The Ice Warriors

 

Chapter the 306th, Ice Cold in Ealing (and Lime Grove studio D).

Plot:

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in a very cold future Earth.  A drastic fall in carbon dioxide has brought catastrophic climate change, a global cooling. The TARDIS team meet Leader Clent and his crew, who run the nearby base that is just one of many around the world that are going to work together using ionisation to defeat the advancing glaciers of a new ice age. They are having trouble with their ioniser as their expert Penley has left to become a scavenger (an underclass that are not participating in the plans to save the world) and is hiding out with friend Stoor nearby. The Doctor is roped in to replace Penley's expertise. One of the base crew brings back to the base what they believe to be archaeological find from the ice. When defrosted, it is revealed to be Varga, an Ice Warrior, who had crashed there thousands of years before. Varga takes Victoria hostage and goes back to where he was found, digging out his spaceship and reviving his crew of Warriors. The Doctor helps to sort out the ioniser, and the base is ready to go. There's just one complication: the Ice Warrior spaceship's power source will be destroyed when the ioniser is used, and could cause an explosion and fallout. Various different parties go to try to rescue Victoria and find out about the ship's power source. Storr is killed by the Warriors when he attempts to ally himself with them. Varga and his warriors attack the base, but the Doctor uses weaponry from their ship to drive them away. With every surviving human including the TARDIS team back at the base, and the glaciers almost upon them, it comes time to choose. Clent cannot bring himself to take the risk, so Penley makes the decision. The explosion of the Ice Warrior ship is small, only destroying the Warriors, who have returned there. The Earth is safe.

Context:

As I've done almost every year for the blog, I took a Doctor Who story away on holiday with me. The family (Me, the Better Half and our three offspring, boys of 18 and 15, girl of 12) went back to Corralejo, which we'd visited a couple of years earlier (see Deeper Thoughts section below and the blog post for Hell Bent for more details). There are so few Doctor who stories left to blog now that it would be difficult to pick something that tied in to the holiday location as in the past. The Romans is still in the 'To Do' pile and it features the main characters having something of a vacation in a villa; there's The Two Doctors too, with its location filming in Spain. These, though, are my final stories left to blog for the first and sixth Doctors respectively; I wasn't sure whether I was ready to deliberately accelerate goodbyes to those old boys yet. So, I left it to chance. The randomiser picked Patrick Troughton story The Ice Warriors, a story so misaligned to viewing in a warm climate that the incongruity tickled me and the choice was made. I downloaded the episodes to my phone using the iplayer app, parts two and three being officially made animations, and watched an episode every other day while away, the final one watched on the flight home. 

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. This post marks the completion of another season, the 27th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing). In full, these are classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13). Though there are a couple of black and white stories still left to blog after this one, The Ice Warriors marks the final story for the blog with any episodes missing from the archives.

First Time Round:

I borrowed a pirated VHS in the early 1990s (probably from David, long time fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog) that had recordings of some, but maybe not all, of the extant episodes (it can't have been many years after they were recovered in 1988) burned with a timecode. I don't know where they'd been sourced from before several generations of copying from tape to tape had led them to me, and I didn't ask. They were anyway of too low quality for me to follow. So, I properly engaged with the story for the first time when it came out as a sell-through VHS release in November 1998, the range's big release for the end of that year. The Ice Warriors was part of a box-set with a documentary and an orphaned episode of another Troughton story; the missing episodes were reconstructed from the audio and still photographs. Later still, I got the DVD with the two episodes replaced by animations; this was in the Summer of 2013. I took those shiny discs on a holiday that year (a couple of years before the start of the blog) and remember that at that time the youngest, still a babe in arms back then, was in the process of being weaned. There were a few four o' clock in the morning stints of rocking my grizzling wee daughter in my arms, accompanied by the episodes, volume low, on the living room TV of the cottage we'd hired in Shanklin, Isle of Wight. The theme music seemed to soothe her.

