The Time Warrior
(Season 11, Dr 3 with Sarah Jane, 15/12/1973-5/1/1974, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Alan Bromly)
Rank: 60
'Hello Irongron, we're The Normans - and we've just made a fantastic pact with The Rutans for a load of futuristic technology to wipe you English out. Of course, its turned all our troops green, but we've blamed all that as a side effect of the stinky cheese we have all been eating and so far nobody's thought to question it. Except, oops...Unfortunately we've just been stopped by a longshanks rascal with a mighty grin and a scarf that would have taken our full herd of cattle to knit, so we're feeling vulnerable. How about quick peace deal instead then, eh? And then we can team up and smash the Spanish! Oh wait, no, hang on, they've teamed up with The Mara to make The Armada and our ships have all been sunk by a giant pink snake. Oh well, back to the drawing board!'
Or ‘A Gallifreyan Timelord in Lord Irongron’s Court...With Sontarons’. Not many Dr Who stories can be summed up in one sentence – certainly few good ones can – but when that one line is ‘a potato headed alien invades a Medieval Castle’ you know you’re in for something special. Despite the title ‘The Tine Warrior’ is one of those stories that’s really pretty timeless – not just because it’s the sort of story that would go down well in any of the sixty years this show has been on the air but because it’s all about how times never change (it’s just that the people in them wear different clothes). Dr Who’s first trip back in time for a massive seven years (give or take being dropped into a miniscope zoo, but that was in the future via a timeloop so it doesn’t count, honest!), many fans had forgotten that the Tardis could even go back to the past. Writer Robert Holmes was himself not at all sure about this commission from old friend Terrance Dicks and thought stepping into the past was a step backwards, as it were (he’d been bored by ‘Marco Polo’ once and turned off and feared other viewers would do the same). However Dicks was adamant: the production team were getting more and more letters every week about how good it would be to go into the past again. Holmes pleaded for it to be given to someone else to no avail, especially when he leafed through a children’s book on castles and struggled to work out how to make his story interesting and historically accurate. Holmes then decided to dispense with the ‘celebrities’ he remembered from stories past and to create a new alien and throw him into the mix to see how the humans reacted, in much the same way other writers did with the Doctor.
Though not a natural researcher Holmes was a voracious reader of anything and everything and was partway through Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz’s epic ten volume ‘On War’ about the similarities in battle strategy across human history when the commission came through. The wars differed slightly in costume and needs, but were basically the same: intimidate the enemy, threaten the enemy, divide the enemy, invade the enemy, occasionally outwit the enemy, send in more troops, repeat. Holmes was struck by the fact that all these successive generations hoped that the war they’d just fought would be it, that once it was out the way peace would reign forevermore, but there was something inherent in humanity, a certain flaw that meant there was always one more battle worth fighting, one more war worth waging. This got him thinking: if it was the same for us, for all our supposed evolution, then maybe it was the same for an alien race for all their supposed technology? So he devised a story where a militaristic alien falls to Earth in the course of his fight against a bitter mortal enemy and winds up working for the Earthman who finds him, helping him in the course of his fight against a bitter and mortal enemy. As above so below, only with more futuristic weapons. The Sontarons also live up to that famous phrase by historian Thomas Hobbe that life in Medieval England was ‘nasty, brutish and short’ – a description The Doctor gives of his enemy here. Holmes being Holmes his new invention also gives him a cheeky excuse to poke fun at the series and the ‘Earthbound’ format he never agreed with by having this alien effectively become the ‘scientific advisor’ to a backward military race (much like The Doctor at UNIT!) Linx even has a sort-of sonic screwdriver, which shoots one end and works as a truth ray when pointed the other way.
The alien isn’t just a
one dimensional joke though and Linx, our first Sontaron, is still my favourite
of the tinpot warriors we get to meet, a schemer and manipulator who gets
increasingly frustrated when things don’t go his way. Kevin Lindsay, who’s so
different in his ‘other’ role out the costume as the kindly K’anpo in ‘Planet Of The Spiders’, gives one of the
single greatest performances in the series, throwing himself whole-heartedly
into the part despite a heart condition and turning his Sontaron into more than
just the simple soldier he was in the script (the director, wondering out loud
if he was pronouncing ‘Sontaron’ right was told at rehearsals ‘If anyone should
know how to pronounce it it’s me – I bloody am one!’; actually Holmes’
intention was ‘Sontar-on’ not ‘Son-Tar-on’ but you don’t argue with a warrior).
