it.  Styre casually pulls out a gun and shoots him in the back.  Sarah is naturally upset about it but Styre doesn't care.  Roth had already provided most of the date a he could for Styre's experiments, but Sarah is another story.

The Doctor meanwhile, regains consciousness, and tries to use a fallen tree as a pole to pull himself out of the hole.  As he's putting his plan into action, Krans, Vural and Erak show up and re-capture him.  They force him to climb up out of the hole but as he does so, Styre's bug robot shows up again and captures the three of them.

The Doctor manages to slide back into the hole and finds Harry's escape route.

Harry leaves Styre to be entertained by Sarah Jane whilst he looks around the rest of the Sontaran's setup.  He finds one of the GalSec crew chained to a rock, being purposefully left to die of thirst and starvation.

The man weakly says its an experiment Styre is conducting into human endurance.  Harry tells him to hang in there and goes off to find Sarah and the Doctor.

Like the GalSec crewman, Styre also chains Sarah Jane up to a rock, but this time, he places an eye like device on her forehead.

She tries to trick Styre into believing that there's loads of humans on the planet but he doesn't fall for it.  He seals her behind a force field whilst he goes off and makes his report to Sontaran HQ.

Harry in the meantime comes across Sarah.  He runs smack into the force field and can't get through it.  He resolves to go and find a way to help her.

Elsewhere, Styre contacts his Marshall (who also looks like Linx) and explains that as thought, it appears as though the Earth isn't inhabited but their preparation study for invasion of Earth cannot be completed until he's cleared up some anomalies that have shown up.  The Marshall is impatient but agrees to hold off the invasion until he's received Styre's report.

Unknown to Sarah at first, Styre's experiment with her has begun.  She is being tested to her reaction of fear.  The device on her head causes hallucinations, particularly that a nasty sentient slime eating her up.

She thinks she's about to die when the Doctor shows up.  He de-activates the force field with his sonic screwdriver and shuts off the experiment.

Styre shows up and easily beats the Doctor to the ground when he rushes him.  The Doctor distracts the Sontaran and tries to run for it but Styre shoots him, just like Roth.

Styre's robot bug turns up again, carrying the three remaining GalSec crew.

Styre exclaims he's happy as he can begin his final experiment, but Vural asks for his freedom, especially as he's done what Styre asked him to do, much to Krans and Erak's disgust.  Styre turns on Vural and goes back on the deal, keeping him prisoner anyway.

After wandering about a bit, Harry returns to Sarah to find her unconscious and the force field deactivated.  He also sees the Doctor and fears him dead and just around the corner finds that the GalSec crewman has finally died of thirst.

Harry waits until Styre turns up to record the results and is about to attack him from behind but the Doctor grabs him and leads him away in silence.  It turns out the Doctor was saved by getting shot in the exact spot where the Doctor placed a sheet of metal (a piece of the rocket locking mechanism from the Nerva rocket).

The Doctor ponders what Styre is really up to, reasoning that Sontaran's never do anything without a military reason.  He goes off to find out the exact nature of Styre's plan, leaving Harry to revive Sarah.

Styre uses the last of the GalSec crew to set up an experiment, forcing Erak and Krans to hold a gravity bar above Vural's chest in an effort to determine the human rib cage's resistance to pressure.

Knowing he'll be occupied for a short time, the Doctor goes to find Styre's ship.  The bug robot shows up and the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to disable it.  He finds Styre's computer and listens to Styre's latest communication with the Major.

The Doctor returns to Sarah and Harry and comes up with a plan to delay Styre, challenging him to single combat and tiring him out whilst Sarah and Harry sabotage the Sontaran's ship.  He's anticipating that the Sontaran will need to "recharge his battery" using Tellurian energy, but he hopes that Sarah and Harry can disable the recharging device.

Sure enough, the Doctor's plan goes as expected, he challenges Styre who's sense of honour demands that he face the Doctor with a hand weapon rather than his gun.

 When Styre finally tires and disables the Doctor long enough to go back to his ship, the ship overloads, draining all the energy from Styre and forcing his head to implode, and destroying the ship.

