Doctor Who: Flux is already one week old, and the only thing we know for sure so far is that things are bad for the Doctor and her friends — and getting worse. Plus, this week they’re about to go toe to toe with the most vicious band of clone warriors since, well, the Daleks.
So, as forewarned is forearmed, here are a few useful things you may want to know about Sontar’s mighty warriors ahead of Sunday's new episode, from the other side of the camera, at least!
1. The distinctive shape of the Sontaran head came out of an idea for a great visual joke by scriptwriter Robert Holmes. When writing “The Time Warrior,” the Third Doctor story in which we first encounter this warlike race, he was thinking of the science-fiction trope in which armored aliens arrive in front of horrified humans and take off their helmets to reveal a terrifying face beneath. Seeing comic potential, he was taken by the idea of an alien taking off his dome-shaped helmet to reveal a dome-shaped head.
2. On a similarly humorous note, he also submitted his original story outline to the production team (including script editor Terrance Dicks) under the title, "Field report from Sontaran Field Marshal Hol Mes, to Terran Cedicks."
3. What Robert Holmes didn’t do was come up with a clear instruction as to how to pronounce the word Sontaran. According to Elisabeth Sladen, who appeared in “The Time Warrior” as Sarah Jane Smith, it was director Alan Bromly’s preferred choice that they be called SON-tarans, with the emphasis on the first syllable. Kevin Lindsay, who played the warrior Linx, disagreed, saying, "Well, I think it's "son-TAR-an", and since I'm from the place, I should know."
4. Oddly for Doctor Who, the origins of the Sontarans – beyond their clone nature and their warlike habits – haven’t been fully explored within the TV series. However, in the Doctor Who FASA role playing game, the story appeared that all Sontarans are cloned from General Sontar, who took over his home planet and named it after himself.
5. Robert Holmes did offer some extra perspective to his original Sontaran warrior in the prologue to the Target novelization, Doctor Who and the Time Warrior. He gave Linx the first name Jingo, showed him in battle with Rutans, and even suggested that his race’s home planet was called Sontara, not Sontar. Having been commissioned to write the whole book, he then sent this prologue to Terrence Dicks and asked him to do it instead.
5. Their greatest military struggle has also been left out of Doctor Who. Sontarans engaged in a long and bloody war with the Rutan Host, a race of similarly one-track-minded warriors (who eventually made an appearance in the Fourth Doctor story “The Horror of Fang Rock”). Their war lasted for 50 thousand years – not unlike the war between the Thals and Daleks of Skaro – but aside from the odd passing mention, we’ve never really gone into it in any detail.
7. According to a 2017 article by Paste magazine, the CIA once set up a project to try and assess any weaknesses in Linux-based voice over internet protocol (VOIP) communications technologies, such as Skype. They called it Sontaran.
Linux and Skype are great names for a general, don’t you think?
8. In the 1997 PC game Destiny of the Doctors, made by BBC Multimedia, you could kill Sontarans by shooting furious bees at them, from a hive. Given the armor, helmet, gauntlets and general battle dress they wear all the time, this seems like an odd tactic to adopt.
9. In 1981, Jean Airey wrote a Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover novella called The Doctor and the Enterprise in which the Fourth Doctor ends up on board the USS Enterprise, which is immediately attacked by Sontarans – a race Kirk, Spock and company have never heard of, despite their clear emotional ties to the similarly grumpy Klingons.
They also crop up in the David Walliams children’s novel Grandpa’s Great Escape, although the reference is to a group of kids stealing costumes from a Doctor Who exhibition and then pretending to be Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans so they can convince the grown-ups that Earth is under attack.
10. Bob Baker, who co-wrote “The Sontaran Experiment” with Dave Martin, tells a tale of consulting Robert Holmes for any biographical information they could exploit for the clone warriors. He said that Holmes had worked out a long and glorious back-story for them, including the (thankfully un-broadcast) idea that they reproduced through the back of their necks.
Are you scared feeling scared of the Sontarans?!