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The Sontarans |
Reviews
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The Sontarans |
A wasted opportunity by Antony Tomlinson 6/12/04
With the exception of the Cybermen, there are few recurring villains in the history of Doctor Who that deserved better, and yet received worse treatment than the Sontarans. The Sontarans - and their enemies the Rutans - offered a fascinating concept of an alien race. They are interesting characters in their own right. And their universe has enormous potential for development. Unfortunately, very little of this potential was actually realised on our television screens during the period of over a decade in which the Sontarans and Rutans occasionally occupied our screens.
The first Sontaran story, The Time Warrior, was, of course, a gem. And it was also an excellent introduction for the Sontarans. Linx, the lone, lost Sontaran commander, is brilliantly realised. And he is particularly interesting as an alien, because he is capable of real emotional interaction with human characters - unlike cyborg villains like the Daleks and Cybermen. Thus, he shows anger, pride and contempt as we do, whilst being able to carefully manipulate and dominate his primitive allies.
The typical Sontaran personality is thus introduced. The Sontarans, we see, have the character of an archetypal soldier. Toughness and efficiency are their bywords for everyday living. Alongside this, however, they also hold the romantic ideal of military glory for its own sake. This ideal drives the character's behaviour. It is this fear of missing out on war that motivates Linx - indeed, he is so obsessed with this aim that he is happy to destroy Earth's history to achieve it.
Not that Sontarans care about the history of other species, of course. Here, however, the Sontarans are also shown to be interestingly different from the Daleks and Cybermen. For the Sontarans are not fighting to achieve some ideal of racial purity like these others. Rather, they are fighting for its own sake - war is the ideal. Good strategy and tactics are the end and, as is sometimes suggested, the Sontarans don't even really want to win.
The nature of Sontaran society and biology is also well introduced. They are shown to be physically tough, as soldiers should be; they are given a "weakness" (the vent at the back of their necks); and the idea that they are a cloned species is also broached with hints. They are also clearly technologically advanced - for instance, time travelling equipment seems the norm for a small Sontaran escape ship. Linx can also knock up a robot from medieval equipment without much difficulty.
As for costumes and props, Linx is superbly realised. The potato-head design is utterly original, and is astonishingly successful when completed. His face is realistic, with its brownish skin tones, tufts of hair - and the actor's performance is aided by the fact that the alien features fit closely with his own. His uniform, with its distinctive helmet, also seems as tough and futuristic as the script suggests. And his equipment and spherical space-craft seem alien and advanced without being absurd. Linx is a thus a Doctor Who masterpiece.
Given this introduction, there are many things that one is left wanting to see. For we have merely had a glimpse of Sontaran society. Now we want to see their homeworld and their leaders. We also want to know more about their cloning process. And we want to see them in battle against their mysterious enemy, the Rutans. For we have been introduced to these ideas - and it is time to see them fleshed out (we could say that we want a sequel to The Time Warrior equivalent to the film Aliens - for that film was based around an attempt to fully explore the nature of the alien race that we only glimpsed in the film Alien).
We do not get anything that ambitious, however. Instead we get The Sontaran Experiment. This story again sees a Sontaran on his own (apart from another Sontaran on a TV screen). This time, however, the Sontaran is in Earth's far-future. This fact alone is interesting. For it shows how long the Sontaran-Rutan war must now have been going on for.
There are also other interesting aspects of Sontaran life explored in this tale. We discover that the Sontarans must recharge in their spaceships (suggesting that they are, in fact, part robotic). And we also see their military research methods through their hideous "experiments". In a series of disturbing scenes (that it would be hard to imagine featuring in the previous season) the Sontaran discovers various ways in which he can kill human beings. He starves a chained up man, nearly crushes another, and tries to cause Sarah-Jane to go mad. This clearly indicates both the Sontarans' brutality, and their incredibly scientific approach to everything.
However, interesting as all this is, it does not give us the wider view of Sontaran society that we might have desired - even if it is a fairly good continuation of the myth.
As for the actual production, most of the props are the same as those in the previous season's The Time Warrior. The biggest change is the Sontaran (Styre's) face (an odd change to want to make, given that he is supposed to be a clone like Linx). And the Sontaran Experiment mask is, in fact, my favourite Sontaran face. For its wider mouth makes it even more alien in appearance.
After this, however, we would not see the Sontarans again for another three or so years. What we do get to see, however, is their enemy the Rutans in what is my favourite Fourth Doctor story, Horror of Fang Rock. Ignoring the story's other strengths, let us say that this tale is an excellent introduction to the Rutans. For the Rutans are shown to be very different creatures from the Sontarans, which makes their interminable war with them all the more fascinating.
While the Sontarans are tough, land based beings from a high-gravity planet, the Rutans are shown to be amphibious amoeboid jellies, who live in icy seas. While the Sontarans live for face-to-face combat, the Rutans use their technology to infiltrate and change their shape, killing with their natural powers of electric discharge. While Sontaran technology is all tough steel, the Rutans use crystalline spaceships. And while the Sontarans seem to want to fight for its own sake, the Rutans seem to actually want to win. It is fascinating to imagine two such alien races, deadly in such different ways, fighting with each other. It is a shame we never really got to see them together - what a face-off that would be.
That said, the two races are also shown to be similar in many ways. They are militaristic and technologically advanced. Like Styre, the Rutan also finds a gruesome, but scientific way to discover human weaknesses - via autopsy. The Rutan in this story also has a wonderful bluster to him, "It is not important" he counters every time the Doctor tells him how he has scuppered another of the alien's plans. And the Rutan seems to identify closely with others of his race "we are a Rutan" he announces, seemingly psychically linked at some level with his fellows (as the Sontarans are genetically).
