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A Rutan |
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Name: The Rutans
Format: Television
Show, Book and indirectly appeared in Audio
Time of Origin: Ruta 3; precise dates
are unknown, but they have apparently been at war since
before Man evolved and exist into the future.
Appearances: "Sontarans VS Rutans: The Children of the Future", "Horror
of Fang Rock", "Castle
of Fear", "Lords
of the Storm", "The First Sontarans", "Sontarans VS Rutans: Born to Die", "Shakedown", "Sontarans VS Rutans: The Battle of Giant’s Causeway", "The
Sontaran Games", "The Gunpodwer Plot", indirectly
played a role in "Evolution", "Heroes
of Sontar",
and "The
Taking of Chelsea 426".
Doctors: Third Doctor, Fourth
Doctor, Fifth
Doctor, Sixth
Doctor, Seventh
Doctor, Tenth
Doctor and Eleventh Doctor.
Companions: The Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith, Leela, Nyssa, Turlough, Peri Brown, Bernice
Summerfield,
Roslyn
Forrester, Chris Cwej, Amy Pond, Rory
Williams; Tegan
Jovanka helped confront the remnants of a Rutan plan, and Sarah
Jane Smith participated in a situation involving Rutan
technology, but neither fought the Rutans themselves.
History: Although The Doctor has more regularly
battled the Rutans’ enemies, the Sontarans, the Rutans
themselves have regularly disproved the idea that ‘the
enemy of my enemy is my friend’, often posing just
as great a danger to The Doctor as the Sontarans, even if
he has managed to work with them on occasion.
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Horror of Fang Rock |
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A race of jellyfish-like creatures in their natural state, the Rutans are essentially a single entity split into multiple different forms, existing as a kind of collective consciousness where each individual is part of the whole. However, their most interesting power is their ability to shapeshift to certain degrees, as well as the ability to kill their enemies with a ‘sting’ when engaged in direct combat. Despite this difference in styles, they are still regarded by The Doctor as just as dangerous as the Sontarans, with The Doctor avoiding ever taking action to end their war as the current conflict keeps the Sontarans and the Rutans too occupied with each other to turn on the rest of the universe. Unlike the Sontarans, who only have one specific weakness in the form of the probic vent on the back of their necks, Rutans have been disorientated by sonic waves and eliminated with heat as their evolution on the icy Ruta 3 has left them vulnerable to extreme temperature changes.
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Sontarans VS Rutans: The Children of the Future
(Tim Foley) |
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Shortly after the Third Doctor and new companion Sarah Jane Smith stopped Linx, a Sontaran marooned on twelfth century Earth, abducting scientists from the twentieth century to fix his ship ("The Time Warrior"), Sarah and The Brigadier were concerned when The Doctor started to leave UNIT headquarters on a regular basis for undisclosed reasons ("Sontarans VS Rutans: The Children of the Future"). Following him one night, the two tracked him to an apparent army base in an old ruin that Sarah recognised as the castle where Linx had hid in the past. The soldiers at the base explained that they came from 1994, having travelled back following a Sontaran invasion of Earth by exploiting the temporal distortion caused by Linx’s ship exploding in the castle. The Doctor claimed that he was helping the soldiers integrate with Earth in this era to prepare for the future invasion, but The Brigadier and Sarah realised that this was a lie as The Doctor had just given Sarah a Dictaphone made in 1997, proving that the story of Earth being invaded was false. Recalling how The Doctor had mentioned that the Rutans were shapeshifters, Sarah confirmed that the soldiers were Rutans, and The Doctor had been pretending to go along with their story until he could properly stop them and determine the origin of the temporal anomaly that they were using to travel back in the first place, as the destruction of Linx’s ship alone wasn’t enough. With The Brigadier’s help, The Doctor was able to set the base to self-destruct, forcing the Rutans to return through the time corridor to their ship and abandon their attempt to invade Earth.
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Horror of Fang Rock |
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The Doctor’s next encounter with the Rutans began when the Fourth
Doctor and his companion Leela had landed on
a lighthouse off the coast of England in the early 20th
century when The Doctor made a mistake setting the coordinates
while trying to go to Brighton ("Horror
of Fang Rock"),
quickly discovering that one of the lighthouse keepers had
been murdered, that a strange light had fallen from the
sky, and that the electricity flow to the lamp had become
erratic. Quickly deducing that something was responsible
for draining the power from the lighthouse - although not
in time to stop a luxury yacht crashing into the rocks, even if the passengers were rescued -, The Doctor realised that the dead lighthouse keeper had been used to provide
an ‘anatomy lesson’ for the invader, but he
still failed to realise that the lighthouse had been infiltrated
when one of the keepers was replaced until most of the yacht
crew were dead. Confronting the alien, The Doctor confirmed
its identity as a Rutan trying to summon the mother ship
after its scout ship crashed, subsequently destroying the
Rutan with a makeshift mortar bomb before using diamonds
acquired from the yacht passengers to turn the lighthouse
into a high-intensity laser that destroyed the Rutan mothership.
