War Of The Sontarons: Ranking - 216

  War Of The Sontarons

(Series 13, Dr 13 with Yaz and Dan, 7/11/2021, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: James Magnus Stone)

'I shall fight for the glorious Sontaron empire and will not stop until we have become victorious!...Wait I've fallen off my horse again. I really need something smaller, like that shire pony over there. That's better....Whoops, no even this one's too big. Is there a Doctor in the horse? Oh typical, never here when you need him/her...' 

Ranking: 216

 

I always hoped that one day DW would do a story on the Crimean War, but I confess I never quite imagined it looking like this. Parallel worlds! Sontarons! On horseback!!! I always wondered what the end of the universe would look like if Dr Who ever fully showed it. Apparently it looks like an alien dressed in blue painting Yaz in black lines while some floating alien lights turn on and off. I also longed to see an episode set in or around my adopted home of Liverpool, but never quite imagined that one looking quite like this either: Scouse comedian John Bishop and his parents running round Liverpool docks and clouting potato-headed aliens on the back of the neck with a wok. I certainly didn’t imagine the three strands ever coming together, but then that’s the ‘Flux’ series for you: why give you one sensible vaguely comprehensible thing when eighteen stuffed in the same episode will surely do? We’re in episode two of ‘Flux’ and time is unravelling, which means that Chris Chibnall can get away with sticking random unconnected things together without contradicting history. Which is new: we’ve had monsters meddling with history before (and it makes sense having the Sontarons here as they sort of invented the formula with ‘The Time Warrior’). It means that, like the Sontarons, he gets to have his chocolate cake and eat it: we get all the flavour and fascination of a trip back to the past but we don’t need to care about the details. However the strength and weakness of the ‘Flux’ story arc are both the same: that anything can happen. On the plus side it means you genuinely never know what’s right around the corner and the series can combine past and future in ways that the series would usually struggle to show without good reason. On the minus side it means that we don’t get a story as such, just incidents as The Doctor and co pass through different time-streams on their way to the finale. The Crimea is just another destination and one that’s going to unravel in time anyway so it’s hard to care too much about this timezone or the people in it and you don’t get a fully rounded story here. In other words this is a story full of surprises, which is fun, but surprises that are never going to be explained, which isn’t.

Still, at least there is a story this week. ‘Flux’ was badly hit by covid restrictions which meant a quick re-think at the last minute, with what might have been panned as a ten or possibly a thirteen part series cut down to six more or less at the last minute. Most of Flux (episodes 1,3,5 and 6. Especially 3) clearly suffer for that, juggling multiple plot strands that seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. However ‘War Of The Sontarons’ feels as if it was left alone more than most and was always intended to be like this, with a main plot in the Crimea where The Doctor gets all the action while Dan gets the comedy relief scenes in ‘our’ time and Yaz gets all the exposition. There is, you see, a beginning middle and an end an attempt to tell an actual story before things get unravelled, with ‘Sontarons’ benefitting from lasting ten minutes longer than the episodes around it (although there are still easily ten minutes that could have been taken away without it affecting the story at all). However it’s all split between different timezones and characters having them independently. Given the Liverpool theme: there are some long and winding roads under the Mersey tunnels. The Doctor is learning that to Sontarons Happiness Is A Warm Gun. Dan is wishing it was Yesterday. And Yaz is Nowhere, Man.   
The most substantial of these is The Doctor helping out the charge of the light brigade against the charge of the heavy brigade, as the Russians seem to have been replaced by the Rutan-avenging Sontarons. It seems a bit weird that with all of time and space to play with, we end up in what was really a minor war that didn’t change much (albeit one that inspired  a lot of poems and stories) but then this isn’t the Crimean War as it would be in the history books anyway. For the Russians have been replaced by potato-headed monsters from outer space!