With Styre dead, the Doctor contacts the Marshall and warns him that Styre is dead and they know exactly what the Sontaran invasion plan is, therefore they dare not invade.

With the Sontaran threat defeated, the Doctor frees the GalSec prisoners and invites them back to the Nerva Station.  They say they'd prefer to wait planet side, so the Doctor, Harry and Sarah Jane step back into the newly repaired trans-mat beam and disappear.

Trivia

• This was the second Tom Baker story to be filmed, but shown third

• This is the second story in Doctor Who's history to have been shot entirely on location.  It does however use video tape, which is why it's not as grainy as Spearhead from Space (which used film).  I believe it was filmed all on location to keep the production costs down.

• During the initial confrontation between Styre and the Doctor, Tom Baker broke his collarbone when he fell.  If you look carefully, you will see scenes where the Doctor is holding his left arm close to his torso (because of a sling).  Needless to say, Terry Walsh stepped in and did the action scenes for the Doctor's final showdown with Styre which is painfully obvious

• The GalSec crewman, Krans is actually the guy who wrote The Space Museum

• The Sontaran head had to be redesigned because of Kevin Lindsay's (the actor who played Linx and Styre) respiratory problems.  Unfortunately, he died not too long after this story from a heart condition

What worked

• I liked the fact that GalSec had regional accents.  It made it feel like they were a separate colony

• The acting is pretty good

• The location, whilst unusual, is interesting

• You get a pretty good feel for the Sontaran mindset in this story, it's nice that they've filled out the background of this race a bit

What didn't work

• Why is everything covered in rock?  Unless there were massive earhquakes, mountains wouldn't just spring up around Piccadilly 

• Similarly, if everything IS covered, where the hell was the trans-mat beacon, on top of a skyscraper?

• The bug robot is terrible

• The fight scenes are terrible

• The "hole" that Harry and the Doctor fall into isn't so much a hole as a ditch.  It reminds me of that mountainside that Sarah Jane falls down in the Five Doctors!

Overall Feelings

This story promises much but the technology and budget of 1975 can't deliver.  We're supposed to get the remnants of a destroyed and desolate world, with the last vestiges of humanity on the threat of being invaded by a powerful militaristic force. Unfortunately, what we get looks exactly like a bunch of props stuck in between rocks on Dartmoor.

I'd be the first one to say you can't judge classic Doctor Who by the special effects, but in this case I'm going to make an exception.  There's just so much about this that pulls you out of the story - the fact that Dartmoor is a destroyed London, that the hole is gigantic, that it's feasible for an entire invasion fleet to be waiting on a field report before they come to an "uninhabited planet" or the fact that Sarah looks in horror at the Sontaran and proclaims that it looks exactly like Linx.  It just leaves you thinking "erm, no".

If there's any salvation to be had, I could say that Tom Baker and almost everyone else puts in a respectable performance.  They all try to take it seriously and that fact saves this story from being one of the very worst.

Rating

5 out of 10

Re-watchability Factor

4 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Rescue

• The Time Warrior

• The Sontaran Strategem (Doctor Who, Series 4)

Consulting the matrix

Do you think that Doctor Who would have been better with more location shooting?

The Ark in Space

Four episodes
Aired between 23rd January 1975 and 15th February 1975

Written by Robert Holmes
Produced by Phillip Hinchcliffe
Directed by Rodney Bennett

Synopsis

Something inhuman drifts through space towards a space station.

Once inside, it approaches a capsule containing a man in hibernation...

Some considerable time later.

The TARDIS materialises on the space station into a darkened room.  The ship is far from the moon as Harry stupidly twisted the helmic regulator on the console, causing them to go massively off course.

It turns out that it's not just the immediate room that's dark and empty.  The station appears to be abandoned without power.  The TARDIS crew begin to look round for a way to get the power and air supply back on.

The Doctor manages to fix the emergency power, but in doing so, allows Harry to unknowingly trap Sarah-Jane behind an electronically sliding door as he's fiddling with a bank of buttons.

Luckily, the Doctor forces Harry to retrace his steps when they realise Sarah is missing and he opens the door again, finding her collapsed due to lack of oxygen.

As they go to help her, the door closes again, sealing them in with the likelyhood of them suffocating to death too.

