The Last Sontaran
Nov. 5th, 2008 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatYeah, we're a little behind.
Somehow I was expecting to enjoy this more than I did. There is a sense in which the Sarah Jane Adventures seems to sit better with the "old skool" fans of the show than the other incarnations of Cardiff Who. This had many of the virtues I came to expect last year: Likeable characters and a coherent plot but somehow it failed to grab me. In the end the plot was just a little too pedestrian and relied too heavily on a lot of running around to generate its energy.
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I can't help feeling that titling the story "The Last Sontaran" was also a mistake. The "predator" effects early on were genuinely quite creepy, but I kept remembering that it was really a Sontaran and that somehow made them seem just a little comic. I think this harks back to some of the flaws of The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky. The Sontarans never appeared to be a particularly serious threat in that story and that rather undermined the attempts to generate tension here. This could have been the Sontaran equivalent of Dalek (though naturally a version pitched at the CBBC audience), generating a similar sense of fear that this is what just one of the creatures could do, but sadly the actors failed to generate the same (any) depths of emotion and, once the Sontaran was itself revealed, the script concentrated on sending up the Sontaran military jingoism rather than trying to convey a sense of threat.
Somehow I was expecting to enjoy this more than I did. There is a sense in which the Sarah Jane Adventures seems to sit better with the "old skool" fans of the show than the other incarnations of Cardiff Who. This had many of the virtues I came to expect last year: Likeable characters and a coherent plot but somehow it failed to grab me. In the end the plot was just a little too pedestrian and relied too heavily on a lot of running around to generate its energy.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
I can't help feeling that titling the story "The Last Sontaran" was also a mistake. The "predator" effects early on were genuinely quite creepy, but I kept remembering that it was really a Sontaran and that somehow made them seem just a little comic. I think this harks back to some of the flaws of The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky. The Sontarans never appeared to be a particularly serious threat in that story and that rather undermined the attempts to generate tension here. This could have been the Sontaran equivalent of Dalek (though naturally a version pitched at the CBBC audience), generating a similar sense of fear that this is what just one of the creatures could do, but sadly the actors failed to generate the same (any) depths of emotion and, once the Sontaran was itself revealed, the script concentrated on sending up the Sontaran military jingoism rather than trying to convey a sense of threat.