 While some fans were surprised to see the Sontarons here rather than a bigger named monster like The Daleks or The Cybermen it makes sense: most Dr Who monsters would only want to be part of an invasion if they could control it but The Sontarons are opportunists, ready to jump on any bandwagon if it’s heading towards the oblivion of the Rutans. The most one-track minded military obsessed of Who monsters, the ‘joke’ is that they can’t see the bigger picture, that if all of time and space is being undone and all life is being destroyed then their war with the Rutans (and Earth. In the middle as usual) doesn’t matter one little bit. Having them in the middle of what is generally held to be one of the most pointless of all Human wars makes sense. Chibnall also restores The Sontarons’ dignity  to their former glory as the unstoppable war-like beings of the classic series, who won’tlet anything slow them down, even if they’re still on occasion the comedy relief villains of the new series (with Commander Sliik only admitting, reluctantly, to The Doctor that a cannonball taken full force in the back ‘did hurt. A bit’). They also serve as a better contrast to Swarm and Azure, the overall villains of the piece who are manipulating time and getting back at The Doctor for personal revenge (they’re also joined by a third, Passenger, who’s, well, a Passenger and barely says anything all episode as well as wearing a silly mask literally left over from the Star Wars franchise). These are two very different flavours of baddies: the ones who just want to win and will fight to death and one who’ll use every last trick in the book to get what they want. The Sontarons are still the best, even if they’re slightly undermined by two new revelations that make for a surprisingly easy conclusion: they wear their helmets not because they’re Dr Who budget conscious but because they can’t handle Earth’s atmosphere which leaves them tired. There are seven and a half minutes every twenty seven hours (how long a day lasts on Sontar) when they need to go back to their spaceship to ‘refuel’ from the probic vent on the back of their neck. All of them. At the same time. That’s a bit of a strategic blunder isn’t it? Why can’t they take it turns and stand on guard? And why use all those hoses at once for feeding when they could save money for their glorious warfare (those weapons don’t come cheap) and only use a few. If nothing else, though, at least explains a bit more about why  they got the very un-Sontaron idea of gassing humans in electric cars (in ‘The Sontaron Stratagem/The Poison Sky’ which didn’t seem very them at all. However seeing them on horseback, mirroring their ‘knights in armour’ look and ‘Planet Of The Apes’ simultaneously, is a move so obvious and so brilliant it’s a wonder they hadn’t tried it before. Dan Starkey continues to be his usual brilliant self (as Svild) and his repartee Jonathan Watson (as Skaak) gives him one of his best foils to bounce off. Betwene them they redeem at least a little of the might of the glorious Sontaron army while remaining funny. Sontar-ha and indeed Sontar-hahahaha! Im really not keen on the use of ‘Sontar-ho’ when something goes wrong though. I’m glad that didn’t stick for future appearances…

Certainly the Sontarons come out of things a bit better than the Humans do. Commander Logan is entirely fictional but he is clearly based heavily on Brogan, an officer who made several daft moves that put his me in danger (‘rushing’ opponents rather than strategic thinking – it might have made more sense to have the English on the side of the Sontarons and the more ‘scheming’ Rutans joining with the Russians – we still haven’t seen them in the 21^st century yet). Logan ends up destroying the Sontaron battle troops anyway even though they’re in ‘strategic withdrawal’ (a nicer way of saying ‘running away’), in a moment designed to look like the end of ‘The Silurians’ or it’s remake ‘The Christmas Invasion’, showing how sneaky Humans can be when scared. However it doesn’t quite pay off as an emotional ending: we don’t learn much about the people here so we’re not caught up in this the same way. And besides, that’s the downside with Flux: it’s all academic in a dying universe anyway.  The only person we really get to see is Mary Seacole and she’s, well, not much like the one from her books (who would have shown a lot more curiosity and asked a lot more questions, even if she’d no doubt have treated Sontaron patients too). She is, these days, quite a controversial figure (removed from the GCSE syllabus in 2012) which is a shame given she dedicated her life to doing right, though still not exactly a household name (and it seems very out of character than Dan, of all people, should recognise her and her name on sight. Although the line ‘she’s a real person? From history?’ is a truly terrible way of passing on a plot point. I hope that was just a side effect of the covid trims and wasn’t as clumsily as this in the original). She was the first woman of colour to have a book published in England (as early as 1851) and provided great relief to the wounded on either side, providing an easier way to get meals and medical supplies. There was a campaign to make her an example of everything black culture did for the British Empire and there was a huge statue dedicated to her outside a London hospital. But here’s the thing: she wasn’t actually a nurse. She didn’t actually treat patients. No doubt she’d have trained and been a great nurse if she’d been able to, but she wasn’t: black women were barred from learning at hospitals. There’s a school of thought amongst historians that her claims in her books don’t necessarily match what happened in the wars: that she provided an important service but was, essentially, providing a glorified mobile canteen which gave her a lot of profits. So when they took down the statue of an actual nurse who had treated patients in the Crimea to make way for her (Florence Nightingale) it caused quite a flurry of speculation and culture fighting. Chibnall ties his sails to the mast, making Seacole into the only ‘adult’ in the room, who can see the bigger picture and simply treats patients (in a way she wouldn’t have been allowed had this been a ‘normal’ war). But she’s oddly played by Sue Powell, halfway between boringly likeable and interestingly but annoyingly unlikeable and besides, that’s just a waste of a story that could have been. Seacole and Nightingale didn’t know each other well but there’s nothing to say they didn’t get on. So why not do the ‘real’ Dr who thing and have them be friends, working together for the greater good in a script that acknowledges how brilliant both are? Personally I’d go the whole way and throw in a scene where the Doctor tells them about a statue in a more tolerant 22^nd century where they have their arms round each other. For Florence, the Lady with the Lamp, is conspicuous by her absence the whole story, treating Sontaron ladies with a limp. As it is Seacole never really comes alive either: she’s there as someone sensible to do The Doctors bidding and ask questions. Because yet again The Doctor is standing around not doing much except talking while everyone else has all the fun (mind you, Mary isn’t exactly rushing around for someone in the middle of a super busy war with lots of casualties either).

