Character Highlight: Strax

For me personally, Strax has had the rawest deal of the Paternoster gang, and that’s because he’s had the biggest character reboot this side of Clara.  Unfortunately, unlike Clara 1.0, Strax had a fairly well-defined character that I really enjoyed in his initial appearance, so I don’t see why there was such a need to rewrite him into the far less interesting (to me) figure he is now.  Today’s post looks at both versions of the character (Strax-related spoilers.)

The Strax we meet in “A Good Man Goes to War?”  I love.  The idea of a Sontaran warrior being forced to serve as a nurse (as a penace, to “restore the order of [his] clone batch,” doncha know?) is just a great concept.  Healing and caretaking is so antithetical to the Sontarans’ typical M.O., and since Strax is still a Sontaran warrior at heart, it gives us great scenes like the one where he provides dedicated care for a human patient and, upon parting, cheerfully hopes to kill him on the battlefield one day.  Preservation of life mixed with bloodthirstiness, violent threats made with a smile and a polite tone – that contrast is terrific.  (To be fair, this version of Strax isn’t uniformly awesome.  I know that some of the comedy here is mined from the juxtaposition of the manly-man Sontaran doing nurturing/“womanly” things.  Overall, though, this is minor compared to some of the unpleasant “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”-esque lines that have cropped up on the show in recent years, and I’m not very bothered by it.)

This was an excellent Strax.  Entertaining, creative, and interesting.  Very competent at both fighting and nursing, and in the end, he provides a surprising bit of poignancy with his observation that he doesn’t enjoy dying in combat as much as he’d always imagined he would (very different character, obviously, but that suddenly makes me think of Nux and the War Boys in Mad Max:  Fury Road.)  Of course, that right there is part of the problem going forward:  Strax diesat the end of “A Good Man Goes to War.”  It’s a good death:  Strax is a character we’ve grown to like, it shows the cost of the heroes’ actions, and his actual death scene is very well-done.  Now, given that nicely-drawn resolution, clearly the best course of action is to completely undo it and the initial conceit of the character.  Right?

We next see Strax with Vastra and Jenny in “The Snowmen,” and like the rest of the gang, he appears in subsequent Victorian episodes.  So, he’s resettled in Victorian England (we’re not sure why.)  He’s no longer a nurse (we’re not sure why.)  He’s very notably not dead (we’re told in a throwaway line that someone “brought him back to life” but given no idea of how – or, for that matter, why this isn’t a much bigger deal.)  He seems a great deal less intelligent and more noticeably “dumb whacky sidekick with scissor grenades” (it’s speculated that some of his brain cells didn’t make it back from the after life, but again, there’s no indication of why, or of why this was deemed a good idea by the writers.)  For all the resemblance he bears to the Strax from “A Good Man Goes to War,” he might as well be an entirely different Sontaran.  Given the race’s clone means of proliferation, such a move wouldn’t have even required getting a different actor; besides, Neve McIntosh has played three separate Silurians on the show, and they’re not even clones!  I think the current version of Strax would be easier for me to take if he were a new character.  That way, at least I wouldn’t shake my head and think, “What happened?” whenever I rewatch “A Good Man Goes to War.”