Pureblood (comic story)

Pureblood was a four-part Seventh Doctor comic story published around the 1992-1993 holiday season. It showed "ancient", non-cloned Sontarans, gave readers a rationale for why the Sontarans evolved into a clone race, and also served as a prequel to The Sontaran Experiment.

It continued the then-close ties the Doctor Who Magazine comic stories were trying to forge with the Virgin New Adventures books by introducing Benny into the strip. While those fans who had never read a New Adventures book might have been completely confused by the sudden replacement of Benny for Ace, those who had been dutifully following along would have picked up on a number of continuity beats between the two ranges.

The story contained some of the earliest visual depictions of Benny. Penciller Colin Howard's interpretation long predated either Lisa Bowerman or Adrian Salmon's involvement with the character, leading to a Benny quite dissimilar to the "Big Finish Benny".

Summary
Sontara, the home world of the Sontarans is about to fall.

Their mortal enemies, the Rutans, are the apparent cause of their demise, but Marshal Stave and his men have little time to analyse the situation. They have only enough time to load the racepool into his flagship, the Warburg, and get into the comparative safety of space. The ship narrowly escapes as Sontara explodes.

Elsewhere in the galaxy, the Seventh Doctor and his new companion, Bernice "Benny" Summerfield, arrive on the orbital genetics laboratory called Pandora Spindle. Though owned by the Lauren Corporation, it's affiliated with the Terran Federation, if only because its crew are dominantly human.

No sooner have they surprised one of these humans than Pandora is attacked and occupied by a Sontaran assault force. The Sontarans want to turn the world the humans are researching into a new homeworld. However, a Rutan spy who had been masquerading as the human Modine contacts the Host's allies - Pureblood Sontarans who see the clones as weak and impure.

The Doctor is forced to forge a peace between these two groups who know nothing but warfare and a mutual hatred, because the Rutans are coming and they plan on wiping out every trace of Sontarans, Purebloods and Clones alike.

Characters

 * Seventh Doctor
 * Bernice Summerfield
 * Sontarans
 * Marshal Stave
 * Major Brel
 * Ganx
 * Geneticist Denx
 * Private Tryve
 * Pureblood Sontarans
 * Vord
 * Chief Lora
 * Dona
 * Rutan Host
 * Modine

Production error

 * Unusually, the story contains a glaring editorial error. At the top of part one, the opening narration establishes that it's the 26th century. Part two's opener, though, says it's the 25th century. Which is right?  Part one.  Not only does it tell the century, but it gives corroboration: it renames the 26th century as the time when "the Second Dalek War has ravaged the stars". Since Frontier in Space and other stories set during the time of the Second Dalek War also point to the 26th century, it appears as though editor John Freeman dropped the ball on part two.

Continuity

 * Immediately obvious in the script is the overwhelming presence of the word cruk, a swear word Paul Cornell had gifted to Benny in her very first story. As a percentage of total word count, this story is likely the "sweatiest" in the history of Doctor Who across all media.
 * Benny mentions Heaven, the planet on which the Doctor first encountered her.
 * The Doctor says that she's just joined her crew, indicating the story can't be too far gone from Love and War.