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Castle of Fear
(Alan Barnes) |
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The
Fifth
Doctor had another interesting encounter with Rutans
when he and his companion Nyssa discovered Rutans hiding in
a castle near the village of Stockbridge ("Castle
of Fear"), a location that he had become fond of over his
various visits. Having become trapped there while tracking
Linx - a Sontaran warrior who had already been defeated by
the Third
Doctor and his allies ("The Time Warrior")
-, the Rutans sought to create a clone factory in the village,
creating clones of Rutans while in human form, with Stockbridge’s
residents possessing elements of Rutan genetics when one of
the clones escaped and mingled with the local human population,
their factory finally ceasing ‘production’ when
the water mill that powered it was destroyed, removing the
static electricity that the Rutan drones relied on. The Rutans
briefly captured Nyssa, but she was able to trick them into
letting her go by providing them with a device from the TARDIS that could generate unlimited power, Nyssa revealing to The
Doctor after the Rutan ship took off that the device had been
pre-programmed to generate an ever-increasing amount of power
until it finally exploded.
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Lords of the Storm
(David A. McIntee) |
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During a visit to the human colony world of Raghi - located
in an area of space that had once been populated by The
Tzun - the Fifth Doctor and Turlough ("Lords
of the Storm") discovered a strange new disease that was sweeping
the colony as well as several missing scientists. Discovering
that the Sontarans had taken control of Raghi’s sister
colony Agni and were kidnapping the scientists, The Doctor
soon discovered that Raghi’s entire population were
being used as bait for a Rutan trap. The strange disease
The Doctor was investigating caused all humans infected
with it to register as Sontarans on the Rutan scanners,
driving the Rutans to avoid that area of space, and thus
giving the Sontarans unrestricted access to Tzun technology.
Contacting the Rutans, The Doctor managed to make a deal
with them, exchanging the truth about the colony - while avoiding to mention the Tzun technology - for their promise not to harm the humans, provoking a conflict between the two enemies that ended when one of The Doctor’s allies sacrificed themselves to stop an unstable ship from destroying the colony. Returning to the TARDIS, The Doctor and Turlough escaped, unaware that a disguised Rutan agent had escaped after learning that the Sontarans had uncovered some vital information about the Rutans.
The Sixth
Doctor faced the Rutans when investigating a mysterious
signal being transmitted from Earth in 1872 ("The First
Sontarans"), discovering a Rutan infiltration unit -
far more skilled at disguise than other Rutans The Doctor
had encountered - that was attempting to acquire a series
of weapons designed specifically to destroy Sontarans that
had been created by the Kaveetch, the Sontarans’ original
creators; they had cloned the Sontarans as warriors against
a Rutan invasion, only to be all but destroyed when the Sontarans
subsequently turned against them. However, despite the presence
of a cloaked Rutan fleet, their efforts failed, with the Sontarans
destroying the few Kaveetch survivors. Although the Rutans
attempted to track the Sontarans back to their homeworld,
Peri and Leandra - one of the only Kaveetch survivors, the
other being her husband Roath - were able to provoke the Rutans
into attacking the Sontaran ship too soon, the Rutans and
the Sontarans destroying each other while The Doctor, Peri,
Roath and Leandra retreated to the TARDIS.
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Sontarans VS Rutans: Born to Die
(Tiegan Byrne) |
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When The Doctor tried to take new companion Charley Pollard to the planet Taxodon ("Sontarans VS Rutans: Born to Die"), he was surprised to find Sontarans on the planet, as the world was far away from the usual Sontaran battle lines. Accused of killing a Sontaran, The Doctor was able to use an obscure Sontaran rule to give himself until sunset to establish who had actually killed the Sontaran (the rule was intended to apply only to other Sontarans but the written rule didn’t actually specify that). The Doctor and Charley determined that the Sontarans had been capturing members of Taxodon’s native species, the Nox, who had a seemingly perfect camouflage, with the goal of harnessing that ability for themselves. However, The Doctor realised that the mission commander, Skein, was essentially a Rutan who had been genetically altered to assume a Sontaran form rather than just shapeshifting into the appearance of a Sontaran, rising through the ranks until he had the authority necessary to implement his true plan. Using the Nox research as a cover, Skein had added Rutan DNA to the Sontaran cloning tanks, with the intention of creating a new wave of Sontaran/Rutan hybrids who could infiltrate the Sontaran army and destroy them all. Aided by Sontaran cadet Skole, The Doctor was able to issue a command to deactivate the hybrids, destroying the Sontaran part of them as well, although Skole agreed to The Doctor’s request to abandon the research on the Nox in gratitude for his help.
