Nasty, brutish, looks like a potato.
But enough about Tony.
We all know about the
Sontarans – nasty, brutish and short, at permanent war with the Rutans, cloned
species, insanely good at fighting, bizarrely never the same twice until New
Who, used significantly as comedy relief in the New Who universe.
This is not the New Who
universe.
The Early Adventures of
course are…pretty much exactly what they claim to be – stories that could fit
into the black and white era and evoke that sense of the Hartnell or Troughton
series, while giving us stories with a 21st century verve, and
making use of ideas which either didn’t or couldn’t have existed back then.
We’re going to go out on a
limb here and say you’re going to love The Sontarans.
Every fan knows the
Sontarans arrived in our world in The Time Warrior, Kevin Lindsey as
Commander Linx kidnapping scientists and stashing them in the middle ages so as
to repair his Christmas bauble of a ship.
But the Sontarans of
course are known to the Doctor when he first sees the ‘ghost’ of Lynx,
suggesting that he’s either heard of them, or encountered them before.
What Simon Guerrier has
delivered in The Sontarans is ostensibly the first time the Doctor
encounters the Spudheaded Sons of Sontar. What’s more, as he’s travelling with
two companions from ‘our’ future, Steven and Sara, it’s one of those rare
occasions in Who where the companions know more about the villains than the
Doctor does. For Steven and Sara, the Sontarans’ reputation in battle, and
their reputation for brutality, goes before them. The Doctor appears to
encounter them cold, and learn as he goes.
The scenario of The
Sontarans is, if not simple, then linear, with little to get in the way of
its storytelling flow. One strategically placed asteroid, one squad of human
soldiers (who also know the Sontarans of old), one squad of Sontarans, one
objective for the humans (a giant space cannon with which the Sontarans are
causing an embuggerance to a great chunk of the cosmos), one indigenous
species, seemingly benign and oppressed, and one particular Sontaran leader
with more than a touch of Styre about him, keen to torture humans for their
information and their responses, so as to make military progress and improve
the next generation of clones. What you’ve got, when you boil it down to its
essentials, is a Dead Planet-style quest for the Doctor, his companions and
those humans who make it through the first battle sequence, down into the
bowels of the planet, to meet up with the indigenous species of the asteroid
and from there make their way to blow the space cannon to smithereens, all the while
being pursued by an enemy that’s ruthless, dogged and a damned good shot. In
essence then, it’s the original Terminator movie, but with asteroids and
Sontarans, in a black and white style.
That style’s important –
Guerrier faithfully reproduces the tone of one of those Hartnell stories that
involve quite a bit of getting from A-B, usually with some abseiling or rock
climbing or leaping over gaps that lead down to the planet’s molten core or some
such. But he manages to do that, and bring the Sontarans in, while conjuring
what feels like a really fast couple of hours of storytelling, with treats
galore along the way for the continuity fan. There’s talk of the Time
Destructor, of the Terranium core, and, unusually for a Companion Chronicle or
an Early Adventure, the story ends with a hard, fast reference point to
on-screen Who, bringing a sense that the Steven and Sara adventures might
almost be coming to their end. It’s true that Jean Marsh is 82 and Peter Purves
is 77, but as Who fans we’re accustomed to being spoiled by these phenomenal
actors showing us what they can still do (No lying down on the job, folks,
William Russell’s 92!). That means the reference point back to The Daleks’
Master Plan comes as a shock. It doesn’t interrupt the flow at all, but the
reality of it, and how close Sara is to fulfilling her destiny, still shocks
and saddens us when we get to the end of the story.
Long before that though,
there’s plenty to love about The Sontarans. The quest, with its
authentic feel, shows us at least two entirely new things about the Sontarans
as we understand them, and Dan Starkey, the modern-day Kevin Lindsey, tightens
his grip on the whole Sontaran race, playing at least a Sontaran fistful of the
clone-boys here, as well as one of the human troopers. In particular, he
channels his Inner Lindsey in the squad leader, Slite, who tortures Steven when
the Tardis crew get inevitably separated (we mentioned it had the tone of those
Hartnellian quest stories, right?). There’s perhaps one moment that will grate
on the nerves of those who don’t think the Sontarans should be funny, ever, but
Guerrier gives us a logical reason why the Sontarans would be open to humour
now and again.
Jemma Churchill as Captain
Papas, the leader of the human squad, is effective here, a kind of proto-Sara
before she joined the Doctor, while Jean Marsh herself is used mostly for
important bits of exposition about the future and why they can’t reveal it.
Peter Purves though continues his presumably exhausting triple act as Steven,
the Doctor and the main narrator of the tale, belying any difficulty with a
fluidity of delivery that has seen him really come into his own in recent years
at Big Finish.
What The Sontarans
gives us then is an amalgam that shouldn’t work, but absolutely does – a black
and white feeling quest story, with what sound like Classic Sontarans, but move
with the speed and determination of the New Who variety. It gives us a glimpse
into the recent past for Steven and Sarah, a concrete link in to the on-screen
chronology of early Who, a story that for all it’s identifiable as a quest,
makes sense at least most of the time, some brand new things you didn’t know
the Sontarans could do, and, on top of all that, the delight of hearing the
first time the Doctor ever encountered a species he would come to know well and
battle comparatively frequently, whipped along at a quick marching pace, and
dogged by the ever-present sensation of loss, of consequences to any failure,
and of being pursued by an enemy that won’t slow down.
The Sontarans delivers a story that’s both a
rollicking big tick on the fans’ bucket list, and an adrenaline-driven
adventure in its own right. That’s worth a listen any day you like.
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