Thin Ice

Chapter the 281st, has all the frost of the fair.

Plot:
London, 1814. The Doctor and Bill visit the final great Frost Fair, a festival of amusements held on the icy surface of the frozen Thames. They investigate strange lights that can be seen moving under the ice, and bump into a gang of street urchins who have been paid by a dock worker to drum up interest in the fair. The TARDIS travellers witness one of the gang, Spider, surrounded by the lights, then sucked under the ice to his death. Investigating, including using some ancient underwater suits that the Doctor has in the TARDIS, the two of them find that a massive creature is chained up under the Thames, being fed people like Spider - the lights were pilot fish living in symbiosis with the larger creature, bringing it food. The creature then excretes a substance that can be used as a powerful fuel. This is being collected by wealthy industrialist Lord Sutcliffe. When Sutcliffe is racist towards Bill, the Doctor punches him out, but the two TARDIS travellers don't have the upper hand for long - the dock worker and other Sutcliffe goons tie them up in a tent on the ice next to barrels of explosive. They are set to explode at noon, breaking the ice and plunging all the revellers into the water to feed the creature. The Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver to free them both; Bill and the gang members get people off the ice, and the Doctor moves the explosives below the water, so when Sutcliffe detonates it breaks the creature's bonds and frees it. It swims off, breaking the ice and Sutcliffe falls to his death; everyone else gets to safety. The Doctor forges a will, leaving Sutcliffe's house and fortune to the street gang.

  

Context:

Watched unaccompanied, from the BBC iplayer. I didn't get the Blu-ray disc down from the shelf as I am still working my way through the season 20 Blu-ray box set, and wanted to leave the Terminus (I'm up to Terminus now!) disc in the slot to better pick up from when I left off later. Is it just me? There are so many extras on these sets, I can't keep up with them unless I work my way through them linearly. Anyway, this was on a day in late October 2023, and it gave me an opportunity to remind myself about using iplayer in preparation for November 1st 2023 when a lot of Doctor Who content is landing on the platform. From the way it was trailed, I'm thinking there will be some interesting material on there that even a completist fan like me won't have seen. Aren't we fans lucky to be getting all this stuff in the anniversary year?!

Milestone watch: This completes another season of Doctor Who for the blog, the first Peter Capaldi series I've managed to complete, and the fifth new series run altogether (after David Tennant's series 2, Matt Smith's series 6 and Jodie Whittaker's series 11 and 13). It is 16th done out of a current, at the time of writing, total of 39 (the classic seasons 3, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25 also having been completed). As I also have covered the festive special Twice Upon a Time featuring Bill, this means I have completed all her stories now.

First Time Round:

The whole family (me, the Better Half and our three children) watched this go out live on BBC1 on the 29th April 2017, the Saturday of a bank holiday weekend. The BH had became tired of Doctor Who the previous year and hadn't watched all the stories, but showrunner Steven Moffat's soft reboot with the introduction of the character of Bill tempted her back. To me, the stories of 2017 do seem fresher and more engaging than the stories of 2015 and the story of 2016, and a lot of that is to do with Pearl Mackie's inclusion as Bill Potts shaking up the dynamic. It somewhat mirrors the situation approaching November 2023. The BH is pretty cold on the Doctor Who stories of recent years (she still hasn't seen any of Flux, for example), but I have a feeling that Tennant and Tate being in the 60th anniversary specials might just bring her back.  

