The Sontaran Experiment

The Sontaran Experiment is the third serial of the 12th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was originally broadcast on BBC1 on 22 February and 1 March 1975.

The Doctor also falls down a crevasse, and the robot returns, capturing Roth and Sarah and bringing them to the alien's spacecraft.

The alien is Field Major Styre of the Sontaran G3 Military Assessment Survey, who has been experimenting on, and killing, the astronauts.

The Marshal is impatient for the intelligence report (without which an invasion of Earth cannot take place), but Styre admits that he has been delayed in his experiments.

This was only the second serial in the history of Doctor Who (the first being 1970's Spearhead from Space) to be shot entirely on location, in this case at Hound Tor on Dartmoor.

However, unlike Spearhead from Space and the location material for other serials, the production was mounted entirely on videotape using early portable video equipment, rather than on the usual 16mm film.

[4] He found the heavy Sontaran costume so difficult to manage that he could not leave the Hound Tor location for breaks, and also could not perform the fight scene – a stand-in, Stuart Fell, was used instead.

[10] The story received criticism from Mary Whitehouse (of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association) for its depiction of "helpless adults in a state of terror".

[citation needed] Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping wrote in The Discontinuity Guide (1995) that the serial "succeeds despite its obvious limitations".

They praised the look of the all-video location recording, but commented that "neither the robot nor the deflection of the Marshal's invasion plans are wholly convincing".

[11] In The Television Companion (1998), David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker said that the premise of a Sontaran surveying humans before conquering the Earth was "silly", but they praised the "atmosphere and imagery" achieved with tension, location filming, and direction.

[12] In 2010, Patrick Mulkern of Radio Times described The Sontaran Experiment as "short, taut and sadistic" and wrote that "impetus and panache prevail over problems with plot logic".

[13] DVD Talk's Stuart Galbraith gave the serial three and half out of five stars, writing that its "best assets are its appropriately confined telling".