Because The Doctor is alone, covid bubbles meaning that Dan and Yaz are enjoying different stories, disappearing in a puff of convenience. Dan gets the more interesting plot, running around Liverpool landmarks and dodging Sontaron spaceships with nothing more than mum and dad and a wok. Now Chibnall is a local lad who grew up in Formby, not many miles away, and this sequence feels like one of those childhood dreams come true. There surely can’t be any of you reading this book who hasn’t, like me, spent time wondering what an alien invasion of the place you grew up in might look like. Only Chibs has now got the time and budget to do it. And it’s great seeing Dr Who ‘invade’ a place you know. The CGI effects of the spaceships are great (while everyone else suffered through covid ost-production had more time than usual and less episodes to work on without the restrictions of the actors and production crew, so they had time to get it right). Dan’s mum and dad are a great comedy duo too: they still treat Dan like a child even (just as Kornavista treated him as the ‘pet’) and don’t bow down to his superior knowledge of outer space. Indeed, they don’t bat an eyelid and don’t seem surprised at all (John Bishop was greatly tickled by the fact that actors Sue Jenkins and Paul Broughton were less than a decade older than him and must have had Dan ‘very young’!) They do, however, have a wok. We haven’t met Dan much and what we’ve seen of him so far just makes him out like a Scouse version of Graham, but he really comes into his own in this story and John Bishop adds a nice lot of layers, making Dan secretly scared but trying not to show it and covering up with deadpan humour (I can vouch that a lot of Scousers are like that, making jokes to avoid crying). I wish these scenes had gone on a bit longer actually as there’s a lot more mileage in them but, before too long, Dab’s made his way to a spaceship and talked to the Doctor.
This scene is perhaps the shining one in ‘war’. Much as Flux sums up the messy confusing jumble of contradictory evidence, slight panic and timelessness of covid lockdowns so this scene sums up the practical day-to-day events. Dan and The Doctor effectively Skype/Zoom each other, like a lot of the rest of us were doing for people outside our covid bubbles. Just because the future of the universe is at stake doesn’t stop the pair of them having the problems we were all having: ‘No you go first’ they both say at the same time before pausing and launching into their long spiel. Dan mishearing something as important as ‘the ten poral portal’ is also something that tended to happen a lot too, to much hilarity (slash borderline hysteria depending what the day’s covid figures were). Then The Sontarons walk in at just the wrong time, during the middle of this ‘meeting’, in much the way your mum/dad/grandparents/children/pets did. ‘Flux’ should have done more of this sort of thing: it’s those moments of shared community, the ‘we’re-all-in-it-together-in-difficult-circumstances’ where Flux shines best.    