Reaction:

Watching the stories of collected Who in random order occasionally throws up something surprising. It's often that a story one looked forward to turns out to be disappointing on this current watch. How gratifying it is, then, when it's the other way round. I can't remember the last time I watched Thin Ice, but it was certainly at least a couple of years ago, and it is fantastic. It's tucked away at the beginning of the season, but not quite the very beginning, in its unassuming way, perhaps overshadowed by the opening and closing episodes and the trilogy of linked stories in the middle; having just watched it, though, I think it's one of the best stories of the year. A lot of this comes down to the chemistry between the two leads, who are both working hard but making it look effortless. Peter Capaldi as the Doctor is leaning into the slightly tweaked role in this season as a teacher, with Pearl Mackie as his student. This gives her character free reign to fulfill the brief of someone to ask the awkward and interesting questions; Mackie gives the character such charm, warmth and vulnerability that this never becomes irritating. Even if it was ever going to edge towards that, Capaldi's gentle sarcasm (toned down from previous years, but still a part of the character) would cut through that. There's a great sequence early on where Bill, on her first trip back in time, is wondering about how to avoid changing history, and the Doctor winds her - and the audience? - up that they've been accompanied up until that point by someone called Pete, a friend of Bill's that must have stepped on a butterfly or similar and wiped himself out.

The dialogue from writer Sarah Dollard positively sings throughout the running time, but it's particularly good at the start when the two leads are just hanging out together having fun and exchanging lines like the following - Bill: "So the Tardis has dresses and likes a bit of trouble? Yeah, I think I'm low-key in love with her"; Doctor: "Me too". The two characters were allowed a bit more time to interact in the last story Smile too, all part of Steven Moffat's 'repiloting' to introduce the show fresh to the newbies tuning in for the first time. Unlike in that story, though, there's a greater sense of urgency here because a loose plot thread from the story proper is made visible, with Bill seeing mysterious lights below the ice. There's also a nice touch that the Doctor, who she's tried to alert to what she's seen several times, is way ahead of her and lets her know this in an offhand way with an "I assumed we'd get to work eventually". The rest of the plot is straightforward but carefully constructed. Thin Ice, unlike Smile and the story before that The Pilot where the menace was from forces that were misunderstood or misunderstanding, has an honest-to-badness villain in the contemptible Lord Sutclifffe. Playing him, Nicholas Burns has very little screen-time, but it's not a character anyone who's seen the story is likely to forget. Obviously, the series normally treats the mores of the past and the morality of navigating them carefully, and it usually promotes non-violent solutions. There's nonetheless something satisfying about watching the Doctor punch a racist.

There's a good marriage of plot to place and time - Sutcliffe's plan involves more people being on the Thames than usual, hence the fair, and it allows him the rationalisation that people are aware of the dangers of walking on the ice, but take the risk anyway. The creature under the water affects the temperature, meaning that when it is free the Thames will no longer ice over, so this is destined to be the last ever fair. The baddie being the owner of a dark, satanic mill is on point for 1814 too. The inclusion of a gang of ragamuffin street kids feels a bit more Dickensian than Regency (you do expect them to burst into Food Glorious Food at points), but I've no doubt its historically accurate that there were such kids out there at that point. Their inclusion gives the Doctor and Bill people who are vulnerable to protect, and also gives rise to a great scene. Bill sees Spider go under the ice, the first person she's ever seen die, and argues with the Doctor about his lack of emotion over such things. In a few minutes, Mackie gets to run the gamut of emotions, and it's great to watch. The ending is a dilemma similar to scenarios seen before in Doctor Who stories with giant creatures (Kill The Moon, say, or The Beast Below): risk freeing the creature which might put more people in danger or leave things as they are. It's handled with economy compared to those other stories that tended to take too long over explaining things. Thin Ice is more effective for keeping things brisk. This story has it all: thrills and jokes, an elephant and a wresting match - what more do you want?!

Connectivity:

Both Thin Ice and The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit feature the Doctor accompanied by one other person travelling down below a planet's surface while wearing a special suit, then discovering an over-sized creature there.

