Here’s the thing nobody warned me about: Sontarans on horseback are genuinely magnificent. “War of the Sontarans” opens with a line of them riding out of the fog at a British encampment in 1855, helmets under their arms, and it’s the single best image Chibnall’s era has produced. It’s absurd, it’s played completely straight, and that’s exactly how these creatures should always be played. The premise is that the Flux has knocked history sideways, so instead of the Russians the British Army is fighting an invading Sontaran force with muskets and cavalry. This is a real step up from the opener and I enjoyed a lot of it.
It’s a properly good hook, too. It gives the episode a setting with real weight, it puts the Sontarans somewhere they’ve never been, and it lets the show do the thing it does best, which is take a serious historical horror and let something ridiculous walk into the middle of it without ever winking at the camera. The war itself is allowed to be grim. The trenches are cold and muddy and full of men who are losing, the field hospital is under-supplied, and nobody in a red coat is having an adventure. Doctor Who has a bad habit of using history as fancy dress, and this episode mostly resists it, because the Sontarans are an absurdity dropped into a situation that was already killing people. A young soldier explaining that he signed up because there was nothing else going is exactly the kind of small, unglamorous detail that makes a historical worth setting where it’s set.
The Sontarans finally get to be frightening
Dan Starkey has spent a decade playing Strax as a punchline, so it’s a relief to see the species restored to something with menace in it. Commander Riskaw is a proper antagonist: vain, tactically sharp, and utterly convinced of his own reasonableness. These aren’t comic potatoes, they’re an occupying army with a doctrine, and the episode takes their obsession with honourable combat seriously enough to turn it into a weapon. They withdraw at a fixed hour every day to feed through their probic vents, entirely predictable and entirely non-negotiable, because ritual matters more to them than tactics do. That’s a lovely bit of alien logic and it pays off properly. The scene where the Doctor works out the schedule and simply waits for it is the most Doctor-ish thing she’s done in a long while, and Whittaker is at her best playing someone who’s just spotted the loose thread.
Mary Seacole gets a genuinely good showing from Sara Powell, written as a practical, unimpressed woman running a hospital nobody would fund. The episode lets her be competent rather than awed by any of it. When she tells the Doctor she’s used to being underestimated, it doesn’t feel like a lesson aimed at me, it feels like a fact about her working life. That restraint is why she lands. She’s the kind of historical figure this show is best with: somebody real, doing a hard job, with no time at all for the TARDIS crew’s nonsense.
Dan in Liverpool, and the split that costs it
Meanwhile Dan is back in Liverpool, which the Sontarans have also invaded, fighting them off with a wok and a frying pan. John Bishop is very good here, and the sequence where he chases a Sontaran down a dock with cookware is funnier than anything the show has tried in a couple of years. Karvanista turning up to help while staying absolutely furious about having to is a reliable joke that hasn’t worn out yet. This is where the way Flux is built starts costing it, though. The Doctor is in 1855, Dan is in Liverpool, Yaz is on a temple in the far future with Vinder, and none of those three stories talk to each other for most of the runtime. Cutting between them means none of them builds any pressure, and the episode keeps interrupting a scene that’s working to check on one that isn’t.
Yaz’s strand is the weakest of the three. She’s on Time, performing a Priest Triangle ritual with almost no explanation of what any of it means, and Mandip Gill is once again given atmosphere instead of material. I keep waiting for this show to hand her something to actually do, and three years in that’s no longer a slow burn, it’s a pattern. The frustrating part is that the ingredients for a good Yaz story have been sitting right there for two series. She’s a police officer, which the show has essentially forgotten, she’s the one who noticed the Doctor was lying about Gallifrey, and she has a family the series introduced properly and then dropped. Any one of those threads would give her something to be other than the person standing next to the interesting character.
The Doctor makes a genuinely bad call
The ending is the most interesting thing in the hour and the show barely acknowledges it. Riskaw, offered the chance to surrender and live, takes it, and the episode lets that be a real decision rather than a trick: an old soldier choosing survival over glory because he’s simply had enough. Then the humans blow him up anyway. The Doctor beats the Sontarans by letting them retreat to their ships, and then stands by while a British officer detonates the entire fleet after a surrender had been agreed. She’s furious about it afterwards. She’s also the person who left the button within reach and walked away.
That’s a real moral problem, and it rhymes with the argument the show made properly back in A Town Called Mercy, where somebody finally said out loud that the Doctor was drifting and needed someone to tell him so. Here she gets a short speech about how the officer was wrong and then the plot moves on to the next location. I wanted the episode to sit in it for even ninety seconds. It’s an ending that’s far more uneasy about its own hero than the script is willing to say out loud, and I liked it more the longer I thought about it afterwards. When this episode stays in one place it’s very good indeed, and the fact that it keeps refusing to is this run’s whole problem in miniature.
Rating: 3.5/5. Really enjoyed the Crimea half of this. The Sontarans are terrific, Mary Seacole deserved a whole episode to herself, and the horseback entrance is worth the licence fee on its own. It loses ground for the way it keeps pulling me away from the best bits, and for an ending it isn’t quite brave enough to look at properly.