While the others get the ‘outer war’ sub-plot Yaz alas, gets dumped with the ‘inner peace’ sub-plot, the short straw where nothing happens. She’s been dumped on a planet called Time and ‘The Temple Of Atropos’ that, ironically enough, we never get time enough to explore. She bumps into Vinder, who will hang around for the rest of the series but never really gets anything much to do. He’s presented to us as if we should know him – and actor Jacob Andersen was in everything at the time (including ‘Game Of Thrones’, the big hit of a few years earlier, which is like the Sontaron bits of this episode if they were in-bred Royals rather than clones and had dragons instead of spaceships). However I don’t think it’s just that; Vinder is presented to as a sexy man about time, a lovable rogue who comes good in the end, even if Jacob sensibly plays him a  bit more down-to-earth and natural than the character on the page. On paper though he feels like either Sabalom Glitz or his 21^st century re-write Captain Jack Harkness. We know that John Barrowman’s character was all set to come back to the series (even promising as such at the end of ‘Fugitive Of The Judoon’) before certain murmurs about what sexual antics he’d got up to backstage meant it was probably a good idea for Dr Who to keep its distance (this is in the wake of the more serious allegations about Noel ‘Mickey’ Clarke, though thankfully away from the Dr Who set). Was Vinder, then, meant to be Jack? Alas taking away the innuendos and making him a ‘romantic’ lead doesn’t do Vinder any favours: he never quite gets a personality the whole way through the series even if we’ll come back to his storyline lots. Here he’s paired with yaz who doesn’t have much of a character either as the pair wonder round looking at some fancy lights (no seriously: they’re just like the Megara from ‘The Stones Of Blood’ though the two are never connected on screen. If the voice  sounds familiar it’s Nigel Lambert who was in another 4^th Doctor story ‘The Leisure Hive’). We learn something about the locals on the planet who are dying out and are called the Mauris, though they don’t look like New Zealand natives to me (they don’t even do the hakka). Then poor yaz bumps into swarm and Azure again, who spend several minutes taunting and teasing about all the awful things they’re going to do – and yet the only thing we actually see them do is mock Yaz (‘What does The Doctor see in you? What does she in any of you?’) and paint some lines on her face. That’s it, that’s the grand total of their villainy. Yaz is there simply as a trap to get hold of The Doctor. But if these baddies have the power to zap Yaz from Crimea then why not just get hold of The Doctor directly? What is the point?

The result, then, is a muddle. A better more enjoyable muddle than four of the other five episodes this year admittedly, with some very good individual pieces like The Sontarons on horseback fighting a mass CGI army and coming off worst or Dan running round with a wok. But it’s still a muddle. These different pieces all serve different functions and don’t mirror each other at all and there seems no rhyme or reason why these characters end up where they do except ‘it’s the Flux, innit?’ which isn’t really an answer at all (not least because this episode entirely dodges the rather good cliffhanger of last week when Flux has zapped our heroes, which has meant certain death for everyone else – but apparently not them. If Swarm and Azure have the powers to control it, which isn’t what they actually come out and say, then why even keep Yaz and Dan alive? They only want The Doctor and killing her playmates would upset her more than any other thing they could do). The randomness of Flux only mitigates the problems with Chibnall too, that he has some truly brilliant ideas but lacks having someone to bounce off to make the most of them. For instance, we never properly stop to linger on what it means for all of time to unravel. Had this story been a Russell T Davies arc it would be full of people sobbing for the loved ones who have been wiped from history and the agony of an eternity of not existing getting nearer. If this was Moffat we’d have had some complicated timey-wimey reason why Flux is doing what it does and an equally complicated way The Doctor can evade death at the last minute (If you want to go back further David Whittaker would have looked in great detail at the impact of The Sontarons changing established history and the ripples till now, Terrance Dicks would have streamlined the Flux idea into a bitesize story, Eric Saward would have had a hundred battle sequences rather than having it happen largely off-camera, Andrew Cartmel would have used the idea to take down the government and Dennis Spooner would have had the general fall off his horse). Chibnall just tells a story and tells it the ‘long’ multi-setting way round because that’s how he thinks that’s how you give a script depth, but it just makes it wider and longer, not deeper. For instance I always wanted to see the Crimean war in a Dr Who and still don’t feel as if I’ve seen it properly (despite the title there’s relatively little war, just lots of planning). I always wanted a story set in Liverpool but hoped to see more of it than one street and a few cars. I always wanted a story where the whole universe was at stake but hoped that the characters would actually acknowledge it rather than simply getting on with stuff.

