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| A Sontaran |
|
 Name: Sontarans
Format:
Television show and Book.
Time of Origin: Planet unknown, but
they have apparently been at war since before Man evolved and exist
into the future
Appearances: "The
Time Warrior", "The
Sontaran Experiment", "The
Invasion of Time", "Lords
of the Storm", "Warmonger", "The
Two Doctors", "Shakedown", "The
Eight Doctors","The
Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky", "The
Sontaran Games", "The Last Sontaran", "The
Taking of Chelsea 426", "The Pandorica Opens/The
Big Bang", "Heroes
of Sontar", "A Good Man Goes to
War" and
"The
Five Companions"
Doctors: Second
Doctor,
Third
Doctor,
Fourth
Doctor,
Fifth
Doctor,
Sixth
Doctor, Seventh
Doctor, Eighth
Doctor, Tenth
Doctor and Eleventh Doctor.
Companions: Jamie, Sarah
Jane Smith,
Harry
Sullivan, Leela, K9, Nyssa, Tegan
Jovanka, Turlough,
Peri, Bernice
Summerfield, Roslyn
Forrester, Chris Cwej, Martha Jones, Donna Noble, Amy Pond and Rory Williams.
History: After the obvious examples of the Daleks and the Cybermen, the Sontarans may be The Doctor’s most recurring
alien adversary. A race of warriors, the Sontarans are apparently
all clones, natural reproduction having seemingly ended long ago.
Their exact origins have never been revealed, but some sources claim
that they are all descended from the genetic stock of General Sontar
(or Sontaris), who used newly developed bioengineering techniques
to clone millions of duplicates of himself and annihilated the non-clone
population, renamed the race after himself and turned the Sontarans
into an expansionist and warlike society set on universal conquest.
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| The Time Warrior |
|
Originating
from a high-gravity world in the southern spiral arm of the galaxy,
the Sontarans are significantly stronger than humans, recharging
through a ‘probic vent’ on the back of their necks rather
than by eating (Although the vent is also their only weakness; the
Fifth and Tenth Doctors - as well as the Tenth Doctor’s companion
Donna Noble - have escaped Sontarans by hitting them on the vent with a
cricket ball, a tennis ball, and a hammer respectively, thus leaving
the Sontaran temporarily disorientated and allowing them to flee,
and one Sontaran was killed simply by firing an arrow into the vent).
The Sontarans have long been at war with a race of shape-shifting
jellyfish-like aliens known as the Rutans - the war having allegedly
being waged since before Man walked upright, and with both sides
now ignorant of what started it - and thus regard every action in
their lives as being dictated from a military viewpoint. Thorough
in their military planning, the Sontarans take care to study every
race that they may go up against before entering into conflict with
them, and respect other species only so long as they have proven
themselves in a military campaign or combat.
The Doctor initially confronted the Sontarans
in his third incarnation while investigating some missing scientists
at a conference (Where he also first met his long-term companion Sarah
Jane Smith). Having crash-landed on Earth in the twelth century, a Sontaran
warrior known as Linx, determined to escape and return to the war against
the Rutans, formed an alliance with a local warlord known as Irongron,
providing Irongron with advanced weapons (Admittedly only musket rifles,
but they were impressive by the standards of the time) in exchange for
somewhere to repair his ship. Using an osmic projector, Linx managed
to draw back scientists from the twentieth century and mesmerise them
to repair the ship for him, but The Doctor and Sarah managed to follow
the scientists (Although Sarah initially thought The Doctor was the man
responsible). Aided by Sir Edward of Wessex, The Doctor repelled one
of Irongron’s attacks, subsequently drugging Irongron’s food
to knock his men out while he sent the scientists back to the present.
Linx attempted to escape in his ship, but was killed by an arrow to the
probic vent shortly before his ship exploded, presumably due to the incomplete
repairs it had undergone.
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| The Sontaran Experiment |
|
The
Doctor’s next encounter with the Sontarans took place in his
fourth incarnation during a visit to an Earth almost ten thousand
years into the future after the planet had been nearly destroyed
by solar flares. At this point, Earth had become strategically important
to the Sontarans in the conflict with the Rutans, and Field Major
Styre had thus been dispatched to the planet to perform tests on
the human population to determine any significant weaknesses they
might have (Tests including seeing how long humans could survive
without water or how long they could survive submerged in water).
