Aside from a few cameos and minor appearances by Strax of the Paternoster Gang, the Sontarans haven’t featured significantly on Doctor Who since 2008. In fact they’ve been absent entirely from the Who universe for at least five years now (wikipedia says they were in “Face the Raven” but I can’t remember). But why is that? Sure, they’re not as big a Doctor Who villain as the Daleks or the Cybermen, and are kind of just this franchise’s answer to the standard sci-fi warrior race (the Klingons in Star Trek for example -though the Sontarans are nowhere as interesting). But they have still been a significant recurring foe for the Doctor, showing up every couple years during the 1970s before disappearing, to be brought back by Russell T. Davies. And Davies’ Sontarans are not the best -more a comic relief race than anything, as demonstrated by their multiple appearances on The Sarah Jane Adventures and the role played by the aforementioned Strax, avatar for all Sontarans for a long time.
In reintroducing them in 2021, Chibnall is bringing them back to their roots somewhat, or at least making them a more formidable enemy. They look quite ugly and in keeping with their original design, and are shown to be quite cruel and merciless so that when the Doctor warns that the one thing they’re very good at is war, you believe her.
“War of the Sontarans” is not a great episode, though it is a better follow-up to “The Halloween Apocalypse”, less cluttered (though still overly plot-heavy) and with firmer direction. The rebooted Sontarans though are maybe it’s singular strength, fierce and frightful, though still a little bit silly -and I’m glad a chunk of the show is devoted to that conflict, even as it is spread across two eras.
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Apparently, just before Karvinista’s shield was fully over Earth, the Sontarans managed to get in -it’s explained somehow, but it’s convoluted and ultimately not important. What is important is that they knew in advance about the Flux (simply via some sightseer) and orchestrated this grand plot where they would wage war on Earth across its’ history through the use of a kind of temporal invasion network. And so when the Doctor and her companions find themselves all of a sudden in the middle of the Crimean War, but with the British fighting the Sontarans instead of the Russians, it’s not taken by those they come across as some new invasion, but a campaign that has always been raging (in fact Sontar has replaced Russia and China on world maps).
But this is to be merely the Doctor’s battleground, as no sooner have they arrived than Yaz and Dan are yanked out of time by some TARDIS energy to follow separate stories, though the former more than the latter, as Dan is simply brought back to present-day Liverpool -the temporal source of the Sontaran war to figure out what’s going on there and how to stop it. Yaz meanwhile finds herself in some unknown temple converging with the paths of a few of the characters introduced last week. Splitting the gang up at this juncture in the series is economical for Chibnall’s dense plot, allowing the structure of the episode to not feel quite so frenetic, but it comes at the expense of their relationship and function as a team. The addition of Dan in particular sticks out rather prominently, and the episode skips over his crucial orientation as a companion. He’s still mostly just a guy the Doctor and Yaz rescued who’s been in the TARDIS about fifteen minutes and is already made to act like a loyal friend of the Doctor, following her into dangerous situations and not terribly perturbed by the fact he’s just travelled through time. Contacting the Doctor is even a priority while he investigates the Sontarans in his time and he’s certainly mustered an unusual degree of bravery when dealing with aliens for a guy who was just a day ago kicked out of a museum for impersonating a tour guide. I like John Bishop a lot and his storyline is overall pretty good here, but I feel Chibnall is trying to rush his character development, force him into a slot too abruptly before he can organically fill it, and consequently Dan remains an awkward companion. It’s not until the end of the episode where he makes the critical choice of accompanying the Doctor of his own volition.
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The person who instead fills in for the Doctors’ companion for much of the episode is Mary Seacole (Sara Powell), a real British-Jamaican nurse who ran a hospital behind the lines during the Crimean War. The kind of figure who deserves the spotlight of a Doctor Who episode, but who is mostly tasked here with being the Doctors’ sidekick -recruited to spy and make notes on the Sontaran encampment and provide a home base in the form of her ‘British Hotel’ for the Doctor in this period. She also is meant as a symbol in contrast to the General Logan (Gerald Kyd), a loyal British officer just as eager to fight as the Sontarans but completely oblivious to their far superior military might -this in spite of the fact the Sontarans have been fighting the British for a while now and laying them to waste. Logan aims to destroy while Seacole is there to heal. It becomes an extremely blunt parallel by the end, where Logan does something heinous that prompts the Doctor to question why she even bothers with humanity, only for a gracious Seacole to remind her of their worth.
War is of course not a context that tends to demonstrate the best in us, and the destructiveness of this one is shown in harsh detail. Whether its’ in Commander Skaak (Jonathan Watson) inviting a massacre and then delivering on it in a sequence that causes the Doctor to invoke the Charge of the Light Brigade, or in Skaak’s counterpart in 2021 executing random civilians, or even the execution of one Sontaran, who had been captured and returned to deliver a message about the Doctor -a Sontaran who definitely felt to be more explicitly in the mould of a Strax, or any number of the kind that Dan Starkey has played. His death therefore reinforces that these Sontarans are not a joke. That said of course, they are still Sontarans, with their potato heads and excess grandiosity and absurd weak spot buttons on the back of their armour.