Reaction:

Briefly starting with the animation, the recreations of missing episodes two and three, married to the off-air soundtracks that still survive, are perfectly good at bridging the gap, covering narrative developments in the middle of the story. The simple style might have struggled to visualise more kinetic or climactic action, but there isn't much of such action in those two parts or, frankly, in the remainder. The visual design of the Warriors is a highlight, and they are equally as effective in cartoon form, a demonstration of the strength and distinctiveness of the costumes of Varga and the other Martians. They're a little bit unwieldy, but that isn't much of a problem as Varga and the other Martians don't do a whole lot, and certainly not much that's kinetic or climactic. They are an interesting complicating factor in the narrative, but most of their activity is just a lot of walking about. Bernard Bresslaw's performance - the breathy, whispered sss-ibilance that laid the foundations for how the creatures would be played forever after - is great, but it would be pretty much as great just vocally. The other performances are also strong, and it would be a bit of a shame to lose the facial expressions and physical touches, but the one thing that most struck me about the story this watch was that it could function perfectly well as an audio play. It is the least animated of any story that has had all or parts animated. There's only three significant locations (and you could probably lose one of them without too much trouble), and the question of how to defeat the nominal forces of antagonism is answered early on (they like it cold, and the base by necessity has a massive heat gun at its disposal).

What moves and develops in the story is instead at the interpersonal level. For this is a bromance tale, a weird semi-professional (but going beyond the bounds of professionalism in places) interaction between Clent, Penley and the Doctor. Penley has spurned Clent, leaving his important role on the base team to go off into the frozen wilderness; the Doctor is the replacement boffin who turns up and takes Penley's place. Ice Warriors and glaciers take second place for most of the running time to this odd platonic love triangle. Aside from Varga and maybe Storr (Penley's new partner, the exact opposite of Clent) none of the other characters has much of a look in. Victoria spends all her time as prisoner of the Ice Warriors, including a whole episode playing hide and seek with one in ice caves; Jamie spends a few episodes knocked out and then lying down; the other base staff are mainly bit parts and/or sonic cannon fodder. Instead, this is mainly a simple tale of who Clent will end up with, mysterious new man the Doctor, or will he tempt Penley back from the arms of the rugged Stoor, into which he was forced by Clent's uncaring robot heart? Yes, I'm taking the piss but only a bit - the plot never gets quite to homoerotic levels, but it does at times veer towards Mills and Boon. Many of the bases depicted in Patrick Troughton's time have brittle bosses in conflict with their underlings, but it's never normally played so emotionally. A clue might be that Peter Barkworth is playing Clent with a pronounced limp. Reportedly, he unsuccessfully tried to persuade the director to let him give Clent a stutter too. This seems to me to be a talented actor making a dull part more interesting. According to multiple lines of dialogue, Clent is supposed to be a robotic drone, but Barkworth just doesn't play him like that.

It may be that some adjustments in rehearsal meant the intended central dramatic question isn't very clearly delineated, but I don't think it can all be blamed on the actors - the script is contradictory in many places. As will be dwelt on a little more in the Deeper Thoughts section below, The Ice Warriors was being broadcast at the same time as the first run of another 1960s telefantasy classic, The Prisoner. Like the central character of that series, Penley has dropped out of a society that he has found to be dehumanising. Both these shows were reflecting fears / hopes in the wider world of 1967 about "dropping out" and there were no doubt some early-adopter hippies in the UK then attempting to create an alternate lifestyle to the rat race. But Penley has dropped out at a time of international crisis, and is neglecting his essential role in combatting that crisis such that the world is put at risk. His motivation for this is sketchy. Sometimes it seems that he's rejecting the computerised nature of the world; but it stretches credibility that he could have grown to become a scientific expert in this society without having used computers extensively, so what's changed recently (apart from the crisis)? In one telling moment elsewhere, he bemoans Clent using "scientists' craniums as stepping stones for his ambitions". So perhaps his reasons for going were more personal. This also muddles up Clent's characterisation some more - can he be both robotic drone and ambitious user of others? In the technologically advanced society as presented, it's hard to rationalise how there would be scavengers like Storr. The threat of societal collapse may have pushed people to abandon society and technology, but Storr is an expert hunter. Has he learned those skills since the ice age, or did he have them before? It seems like the former, but why and how would such skills be learned in the civilisation as presented?