After capturing some members of a human expedition team sent to investigate
Earth from one of the colonies that had established themselves since
the original disaster, Styre was confronted by The Doctor, who claimed
that he was the true ‘warrior class’ human and that Styre
had only been studying their ‘slaves’. Goaded into combat,
Styre managed to overcome The Doctor using his sheer strength, but
The Doctor’s main goal had succeeded; Styre was so exhausted
by the confrontation that he was forced to return to his ship to ‘recharge’,
unaware that Harry
Sullivan had removed the terulion diode bypass
transformer from his ship. As a result, the energy fed on Styre rather
than the other way around, causing Styre to die and his ship to explode.
Contacting the Sontaran Marshal, The Doctor claimed that the Sontaran’s
invasion plans were now in human hands, informing the Sontarans that
they could no longer invade and forcing them to call off their attack.
In a later adventure, the Sontarans launched their most
ambitious scheme to date, as they attempted to conquer Gallifrey
itself ("The
Invasion of Time"). To this end, they used a race called
the Vardans to
provide a ‘cover’ for their invasion, the Vardans sending
out a message that they were seeking to make an alliance with a renegade
Time Lord to penetrate the transduction barriers around Gallifrey.
To stop one of the other rogue Time Lords out there from doing it
instead, The Doctor pretended to betray his planet, opening a hole
in the barriers to allow the Vardans through and subsequently using
the teleportation to locate the Vardan homeworld and trap it in a
time loop. Taking advantage of the brief hole in the barriers, the
Sontarans arrived on Gallifrey, but The Doctor managed to end the
threat by trapping the Sontaran leader in the TARDIS and
killing him with a forbidden Time Lord weapon; the De-Mat Gun, which
erased the target from Time itself.
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Heroes of Sontar
(Alan Barnes) |
|
While attempting to find a peaceful location to visit,
the Fifth Doctor took his companions, Tegan, Turlough and Nyssa to
the planet Samar ("Heroes
of Sontar"), only to discover
that it was currently on the outskirts of the ever-expanding Sontaran
empire, the Rutans having infected the planet with a biological weapon
- the resulting virus infecting Nyssa, although her companions were
able to find a cure -, as well as unleashing a mysterious being known
as the ‘Witch Guard’ on any Sontarans visiting the planet.
Attempting to eliminate the Witch Guard, the Sontarans sent a squad
of seven Sontarans, each one a deliberately-weakened clone of a great
Sontaran hero, only for the Witch Guard to absorb the weak Sontarans
and the Sontaran crew that had sent them to Samar. Fortunately, Fleet
Marshall Stabb took his suicide pills before the Witch Guard could
absorb him, his death while part of the resulting gestalt destabilising
the Witch Guard and causing it to explode.
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Lords of the Storm
(David A. McIntee) |
|
During a visit to the human colony world of Raghi - located
in an area of space that had once been populated by The Tzun - the
Fifth
Doctor and Turlough ("Lords
of the Storm") discovered
a strange new disease that was sweeping the colony as well as several
missing scientists. Discovering that the Sontarans had taken control
of Raghi’s sister colony Agni and were kidnapping the scientists,
The Doctor soon discovered that Raghi’s entire population were
being used as bait for a Rutan trap. The strange disease The Doctor
was investigating caused all humans infected with it to register
as Sontarans on the Rutan scanners, driving the Rutans to avoid that
area of space, and thus giving the Sontarans unrestricted access
to Tzun technology. Contacting the Rutans, The Doctor managed to
make a deal with them, exchanging the truth about the colony - while
avoiding to mention the Tzun technology - for their promise not to
harm the humans, while one of his allies sacrificed themselves to
stop an unstable ship from destroying the colony. Returning to the
TARDIS, The Doctor and Turlough escaped, unaware that a Sontaran
ship had escaped after downloading some very interesting information
from the Rutan data core…
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Warmonger
(Terrance Dicks) |
|
The Doctor’s subsequent meeting with Sontarans
remains unique among his battles with them; in this instance, he
actually worked with them rather than against them. Arriving at a
time period in Gallifrey’s own past, The Doctor found himself
pitted against a past version of his old enemy Morbius, who was attempting
to conquer the galaxy ("Warmonger"). Forced to recruit
his own army to oppose Morbius, The Doctor gathered together such
diverse races as the Draconians, Ice Warriors, Cybermen, Ogrons and
Sontarans into an Alliance that would confront the former Time Lord
President, although the Sontarans mainly joined with the intention
of learning the strategies of the others in the event of future conflicts.
