The Snowmen

Chapter the 287th, where it's Snow Joke for the Doctor and Clara at Christmas...

Plot:
London, England 1892. Disillusioned after losing the Ponds to the Weeping Angels (though they did get to die of old age, so that's alright then!), the Doctor is hiding out in the TARDIS on top of a cloud reached by an invisible spiral staircase (yes, really). Vastra, Jenny and Strax are trying to engage him in helping people again, but he's resisting futilely. He meets a governess and sometime barmaid Clara Oswald, while investigating telepathic alien snow that can form itself into killer snowmen. The head of the G.I. institute Doctor Simeon has had a telepathic link with the snow since he was a child, and now is aiming to make the intelligence corporeal. To achieve this, he needs the icy body print of a human that exists at Clara's employer Captain Latimer's house, as the previous governess a year earlier drowned in a pond that then froze over. Snowmen surround the house, and the ice governess comes to life, but Clara protects her charges (a young girl and boy). The Doctor, and then Vastra, Jenny and Strax arrive to help out.

The Doctor and Clara lead the ice governess to the top of the house, then both escape up the invisible staircase to the TARDIS, where the Doctor believes the governess will not be able to follow. Just as he's inviting Clara to travel with him in the TARDIS, the governess arrives, and pulls at Clara and they both fall down to Earth. The governess is smashed to smithereens, and Clara is mortally wounded. The Doctor brings her in to the Latimer house where the others try to save her, while he goes to confront Simeon. With a nice little bit of the old Doctor flim-flam, he manages to wipe Simeon's memory, but instead of removing the link to the snow, it allows the snow to animate the blank Simeon. Suddenly, though, it starts to rain, the snow melts, and Simeon collapses. The telepathic signal caused by the Latimer children crying has created rain, and they are crying because Clara has died. In the aftermath, the Doctor realises that the G.I. in the institute's name stands for Great Intelligence, so maybe the disembodied force behind the snowmen might have survived. He also realises Clara is someone he's now met twice and both times she has died, He goes off into time and space to investigate that mystery.

Context:

Watched on a Sunday afternoon in the lead up to Christmas 2023, accompanied by the eldest and youngest child (boy of 17, girl of 11). The Better Half and middle child (boy of 14) were elsewhere in the house rewatching Good Omens season one, the David Tennant-loving genre traitors! I watched from the BBC iplayer, rather than bothering to get the Blu-ray set down from the shelf.  

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. The Snowmen is the final (at time of writing) new series Christmas Day special to be covered. There was a good run of these from The Christmas Invasion in 2005 to Twice Upon a Time in 2017. After that, the Who festive specials moved to January 1st and didn't look like they were ever going to come back to December 25th. Missing them, I decided then to hold back a few of the older ones, exempting them from selection during the rest of the year, to blog about annually - but in a random order, natch - just before the big day. Luckily, now that I've run the old ones out, Doctor Who is back on Christmas Day again from 2023 onwards. Exciting!

First Time Round:

I can't remember much about Christmas 2012. My In-Laws were round during the day, and the youngest's first Christmas was a bit rubbish as she was ill with an ear infection, poor thing. I definitely watched The Snowmen on the day, probably time-shifted a little into the evening as its 5:15pm broadcast time would still have been a bit busy in the house.  The only clear memory in my head from around this time is reading the Christmas Radio Times listings magazine, which introduced Jenna Coleman as the new companion Clara. I'm struggling to remember whether it had leaked that she wasn't the real Clara, and that this was to a certain extent misdirection with the Victorian Clara dying during the special. (Like in many a show since it was done - spoiler alert for old telly - by Spooks in the UK, writer Steven Moffat is pulling the trick of introducing someone who appears to be a regular and therefore plot-armoured, but then killing them off as a surprise.) I don't think I had heard anything about this, so when reading about Clara I would have thought that she was to be a Victorian in the TARDIS, and I probably thought that wasn't the greatest idea.

Reaction:

When The Church on Ruby Road is shown on the 25th December 2023, it will make it fourteen specials in total for the new Doctor Who broadcast on BBC1 on the big day. It's rare for something that isn't a light entertainment show, soap or monarch's message to rack up such numbers. Fourteen specials is equal with Only Fools and Horses's total (the popular sit-com being something of a benchmark for festive ubiquity). As OFAH's writer John Sullivan found earlier (the most popular Only Fools Christmas special is set around August Bank Holiday weekend), it's hard to keep coming up with ideas that feature significant festive trimmings. The Snowmen marks the point that Moffat pretty much gives up, and - with the exception of the cracked / genius / both idea to include Santa Claus in a Doctor Who story a couple of years later - all of his Christmas specials from this one onwards barely feature any festivities, and could be set at any time of the year. That's fair enough, as it is a hard ask of anyone, and there would have been diminishing returns in sticking with killer tinsel monsters, or whatever, year on year. The Snowmen is at least wintery, and the central idea of semi-sentient carnivorous snow telepathically connected to a formless intelligence is an interesting one. The visuals pop, whether it's deep and crisp and even backdrops to dialogue scenes, or the moments where razor-toothed snowmen form instantly, or of Simeon using a machine to create an artificial blizzard in the Latimer house.

