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CS
Weekly Archive > DVD
of the Day > 03/16/07
Cost-Cutting at the Expense of Story
by jason davis
Doctor Who: The Sontaran Experiment
 Bob Baker and Dave Martin
 
 
Conceived as a producer's attempt to carve two stories from the budget of one, The Sontaran Experiment offers up inconclusive results. The story, picking up directly from the foregoing The Ark in Space (which received the other half of the budget), follows the Doctor (Tom Baker), Harry (Ian Marter), and Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) to a post-apocalyptic Earth newly recovered from a disaster long past. The atmospheric set-up portents a good yarn as a group of surveyors from an Earth colony are picked of by an ill-executed robot, but the Mengele-esque experiments of the story's villain are given little time to develop across the unusually short, two-part story. The first of BBC Video's so-called "vanilla" Doctor Who releases, the DVD still boasts more supplemental material for two episodes than most season sets. Writer Dave Martin joins Sladen and producer Philip Hinchcliff for an informative commentary and a lengthy feature examines the origins and deployment of the story's recurring militaristic villains, the Sontarans.
Doctor Who: The Sontaran Experiment
BBC Home Video
Not rated; 93 min.
$14.98
Buy it now
Jason Davis is the DVD Manager for CS Weekly , a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.
Doctor Who: The Sontaran Experiment courtesy BBC Home Video
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