Deeper Thoughts:

Never cruel or cowardly or carnivorous?! Should the Doctor be a vegetarian? Thin Ice's plot touching on ideas about the exploitation of animals and the value placed on all life suggests this question, which comes up periodically in fan analyses over the years. It's difficult to track with accuracy the Doctor's relationship to food; we're talking about a science fantasy adventure show, so scenes of people eating are few and far between and don't normally have too much of a fuss made of them relative to the rest of the narrative. Right at the beginning, though, we can be reasonably sure that - in his own gaff at least - the Doctor has a meat-free diet. The TARDIS food machine is introduced in the second ever story The Daleks and according to the Doctor synthesises food in blocks blending flavours "like primary colours... you blend two to achieve a third". We don't see the raw materials the machine has fed into it, mind; it could be forming the dispensed food bars out of mashed up guinea pigs for all we know. Assuming that they're either vegetable or mineral, though, we can see - at least when he's in his mobile home - the Doctor isn't eating animals. At this stage, though, he's an explorer who visits various different times, without being able to fully control his ship. He also often spends extended periods separated from the TARDIS in historical periods, and has to go native. As such, logistics probably precluded any strictness about dietary requirements. If he had to eat meat in the Cave of Skulls in his first televised adventure, or when travelling with Marco Polo's caravan for many months, or when staying at a villa in The Romans, then it was not entirely through choice.

The second Doctor enthusiastically tucks into plates of seafood in The Underwater Menace with no qualms, but for later Doctors there isn't as much on screen confirmation one way or another. None of them are vegans, seemingly. The third Doctor's happy to tuck into cheese when guarding Sir Reginald Styles's mansion from ghosts, and the fourth definitely consumed a lot of gelatin in the form of jelly babies over the years. The events at the end of The Two Doctors would tend to suggest that he hasn't been a vegetarian before his sixth incarnation, as he makes something of a big deal about changing his ways at that point. At the start of the story, he's fishing and waxing lyrical about recipes for preparing his anticipated catch. After having to deal with the machinations of a race of aliens that treated humans as food animals, though, he gets some perspective and tells companion Peri that "From now on it's a healthy vegetarian diet for both of us". There's a reference a couple of stories later to the Doctor making nut roast (the quintessential 1980s vegetarian dish, at least in the popular imagination of the time) so he clearly stuck to it for a while. He's seen during the second segment of the Trial of a Timelord to eat fish, but that could be falsified evidence, or it could just be that the Doctor was acting out of character after being 'mindwarped'. For the rest of the classic series, there's again nothing depicted that would confirm things either way. Extended universe texts in the 'wilderness years', though, suggested the Doctor had remained a vegetarian (and confirmed a lot of other characters seen in the classic series were veggie too, like Jo Grant and Mel Bush).

The situation had definitely changed for Christopher Eccleston's Doctor, as in Boom Town he ebulliently orders steak and chips. I haven't heard the interview, but Russell T Davies reportedly said in a podcast that this was a deliberate choice to make the Doctor more relatable to an audience. I'm not sure I agree that vegetarians aren't relatable (I'm married to one, after all), but he was the boss; so, those who were following the bigger story had to accept that the Doctor had lapsed. A possible reason came in Matt Smith's first story The Eleventh Hour. The newly regenerated Doctor - while trying lots of different foods in little Amelia's kitchen, including bacon and fish fingers - explains that every time he changes, his tastebuds do too. Most who hoped for a plant-diet Doctor, though, thought he should take the decision because of morality rather than taste. The twelfth Doctor talked a good game, admonishing Clara in Deep Breath when she mentally separated slaughterhouse from restaurant: "You weren't vegetarian the last time I checked". He was pointing out that the actions of the Half-faced man killing creatures for survival wasn't so different from eating animals. In World Enough and Time, he tells Bill that her bacon sandwich "had a mummy and a daddy". Yet, he appears to be enthusiastic about eating meat in Thin Ice earlier in the season. Is it enough to be aware of morality but not change one's actions? Something to chew over there. Doctor Who stories by Russell T Davies are just about to return to TV at the time of writing. Will the Doctor be on the steak and chips again, or has what is relatable to an audience changed in the two decades, give or take, since the Doctor was eating out in Cardiff? Will food just not be mentioned at all? We'll find out soon.

In Summary:

Cracking!