The Doctor works against time, finding that the power cables have been sheared clean through.  With his last breaths, he manages to fix the main power cables and gets the oxygen running again

Harry and the Doctor lift Sarah-Jane and place her on a nearby couch whilst they nip back out to the TARDIS.

As they step outside, they're attacked by a remote guard that descends from the ceiling.

The Doctor and Harry dive to cover as the electronic guard fires a bolt of electricity at them, frying Harry's shoe.  The Doctor warns Sarah not to enter the room, unaware that she has mysteriously disappeared.

In only a couple of moments, the Doctor figures out that the guard attacks organic matter and is controlled by a panel on the wall.  Again using his Sonic Screwdriver, the Doctor unbolts the desk they're hiding behind and begins to shuffle round towards the control panel.

Meanwhile, Sarah has found that the couch she was on is a transportation couch.  She has been teleported elsewhere in the station into a small chamber.  The recorded voice of a woman comes over the speakers.  The woman indicates she is a leader of Earth and the station is an ark, sent out into space carrying the last vestige of humanity before a terrible catastrophe befalls the planet.  As she stirs, the stations automated systems come online and act as they would with the colonists who belong on this station.

Back in the control room, Harry manages to distract the guard by throwing his other shoe, whilst the Doctor flips the guards activation switch, sending it back up into the ceiling. They go to recover Sarah and find that the couch has a short range matter-transmitter.

With little option left, they go off deeper into the station to find Sarah-Jane.  It's not long before they come across a slime trail on the corridor.  Harry's insistent that he saw the thing that made it just before it disappeared into an air vent.  The Doctor looks worried, but dismisses it and continues on.

They come to a large octagonal chamber containing hundreds and hundreds of human beings in suspended animation, along with vegetable and animal life.  The Doctor figures out that this is an ark.

Harry opens some of the capsules, dumbfounded to find that Sarah-Jane is in one.

The Doctor tells him that there must be a resuscitation unit nearby so Harry goes to find one whilst the Doctor examines Sarah.  Harry opens a nearby cupboard and is confronted by a giant insect that looms towards him.

The insect falls to the ground, obviously dead.  The revival machine is in the cupboard and the Doctor encourages Harry to forget about the creature for now and concentrate on reviving Sarah.

They take the kit to Sarah's pod, but neither are familiar with how it works.  Behind them, one of the capsules glows to life and the woman inside it begins to stir.  The Doctor and Harry take a look at her and she points to one of the devices.  They hand it to her and she revives herself.

Once recovered, the woman looks shocked at the Doctor and Harry's presence on board the ark.  She calls herself Vira and is Nerva Station's First Med-Tech.  She says that Earth was about to face destruction by solar flares.  Knowing their fate was sealed, the Government put a chosen few up into space on the Nerva Station in hyper-sleep to re-populate the Earth once everything had cooled down.
The Doctor explains to Vira that their metaphorical alarm clock didn't go off as it should have and they've overslept by several thousand years because the station had been infiltrated by a giant insect that cut the power supply.  It then took one of the bodies (a guy called Dune) through a nearby air vent.  He shows her the body as proof.  He goes on to explain that their presence on the station is just a mistake and Sarah's been put into hibernation by accident.

Vira is about to deal with Sarah-Jane when another capsule glows to life.  Vira diverts her attention to this and starts to revive Noah, the stations leader.  As she does so, the stations power goes down again.  The Doctor thinks its a problem in the solar stacks so goes to have a look.

Once revived, Noah is less understanding of the Doctor and Harry's situation.  He orders them to be thrown off the station before they contaminate the gene pool.  He grabs a gun and goes off to find the Doctor.

The Doctor checks the solar stacks and finds a giant green grub inside them.  He locks the access hatch to the stacks, sealing the thing inside and then rushes back to tell everyone.

He comes face to face with Noah on his way and Noah uses the gun to stun him.  Noah then goes to the stacks to see if the Doctor has sabotaged anything.

Back in the main chamber, Sarah is successfully revived.

Noah gets to the stacks and investigates the broken hatch door.  He's attacked by the grub that slimes part of his hand, causing him to go unconscious.