No skills will be enough to keep Penley and Stoor alive anyway: their lifestyle is shown only to be sustainable if they steal supplies from the society they're denouncing (as seen in a couple of occasions in the story) and in a very short period they and everyone else is going to be frozen to death because Penley has abandoned his post. There's separate scenes where the Doctor and Miss Garrett implore him to come back as he's desperately needed, and Penley stubbornly refuses. He's no hero, and Clent's not exactly a villain either: he's someone with an exemplary record, is shown to care about his team (witness his consoling of Arden when the latter is beating himself up about bringing the frozen warrior to the base), is pretty brave in playing for time when the Warriors invade the base, and always has his focus on the important job at hand. When the crunch moment comes, the decision to be made is whether to go against the computer (which doesn't have enough information to give a decisive instruction) and use the ioniser, even though it risks a nuclear explosion. Dramatically, the logical person to make the final decision is Clent: the influence of Penley and the Doctor convince him to trust his instincts above the data, and he takes the risk, the culmination of the plot linking in to decisive character growth for him. This isn't what happens, alas. Instead Clent can't make the decision and Penley steps in. So, Penley is the ultimate protagonist and his journey is to end up working as the ioniser expert of the base, which was exactly where he started; the drop-out has dropped back in and there's no real character growth at all. At least Clent and Penley are reconciled at the end, sharing a few nice words as well as a hug and a kiss (I may have made some of that up).

A few other points of note: the story has a special title sequence for all the episodes, with some interesting music by Dudley Simpson (including vocal performances - eat your heart out, Murray Gold). The TARDIS materialises on its side, for I think the first time ever in the history of the series, and there are a few chuckles had from the regulars extricating themselves from their mobile home (shame that this orientation is forgotten about by the time of the dematerialisation in episode six). The whole running reference to people being shipped off to Africa as if that's the worst fate imaginable is pretty dodgy. Also dodgy is the dialogue at the end of episode one where Jamie leeringly discusses short skirts and attempts to persuade Victoria to wear one (also a minor continuity error as she has already worn a minidress two stories earlier, with comments arising on the length thereof). The ioniser base is not the only workplace with overfamiliar colleagues: Varga seems to spend the whole of one episode chanting Zondal's name. Troughton has some great bits of business with the Doctor using stink bombs against the Warriors, or using a chemical machine to get himself a drink of water. The sets of the icy areas aren't too bad; the movement of the glacier is effectively sold by sound effects and the actors' conviction. One other personal note: the hotel where me and the family stayed had a foam party in the swimming pool during our stay (it's a weekly occurrence apparently). It was fun for the kids particularly, but it had extra resonance for me: what could fit better with the Troughton era story I'd taken with me than the ubiquitous foam machine. It isn't used in The Ice Warriors (it would be in its sequel story The Seeds of Death and many other stories around this time); you can't get away from it!

A foam machine in Fuerteventura

Connectivity:

Both The Ice Warriors and 73 Yards feature snow, and the TARDIS landing in a cold environment with the Doctor wearing a big coat.