The Horror of Fang Rock is also interesting as it gives some idea of the scale of the Rutan-Sontaran war. We see that it is a war in which whole planets can be wiped out in a matter of minutes for strategic reasons, and is one that takes up entire galaxies. Here, then, as with The Sontaran Experiment, the Doctor's aim is to stop Earth getting caught up in the massive crossfire.
As far as the prop itself goes, the Rutan is supposed to be a green blob - and that's what it is. And it looks to me like the production team did a good job realising what turns out to be quite an athletic, tentacled, bioluminescent amoeboid. I would have liked to see the use of such Rutan props again, too. Imagine a scene with a whole spaceship bridge filled with these hideous blobs - the walls glowing green with their bioluminescence. That would have been a shot worth seeing.
Anyway, by this point we now have a good idea of the lone Sontaran and a good idea of the lone Rutan. Surely, then, it was time to give us a story featuring both races, and showing the details of their fascinating alien societies and the huge war which dominated their lives.
Instead, however, at this point the Sontarans seemed to become what the Cybermen would soon be - "rent-a-villains". That is, when there was a slot for "an old enemy" to be filled in a story, the Sontarans would be called in to fill it (grudgingly). And this new role unfortunately killed off any chance of really exploring Sontarans and their society.
And so we get to the travesty that is The Invasion of Time. Whatever the story's other faults, its treatment of the Sontarans is unforgivable. They appear at the end of the fourth episode to fill the "you thought it was all over, but here are the real villains" role - and all we discover that's new about these fascinating aliens is that they are willing to work with other races like the Vardans.
For most of the story, however, we just see these stocky creatures blundering up and down the corridors of Gallifrey and the TARDIS, whilst relying on one Time Lord turncoat to do all their thinking for them. Nothing else is added to their legend. What should be the exciting sight of a full squad of Sontarans is rendered disappointing in this dreadful context.
Worse still is the actual physical attributes of the Sontarans. The actor playing the leader Stor has none of the hushed menace of Kevin Lindsay who played Linx and Styre. He just shouts a lot, and offers no real sense of power. Embarrassingly, he also has a cockney accent and a speech impediment. This is not a problem in itself, but if someone is supposed to be an alien commander, they cannot sound like a bloke from East Ham. And no one can be convinced by a creature that threatens to "week wevenge" on his enemy, the "Dogdaw".
As for the costumes, they are a disgrace. The Sontarans' space helmets actually bend - they are clearly made of rubber. And Stor's face is simply crap: the huge nose has been taken from a Groucho Marx joke-shop disguise kit; the eyes are too close together, making it look a bit like Stor is concussed; and the material from which the face is manufactured keeps being revealed around the mouth and eye areas - and it looks disturbingly like marshmallow. Utter rubbish, and a huge insult to all that had gone before. The Sontaran high command should demand satisfaction.
The rent-a-villain thing unfortunately continued. In the comics we saw Dragon's Claw, which features about three panels of a strip in which the Sontarans appeared (again, as the pointless "real villains behind it all"). Then, they would fill this role again on the Jim'll Fix It kids programme in A Fix with Sontarans.
However, there was one more "proper" televised story for them to appear in - again as a rent-a-villain. This was The Two Doctors. Having missed out on the fun of The Five Doctors, the Sontarans turned up to be revealed as (one of) "the villains behind it all". The two Sontarans in this story were admittedly slightly more impressive than Stor. There was even a good scene where Patrick Troughton's Doctor challenges Group Marshal Stike to a duel by calling him a coward - clearly a terrible insult for a Sontaran. And we see them working with other alien races to gain advanced time travel technology. As with Invasion of Time, it is clear that the Sontarans see themselves as a power on a par with the Time Lords - again, helping to illustrate the scale of their power, and so the scale of their war with the Rutans.
However, little else is revealed about the Sontarans in this tale, apart from the fact that they have green blood, get melted by coronic acid, and have some nice red guns. The costumes are admittedly an improvement on Invasion of Time, but their heads still look a little bit rubbery, as though they are about to cave in on themselves (it seems hard to believe that this expensive 1980s production could not achieve a look as impressive as that achieved in the mid 1970s). Anyway, the Sontarans are eventually dispatched with all the dignity required by their superfluous role. And so we are disappointed once again.
So there we go. Wasted opportunities. This wonderful race should have been explored in detail, but never was. Like the Cybermen, they turned into someone to call in when no one else was available. Of course they would appear again. The independent production, Shakedown tried to show a Rutan/Sontaran battle, and introduced some interesting Sontaran costumes (but also, disappointingly, ridiculed one of these Sontarans - in a parody of Stor - thus making all the others far less menacing). And there were also further books and comics of varying quality (though no Doctor Who audios, interestingly). [That said, I do not know much about Sontaran strips in the 1980s and 1990s, but I would be interested to find out about them].
However, in the end we never really got the detailed exploration of Sontaran/Rutan society that we wanted to see - and we probably never will. It is a shame that such good ideas should have gone on to be so hopelessly squandered. Still, at least we have the Rutan-Sontaran wars to marvel at in our imaginations.
That said, I'd still quite like to know who eventually wins. My money is on the Rutans - stealth is likely to beat brute force. Does anyone else want to place a bet on it, though?