During the war, The Doctor earned a great deal of respect from the
Sontaran commander, Battle-Major Streg; Streg even gave his own life
in the final battle to save The Doctor from being fired upon, his
last words being to thank The Doctor for allowing him the honour
of a place in a legendary battle and a glorious death. On The Doctor’s
insistence, rather than being thrown into the burial pit with the
other bodies, the Sontarans buried Streg with full military honours,
in a ceremony attended by the entire Alliance, before The Doctor
departed from his role as military leader.
The Doctor’s next encounter with Sontarans, while
not one of the most challenging, was certainly one of the most personal,
particularly since it involved two different incarnations of him;
the Second
Doctor and the Sixth
Doctor ("The
Two Doctors").
During his period of working for the Celestial Intervention Agency
("World
Game"), the Second Doctor was sent to investigate
a space station that was conducting experiments in time travel, led
by his old friend Dastaari. However, Dastaari’s assistant,
Chessene, was an artificially augmented Androgum - a race who exist
solely for the pleasure of eating new things - and her resolve to
put herself among the gods had driven her to form an alliance with
the Sontarans to give them time travel. They attempted to duplicate
the Second Doctor’s Rassilon Inprimature - the symbiotic nuclei
that gave Time Lords a link to their TARDISes - so that non-Time
Lords could safely use the time travel capsules - The Doctor’s
companions were always protected by the presence of The Doctor in
the TARDIS - but the Sixth Doctor managed to rescue his past self
and sabotage the time-travel capsule, causing the Sontaran who used
it to explode.
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The Eight Doctors
(Terrance Dicks) |
|
Two incarnations after the confrontation on Raghi, the
Seventh
Doctor, now accompanied by Bernice
Summerfield, Chris Cwej and Roslyn
Forrester, discovered
precisely what information the Sontarans had acquired from the Rutan
data core; the existence of a natural wormhole between the Rutan
homeworld and the planet Sentarion, which the Rutan had intended
to use to allow their Queen to escape if the homeworld was ever directly
attacked. Unwilling to allow the Sontaran/Rutan war to end - as it
would leave the Sontarans free to turn their attention to the rest
of the universe - The Doctor managed to re-route the wormhole just
as a Sontaran ship entered, turning it into an infinite loop that
could never be escaped, the remaining Sontaran forces subsequently
being overpowered by the Sentarii (Who had long worshipped the Rutans
as gods).
During a brief period where he had contracted amnesia
and was visiting his past selves to regain his memories ("The
Eight Doctors"), the Eighth
Doctor’s visit to the Fifth was complicated by the actions
of a renegade Time Lord called Ryoth who had acquired the Timescoop;
a piece of technology that plucked people out of one location in
time and space and sent them to another. Attempting to kill The Doctors,
he initially sent a Raston
Warrior Robot to The Doctors’ current location, but when
The Doctors overloaded it by using their identical brainwaves to
confuse it - it seemed to be sensing the same target in two different
places - he sent a squad of Sontarans to confront them. Fortunately,
the Eighth Doctor managed to convince Commander Vrag that the Raston
Robot was a vital part of the TARDIS operating system. Vrag thus
reactivated it, and the robot slaughtered its way through the Sontarans
until Vrag was able to stop it momentarily by tearing its head off.
The Doctors then rigged up a device to generate temporal feedback,
and when the infuriated Ryoth attempted to send a Drashig after them,
it materialized instead in the Timescoop chamber, where it ate both
Ryoth and the Timescoop machinery before being caught and destroyed
by Chancellory guards.