As much as they’re a clone race, more often than not played by Kevin Lindsay
anyway in future stories, Linx has an extra layer of sarcasm and wit that the
others don’t have and a temper twice the size that he is, while he’s one of the
few aliens that can go toe-to-toe debating with The Doctor (rather than being
mute or making half-dialogue like the Daleks or Cybermen). Surprisingly we’ve
had very few out-and-out fighters in the alien races we’ve seen in Dr Who: most
tend to be sophisticated, stealthy or at the very least chatty, while even the
Daleks and Cybermen come with back stories that fleshes out just why they ended
up in their metal or cybernetic casings that makes them more than mere
soldiers. The Sontarons though are as straightforward as they come: they’re
bred for war, any war, though its one they’re fighting with The Rutans that
takes precedence – Earthlings are just collateral damage in their endless fight
(though I find it amazing that we’ve still never had a full Sontaron-Rutan
match on screen in all these years). New Who has enjoyed taking their
straightforward obliviousness and single-mindedness and turning them into a
comedy monster, but here in particular it’s the Sontarons’ ruthlessness and
willingness to win at all costs that makes them so dangerous.
The Sontarons are lethal
because there’s so many of them that can be bred ‘every military parade’ they
don’t need to be careful like other races facing extinction. They’re the sort
of fanatics perfectly happy to go to any lengths and die in the name of their
cause because if they die in battle nobly then great – it’s the best way to die
- and they know there’s another million clones waiting in the wings anyway.
Even Davros or The Cyber Controller want to save their skins when things get
hairy, but not the Sontarons: they have a death wish and don’t mind who they
take with them either. It makes sense they should first meet up against the
regeneration who is in so many ways the most peace-loving of the Doctors
(despite or perhaps because of working for UNIT), the one who in every story is
determined to do everything to prevent all-out conflict (before the Brigadier
blows people up usually, though he’s barely in this story). Maybe it’s no
surprise we end up with comedy characters like Strax from here though: Holmes’
scripts were often tongue-in-cheek and often the joke is on Linz for not having
the imagination to see that he’s being outwitted. The first classic cliffhanger
(when Linx finally takes his helmet off) is one of the series’ best gags (we’ve
got so used to seeing Sontarons now that it’s somewhat lost on us, but the fact
that the alien has a helmet-shaped head after 25 minutes of fevered behind-sofa
speculation of what might be underneath it is hilarious). The most famous of
the ‘colour’ era monsters right up until The Weeping Angels, there’s a reason
The Sontarons took off in the public perception: they’re a brilliant idea and
never better than here where they sound right, act right (Lindsay gave his all,
even at the cost of his health, collapsing on set in the heavy claustrophobic
costume late on and having his remaining scenes broken up by regular rests) –
and look right, the superb costume a collaboration between costume designer
James Acheson and makeup artist Sandra Exelby, who both excel at coming up with
a creature described I Holmes’ script simply as a cross between a Human and a
toad dressed in a futuristic suit of armour.
What Linx can’t see is
that he’s repeating history and the joke’s on him, especially the gloriously
silly scene where he arrives on a fully inhabited planet and plants his weedy
flag that no one will ever see (in Holmes’ foreword to the Target novel of this
story, finished off by Terrance Dicks, his first name turns out to be ‘Jingo’,
as in ‘Jingoistic’). He’s also so sure of his military might that he hasn’t
worked out that, as a creature from a planet with higher gravity, he’s not
built for Earth conditions and thus tires himself out easily (the opposite of
their rival Rutan gas-bags). Sontarons are also vain enough to see their probic
vents at the back of the neck with pride, as assign that they always have to
face each other in battle – but don’t have the imagination to see that other
races without the same moral code (including, presumably the Rutans) don’t need
to submit to the same moral code and can take them out easily (it seems a
mighty weird evolutionary quirk, just one vulnerable part without armour where
they both feed and recharge, a cross between a throat and a hole for a charger
plug. You’d think they’d at least cover it with something - a helmet would be
in keeping. At least by the time The Doctor defeats them multiple times if not
here).