Deeper Thoughts:

Back to Life, Back from Gallifrey. We were away in Corralejo, Fuerteventura for 10 days at the start of August 2024; the weather was hot during those days but it was the UK that we'd left behind that seemed to be on fire. As explored in the Deeper Thoughts section of the post for Hell Bent, which I posted after our holiday there two years ago, somewhere in the dunes and volcanic hills of Fuerteventura is the shooting location for Gallifrey as seen at the end of Heaven Sent and for a lot of Hell Bent. Those episodes, and indeed every reference in Who's long history to the Doctor's relationship with his people, align with the - slightly muddled, see Reaction section above - themes of The Ice Warriors about the freedom of the individual versus the compromises of collectivism. By coincidence, such themes were also prevalent in one of the holiday reads I took with me to enjoy poolside, Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. The book is a thoughtful and sometimes breathtaking overview of recent politics as illuminated by the ongoing situation where Klein gets confused with another writer with a not dissimilar background who has covered similar subject matter to her in the past and shares the same first name: Naomi Wolf. This was a manageable inconvenience for many years, but got more and more difficult for Klein as Wolf delved into more and more extreme conspiracy theories about Covid vaccines. This culminated in Wolf being banned from Twitter in summer 2021, around the time that she was opining that vaccinated people's urine and faeces should be separated from the rest of the general sewage system until the impact of the waste on unvaccinated people through drinking water could be ascertained. She's back on the platform now, having been reinstated when it came under new management.

Klein is generally empathetic towards her namesake throughout the book, believing that conspiracy theories are based on a kernel of real, understandable feeling, but with the response to that feeling wildly misdirected. The book brings back to mind a period one could easily forget. The first time we went to Fuerteventura in 2022, less than two years before this latest visit, we needed to bring proof of vaccination status with us, and spot checks were made as passengers disembarked and made their way to passport control. At the time, we didn't see this in any way as a restriction on our freedom, nor as a scheme by some shadowy cabal of world governments and big pharma corporations to monitor us. On the contrary, it seemed like the important latest step of many collective steps, lockdowns and social distancing and masking, that had to be taken to break the virus's hold on individual freedoms. Unfortunately, a vocal minority felt very differently about the vaccine (and lockdowns and social distancing and masking). Klein eruditely sees that a cultish focus on the individual can come from many places. Unexpectedly, the anti-vax conspiracy was bought into not only by the usual rabble-rousing suspects like Steve Bannon but also a good deal of online wellness and workout influencers who had previously seemed apolitical in their content and outlook. The belief in the power of the individual to shape their own health overpowered everything else, and Klein gives examples of such people making some dodgy statements along the lines of letting the weak go to the wall. If there's one thing that demonstrates more than anything else that healthcare must be a collective and universal endeavour it's surely a pandemic. If everything that happened with Covid-19 didn't manage to convey that message, then I worry about the future of the human race.

The Doctor as lone wolf outside of his society?

I can't get too high and mighty about this of course, because my favourite TV programme, Doctor Who, a programme I've spent nearly ten years documenting, championing its politics and philosophy, has at its heart a character who has rejected his own society and become a lone-wolf individualist. The programme was born in the 1960s, and it's a particularly 60s theme, though still lingering in our collective unconscious many decades later. It's not that simple, though, as the Doctor separated himself from the Time Lords because they weren't interventionalist enough. He champions science, so could never be an anti-vaxxer - he's definitely shown as different to the resolutely anti-science character of Storr in The Ice Warriors, so blinded by his hatred of big science that he's driven to attempt to ally himself with forces that have no interest in his wellbeing. Even the 1960s programme The Prisoner (which, as mentioned above, was first being broadcast at exactly the same time as The Ice Warriors) is not all it seems. It appears to be the epitome of individualist cheerleader, with it's central character's repeated cry of "I am not a number, I am a free man", something one can imagine Penley in The Ice Warriors saying; but, in the final Prisoner episodes (broadcast a few weeks after The Ice Warriors had finished) it's shown that the individual, no matter their achievements on their own, cannot necessarily make significant changes outside of society. The protagonist of the programme is literally shown to be his own worst enemy. If even a genre drama like Doctor Who or The Prisoner is complex, then reality is even more so, and it would be wrong to trust anyone - of any political stripe - that says there are easy answers, or even easy problems. The misinformation keeps on coming, though.

