In this third of three extraterrestrial Creature Canons, we enter an entirely new realm: the glorified fan film, based on a popular Sci-Fi TV property. Wait, come back! There’s stuff to say here!
I’ve found myself in and out of the Doctor Who audience over the years: first discovering reruns of the Tom Baker episodes in high school, getting on board the revival when it began in 2005, jumping off board when I inevitably lose interest in watching a TV show on a regular basis, and then watching a few new ones here and there before stopping again. Last year, when Twitch was streaming episodes of the older series non-stop for a few months, I was tuning in regularly—there is still something deeply enjoyable about that run from the sixties to the eighties, even with its low budget nature and the weak stories that are peppered in throughout. What I think always appealed to me about the show is that it often had the feel of a classic Sci-Fi monster movie, combining aspects of the fifties stuff with the darker atmosphere of a Hammer movie—no show had a greater devotion to weird concepts and adorably ratty, but often imaginative!, creature costumes—with the serialization only adding to the charming old-fashionedness of it all. While the show’s time/space-hopping format meant it could be something completely different from week to week, Doctor Who still ended up becoming a motherlode for monster fans, and many of its alien menaces have since become iconic on their own.
The show’s original run ended in 1989, and the fifteen year period where Doctor Who was not on television (I mean, except for the bad American TV movie, but let’s not beat that horse any deader) became the time when spin-offs and fan projects tried to fill the void. There were products that were officially sanctioned by the BBC—including sprawling lines of novels and audio plays that still run to this day—and then there were things like Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans, a 1995 short film produced by the publishers of a Sci-Fi magazine that only exists because of how the BBC handles copyright. You see, sometimes the rights to concepts introduced on one of their shows actually goes to the writer that created them—Doctor Who has had to reckon with this many times, specifically when it comes to their most iconic aliens, the Daleks, who basically need to be leased from the estate of Terry Nation, the writer of the original Dalek episodes (but not, notably, the one who created their famous look.) The Sontarans, another recurring alien from the series, are similarly owned by the estate of Robert Holmes, one of the more prolific (and arguably one of the best) writers of the old show, and so the producers could get the rights to them without going through the BBC, although there are things from the show they can’t directly reference, including the Doctor himself (there is a joke about that in Shakedown.) So, we have a production that’s about one of the aliens from the show without the presence of the main character, with the base assumption that the alien themselves are enough of a draw for fans.
The Sontarans appeared in several episodes of the original series, but there really isn’t much to them: they are a species of potato-headed clone soldiers who are in a never-ending war with another group of aliens called the Rutan (who only physically appeared once on the show, although it was in a really good story.) Their helmets look kind of a cool, and they have guns that are designed for their three-fingered hands. That about covers it. They seem to be well-known to Doctor Who fans more because they had a distinct visual and showed up more than once then because they were particularly interesting. I can imagine that’s why Shakedown exists at all, because it really doesn’t add much to them on a conceptual basis, aside from briefly playing around with some vague details, such as their sense of respect for worthy opponents and how they can’t understand concepts like doing something for fun (or of their being more than one sex, which makes one Sontaran ogling one of the women make even less sense.)
The plot of Shakedown follows the crew of a solar racing yacht (where you set the sails by pretending to do so physically using VR, which is complete nonsense) out for a test run in space—we have a highly competent captain who is forced to put up with the wealthy ninnies who own the yacht, but a bigger problem than that is the sudden appearance of the Sontarans, who fire on the ship and then board it. They are seeking a Rutan spy, who they think might be on the yacht, and so the rest of the fifty minutes is spent with the humans, Sontarans, and one sentient green orb (who can disguise itself as others and kills with electrical shocks) trying to outwit each other with varying degrees of success.
First, this is a fan film to the nth degree, and if you couldn’t tell from the sometimes amateurish camerawork (although the special effects and silly MIDI music aren’t far away from what the BBC was putting out), then you can really tell by the casting: it has actors from Doctor Who (including Carole Ann Ford, who played the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan in the earliest seasons, and Sophie Aldred, who had been playing the Doctor’s sidekick when the show was discontinued) and also the other cult favourite BBC Sci-Fi show, Blake’s 7. Funnily enough, despite being aimed at Who fans, the Who actors on this play unlikable jerks who are subsequently murdered, where the Blake’s 7 actors get off easy—this doesn’t mean anything, it’s just something I noticed. This is also scripted by another prolific Doctor Who writer, Terrance Dicks, who has produced some notable stories for the show (including the previously mentioned one featuring the Rutan.) The people making this clearly wanted to get as much Doctor Who stuff in here as possible, but having all of these people involved just highlight that it’s really more interesting as a random piece of fandom history than as an standalone piece of entertainment.
The one recurring thing throughout Shakedown is that almost every character in it is a complete dope, human AND alien, giving this whole thing a somewhat nasty and cynical tone. Of course, you’d expect some of this by having most of the human passengers be the kind of petty, self-serving upper class types that have giant “I exist to increase the body count” signs on them, but what’s more impressive is just how dumb the Sontarans are. Aside from how they are outmanoeuvred by the sentient green orb (who is secretly a jellyfish, for what’s it worth) over and over again, the biggest signal of this is how stupid their search for it is: they only know that it was last detected on a specific space station, and so will be ransacking every single ship that went through there, one by one, until they find it. Despite being positioned as intimidating, we are clearly dealing with an army of blockheads. At times, it seems like the script recognizes this and tries to position it as part of their characterization, a bunch of aliens who are dangerous specifically because they try to solve every problem through brute force no matter how inefficient it is (and we even get a few jokes where the leader of the Sontaran group thinks his own soldiers are too stupid), which if developed further could’ve been a neat idea, but doesn’t get enough play here. Even the solo Rutan, who manages to kill off almost every Sontaran and a few humans, is tricked and then blown up in the end. The only competent characters are the captain and one of the other crew, who are savvy enough to play the two opposing aliens against each other, which is another fairly decent idea that just sort of comes and goes. At least they get a happy ending (they now own the yacht), despite being stuck on a spaceship full of dead bodies.
How this thing ultimately plays out makes it clear that the presence of these monsters is really the entire purpose of the project, and the plot of “Dumb Aliens vs. Slightly Less Dumb Alien” was concocted just to make it happen. If you didn’t have any prior knowledge of these characters, Shakedown doesn’t really go out of its way to make you care (I mean it’s “Return of the Sontarans”, so if you don’t know the Sontarans, why would you want to see them return?), and includes a lot of imagery and ideas that are pulled from their previous appearances without much explanation. It’s almost as if this was a specialty product that needed to be specially ordered (possibly by mail), and therefor definitely had a self-selecting audience who would already know this stuff. But you’d think that those sorts would also have remembered that these alien monsters were fun before not just on their own, but because they were part of stories that were enjoyable for many reasons aside from them. There’s no real reason to have expected much more from a fan-produced direct-to-video Doctor Who spin-off than a surface level greatest hits collection, but it does show how sometimes, a recognizable monster is not enough to make something noteworthy.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 