This is one of those Dr Who
stories that’s all about perspective and your place in the food chain: to his
people in medieval England Irongron is a near-God, a lord who keeps them safe
and fights all their battles, a shark in a duckpond. To Linx he’s a primitive
like all the other humans, someone easily manipulated into doing his bidding, a
minnow in a drop in a puddle insignificant compared to the real battle against
the Rutans. To a timelord, though, both are primitive for even thinking in
terms of war when you’re someone who can flit out of history and see it all,
including how little it ever gets anyone for any length of time. Everyone in
this story is short-sighted and unable to see further than the end of their
nose (all except the timelord with the mighty sized one, a joke at poor Pertwee’s expense). Notably both
sides are closer foes than they seem and each treats the Doctor in exactly the
same way for all their technology because neither gets the point of what life
is for (the Doctor spends a lot of this story being captured by both). Just to
ram the point home about what an alien he is this is the first story that
refers to The Doctor’s home planet as ‘Gallifrey’ – yes even though we’ve been
there already it’s never been referred to by name (Holmes was shocked that it
didn’t have a name and asked if he could give it one, basing it on one of his
favourite words ‘gallimaufry’ (more for the sound of it than the meaning, which
is simply a ‘mixture’ of something),though technically the first reveal of the
name came a week after the story was filmed (and five months before broadcast)
in reply to a letter asking about the Doctor’s background in TV Action Comic.
The Doctor is different to anyone here, above it all, outside the boundaries of
space and time that no one else is able to see past. After all, Linx is what
the Doctor could have been had he been less moralistic, an exiled alien sent to
Earth in a timezone he finds primitive and where all that brainpower is used to
simply make weapons to blow other primitive people up (just as Irongron is a
less moral – and hairier – Brigadier with all the military might of his local
area at his command).
One of the other things
that annoyed Holmes, apart from research, was paperwork. Traditionally writers
had to submit a scene breakdown to prove that they knew what they were doing –
useful for first time writers who maybe needed a bit of help and a reminder not
to put twenty expensive battle sequences and a metaphysical lizard wizard
together (naming no names Bob Baker and Dave Martin!) It’s kind of null and
void for this story though: Dicks has been script editor for five years and is
thinking of moving on, with his friend Bob the obvious successor. Yet paperwork
still had to be done. Holmes, knowing that any old thing would be accepted,
wrote in reply one of the single funniest bits of Dr Who prose ever committed
to paper, even though it wasn’t until the fanzines in the 1990s that the
general public were able to read it. Holmes wrote his entire scene breakdown as
a missive from ‘Field Marhsall Hol Mes’ to ‘Group Leader Terran Cedicks’.
Holmes then writes the entire story in the form of a military report, from the
Sontaron’s point of view, as he lands on ‘an inhabited backwater planet third
from their sun’ and his great plan is interfered with by a meddling timelord in
a blue box. The most notable differences between script and screen is that The
Sontaron hides in a suit of armour where he’s assumed to be one of the locals
in 13th century Wessex, that he’s discovered at night and that
there’s a big ol’ robot fight at the end rather than just one (all inevitably
cut by Dicks for reasons of budget). In the end, too, he dies by The Doctor’s
hand as he writes his last report rather than local archer Hal.
Usually Holmes is up to
some sort of disguised political commentary as mischief and some fans have
picked up on that story breakdown which also happens to be written in the sort
of American slang usually seen in Vietnam war movies with phrases like ‘gook’
‘pow’ and ‘zap’ (none of them used onscreen). The Vietnam war was in its 19th
year when this story went out in 1974 and winding down (there’s an official
ceasefire in 1975) and the general consensus around the world was ‘what was the
point of that then, eh?’ The Americans, like Linx, had wandered into a tiny
country on the grounds that it was of ‘strategic value’ and they didn’t want it
falling into the hands of their enemy (the Russian-like Rutans). They figured
with their superior firepower the war would only last a few days and not take
many troops, but the locals understood the landscape better and were sneakier,
taking advantage of their one-track military firepower the way The Doctor does
here (with traps and hidden mines rather than fake archers and smoke bombs but
it’s much the same thing). The Sontarons’ arrogance has been turned against
them because they lack the imagination to see how they might still be
outsmarted, a valuable moral on a lefty series like Dr Who (and yes, it was
woke decades before the term was a thing. Indeed has there ever been a series
more wide awake to injustice and inequality than this one?!) Though it’s
actually an addition by Dicks to keep the amount of extras needed down, even
the reference to the population all away from home and fighting The Crusades
feels like a dig at Vietnam (while most ‘classic’ Who stories are about the
cold war if you dig deep enough anyway). The general sense in this script is
that wars are just a by-product of mankind’s medieval mindset that somehow
continued to become an anachronism in the present and it takes someone learned
and noble like The Doctor to see through the stupidity of it all.