The Prisoner

As well as depicting Gallifrey, Fuerteventura was site of some location filming for the two-part story The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion, earlier in the same season, its - slightly muddled, see Reaction section of the Zygon post - theme being immigration-related paranoia leading to stand-offs and violence. This is another topic covered in Doppelganger, and sadly at the end of July and start of August, while me and the fam were unaware enjoying a holiday many hundreds of miles away, it was re-enacted in cities of the UK. There were riots, initially sparked by one terrible act of violence by an individual. It was another case of feelings misdirected that were stirred up or harnessed by other people acting in bad faith (misinformation online connected the wholly unconnected topic of immigration to a terrible tragedy that was not being treated as any kind of terror incident and whose suspected perpetrator was born in the UK). Again, there was the desire for easy answers to problems: it would be less difficult to believe that these were some kind of anti-immigration protest, rather than an excuse to have a racist riot, if it was clear exactly what the protestors wanted: more budget for quicker processing of arrivals on UK shores? More agreements with France for processing centres on their side of the channel? Or a magic barrier around the country that protects a nation state as defined imprecisely in each individual's own prejudiced head? The story didn't end there, though. Hearteningly, for an overseas observer (the news where we were having caught up), the plan for a rolling wave of violence overreached themself, and the wave collided with a wall of counter protest. A much hyped rally in Brighton ended up with four - four! - 'anti-immigration protestors' versus thousands of anti-racist counter protestors. It made me worry just a little less about the future of the human race.

That's still not the end of the story, though. Doppelganger urges a collectivism within class lines, ignoring distractions like race being pitted against race, to fight against the excesses of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy. I would like to see such a collectivism exist, and I still have hope (even though sometimes it feels like I'll be waiting until the next ice age).

In Summary:

A cool mess, but not without some good points (though they're buried a bit and might need digging out).

The Monster of Peladon

Chapter the 301st, wherein the Miners are revolting!

Plot:
The Doctor makes a return visit to the planet of Peladon with Sarah Jane Smith, 50 years after he was last there. King Peladon's daughter Queen Thalira rules, but she is young and her advisor Chancellor Ortron holds sway. The federation is mining a valuable mineral on the planet to help in the war effort against another galaxy, but the local miners aren't happy. They're even less happy when an apparition of sacred beast Aggedor keeps appearing and killing some of their number. They down tools. The Doctor suspects someone is trying to sabotage the mining, but he is distrusted by Ortron, despite federation ambassador Alpha Centauri vouching for him. When some of the miners go on the attack, the federation's engineer onsite Eckersley persuades Centauri to call in federation troops. Some Ice Warriors appear on the planet, but there's evidence to suggest that they haven't just arrived and were previously in hiding. They are a rogue breakaway group and, along with Eckersley, were engineering the Aggedor attacks in order to take control of the planet; they plan to sell the minerals once mined to the enemies of the federation. The Doctor defeats them using their own combined matter projector / heat ray in the shape of Aggedor. Ortron is killed, and the Doctor recommends that the miners' leader Gebek is made the new chancellor.

Context:

I watched this story as nature (or at least Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks) intended, one episode a week during April and May 2024. I viewed the episodes from the DVD, rather than the iplayer; I don't know why really - habit, perhaps - as it makes no difference in terms of quality. I mean visual quality, of course, not story quality. Story quality is where this tale is generally felt to be lacking: it's six episodes long, and is not known for containing too many engaging moments of narrative or visuals, hence why I avoided watching it in one big lump or even slightly fast-tracked from the weekly frequency for which it was built. When I tried this experiment before, it improved my experience of watching the story (as it did this time) and even left me eager to see the next episode (it didn't quite get to that level for Monster of Peladon, alas).