Just because you never imagined something turning out quite the way you see it, though, doesn’t make it bad. This is definitely one of the more enjoyable 13th Dr episodes. Yaz and Dan get more to do and feel like proper characters at last rather than feeds for the Doctor’s psychobabble. The dialogue is often surprisingly biting and clever (‘Who found out?’ asks a shocked Dan about how to knock out a Sontaron. ‘Drunken bloke in Birkenhead with a mallet’ his dad replies ‘Figures’ he replies, while The Sontarons go from bloodcurdlingly nasty to silly within a line (‘Your blood shall soak our uniforms! Your bodies shall soften our steps!...I always wanted to ride a horse’). Yaz feels more like a real life character rather than just a Dr worshipper too as she moans about needing a universal GPS so she can work out where she is as ‘this keeps happening’, while having the acronym ‘WWTDD’, ‘What Would The Doctor Do?’ on her palm). The plot is decidedly weird but functional, with less of Flux’s annoying habit of cutting away just as things are getting interesting and at least it feels as if the plot strands are tied together with more than string and sticking tape. Youy’re certainly never bored when watching it as there’s quite often something happening, which is more than a lot of 13^th Doctor stories it has to be said. There are some nice little touches that didn’t really need to be there but really ‘make’ the episode, such as seeing inside the Doctor’s mind (it’s black and white! Were those early episodes from her point of view?), the Tardis without doors so there isn’t an easy escape and Dan and Kornavista bickering over a wok while the universe burns (exactly the sort of banal mundane way it would end). There’s even some impressive continuity, with the Sontaron flag copied from the diamond logo seen in ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ (itself a sort of cheeky variation on the Pertwee era Who logo!) – although that said the Humans are walking round with pistols that seem a good deal too old for use in the Crimean War (a single flintlock pistol in an era of double-barrelled ones. Budget cuts? Or did The Sontarons have a raid and nicked all the best guns for themselves?) They could have done more with the gags too, such as having people fighting the battle of Balaclavas in Balaclavas (which the Sontaron helmets do slightly resemble, after all). Certainly this episode is made with more care than many and this episode and ‘Village Of The Angels’ are by far the best two in ‘Flux’, telling an actual story rather than incidents and feel as if we’re leading somewhere (though we never quite do before the end), feeling more like the source material ‘The War Games’ (that also starts off a historical before pulling away to show a bigger picture and as if it was building up to something) rather than a scatterbrained mess where the series ends up going sideways. I wouldn’t say this story restored my flagging faith in a dying series single-handedly but along with ‘Village Of The Angels’ it gave me hope again – and hope, as Dr Who fans say, is worth a cartload of certainties. Especially when a Sontaron is riding the horse. A lot of the Chibnall era is nowhere near the rest but this one is maybe only half a league behind the best of it. It’s the Flux overall that’s the problem and gets in the way of what would have been a better standalone story. In other words Chibnall wins this battle, but he loses the war.      

POSITIVES + The idea that the Merseyside tunnels are (until the timelines are restored a few episodes later at least) gateways to different timezones, each with their different doors, is such a strong Dr Who concept. It’s a clever way of a local lad using local knowledge to tell a story and move us outside the usual London or (nowadays) Welsh settings. There are, you see, more paranormal sightings around Merseyside than almost anywhere else, including a number of real life time slip stories (including a street where lots of people have ‘travelled’ to an alternate Liverpool where Hitler won WWII and everyone is speaking German and one where a Liverpool graveyard is a time portal to a fairy universe. Sadly neither have worked for me. Author Tom Slemen is up to volume thirty-six of ‘Haunted Liverpool’, a series featuring ghost and UFO tales sent in by locals, for a reason!)

NEGATIVES - It’s a problem in all of Flux but particularly here in an otherwise strong episode: the story slows to a crawl whenever The Swarm and Azure are on screen. They were delivered to us at the end of the last one as the big bad, people we needed to know more about but they don’t even bother to turn up until fifty minutes into this one. Even when they do there’s no reason to: they’re the blandest thing here by a country mile so it feels wrong that they’re supposedly the masterminds in charge of everything and more powerful than other Dr Who races we know are pretty strong. Sadly the big finale is full of moments like the weakest elements of this episode. The masks look weirdly cheap too, even the ones that aren’t Star wars leftovers.

BEST QUOTE: Svild: ‘May death rain down on you both!’ Dr: ‘Well, it's nice to meet you, too’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS:  ‘The Charge Of the Night Brigade’ (2020) is a ‘12^th Doctor Chronicles’ adventure from Big Finish also set in the Crimean war and released to coincide with this Sontarons. It once again stars Mary Seacole as the tough but fair nurse as she bumps into The Doctor one night, on the trail of a ‘space rat’ from another planet. Mary’s sceptical, far more so than on TV (the 12^th Doctor squabbles with Mary even more than the 13^th did!) but The Doctor asks her to get a sample tested to prove its alien and when it is the test-tube it’s in explodes. The Doctor allows himself to be bitten so he can talk to the animal and finds out that it’s the atomised remnants of a race destroyed in the time wars, the ‘Grathnol Zavak’. There’s a very weird sequence where the rats stand on each other and turn into a ‘man’ (or at least the shape of one) to have one last showdown with The Doctor, but he’s guessed that the Zavak find Earth sunlight poisonous and has timed it so that they grow into human form just in time to did. This is definitely one of those audio adventures you need to keep the light on for, a gruesome story unlike anything else in this book and a long way from the comedy of the TV episode, simultaneously brutally real and weirdly surreal. There are, alas, no Sontarons on horseback.