Harry and Sarah go after the Doctor and find him knocked out.  As they revive him, Noah returns.  He is still angry and keeps them covered with his gun, but oddly, his other hand remains firmly in his pocket.

Noah takes them back to the main chamber where Vira is reviving a guy called Libri, who initially mistakes Noah as some kind of monster.  Noah looks non-plussed and insists that Vira stop reviving the crew.  Vira argues against it, pointing out that somethings on the station and it took Dune.  Noah smiles and says "but I am Dune" before he storms out.

The Doctor tells Libri to go and stop Noah who's obviously affected somehow by the larva of the dead insect.  Once Libri has left, the Doctor takes a closer look at Dunes empty capsule and determines that the insect must have been a queen and laid her eggs in Dune's body before she died.  Once the larvae hatch, they absorb the knowledge of their host, thereby passing this knowledge to Noah when he was clearly infected.

Libri meanwhile catches up to Noah in the control room.  He threatens Noah but when it comes to it, doesn't believe that Noah's not in control of himself, therefore he cannot bring himself to kill his commanding officer.

Noah however has no such compunction and easily kills Libri.  He looks pained afterwards though, and raises his hand out of his pocket, revealing it to have been transformed into a green slimy stump.

Noah uses the controls to contact Vira over the intercom.  He is clearly fighting the alien influence in his body and struggles to tell Vira that she must revive the humans and get them down to Earth as quick as she can.  He reveals that the alien insects are called the Wirrn and their goal is to absorb the humans.

The Doctor and Vira go to the control room to try and help Noah whilst Sarah and Harry are given the resuscitation kit to awaken two more colonists - Lycett and Rogin.

Before they can get to the control room, the Doctor and Vira encounter Noah in the corridor.  The green gelatinous substance has spread over his face and torso now.  He warns them that the Wirrn larvae are approaching adulthood and they should get away.

He seals the blast door in the corridor, shutting them both out.  Vira is clearly upset as Noah was "pair bonded" with her when they were chosen for the ark.

Needing more information, the Doctor leads Vira back to the main chamber and with Harry's help, they do an autopsy on the Wirrn Queen.

Turns out they are a species capable of flying through space and as such, they don't need oxygen to survive.  This means it's only a matter of time before the Wirrn cut the air supply.  Vira wants to revive more colonists, but the Doctor advises against it, no point having more people take up the oxygen until the Wirrn have been dealt with.

The Doctor wracks his brain to think of a way to discover the Wirrn's weakness, deciding in the end to use the membrane from the Queens eye to hook up to the stations telepathic circuits and see the last moments of the creatures life.  This doesn't work until the Doctor "boosts the mental power" by linking his own mind to it.  Before he does, he warns Sarah not to interrupt the experiment part-way through or it will likely fry his brain.

He links to the membrane and on the video monitor, a faint image of Nerva Station forms.  It's the Wirrn Queen's eye view.  They watch as it enters the station.

Outside, in the main chamber, the grub gets in via the broken vent and attacks Lycett, killing him.  It moves towards the room where everyone is, forcing them to try and keep the door shut.

They intend to wake the Doctor up, but hold off when they're reminded that doing so will kill him.

The Doctor struggles mentally with the images as Harry, Sarah, Rogin and Vira struggle physically to keep the grub outside the room.  Harry and Rogin leave the struggle to Sarah and Vira as they rush off to the armoury to get some Fission guns.  On their way back, they are attacked by an even more insect-like Noah.

They fire on each other, Noah is a crap shot and the Fission guns hit but seem to do little other than sting him.  They close another blast door in the corridor and race back to help the ladies. Once there, they fire at the grub but it seems to have little effect.

By now, the memory sequence has finished and the Doctor revives just in time to suggest aiming for the bottom of its body.  The fission blasts do indeed hurt the grub and it scurries off back into the vent.

The Doctor explains to the group that the Wirrn Queen was fatally wounded by the automatic guard, and limped to Dunes capsule before it died.  Therefore, large volts of electricity are a definite weakness of the Wirrn.  They come up with a plan to electrify the main chamber walls and therefore create a protective ring around the humans.  It requires moving to other parts of the station though.