And yet change can
happen, slowly, Meet Sarah Jane Smith, the new companion in her very first
story, who hasn’t yet been cast when Holmes sat down to write this script and
the only thing he had to go on was that she was a ‘feminist’ (Holmes, either as
writer or script editor, has a hand in creating the first story for every female
companion from Liz to Leela, covering a decade). So Holmes chucks her straight
into a story that reminds her and us of how far feminism has come, with the
best of this story’s many gags coming when Sarah tries to rally the female
staff into action with the line ‘you’re all living in the Middle Ages!’ before
looking round and realising where she is. She gets a memorable debut working on
a story for her newspaper about disappearing scientists and who reckons The
Doctor is a bit dodgy, sneaking into the Tardis to see what he’s up to. Barry
Letts and Terrance Dicks created her to be a more proactive companion than Jo,
one who was an outspoken feminist who had a curiosity that matched the Doctor’s
without as much need to be protected and Sarah’s at her best in these early stories,
full of spiky put-downs covering up a vulnerability and fright (as much as fans
love the 4th Dr-Sarah pairing and as great as Elisabeth Sladen is bouncing off
Tom Baker, her character is never quite as fully dimensional again past this
season where she’s continually frightened and overwhelmed but pushes through
pluckily anyway). Lis Sladen was hired as a last minute replacement for April
Walker (who was hired when Pertwee was on holiday and he had a fit – not
because he didn’t like her but because he felt she was too buxom and ‘mature’
and gave his Doctor no room to be protective; an expensive mistakes as April
was paid in full for the season as per the terms of her contract) despite being
very inexperienced on TV. So far she’s done three episodes of ‘Z Cars’ and it
was producer Ron Craddock, a friend of Who producer Barry Letts, who
recommended her to audition, along with a – sadly wiped – episode of Gerry
Davis and Kit Pedlar’s ‘Doomwatch’ (where she plays another ‘Sarah’ in a story about
how Doomwatch boss Quist once worked on the Manhattan Project and started
having nightmare flashbacks, titled ‘Say Knifge, Fat Man’ – crazy title, crazy
episode) so by rights everyone on Who should have known who she was. Out of
work after this first flurry, Lis had just got a much needed advertisement for
Cointreau Liquor and was getting in from a nightshoot at 2am when she found a
panicked message on her answerphone inviting her to audition for Who that
morning. In her sleepy state she hadn’t realised it was for a regular part.
Reading an audition piece with regular Who baddy Stephen Thorne (who later
plays opposite her again in her leaving story ‘The
Hand Of Fear’) who turns into a lizard man, Letts and Pertwee (now very
much on the audition panel) were struck by how well she switched from fight to
courage and back again (Sladen said later she based Sarah on her eight year old
cousin, who seemed frightened of everything new but charged ahead anyway).
Accepted on the spot, reportedly Sladen rang up her agent to give her the good
news – and got an earful for saying yes without the chance to negotiate terms!
Pertwee, meanwhile, was thrilled with the casting (he and Letts reportedly gave
thumbs up signals to each other at the audition behind Sladen’s back) but hated
the name, giving a mock-complaint that
calling a character ‘Sarah Jane Smith’ with so many ‘s’ was mocking his speech
impediment!
Holmes’ reaction to this
new character is to throw her so far out of her comfort zone poor Sarah’s
ideals and belief in equality take quite a hammering but as much as the script
makes her a figure of fun for most of the story, running to keep up with what
the audience already knows, these aren’t cruel put downs either: it’s the men
in this story who don’t seem to have evolved much in a thousand odd years, with
the Brig and UNIT just a higher-tech version of the Medieval soldiers battling
over land and keeping their ‘local’ territory safe from invaders; actually
women have come a long way, as Sarah shows (Holmes also makes the point that
Sontarons only have one gender because they consider it slow and ineffectual –
but without female Sontarons their race has stalled at the point of a war in
endless stalemate). It’s a great debut for Elisabeth Sladen who manages to make
Sarah the middle ground between Liz Jo and Leela to come, bright without being
brainy, cute without being gullible and brave without being savage. It’s an
even better one for Jon Pertwee who, for pretty much the last time, looks as if
he’s having great fun, perfectly at home running round castles and out-mouthing
humans and Sontaron alike (I so wish he’d had more historicals – this is his
only one despite being the Dr for five years; by way of contrast Hartnell did
eleven in three years). Indeed nobody watching this could think that the news
would break soon after that he was leaving the show, such fun is he having here
for more or less the last time: alas the news that Roger Delgado had died in a
car crash in Turkey broke six days after the last recording session (which
finished with a ginormous tea party in the castle grounds, with the owner’s
daughter having invited lots of her classmates along) and while this story was
in post-production. Pertwee, usually such a reliable actor, doesn’t seem quite
himself for the rest of the year (it didn’t help that he was still missing Katy
Manning deeply, accidentally introducing Lis to his colleagues by her
predecessor’s name – and bursting into tears straight after).
