“I used to work for them back in the seventies … or was it the eighties?” (for those who don’t know, there are inconsistent date references in the UNIT stories making their setting uncertain and controversial)
Escape from the UNIT van, ran, duck and cover … then the device makes a tiny little pop. “Is that it?” says the Doctor, almost disappointed.
I was waiting for that officer in regular uniform to declare himself to be a Brigadier with some put down from the officer about not being as good as the last, but alas no.
I liked the comedy spots in the episode as seems to be usual for this series, the Doctor saying goodbye to Donna and the little un-Sci Fi spark from the ATMOS in the Land Rover and the stumpy Sontarans.
Martha was an unwelcome return, as wooden as the other UNIT staff.
Couldn’t place Staal’s voice at first, when I checked wikipedia for his voice, I found the actor to be well suited to their physique. Quite a few British TV stars seem to be finding a bit of work in this nu-Who.
Not a bad episode all in all, next week should be a step up. Although I’m wondering if its going to try and be a little bit political and stuff, what with the Sontaran McGuffin centred on oil and pollution. Something along the same lines as the “massive weapons of destruction” from “World War Three”.
When I heard Staal’s voice though, my first thought was “That’s Mike from The Young Ones”.
I was never a fan of the Sontarans before, but their nu-WHO incarnation is to my liking. They should have cast an American as the teen genius though, that actor’s accent is bad.
I really liked this episode. Actually, I’ve enjoyed the entire series so far, which is better than the last two.
I’m not a big fan of martha, but she was good in Torchwood, and she’s carried that maturing of her character through here, and it worked pretty well.
I also thought the Sontarans were excellently realised. It’s got to be hard to take existing character designs that were often quite absurd, and update them into working in a modern context. Good job on the Cybermen, and now on the Sontarans.
I think it helps the deisgners immensely that they’ve actually got a decent budget with which to make costumes, sets and props.
I recently watched some documentaries on the special effects for Red Dwarf which, at the time of the first few series were done inhouse by the BBC. The use of sticky-backed plastic and loo rolls was a necessity. It didn’t detract from the show though because the writing (on Who and RD) was largely excellent.
I loved the PC keyboards that seemed to be stuck liberally to every wall possibly in Red Dwarf
One possible nitpick, if the bullets were expanding and jamming in the barrels, wouldn’t that mean the powder would still ignite, but blow back in the gun?
I enjoyed this episode a lot and was pleased that it ran over into a second one - personally I think the shows were a lot better when the stories ran over 3-6 episodes. The writers, correctly, realised they couldn’t do this story in 50 minutes and therefore didn’t try.
A few hanging questions:
[ul]
[li]Why are the Sontarans attacking Earth? Is it just because or is there a point to it being now? (guess we’ll find out next week… or it might just not be addressed, being the “invasion of the week”)[/li][li]Why is teen genius boy helping them? He doesn’t seem to be getting a lot out of this.[/li][li]How exactly are these cars weapons? Besides, even 400 million cars still leaves vast swathes of the planet untouched by them (admittedly cars are concentrated in the most advanced nations)[/li][li]Why do the Sontarans need to clone anyone? Indeed, this whole cloak and dagger thing is completely at odds with their ultimate warrior mentality[/li][li]How did UNIT and Torchwood coexist? They couldn’t have been ignorant of each other given that their missions are effectively the same (and with Torchwood’s original stance of acquiring technology to increase their power they wouldn’t have looked kindly on UNIT’s interference)[/li][/ul]
I hope these get tied up next week. I really do. I was quite glad to see Martha back, but mainly because I knew it would only be for a small number of episodes. Give me Donna as a companion any day.
Perhaps Torchwood’s remit ran down somewhat with the shrinking of the British Empire? Or perhaps they were happy enough to let UNIT take on the big problems and pick over the left overs. UNIT, being a military arm of a bureaucracy might have been easy to infiltrate by a secretive organisation that’s there to only to steal something useful and shrink away.
Ofcourse, Torchwood (est. 1879) has existed a lot longer than UNIT (est. 1968), so it’s not impossible that Torchwood had a say in the formation of UNIT and its guiding principles. It would have been easy for the UK government to steer UNIT’s remit carefully away from Torchwood’s. It’s also likely that versions of Torchwood exist in other countries (France, Russia and the US for sure) and their governments would have therefore had an incentive to keep UNIT from overlapping with their ET-tech agencies.
I find it interesting that the UN has officially objected to the use of “United Nations” in UNIT, so it had to be changed to “Unified Intelligence Taskforce” for the new series.
Actually, I don’t think the writers brainstormed the story and then decided it needed to be a two-parter, The first series of New Who had episodes 4 & 5 as a two-parter, then the 2nd series had a two-parter for episodes 5 & 6, and last series had a two-parter for 4 & 5. It seems like they’ve established a pattern of having a two-parter in the first half the series, and a two-parter in the second half of the series. They probably didn’t realize they had a story that needed two parts, they had two parts that needed a story.
Isn’t each episode (or double episode in the case of cliffhangers) written by a single “freelance” writer, rather than the regular group of writers you would have with a US show?
Hedging their bets in case an actual alien comes to Earth and takes offence?
And yes, I remember the old Who serials taking place with two and a bit stories taking as much time as the current season does to run. I miss that a bit.