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It’s Dan who most exploits this design flaw, finding out about it not from the Doctor but from his parents, who conveniently show up shortly after his arrival in Liverpool, and tell him of some idiot friend of theirs who discovered it while trying to fight off the Sontarans with a bat. So Dan arms himself with a wok of all things, and not particularly knowing what he’s doing, makes in the direction of the Sontaran ship to try and get aboard. Dan’s storyline may stand on the weakest footing in terms of motivation and sense, but it is nicely peculiar and simple, and provides for some decent humour, that wok being put to good use. The jokes given over to his parents are pretty poor, but the bit where he fools the Sontaran by essentially pulling the “look over there” move is dumb and delightful. And things get better when Karvinista shows up to save him from execution and the two resume their fun sardonic rapport -even as his appearance comes loaded with lazy writing to quickly bring about an end to the conflict.
The Sontarans aren’t so much defeated this time as forced into a truce, the Doctor having hatched a plan and carried out with Seacole and Logan to disrupt their roughly seven minute regenerative process, leaving them without adequate protection in Earth’s atmosphere. Rather conveniently, due to their armies across time being in sync, it effects the Sontarans in Liverpool too and they all leave. This all transpires in the span of roughly five minutes, Chibnall’s pacing is wildly inconsistent -and it’s difficult to make out what all is happening and at what time. Of course, somewhere in that seven minute stretch, Logan found the time to arm an elaborate concoction of explosives that blow up the Sontarans in Crimea as they are retreating, and earning that aforementioned ire from the Doctor. Intended to remark palely on humans’ capacity for vindictive cruelty, in the confusion of this climax, it doesn’t mean anything.
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As all this is happening of course, Yaz is off on another mystery completely unrelated to the Sontaran attack. Chibnall adds more layers here to the overarching story of Flux as Yaz finds herself somewhere called the Temple of Atropos, where little balls of light in glass triangles fly about assigning help repairing the Mouri -living figures mounted on pedestals in a kind of arena room who have some kind of role maintaining ‘time’ -whatever that means. In this place, Yaz briefly runs into Williamson, the 1820s excavator, though he disappears before too long without further explanation or making any impact whatsoever on the episode at all. Instead she connects with Vinder, also here for reasons he doesn’t understand, and neither understands how to repair these Mouri, currently existing as just husks of statues. Before too long though, Swarm and Azure come along, recognizing Yaz to indicate their familiarity with the Doctor that continues to be kept a secret. And once again they prove their nastiness by turning the little triangle guardians into ash, and then just in time for the Doctor and Dan to show up have done the “repair” job by somehow converting Yaz and Vinder into Mouri. This is the heaviest piece of the episode both in its’ stakes for the future and in its confounding, often tiring denseness -a lot of exposition is crammed into the final minutes about the Mouri and how time is broken and being unleashed across the universe -which is a concept puzzling to wrap one’s head around.
Throughout this subplot, time is referred to as though it were some kind of material thing or manifestation, and if Chibnall actually intends to follow that train of thought I’m concerned. Because it would seem to be a discussion I think too deep and metaphysical for Chibnall’s capabilities, or even the capabilities of Doctor Who in general -and would require so much explanation and detail that I really don’t think the show needs more of at this time, when story and character seem to be taking such a substantial backseat. What does it mean that time is broken? How can it be let loose? How is it evil, as the triangle guardians seem to believe? These questions need answers, but the answers need to be streamlined, and cannot just provoke more questions that are beyond the scope of this series to address.
I myself may be over-analyzing it, but since at least the Moffat era, Doctor Who has had a tendency to want to complicate the time-space dynamics of the show beyond reasonable speculation. And these hints as to the nature of time itself suggest the possibility of the show going to places more incomprehensible than ever before. The next episode is called “Once Upon a Time”, so maybe this theme will exhaust itself there, but if not I think it bodes poorly for the rest of Flux.
I myself may be over-analyzing it, but since at least the Moffat era, Doctor Who has had a tendency to want to complicate the time-space dynamics of the show beyond reasonable speculation. And these hints as to the nature of time itself suggest the possibility of the show going to places more incomprehensible than ever before. The next episode is called “Once Upon a Time”, so maybe this theme will exhaust itself there, but if not I think it bodes poorly for the rest of Flux.
Outside of these premonitions, the Sontaran side of “War of the Sontarans” was relatively decent, conceptually strong, and in some places very satisfactory. I would have liked for Yaz to have been involved in it, perhaps fighting in a third chapter of world history. There are still jumbled pacing issues, and in terms of character there remains a lot to be desired -though at least Dan is on the right track now to being a proper TARDIS companion. Chibnall needs to lighten up on his plotting though. And it may be the problem of science-fiction that so often demands over-indulgence in world concepts and technobabble. But Doctor Who has in the past gotten along without, there’s no reason it can’t again.
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