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| Bred For War -
The Sontaran Collection |
|
Initially, it was believed that the Sontarans would not
be returning in the new series, although their influence was still
witnessed; their appearance went on to inspire the look of the helmeted
Judoon, a rhinoceros-like race who wore domed helmets and black armour
that resembled the Sontarans. The Sontarans themselves returned in
the two-part adventure "The
Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky",
where they attempted to invade Earth by making contact with teenage
genius Luke Rattigan, providing him with the means to create global
navigation systems for every car on the planet - the navigation systems
being equipped with gas bombs, - while ‘promising’ him
that they would take him and a select group to another planet to
begin again. They even managed to infiltrate UNIT by brainwashing
soldiers, going so far as to create a clone of the Tenth Doctor’s
past companion Martha Jones, although the clone required
the original Martha to be kept alive to allow it to access her memories
and thus
present a convincing front to the UNIT senior staff. Fortunately,
The Doctor easily identified Martha as a clone, leaving her alone
so that he could pass on disinformation to the Sontarans while working
out their plan. Having analysed the gas, he realised that it was
the same gas used on Sontaran clone worlds; the Sontarans intended
to turn Earth into another clone planet, thus allowing them to grow
multiple clones and thus gain even more forces in the Rutan war.
Convincing Rattigan that the Sontarans had no intention of keeping
their word - and with his fellows having abandoned his insane plan,
- The Doctor used an atmospheric generator Luke had created to destroy
the gas already in the atmosphere. Knowing that the Sontarans would
now simply destroy Earth, The Doctor reprogrammed the atmospheric
generator to ignite the atmosphere in the Sontaran ship, subsequently
teleporting up to the ship to give the Sontarans one last chance
to depart, regardless of the fact that igniting the atmosphere would
kill him as well. Even after the Sontarans rejected his order for
them to depart, The Doctor was unable to trigger the generator, but,
at the last minute, Rattigan used the Sontaran teleporter to switch
places with The Doctor, sacrificing himself to destroy the Sontarans
and redeem himself.
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The Sontaran Games
(Jacqueline Rayner) |
|
Despite the devastating nature of this defeat, a single Sontaran
managed to escape the destruction in the form of Command Kaagh. Attempting
to avenge his peoples’ defeat, Kaagh attempted to annihilate
humanity by bringing Earth’s satellites down to crash into
the nuclear power plants, trigger a chain reaction that would destroy
the human race, but his plan was discovered by Sarah
Jane Smith and
her ‘team’ of teenage investigators, her adopted son
Luke reprogramming the computer that Kaagh had been using to ground
the satellites while Kaagh was knocked out by Chrisse Jackson - the
mother of Sarah’s young friend Maria -, forced to return to
his homeworld in disgrace after his ship’s engines were disabled
("The Last Sontaran"). Kaagh returned to Sarah Jane’s
life while working with Mrs Wormwood - a member of the alien race
known as the Bane, who had created Luke Smith as part of their plan
to invade Earth ("Invasion of the Bane"), Sarah’s
defeat of their plan leaving Mrs Wormwood exiled from her kind -,
the two having been exiled from their kind for their failures. In
an attempt to gain new power, the two attempted to trick Sarah into
helping them uncover the resting place an ancient immortal warrior
known as Horath, whose body and mind were separated at the moment
of his defeat, by stealing the fabled Tunguska Scroll - containing
the location of Horath’s body - from UNIT’s Black Archives,
claiming that the Bane were after it for themselves when in reality
Mrs Wormwood and Kaagh had discovered Horath’s mind and now
sought his body (Horath was actually a computer powerful enough to
command the physical laws of the universe). With the aid of the now-retired
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Sarah was able to gain access to the
scroll, which led them to a stone circle that served as the ‘door’ to
the pocket dimension where Horath’s body had been left after
his defeat. After Luke managed to convince Kaagh that Mrs Wormwood
had no intention of sharing power with him after she had awakened
Horath, Kaagh sacrificed himself to defeat Mrs Wormwood and restore
his honour ("Enemy of the Bane").
The Tenth Doctor had another confrontation with the Sontarans
when visiting the British Academy of Sporting Excellence, training
elite athletes for the Globe Games, prompted to investigate reports
of the recent strange deaths of some of the academy’s students
("The
Sontaran Games"). Witnessing Sontarans in the corridors
while examining the dead students - swiftly determining that the
victims had been killed by electrocution -, The Doctor and his allies
were trapped in the Academy when the Sontarans surrounded the building
with a force field while also electrifying the TARDIS to prevent
The Doctor escaping. While The Doctor was forced to compete against
the humans in various sporting events in an outside arena, his new
friend Emma was able to disable the force field that the Sontarans
had erected to keep the javelins, hammers and discuses away from
the humans, allowing the humans to kill their enemies. Although The
Doctor deduced that ‘Emma’ was really a Rutan who had
killed the real Emma to take her place and trigger a diplomatic incident
at the Games, he gave her the option of travelling with him after
he realised that she had shown concern for the other athletes at
the Academy when she hadn’t needed to do so, but an attack
by the injured General Stenx resulted in the two enemies destroying
each other before The Doctor could learn what Emma’s answer
would have been.