Unusually for Holmes, who
tended to be a safe pair of hands brought in at the last minute or who worked
on Dr Who alongside other projects, he had a lot of time spare to write this
story and it shows: this may well be his cleverest script for the series and
one that he’s clearly spent a lot of time thinking about, with all the
contrasts and themes there in plain sight but never getting in the way of a
rattlingly good story. Every main player receives great and quotable lines in
this story and Holmes makes them all sound different: Sarah is ‘normal’, The
Doctor ‘clever normal’, Linx ‘clever evil’ and Irongron ‘thick evil’. The
Medieval characters all talk with some of the best Who period dialogue around
while The Doctor and Linx natter about high-falluting spacey stuff and Sarah
couldn’t be more out of the 1970s (umm, even if this story is actually set in
the 1980s, given that no two writers could agree on when the UNIT stories were
set). Director Alan Bromley even shoots this story like a costume drama, with
lengthier scenes than normal and less camera cuts (so much so that this is one
of the few Pertwee stories not only finished on time but early, something the
cast – so used to over-runs – found unnerving!) The longer scenes help give
extra emphasis to the dialogue, most o which is terrific. Perhaps best of all
is the one Holmes borrows from Pertwee himself, who used to say that he loved
getting the cast and crew to have ‘fun’ on his shows but reminded everyone that
once the cameras were rolling they had to take things deadly seriously or the
series wouldn’t work. It’s perfect for his Doctor as well as himself. Even the
Brigadier, though he’s barely in this story, gets one of his all-time best
lines when he describes the scientists as being ‘so top secret they don’t even k
now what they’re doing themselves’, while Holmes continues to poke fun at Dick’s
idea of the timelords as all-seeing gentry with the line where The Doctor calls
them ‘galactic ticket inspectors’ (very different to ‘The War Games’ but close to what Holmes will
himself write of their corrupt society in ‘The
Deadly Assassin’ in a couple of years’ time). In keeping with his request
not to do any research the characters in this story are all based on real
warriors – but none of them English and true Saxon warriors almost certainly didn’t
have names like ‘Irongron’ and ‘Bloodaxe’ (who are both Danish Vikings of the
sort Irongron would loathe on sight: Bloodaxe is very Dr Who-ish explorer Leif
Erikson’s brother in fact).
Yes there are more
complex Dr Who scripts than this one, yes the sub-plot about the missing
scientists gets a bit wasted (for a while it looks as if the script is going to
be a repeat of ‘The Time Meddler’
and be all about the Doctor preventing past man getting his hands on future
equipment, before Linx becomes more interesting as a foe), the sub-plot about
building a robot doesn’t really go anywhere (it breaks rather too easily – the
plot and the rather flimsy robot both) and Irongron’s hordes aren’t anywhere
near as interesting as he is (David Daker as Irongron himself is just the right
side of caricature and very much a 1970s English ‘lad’ , so much so you half
expect to watch ye medieval football while drinking ye medieval beer. The
production team originally wanted Bob Hoskins – perhaps to get across the
parallels with Linx by casting another brutal short-arse – but Hoskins was busy
and himself recommended Daker as a suitable replacement as they often did jobs
the other couldn’t do. Daker is so good it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the
part). Lots of actors either are or become regulars too: you can see Jeremy
Bulloch (Hal) with nearly as silly a hairdo in ‘The
Space Museum’ with brief consideration to making him a companion instead of
Harry; Alan Rowe (Evans in ‘The Moonbase’) plays Edward of Wessex and June
Brown, still a few years away from her breakout role as Dot Cotton, plays his
wife Eleanor (I can guarantee it’s the youngest most Eastenders fans have ever
seen her!): sadly all are a bit under-served by a script that only has space for
the big guys. However for the most part ‘The Time Warrior’ does a lot of things
very cleverly: it introduces a new companion, a new monster, re-introduces the
idea that the Tardis can go back in time after a super long break and it makes
a serious point about man’s evolution. However more than all of that it’s such
a lot of fun, one of Dr Who’s most laugh out loud stories with a bunch of fun
set pieces too. Far from being a step into the past, this historical feels like
a warm coat, the sort of thing Who used to do so well and naturally and somehow