The title makes it seem like this is the third and final one of a series of Moffat Christmas specials loosely based on literary texts associated with the season, following the use of A Christmas Carol and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe the previous two years. Was The Snowmen in any way alluding to Raymond Briggs's The Snowman singular, the animated short film of which has been a festive fixture on UK channel 4 for decades. There is a sequence where the Doctor and Clara are literally walking in the air (the refrain of the famous song featured in The Snowman) so it's possible. It could, though, just be a coincidence. My money's on the latter, as Moffat seems to be much more interested in riffing on texts that are closer to home, creating an origin story for a classic monster from the early days of the show - the Great Intelligence. As would be expected of the writer, it's very clever: in one short programme with a few other things going on, the Doctor accidentally gives freedom and agency to the floating snow intelligence, as well as giving it the ideas for its first two battles with him in his Patrick Troughton persona (The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear). This is summed up in some slightly glib but funny (for a long-term fan) dialogue shared between Vastra, Jenny and the Doctor towards the end - a wink to the audience. Of course, this means that the defeat the alien invasion plot is not resolved during the special. The Great Intelligence will turn out to be the Big Bad of the episodes broadcast in Spring the following year.

One might think, and I agree, that the defeat the alien invasion plot is not the main point of The Snowmen. The real story is about the introduction of Clara. Jenna Coleman is perfect in her first appearance (well, sort-of, she had an unexpected teaser appearance earlier in 2012, but this is the first time she's properly interacted with the Doctor). She's sassy, assertive, cheeky, brave, clever; the character clearly passes the audition, for Doctor and for audience alike. But it's all misdirection: this Clara dies, and the Doctor then realises it's the same person as he talked to in the Dalek asylum. There's a mystery to solve and - perhaps - a prime Clara to find somewhere in the universe. So, again, the plot is unresolved and leads in to the episodes the following Spring. With The Snowmen being all so much set-up, how does it manage to engage the perhaps more flighty Christmas day audience? Maybe a lot of people watching don't care about the resolution of plot arcs - they'll either be watching in 2013 anyway, in which case they'll find out how things pan out, or they won't, so they won't care. They are rewarded during their hour's worth of Yuletide attention with comedy at least, and that might well be enough to get them through it. This is one of those Doctor Who stories blessed with more than its fair share of funny lines, and a lot of them are thanks to Dan Starkey's performance as Strax. The combination of his delivery and the material Moffat provides him is a winning combination (that the show would regularly milk over the next couple of years). The memory worm scene alone justifies the entire episode. In fact, even if the other 59 minutes and 50 seconds were fuzz and white noise, it would be worth it just for the line "Do not discuss my reproductive cycle in front of enemy girls."

  

Starkey is not the only one delivering; everybody's giving it their all. Richard E. Grant is as good as you'd expect as a restrained baddie, Neve Mackintosh as Vastra and Catrin Stewart as Jenny are not going to let the Sontaran have all the fun ("I'm a lizard woman from the dawn of time, and this is my wife"), Tom Ward and Liz White are memorably great too, without a huge amount of screen time. Murray Gold's music is sublime, there are some great set piece sequences like the interrogation scene where Vastra makes Clara form her answers as a single word only. There's a nice new beginning title sequence with Matt Smith's face appearing (for old times sake as the 50th anniversary approached); there's a wonderful new TARDIS control room set (possibly the best ever since 2005). As every parent knows, some years you can't find one big, perfect present for a child, and you have to instead give them lots of little things. The Snowmen is like that, a stocking full of individual, small pleasures rather than one solid plot. Sometimes, that's enough. If you stuff every gift you can think of into a stocking,  inevitably not everything will be liked. I didn't like Clara forcing a kiss on the Doctor without consent, and I didn't like the Doctor's borderline bullying of Strax, making many disparaging comments about his appearance. I don't think those moments would be handled in the same way if this story was made today.