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The Taking of Chelsea 426
(David Llewellyn) |
|
The Doctor’s third encounter with the Sontarans in his
tenth incarnation took place on the colony Chelsea 426, in orbit
of Saturn, in the twenty-sixth century. Arriving on the colony for
a brief holiday, The Doctor attending the local flower show out of
idle curiosity, but was shocked to learn that the show was exhibiting
strange plants discovered on Saturn itself, with matters becoming
further complicated when the Sontarans arrived. Allowing himself
to be arrested so that he could talk to the Sontaran commander, The
Doctor learned that the plants were actually part of a Rutan attempt
to infiltrate the Sontarans, the plant spores being Rutans and the
plants having been left on Saturn - apparently during the events
of "The Sontaran Strategem/The Poisoned Sky" - with the
intention that the newly-produced Sontaran clones on Earth would
be infested by the plant spores, only for the failure of the Sontaran
plan resulting in the spores being left on Saturn for centuries until
the colony discovered them. Although The Doctor was unable to convince
the Sontarans to depart by pointing out the impracticality of them
trying to identify the Rutan hosts among the colony, he realised
that the Rutan spores depended on ammonia to exist after luring one
of them into the TARDIS, where its air-filtered atmosphere caused
the Rutan to ‘starve’ and the human to regain control.
Having distracted the Sontarans by generating a low-level sound frequency
- based on a comment from an old soldier who sacrificed himself to
save The Doctor and his allies, the frequency operating on the same
principle of dogs being able to hear certain sounds that humans couldn’t
-, The Doctor modified the colony’s air systems to filter out
the ammonia, later tricking the Sontarans into abandoning the colony
by having the humans pretend to still be under Rutan control, the
Sontarans’ numbers now too limited to fight them.
 |
| The Sontaran Stratagem/The
Poison Sky (2008) |
|
A Sontaran made a brief appearance at the conclusion of "The End of Time", when a single Sontaran - possibly another surviving
of the ATMOS attack - attempted to kill the now-married Martha Jones and Mickey Smith, the two working as freelance alien hunters after
Martha left UNIT following the events of "The Stolen Earth/Journey's
End" and "Children of Earth". Fortunately, The Doctor
defeated the Sontaran for them, hitting it on the probic vent when
it was about to shoot them during a fight at a construction site,
but he only remained long enough for Martha and Mickey to see him
before he departed, his body on the verge of regeneration as he used
his last hours in this incarnation to say goodbye to his companions.
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| The Pandorica Opens/The
Big Bang (2010) |
|
The Eleventh Doctor faced the Sontarans again when they joined
forces with his other enemies in a vast Alliance to trap him in the
Pandorica - a legendary prison that had been spoken of in myth, created
specifically to hold The Doctor - after they became convinced that
he would be responsible for a temporal explosion that triggered the
creation of cracks in the universe after the TARDIS exploded, unaware
that the explosion had already taken place when his future companion
River Song was piloting the ship. With the collapse of history, the
various races in the Alliance were all erased from existence, leaving
only statues of themselves gathered around the Pandorica as ‘after-images’,
Earth the last fragment of time left in the universe thanks to the
exploding TARDIS putting itself in a time loop at the moment of its
destruction to act as a substitute sun for Earth. With The Doctor
having taken the Pandorica into the TARDIS explosion, using the TARDIS
itself as a power source to transmit the remaining atoms of the true
universe stored within the Pandorica across all of time and space
in a second explosion that restored the history of the universe,
the Alliance was erased and history restored.
When mounting an assault on the asteroid base of Demon’s
Run to rescue his companion Amy Pond ("A Good Man Goes to War"),
one of the members of The Doctor’s ‘strike force’ was
Strax, a Sontaran warrior who had been sentenced to work as a nurse
caring for the sick after an encounter with The Doctor. Helping The
Doctor in order to remove his shame, Strax assisted in the taking
of Demon’s Run, but was subsequently killed by one of the Headless
Monks in their counter-attack, his last words being to reflect that,
despite his frustration with the events of his life, he had enjoyed
a long run by Sontaran standards. |