still can. Holmes so got the last laugh: three years later, when he was script
editor, he commissioned Terrance Dicks to write a historical set on a
lighthouse involving The Sontaron’s bitter enemy The Rutans, despite Dicks’
protests he knew nothing about any of these things (see ‘The Horror Of Fang Rock’ for his response…)
POSITIVES + What’s more
this entire story looks gorgeous: they filmed it in a real castle with lots of
location filming – not an actual 13th century one (most of which are
now damaged beyond repair) but a mock Victorian one, Peckerton Castle. It’s the
furthest North the ‘classic’ 20th century series will ever go to
film (even Vancouver in the ‘TV Movie’
is, technically, South of Cheshire) and won’t be beaten until as late as ‘Tooth and Claw’ in 2006 (which really
is made in Scotland, unlike ‘Terror Of The
Zygons’). It’s used for both Irongron’s castle and his Wessex rivals, shot
from different angles and might just be the best use of a castle in the series
to date. It might seem strange to describe it as a ‘very mediaeval English
castle’ but if you’re not from round these parts you’d be surprised how much
they vary and how many have been rather obviously repaired in later centuries,
with the effect of looking as if someone’s poured several different limited
editions of LEGO into one project (like the ‘Merlin’ series castle, which is
actually French). The owners, an American family, really liked working with the
Who production team who said they were better behaved and tidier than any
number of feature film crews that had been there! Even more impressive in many
ways, though, are the studio sets of the inside which fit perfectly with what
the outside looks like. For a start, they look really well-lived in; so many TV
programmes, from the ever-excellent Merlin down to its darker cousin Game Of
Thrones, make the mistake of having castles look smart the way they do when
tourists walk round them rather than lived in the way they did when dozens of
people called them home. Not here: this place has seen better days already,
even in 1200-and-something. Note how it also looks like Linx’s space ship
(another highly impressive prop, round like a golf ball) which is basically
just his own portable castle too, complete with thick layers and ‘turrets’ to
keep invaders out, another of this episode’s throwbacks to how nothing really
changes in past, present or future.
‘Castle Of Fear’ (2009) is a Big Finish audio story
(#127 in their main range) and features the 5th Doctor and Nyssa in
Stockbridge, the scene of a run of popular Dr Who Magazine comic strips
featuring the Davison Doctor. The Tardis lands in 1899 where The Doctor is
asked to take part in a 700th anniversary recreation of a Medieval
play about the devil coming back to life, written by a woman with the wonderful
name ‘Maude The Withered’. It turns out that he was involved in the events that
led to the original play back in 1199. The ‘demon’ turns out to be a Rutan –
the one Commander Linx was chasing when he himself crash-landed (we never do
get a proper date for ‘The Time Warrior’ but it’s most likely a few decades
earlier than this). The Doctor and Nyssa go back in time and stop the rutan in
a story that’s very like ‘The Time Warrior’ (but lacks Holmes’ brilliant dialogue,
not helped by the fact Rutans only speak when possessing someone!) It’s still
worth a listen though, especially if you like historical stories.
How come The Doctor already knows The Sontarons in
this, their first TV story? Because he encountered them before, in Big Finish’s
‘Early Adventures’ story titled, umm, ’The Sontarons’ (2016). We already
covered this one in ‘The
Dalek’s Masterplan’, slotted as it is somewhere around
episode seven or eight of that story with the 1st Doctor travelling
with Steven and Sara Kingdom, but it’s worth mentioning again. Not least
because for once The Doctor’s companions know more than he does: Steven warns
The Doctor of how ruthless they are, while Sara, from her days with the Space
security Service, knows how to kill them via the probic vent. It’s a tad
unsettling actually to hear the 1st Doctor so out of his depth with an alien
that simply doesn’t do what 1st Doctor aliens do (i.e. do
bloodthirsty things rather than natter and threaten), but it’s good to hear The
Sontarons at their brutal best again after so many TV stories poking fun at
them and making them the butt of all the jokes; Steven, especially, spends
quite a lot of this story terrified out of his wits.
Previous ‘The
Green Death’ next ‘The Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’
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