Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: bbc, cybermen, daleks, doctor who, sontarans

Doctor Who: Defending Sontarans: The Most Underrated Evil Alien Army

Let's celebrate the Doctor Who baddies, the Sontarans, the original Evil Mr. Potato Head alien invasion clone army/metaphors for endless war.

Oh look, it's the Sontarans, everyone's favourite evil alien army from Doctor Who! Sontarans are the original Evil Mr. Potato Heads, all clones of the same Evil Mr. Potato Head, but mass-produced into the millions, possibly billions, to scourge the universe, invading any and every world they see in endless war. That is what they represent: the banal sameness and senselessness of Endless War.

Sontarans form the third variation in the fascist triumvirate with Daleks and Cybermen. Daleks are Nazis because they want to exterminate everyone that's not like them. Cybermen are Soviet Communists because they want to force everyone to become like them. Sontarans just want to wage endless war for the blood and glory of it all. What all three factors want in command is Conquest and Dominance. It's everything Doctor Who – and, by implication, the British – are pledged to fight. Doctor Who has always at heart been an anti-fascist show since its creation in the 1960s when defeating Nazi Germany was still fresh in the minds of the British. The Sontarans' schemes are more in keeping with Cold War plots and conspiracies, laying the groundwork for invasion rather than all-out assault all at once. They are the other side of the equation of Soviet Communism metaphors. They all look and think the same as they plot. They're also comically childish and lacking in imagination, always falling for the "look behind you!" trick as a running joke.

The Sontarans have been even more consistent in Doctor Who than the Daleks or the Cybermen, who have been redesigned and updated many times to look more modern and less cheap or cheesy. Like the other villains, they have benefited from higher budgets in the modern version of Doctor Who, where they could get better faces and masks for the actors and costumes that look like alien armor instead of leather jumpsuits found leftover in a corner of the BBC Costume Warehouse and properly designed. Higher budgets and CGI also mean they can have the big epic battles they were always meant to get instead of one speaking Sontaran and five extras passing for an entire army of millions in the old show. Now we can get lots of them cut and pasted on screen like the clones they are.

We miss seeing their heads deflate like punctured footballs when they die, though.

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