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The First Sontarans was the sixth story release in the third series of The Lost Stories, produced by Big Finish Productions. It was adapted by Andrew Smith, from his original script, and featured Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor and Nicola Bryant as Peri Brown.
Publisher's summary
1872. After finding a strange signalling device on the moon, the Doctor and Peri travel to the depths of the English countryside to track down the source of its transmissions. But they're not the first aliens to arrive on the scene.
Old enemies of the Doctor are drawing their battle lines in the forest and the local humans will be lucky to escape the conflagration unscathed.
For hidden within this village is a deadly secret - a secret that could destroy the entire Sontaran race...and reveal the terrible mystery of their creation.
Plot
Part one
The Doctor takes Peri to Mare Nectaris on the Moon in 1872 where they find a crashed communications repeater. Taking it back into the TARDIS, he finds that its purpose is to cover up the fact that the message it is retransmitting, saying "We are here", comes from Sussex. They trace the message to a forest and put a stop to a cockfight, for which innkeeper Jacob Gilley apologises whilst also emphasising the difficult times that the villagers are currently going through. Peri, recognising the opportunity to collect information about possible anomalies in the area, suggests that Jacob take her and the Doctor to his tavern, The Coach and Horses.
The Gentleman bursts into the tavern and demands to know what a Time Lord is doing on Earth, having recently killed another alien. Before he can attack the Doctor and Peri, Major Thessinger arrives and invites the two of them to his home to seek sanctuary against the Gentleman, who departs after warning the two travellers to leave. They do not stay long with Thessinger, whom the Doctor quickly realises is not as affluent as he claims and is lying about serving in the Battle of Inkerman, and are knocked out and captured shortly after leaving his home.
Thessinger is visited by the Gentleman, who accuses him of being a Kaveetch and draws a technologically advanced firearm which Thessinger claims not to recognise. The Doctor awakens in a dungeon fitted with an anachronistic CCTV camera and electronic doors, behind one of which he finds Commander Lork of the 1st Sontaran Battle Fleet, a Sontaran prisoner who assumes that the Doctor is his jailer and goes to attack him.
Part two
The Doctor manages to lock Lork back up and release Peri from behind another door. The two of them get through the exit by applying different degrees of force to its energy field and enter a makeshift morgue in a cellar. The Doctor switches off the transmitter to the Moon, finds two dissected Sontarans and identifies the contents of four jars as the remains of the other members of a Sontaran patrol before Gilley enters, granting him and Peri their freedom as he has confirmed that they are not Sontaran agents. In truth, Gilley is Meredid Roath, a Kaveetch cellular geneticist.
Roath explains that the Sontarans attacked his planet and that he and his ex-wife, Leandra, escaped to Earth before sending a transmission to summon the other survivors and lure in a Sontaran patrol which he could dissect. Lork escapes his cell and, finding the corpses of his comrades, attacks the Doctor, Peri and Roath, who lock him in the basement until he uses a photon grenade from his companion's survival pack to break out and flee the tavern. The Doctor and Roath stop him from getting too far away whilst Peri, looking around the tavern, is joined by Leandra, who shoots Lork with a gun which targets Sontaran cell structures. The Doctor and Peri recognise her as Thessinger's housekeeper.
After the Doctor deactivates a distress beacon activated by Lork, Peri and Leandra teleport to the Roaths' orbiter to run a scan and detect a Sontaran Planet Kill Fleet commanded by Fleet Marshal Jaka. The Doctor and Roath learn of Thessinger's death from Barclay, his manservant, and go with him to the house where they find Thessinger alive. The Doctor suspects that he is a Rutan impostor, however, and goes looking for the real Thessinger's corpse. Instead, he finds Barclay's, leading the Gentleman, who has been impersonating him, to attack.
Part three
Thessinger shoots the Gentleman before he can kill the Doctor and Roath, but he escapes through a window. Roath tells Leandra to send out the Exodus Signal to the Kaveetch, who are allied with the Kreliban Confederacy and intend to wipe out the Sontarans with their help. However, the Doctor informs Roath that Krelibas has been conquered by the Rutans, whom Leandra reveals to Peri that she is working with when she teleports the Gentleman up to the ship. The Gentleman soon takes both of them prisoner and contacts the Rutan fleet as he wants to use Roath and his anti-Sontaran technology in their war and has been killing the Kaveetch on Earth to find him.
The Doctor takes Roath and Thessinger, who has admitted that he fled the Crimea before Inkerman, to where the TARDIS landed, but Jaka has Commander Strek teleport it to the Sontaran mothership and the three of them are pursued. Cornered by Jaka in his workshop, Roath admits to the Doctor that the Kaveetch are from Sontar and that he created the Sontarans as a last resort to win the Kaveetch's war against the Rutans. The Sontarans turned on the Kaveetch whilst they celebrated the turning tide of the war on account of them having too much knowledge of their physiology and way of thinking and took control of the planet.