The Doctor uses the trans-mat couch to send Harry and Rogin back to the control room, and is about to send Sarah-Jane when the power is cut.

The Doctor hypothesises that the Wirrn must be pupating into adults, therefore they don't need power.   He intends to cheerily just walk back down to the solar stacks and turn the power on again as all the Wirrn will be in a chrysalis form.   When he does though, he encounters a fully formed Wirrn version of Noah.

Vira turns up with a stun gun and shoots Noah, allowing the Doctor to get back to the entrance.  Noah calls them back and gives them a preposition.   He will let the Doctor, Harry, Sarah, Rogin and her go if they get in the station's shuttle and leave the rest of the humans to them.  They intend to absorb the sleeping humans and become a technologically advanced race.  Noah explains that the Wirrn happily lived in the Andromeda Galaxy until the humans came and destroyed their colonies, forcing them to drift in space like nomads.  This absorption of the humans will be a kind of poetic justice.

Vira and the Doctor return to the main chamber and go back to square one with their plan.

She refuses to leave the colonists and the Doctor refuses to take everyone away in the TARDIS.  With no main power, their plan is a bit redundant, but there's shed loads of power in the shuttle that Noah mentioned.  As the Wirrn are hatching by now, it's too dangerous to run the power cable openly through the corridors though.  Not to worry, Sarah-Jane volunteers to take the end of the power cable and pull it through the service conduits from the shuttle bay to the main chamber.

The survivors begin to put their plan into action, with Rogin, Harry and Vira setting up the shuttle to transfer the power, and Sarah taking the cable through the conduit that runs perilously close to the solar stacks.

The Wirrn tumble to the human plans and send a couple of them to the shuttle.  Rogin scolds them with a quick blast of the shuttles engines and they don't bother to try a second time.  They decide to assault the main chamber instead, again sending just a couple to break down the door to the room.

The Doctor seals the door off and crosses his fingers, hoping Sarah won't be too much longer.

Sarah gets close to the finish line, but gets stuck in the conduit.

The Doctor uses reverse psychology on her, lecturing about how she's only a girl and complaining about her whining all the time.  Sarah gets mad and sure enough, wrestles herself free, completing the journey.

The Doctor connects the cable just as the Wirrn are breaking through the door.  The voltage is turned on and the Wirrn at the door get a huge shock.

The two groups are seemingly locked in a stalemate.  Noah uses the intercom to try and convince Vira to leave, but the Doctor speaks for her, insisting that the Wirrn should be the ones to leave the station and just go and inhabit a different planet.  Noah refuses and threatens to cut off the oxygen supply.  The Doctor appeals to Noah's human side and encourages him to lead the swarm into space.

The intercom goes dead and Rogin spots the Wirrn crawling around the outside of the station, heading towards them in the shuttle, presumably to kill the power.  Vira comes up with a plan and sets it to self-take off.  They abandon the shuttle and hope that the swarm of Wirrn all go into the shuttle thinking they'll get the survivors.

The plan works and the Doctor catches up with Rogin as he is disengaging the synestic locks that stop the shuttle from taking off.  It comes to the final lock and they both know that the shuttle will start ignition when it's disengaged.  The Doctor tries to be the heroic one, but Rogin knocks him unconscious and pulls him to safety before disengaging the lock and sacrificing himself.

The Wirrn reach the shuttles bridge as it takes off into space, heading to a new destination.

The Doctor comes around and joins Sarah, Harry and Vira.  He ponders that maybe Noah did lead them to the shuttle after all.  As if in response, Noah's voice comes over the intercom and simply says "goodbye, Vira" before the shuttle detonates, killing the Wirrn.

In the aftermath, Vira vows to revive everyone else and get them back to Earth. Now the shuttles gone, she will have to use the transmat which can only send three at a time.  The Doctor takes a look at it and says that the transmat receptors on Earth are faulty and volunteers to beam down and take a look at them first.  He grabs a big coat just in-case the weather is a bit off and Harry and Sarah, after a quick change, go with him.

Trivia

• As noted in the trivia for Robot, this was the first story to be undertaken by the new crew, headed up by new Producer, Phillip Hinchcliffe.  Barry Letts was still around, making sure that the transition went very smooth.

