{"id":170,"date":"2011-02-23T12:30:38","date_gmt":"2011-02-23T20:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/?p=170"},"modified":"2011-03-02T15:46:57","modified_gmt":"2011-03-02T23:46:57","slug":"mark-watches-doctor-who-s04e05-the-poison-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/2011\/02\/mark-watches-doctor-who-s04e05-the-poison-sky\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Watches ‘Doctor Who’: S04E05 – The Poison Sky"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the fifth episode of the fourth season of Doctor Who<\/em>, the Doctor and his companions have to work together to counter the disastrous plans of the Sontarans. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to watch Doctor Who<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I think that the small details in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Poison Sky\u00e2\u20ac\u009d are what make this episode work. As a grand statement, and in terms of the larger plot, this episode is a bit of a letdown. It never reaches precisely the same heights as the first half of the story. (This was a common complaint from me during the first two series of the show, but series three seemed really on top of the ball in terms of multi-part storytelling.) But it seemed full of clever nods to past stories and the future as well, so I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to be too quick to discount it as a whole, either.<\/p>\n

The cliffhanger of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Sontaran Strategem\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is resolved in a painfully obvious way: BREAK THE WINDOWS. Anticlimactic? Sure. It seems there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lot of that here, but, again, this isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t necessarily a bad<\/em> episode at all. We see that Martha\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cloning was done as an attempt to infiltrate UNIT, but I did love that the Doctor figured out that this \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Martha\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was an imposter pretty early on. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think I would have believed the idea that the Doctor could be fooled by her for more than a few minutes. By hinting that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d figured it out so early, it actually added an interesting tension to the story. If the Doctor knew Martha was a clone, then what was he planning the entire time? A great deal of time is spent on this idea of filling in the missing pieces, but I found myself\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6disinterested? Is that the word? I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t dislike it and I still think the Sontaran story is really fascinating at heart, but not one of the revelations seemed all that mind-blowing.<\/p>\n

What I did find interesting were the small things. The Doctor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s disgust and repugnance with guns is so wonderful. Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a hero of sorts who flat-out refuses to use guns himself, who balks at them being used in situations where there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always another solution. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think of it as any sort of commentary on gun use or ownership. Instead, I feel like it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a way to criticize the dependence on guns in cinema and television. Once you remove the option to just shoot your enemy, what options do you have to defeat them?<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s weird writing this review because I am struggling to find things to talk about. We knew the Sontarans could clone and survived\/procreated that way, so the Doctor figuring out the gas was meant to accent that seemed pretty obvious. The Doctor clearly couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t die and once he told Rattigan to do something clever with his life, it seemed obvious that Rattigan would take the Doctor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s place on board the Sontaran ship. I loved the visual effect of the atmospheric converter causing that fire above the entire word and it seemed like yet another over-the-top thing the Doctor does to save the world.<\/p>\n

So let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just get to the few awesome things I wanted to discuss. I know this is a short, short review so far, but I really don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to force myself to write about things I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not inspired by.<\/p>\n

THOUGHTS<\/strong><\/p>\n