When the Rutans start the docking procedure with the Kaveetch ship, Leandra, at Peri's suggestion, opens the door and kills the Rutans through decompression, after which the orbiter starts to fall apart as Sontaran ships approach. The Doctor and Roath get away in Thessinger's carriage and join the four hundred Kaveetch waiting to be teleported to the orbiter, but they are forced to surrender to the Sontarans and Thessinger is killed. The Sontarans destroy the orbiter and vapourise the Kaveetch on Jaka's command; the Doctor and Roath, however, are to be taken to Sontar to face Sontaran justice.
Part four
During the journey to Sontar, Roath tells the Doctor how he had to save himself and the unconscious Leandra during the burning of their city rather than collect his son and daughter, something Leandra apparently never forgave him for. Jaka, having been listening, shows the Doctor the clone hatchery he is sworn to protect and orders him to take him into the TARDIS, which he intends to use to defeat the Rutans. Disguised as a Sontaran, Peri knocks Jaka out by hitting his probic vent and she and Leandra explain how they escaped the orbiter using the teleporter's emergency settings, which sent them to the Sontaran cargo hold.
The Doctor picks up an encrypted Rutan transmission and uses a code memorised Peri to access it, learning that the Rutans will soon be attacking to acquire Roath's anti-Sontaran weapon. He deliberately gets himself recaptured to be reunited with Roath and escapes thanks to Peri deactivating the security systems through the TARDIS, but they fail to return to the TARDIS before the Rutans attack the ship and start destroying the hatchery. Jaka, holding Peri and Leandra hostage, comes to defend the hatchlings and wounds Leandra when she takes his jumps in front of his shot to save the Doctor. The Rutans mortally injure Jaka and he orders Strek to activate the self-destruct before he dies.
The Doctor, Peri and Roath get Leandra to the TARDIS and into the Zero Room, keeping her alive long enough to get her to the surgeons of Calisto 4. With the Sontarans and the Rutans killed, they attend Thessinger's funeral and the Roaths decide to leave Earth to start the Kaveetch race anew on a nameless planet that the Doctor recommends to them. The Doctor and Peri congratulate them on moving on rather than continuing to seek revenge against the Sontarans and depart.
Cast
Worldbuilding
Cultural references from the real world
- The Doctor refers to Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969.
Individuals
- Petros Ambier goes by "John Mackie". He worked as a porter at Covent Garden Market for seven years.
- Major Thessinger's father fought in the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. Furthermore, Thessinger claims that he himself fought in the Battle of Inkerman on 5 November 1854 during the Crimean War.
Planets
- The Doctor takes Leandra to Calisto 4 to heal after her wound from a Sontaran blaster.
Timeline
Species
- The Doctor refers to the Sontarans' sworn arch-enemies the Rutans. The two species have been at war for millennia.
- A Sontaran patrol numbers seven.
- The Kaveetch were natives of Sontar. They worked with an infiltration scout.
- The Kreliban from Krelibas were once a well established military force in the Mutter's Spiral. Now, they are slaves in the Rutan Empire.
- The Sontarans were created on Alminus, a moon of Sontar.
- The Sontarans are led by the Grand Marshal. The Table of Seven oversee justice.
TARDIS
- The Doctor is able to preserve Leandra's life using the Zero Room.
Notes
- This is the first Big Finish audio drama to feature both the Sontarans and the Rutans.
- Writer Andrew Smith removed all of the Mary Celeste scenes from the original TV script and instead added a reference. According to Smith, when he was originally writing the TV episode, he became highly disturbed when his research about the Mary Celeste turned into him knowing every detail about all the crew who died on the ship.
- This story was recorded at the Moat Studios.[1]
- The cover for this story, along with that for The Anachronauts, was revealed on 3 November 2011.[2]
- This story was originally released on CD and download.
Continuity
- The Doctor and Peri would return to the Moon when they visited the Gogglebox in the far future. (AUDIO: The Reaping) Although he objects to the notion of visiting the Apollo 11 landing site in person, he is willing to allow her to view it from a distance aboard the TARDIS following a visit to 1963. (AUDIO: The Space Race)
- The Doctor refers to the disappearance of the crew of the Mary Celeste in 1872. The Doctor refers to the Daleks' involvement in the incident. The First Doctor and his companions Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright and Vicki Pallister were indirectly involved in the crew's disappearance. (TV: The Chase, AUDIO: The Rosemariners) The Fifth Doctor had told Alan Fitzgerald, a student summer intern at the Gogglebox, that he was "sort of" responsible. (AUDIO: The Gathering)
- The Doctor and Peri previously encountered the Sontarans in Seville, Spain in 1985. (TV: The Two Doctors)
- The Doctor tells Roath and Fleet Marshal Jaka that he is aware that the Sontarans possess rudimentary time travel technology as he previously witnessed it in operation. (TV: The Time Warrior, The Two Doctors)