“‘Ha! Ha!’ said the Clone.”

The Sontarans are a clone species. Every fan knows that. But when did we find it out? When did the idea become textual?1 Well, on meeting Sarah Jane Smith in The Time Warrior (1973/4) Commander Linx immediately denied that Sontarans had “a primary and secondary reproductive cycle” and explained, albeit not in so many words, that all Sontarans were all coded and identified as being masculine2. But he didn’t say they were clones. He also later told Irongron that the Sontaran Military Academy had “hatchings of a million cadets at each muster parade!”

But that doesn’t have to mean Sontarans are clones. They could, for example, be hatching from eggs. From those first four episodes we know Sontarans’ muscles are designed for load bearing, and that they come from a high gravity planet, but not that they are clones.

Seven stories and thousands of years later, Sarah met another Sontaran. She assumed he was Linx, calling them “identical”. While this suggests the clone idea was firmly in the production office’s mind )unsurprisingly given that The Time Warrior writer and Sontaran creator Robert Holmes was now the series’ Script Editor), the thing is, they weren’t. Identical, I mean. Field Major Styre had five fingers. Linx had three. Styre’s face was wider, and its flesh a different tone. This was because Styre had the same costume3, but not the same mask / make up as Linx. Reportedly to make wearing it easier on Kevin Lindsay, the actor who played both, who had health issues.