Two incarnations after the confrontation on Raghi, the Seventh Doctor, now accompanied by Bernice Summerfield, Chris Cwej and Roslyn Forrester, set out to track down the Rutan agent and learn what had been discovered in the Sontaran data banks. Despite the agent's attempt to escape, The Doctor eventually learned that the Sontarans had learned of the existence of a natural wormhole between the Rutan homeworld and the planet Sentarion. The Rutans had intended to use the wormhole to allow their Queen to escape if the homeworld was ever directly attacked, but it could just as easily be used to send a Sontaran strike force directly after the Queen. Unwilling to allow the Sontaran/Rutan war to end and leave the winners free to turn on the rest of the universe, The Doctor managed to re-route the wormhole just as a Sontaran ship entered, turning it into an infinite loop that could never be escaped, the remaining Sontaran forces subsequently being overpowered by the Sentarii (Who had long worshipped the Rutans as gods).
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Sontarans VS Rutans: The Battle of Giant’s Causeway
(Lizzie Hopley) |
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Some time later, a temporal anomaly drew the TARDIS to Ireland in 55BC, where the Eighth Doctor and companions Charley and C’rizz were surprised to find Sontarans who seemed to genuinely believe they were Roman soldiers ("Sontarans VS Rutans: The Battle of Giant’s Causeway"). While The Doctor and Charley were taken to the Sontaran camp, C’Rizz was taken by a group of Celts to meet their ‘queen’, who claimed to have the ability to revive the dead and sought to create more ‘children’ for herself. C’Rizz assumed that The Doctor would be willing to help the queen get off planet, but was unaware that the queen was actually a Rutan, who had planted eggs in the Causeway to use its natural piezoelectricity to support the children, the same eggs having drained most of the TARDIS’s energy when it landed. Speculating that the two races had ended up in the past after being caught in the same temporal event, The Doctor was suspicious at how these Sontarans were proving particularly adaptable and responsive to external input, such as one soldier using phrases that Charley had uttered only moments ago. He confirmed that this was the reason the Sontarans had adopted the identity of Roman soldiers, to the extent that they had no memory of their true pasts until he started to remind them of details such as the Rutans, but he had to prioritise stopping them from interfering with history over learning the answers to these questions. Realising that the energy of the Rutan eggs was unstable, The Doctor programmed the TARDIS to cause an energy surge at the same time as it dematerialised, wiping out both sides (The Doctor noted that his methods should have only erased the Rutans rather than both, but there was no way to answer that question at this point).
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Sontarans VS Rutans: In Name Only
(John Dorney) |
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During the devastating Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks ("The Day of The Doctor"), the Rutans seemingly decided to become involved in the conflict when a Rutan infiltrated a TARDIS and attacked a Time Lord outpost ("Sontarans VS Rutans: In Name Only"). Commander Blaxill was quick to convince the Time Lords that the Rutans must be wiped out before they could open a third front in the War, but this drew the concern of the War Doctor (an incarnation of The Doctor specifically ‘engineered’ to fight in the Time War ("The Night of The Doctor")). Suspicious at why the Rutans would provoke the Time Lords in such a manner, the War Doctor traced the TARDIS that had brought the Rutan to the outpost to Sontar, and was able to talk with his old acquaintance Skole to determine that the raid had been carried out by a Sontaran/Rutan hybrid created by the Sontarans. The War Doctor and Skole realised that the Sontarans intended to use these hybrids to provoke the Time Lords into destroying Ruta III, but The Doctor’s recollection of his previous encounters with the Rutan/Sontaran hybrids led him to realise that the Rutan hybrids would be created by analysing the Sontaran hybrids taken from the Giant’s Causeway, which had been created through the Sontarans’ analysis of the Rutan hybrids on Taxodon… which meant the hybrids were the product of a bootstrap paradox creating itself. While the Time Lords would use an anomaly cage ("The Two Masters") to stop the paradox of erasing Ruta III having an effect on the wider universe, the accompanying bootstrap paradox would make the paradox so complex that the anomaly cage couldn’t contain it, potentially destroying the universe. While Skole kept the hybrids occupied (including the hybrid that had replaced Blaxill), The Doctor set off the planned temporal destructor intended for use on Ruta III in orbit around the planet, destroying the fleet carrying the hybrids. This destruction erased the hybrids from history on a larger scale, but the War Doctor was able to use the anomaly cage to preserve his own encounters with the hybrids so that he would still remember what had to be done to stop the paradox of their creation destroying the universe.
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The Sontaran Games
(Jacqueline Rayner) |
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Once the Time War had concluded, the Tenth
Doctor had a particularly significant encounter
with the Rutans when visiting the British Academy of Sporting
Excellence, training elite athletes for the Globe Games, prompted
to investigate reports of the recent strange deaths of some
of the academy’s students ("The
Sontaran Games").