• One telltale thing to note is that Elizabeth Sladen's hair is longer in this story compared to Robot, due to the sequence of filming after a break

• The original version of this story was actually submitted by John Lucarotti (see Marco Polo and the other historical stories of the First Doctor's run).  Holmes accepted the script and paid Lucarotti, but changed a few things around including the aliens encountered.  They were originally called the Delc and were ball shaped.  Another thing that was changed was that Vira was supposed to be from Hati.  The Director changed that though.

• Locarotti hadn't written a Dr Who script since the days of the First Doctor, so when he submitted this script, it had individual episode titles!

• Knowing that the budget was going to be tight, the team planned to re-use the Nerva station set

• Apparently they tried to experiment with different tints on the title sequence, but the colour ended up being distinctly brown so they abandoned that idea after the first episode.

• There is believe it or not, a tenuous link between Doctor Who and Ridley Scott who directed Alien in 1979.  I'm not saying he stole the idea, but who knows, maybe he was influenced a little by Ark in Space?

What worked

• The mysterious case of the deserted space station worked very well

• The interaction between all three characters is great too

• Well, it's not just the main characters.  Noah's wrestle with his own arm is a bit cheesy, but the noises he makes seem to add pathos to it

• Monster effects and model shots notwithstanding, the set for the main chamber looked pretty impressive

• The grub in the solar stack also looked quite good, certainly better than when they did the same thing in Spearhead from Space

What didn't work

• The prologue bit at the beginning makes it feel like Dune's only just been killed, when it's probably meant to be much later

• The model work for the station

• The bubble wrap slime trails are laughable. 

• Come to think of it, why does everyone ignore the really obvious slime trail leading to Dune's capsule, or the smashed vent for ages?

• How come the Earth Government didn't get on Nerva Station first?  Must have been on a different colony ship

• The model shots of the Wirrn crawling across the outside of the station,  I'd have thought they'd have re-worked that on the DVD for definite.  

Overall Feelings

Okay, lets get it out there: I love this story.  I watched it as a kid in high school so I have far better recognition of it, and it worked its magic on me.

I remember that I got it as a gift, and one that I never asked for. I loved Doctor Who, but I'd never seen anything of the Fourth Doctor.  To be honest, the cover looked a bit knaff and on the first watch through, the Wirrn put me off a bit, but not being one to be ungrateful I thanked my parents for the gift.  Now, here's the odd thing.  I didn't have to go back to it, I could have left it to gather dust, but I didn't.

The truth is, for every god awful shot of sausage shaped Wirrn dancing on wires across a space stations surface, for every sheet of green painted bubble wrap that's meant to be a slime trail, there's a scene with actors doing what they do best.  Liz Sladen is great, Ian Marter makes you think that Harry really is a bumbling idiot, and Tom Baker, well, he just looks so natural it's like he's been doing it for decades.  Grand gestures and speeches, grim looks and a great toothy grin all come together as the very epitome of his character and it's captivating.  The plot is great, the music is great, the lighting is great.  The biggest testament I can give is that part one is entirely about the set up.  We don't see a single monster until the closing moment and you know what, it never once feels like filler.  Like the Sea Devils, I love this story warts and all and I'm confident that I would say that even if I came to it for the first time.

Rating

10 out of 10!

Just like the Sea Devils, there's a couple of things wrong with the plot, but the atmopshere, the feel of it is just amazing.

Re-watchability Factor

9 out of 10

Watched this when I was 11 years old and it's still as good today as then,  I watched it so many times, I could practically quote it word for word.

Watch this if you liked...

• The Sensorites
• The Web Planet
• The Ark
• Tomb of the Cybermen
• The Wheel in Space
• The Seeds of Death
• The Stones of Blood (Key to Time Story 3)
• Frontios
• The End of the World (Doctor Who, Series 1)
• The Doctor's Daughter (Doctor Who, Series 4)
• The Beast Below (Doctor Who, Series 5)
• Alien (the 1979  movie)

Consulting the matrix

Could you look past the special effects or was this one bubble-wrap too far?