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. This post marks the completion of another season, the 26th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing). In full, these are classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I first saw this story after it came out of VHS in 1995. It came out a couple of days after Christmas that year, and I would have picked it up at Volume One in Worthing sometime around then. It was rare for a Doctor Who video to have a late December release, for the obvious reason that it could get lost in the post-Yuletide period. The previous time it had taken place (for a couple of tapes at the end of 1993), I remember vividly the excitement of finding something I wasn't expecting in a shop. I don't remember the same thing for The Monster of Peladon VHS, so I might have only got it in the new year. The one thing I can remember is that it came with a free postcard of the tape box's cover art, which had been happening for all the releases for the last few months of 1995. The box set released in November 1995 of The Five Doctors Special Edition paired with the King's Demons, which I received as a Christmas present that year, came with a little album to keep them all in (see First Time Round section of the Five Doctors post). I would have slotted the Monster of Peladon postcard directly into the plastic sheath within the album, and left it there forever after. I'm sure I still have the album, so presumably it's remained there to this day - let me have a look...

Album + postcard (taken out for the first time since 1995)

Reaction:

This story is a sequel to The Curse of Peladon, shown a couple of years earlier; as well as featuring a return to the planet Peladon, plus the Ice Warriors and lovable walking nob Alpha Centauri, they both have in common the hook of referencing contemporary political events from the UK as a gag / imaginative jumping-off point. Curse was a Doctor Who alien planet take on the UK's joining the European Economic Community; Monster does the same for the miners' strikes of the early 1970s. In my blog post on The Curse of Peladon from 2017, I put forward my view that that story isn't really political at all. It isn't doing a thoroughly worked out allegory, nor even light satire. It just throws in a reference to a vaguely topical area, then goes its own way with the story. The Monster of Peladon is a bit more political in one way in that it picks a side. It was surprising to me how pro-miner the Doctor was shown to be, expressing with regularity that the striking Peladons have legitimate grievances and should be given a fair hearing. Whether or not this represented writer Brian Hayles's views about the UK's National Union of Miners in real life, he certainly puts the Doctor on the side of the striking worker. Though there is internal squabbling in the ranks of the Peladon miners, they are presented in the story as the good guys against the antagonists - the unfeeling aristocratic class of Peladons in the early part of the narrative, and the scheming off-worlders exploiting Peladon's resources in the latter. They even - unlike in real life in the UK as it eventually turned out - get a happy ending, with their leader Gebek elevated to a position of power where he can make a positive difference for his comrades.

Of all the classic series, the Jon Pertwee era is probably the most aligned with the current series in terms of political outlook; the raison d'etre for the villainy in Monster of Peladon - rampant capitalism cashing-in on a war - would definitely be on brand for a story in Ncuti Gatwa's first season. This villainy is personified in the character of Eckersley, a performance of smooth amorality from Donald Gee, who plays the character as slightly amused by everything happening around him throughout. Eckersley consistently expresses detachment from the events early on, not wanting to get involved in "local politics", so isn't exactly depicted as a saint even then; towards the end, though, it is revealed that he's been manipulating events all along. It's a nice enough reversal, but does relegate the Ice Warriors to henchmen rather than the main antagonists. As a sequel, the story was inevitably going to repeat a lot of the story beats of The Curse of Peladon. In that earlier story, the Ice Warriors are good guys suspected for a long period of being bad. One might expect that to be reversed here, with a period of time where the Martians are trusted but then turn against everyone, but that's not how it plays out. As that villain reveal twist is instead being done with Eckersley, the Ice Warriors are shown to be baddies pretty much as soon as they appear, which feels like an opportunity missed. It might have proved a useful additional subplot to have the Doctor (who mistrusted them the last time he was on Peladon) trusting them at first, and gradually coming to the conclusion that they are up to something. The Warriors also are not looking their best, with make-up not as convincing as in their previous appearances, and some of the costumes not fitting the actors as well. This may be down to general budgetary issues as the furry version of Aggedor here is a lot more fake-looking than the one in Curse too.