Witnessing Sontarans in the corridors while examining the
dead students - swiftly determining that the victims had been
killed by electrocution -, The Doctor and his allies were
trapped in the Academy when the Sontarans surrounded the building
with a force field while also electrifying the TARDIS to prevent
The Doctor escaping. While The Doctor was forced to compete
against the humans in various sporting events in an outside
arena, his new friend Emma was able to disable the force field
that the Sontarans had erected to keep the javelins, hammers
and discuses away from the humans, allowing the humans to
kill their enemies. Although The Doctor deduced that ‘Emma’ was
really a Rutan who had killed the real Emma to take her place
and trigger a diplomatic incident at the Games, he gave her
the option of travelling with him after he realised that she
had shown concern for the other athletes at the Academy when
she hadn’t needed to do so, but an attack by the injured
General Stenx resulted in the two enemies destroying each
other before The Doctor could learn what Emma’s answer
would have been.
The Eleventh Doctor found himself facing the Rutans and the
Sontarans simultaneously when he arrived on Earth in 1605,
shortly before the events of the infamous Gunpowder Plot of
November 5th ("The Gunpowder Plot"), tracking a
sub-temporal distress beacon being broadcast by a Rutan ship
that the TARDIS had briefly collided with while leaving thirteenth-century
Japan. With dimensional lesions being created around London
due to the proximity of the TARDIS and the alien ship, The
Doctor sent Amy and Rory to try to find the crashed ship while
he worked on repairing the lesions, only for the Ponds to
discover that they were underneath the Houses of Parliament
as the Gunpowder Plot was being plotted, Rory noting the anomaly
of female conspirator Lady Winters. Amy’s subsequent
attempt to follow Lady Winters quickly revealed her identity
as a Rutan, Amy only being saved when The Doctor’s attempt
to close a lesion instead shifted it to open close to Amy
and ‘Lady Winters’ as she reverted to her true
shape, allowing The Doctor to travel through the lesion in
time to disorientate the Rutan with the sonic screwdriver
and force her to flee. While Amy searched for Lady Winters
and The Doctor attended to the other dimensional lesions,
Rory discovered a Sontaran battle squadron searching for the crashed Rutan ship, prompting him to find Amy to help him search for the ship. As The Doctor confronted Lady Winters, he confirmed that she was participating in the Plot to release her spaceship from its location underneath Parliament, just as Amy and Rory located the ship in question. Learning that the Rutan ship carried two genetic bombs that could each wipe the Sontaran race from
existence - although they could also be reprogrammed for use
against other races -, The Doctor was able to use the lesions
to temporarily teleport Parliament into Earth’s atmosphere
to escape the explosion while allowing the Rutans to take
off, but then discovered that the bomb was still in Parliament,
forcing him to return to Parliament and find both weapons.
Having reprogrammed one bomb to be a dud, The Doctor gave
one bomb to each side, noting that they could never use the
bombs as they might be triggering the destruction of their
own species.
Even without encountering the Rutans directly, The Doctor
has found himself facing the consequences of some of their
plans against the Sontarans. On one occasion, the Fifth Doctor
was forced to help the Sontarans against a Rutan creation
known as the ‘Witch Guard’ which absorbed Sontarans
into itself to grow, only being destroyed when a Sontaran
marshal took his suicide pills before allowing the Witch Guard
to consume him, killing both himself and the creature ("Heroes
of Sontar"). On another occasion, the Tenth Doctor
discovered that the Rutans had attempted to sabotage the Sontaran
conquest
of Earth ("The
Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky")
by seeding plant spores around Saturn that would infect the
Sontaran clones and turn them into hosts for young Rutans,
only for the plan to fall apart when The Doctor defeated the
Sontarans, leaving the spores on Saturn until Earth colonised
some of the planet’s moons. Although the spores infected
the human colonists during a local flower show, The Doctor
was able to ‘starve’ the spores out of the humans
after realising that they needed ammonia to exist when one
died after the host was exposed to the TARDIS’s air-filtered
atmosphere, inspiring The Doctor to program the colony’s
own air-filtration system to remove the ammonia ("The
Taking of Chelsea 426"). One trip to Victorian England
even saw the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith dealing with
a plot to manipulate human genetics using a Rutan healing salve, recovered from a crashed Rutan ship, to merge genetic samples and create a superior ‘slave race’ that could do tasks humans couldn’t, such
as laying underwater cables, The Doctor and Sarah thwarting
the plot with the aid of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle - the physician
of a ship that had docked in the area and had been called
in to examine the bodies of the creatures' victims - and a
teenage Rudyard Kipling, The Doctor taking the merchildren
created by the experiment to a new world where they could
live their lives in peace after their creator had been defeated
("Evolution"). |