Connectivity:

Both The Snowmen and The Ultimate Adventure feature the Doctor meeting a new female companion who works in an establishment that serves drinks. Both stories also see the Doctor with a cute alien sidekick (Zog, Strax).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Year of the Whoniverse. In the approach to Christmas Day, it's appropriate to look back on the year just gone. The biggest part of Doctor Who in 2023 will be forgotten, maybe already is forgotten, and that was a long wait. The longest period ever between new episodes on television since the programme returned in 2005 elapsed between the Power of the Doctor in October 2022 and The Star Beast in November 2023. The stretch of time was a miniature version of the so-called wilderness years between the classic and the new series, and like those years it didn't exactly live up to the name, not being particularly barren. For a start, there was excitingly new Doctor Who being made. There were frequent press releases throughout the year announcing new guest stars, or featuring photographs of the new main stars of the show Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson in different outfits (the wardrobe budget certainly seems to have been expanded with the influx of Disney+ money). I don't think there's ever before in its 60 year history been a period when Doctor Who has had so much in the can ahead of broadcast. All of Gatwa's first season has completed production and is into post before a single story of his has been shown. At the time of writing in December 2023, his 2024 Christmas special is being shot before his 2023 Christmas special has aired. After having two years on the trot with only a few specials, an effort's clearly being made to ensure in future there will be a regular season and special broadcast annually, without gap years.

There's also lots of delicious rumours of spin-offs that might well be entertaining us between seasons. A little taste of that was the Tales of the TARDIS series of shorts that landed on the BBC iplayer at the start of November 2023, but I'd be surprised if there weren't plans for bigger things in 2024. Those Tales of the TARDIS were the start of a flood of new stuff from the start of November that helped fans forget being patient for the first ten months of the year. There was an exclusive new scene for Children in Need for the first time in simply ages, and there was a colourised and re-edited version of classic story The Daleks. Again, it's been confirmed that another such programme will be coming in the next year. The main event for the anniversary, though, was a trio of specials featuring David Tennant and Catherine Tate. For me, these were perfect, and I don't think I'm alone in that view. The only sane negatives I've seen were more to do with people's expectations than the stories themselves. For most viewers, getting David Tennant and Catherine Tate back was nostalgia and celebration enough, but some fans were expecting many more returning elements from the show's history. Secrecy about the nature of middle story Wild Blue Yonder, as by its minimalist nature it didn't have much to use for pre-publicity that wasn't a spoiler, led to wild theories online about appearances from Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi and such. Instead, what we got were more leftfield choices exploring the nooks and crannies of Who history, which were ultimately more celebratory.

One might think the past of the programme had been mined to exhaustion, but adapting a plot from the early years of Doctor Who Magazine, or bringing back a well-remembered one-off foe from decades before, proved that to be false. The Meep and Neil Patrick Harris's Toymaker left me wanting more, as did Tennant and Tate themselves (on particularly good form with the material they got to play in Wild Blue Yonder). I'd love to see any or all of them back, but - as Ncuti's appearance at the end of The Giggle underlined - it's all about the future now. The tantalising glimpses seen so far of Ncuti's first stories haven't included any hints of returning monsters as yet, so it may be a clean slate, Who knows. Another way of experiencing the past of Doctor Who, and another thing keeping fans entertained for the first 10 months of the year, were the releases on Blu-ray and DVD. There were another two seasons of 20th century stories released on Collection Blu-ray boxsets, season 9 (Jon Pertwee's third run) in March and season 20 (Peter Davison's second, including no less than three different versions of 20th anniversary tale The Five Doctors) in September. The most surprising release was an animated The Underwater Menace in November, when last year the animation range had seemed like it was dead. It was an enjoyable version, but was probably overshadowed by everything else going on in November. I look forward to seeing the next one (confirmed during the BFI panel for the release as being lined up - see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Tenth Planet post for more details).

The year for the blog has seen 35 stories written up. I will endeavour to get The Church on Ruby Road blogged by New Year's Eve '23 too, which will mean 36 in total, three a month, which is generally the rate I maintain every year. Of these, there was a slight weighting in favour of new series stories. For the classic series Doctors, I watched three William Hartnell stories (one wholly intact, one wholly missing, and one mix of episodes and animation to plug gaps), two Patrick Troughtons (one wholly intact, one wholly missing), three each for Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, one each for Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy (though I also snuck in a post about a stage play recording also starring Colin). For the new series, one story only for Christopher Eccleston, four for Matt Smith (though he did additionally feature briefly in a spin-off that I blogged this year too), four for Peter Capaldi, and three for Jodie Whittaker. Winning out over everyone - it really was his year - was David Tennant with seven stories. Four of these were standard stories from his original TV run from 2005 to 2010, two were animated stories shown in that same period, and one was a 2023 60th anniversary special where he returned as the 14th Doctor. No other Doctor before (or between) Tennant is adding to their total anymore; with dwindling supplies of stories to cover, I will likely run out by the end of next year, even taking into consideration the nine stories starring Ncuti Gatwa to be broadcast that year. I may well branch out and look at some more spin-offs. If you find me blogging The Airzone Solution in 2024, you'll know why (and, needless to say, apologies in advance). All that's to come in the new year, so for now all there is to say is Merry Christmas!  

In Summary:

Incidentally, a Happy and Snowy Christmas to all of you at home.