The key difference between The Curse of Peladon and its sequel is that the later story is two episodes longer. With mostly the same story beats playing out, that means quite a bit of padding. The recaps at the start of episodes are suspiciously lengthy, and there are some repetitive sequences and some longueurs. Interminable early sections are spent of capture, escape, recapture as the Doctor and his companion are chased by the Peladon guards; this, despite a high-ranking diplomat known to the court confirming his identity and bona fides. It's not that there aren't nice moments in there, though. There's some decent fights and action moments. Aggedor looks much better as a statue zooming towards people than in his fuzzy felt form. Ysanne Churchman's vocal performance as Alpha Centauri, delivering quite a few humorous lines - "Thank you Eckersley, but you are still a traitor" - some of them wonderfully bitchy, is fun. Nina Thomas as Queen Thalira does a good job at showing a young ruler trying hard to exert their authority. The romance subplot between Jo Grant and King Peladon from the first story is replaced by Sarah teaching Thalira about female empowerment, which includes the nice line "There's nothing only about being a girl". This theme is undermined by the Doctor being a little bit chauvinistic in places: maybe I'm overreacting or getting oversensitive as I get older, but I feel he crosses a line with the supposedly jokey roughhousing at the end: he pulls Sarah into the TARDIS by her ear.

Connectivity:

The Monster of Peladon, like The Stolen Earth / Journey's End, features the Doctor teaming up with allies from previous adventures in his era (including Sarah Jane Smith) to defeat a famous recurring Doctor Who monster race who aim to exploit a planet for power.  

Deeper Thoughts:

And on that bombshell... part 2. A quick reprise then, as we return to my treatise on cliffhangers: story structure dictates there will be at least a couple of significant moments in a story the length of your average Doctor Who tale, where the protagonist or the action goes through a fundamental change. These act breaks (for want of a better name) will rarely line up exactly with the point where the credits are required to roll at the end of that particular chunk of episodic drama, though. So, writers of such drama have to use different types of tricks to make any ending engaging enough for the audience to want to return. If everything lines up, you might have a game-changer cliffhanger; if not, then you might have the much more common bisected action sequence style cliffhanger (from which the name is derived): the Doctor is in a predicament - like hanging off a cliff - that it looks impossible to get out of, and we viewers are left for a while to wonder what cleverness they are going to employ to extricate themselves. Sometimes, though, a cliffhanger begs not so much the question "How will they get out of that?" but more "Oooh, what does that mean?". The third type of cliffhanger is the enigmatic cliffhanger. It's a more distant echo of the game-changer cliffhanger - something has happened, maybe not so significant as to fundamentally change anyone's life, but it nonetheless propels us into the next phase of the action. This is another that's often used in Doctor Who. One particularly prevalent version of this is the monster reveal. For all of part one of any story (or perhaps even later) we've caught glimpses or hints of the threat, but it is finally revealed in full.

There are good and bad end of episode monster reveals; for example, it became a tradition that the Daleks would not appear in a Terry Nation story until the first cliffhanger. When this is at the end of an episode titled "World's End" then the appearance of a Dalek (rising up out of the Thames) has more impact than it does in, say, "Planet of the Daleks episode one", where it's obviously going to be less of a surprise. In that story, the Doctor already knows that he's facing the Daleks as they appeared at the end of previous story Frontier in Space, and he's gone to the planet deliberately to find the Skaro pepperpots. Yet, he still acts surprised to see one - he's obviously very committed to this cliffhanger strategy. With monsters that keep coming back (usually with a blaze of advance publicity) there will be diminishing returns in the monster reveal. Leaving it for a while since the last appearance and avoiding any publicity can help (see the end of Earthshock part one). For a new foe, it can also work very well. The Curse of Fenric has a nice reveal of the monstrous Haemovores at the end of part two, but tops it for the next cliffhanger with the reveal of the villain Fenric. A character is possessed by the spirit of Fenric, and rises up saying "We play the contest again, Time Lord". Oooh, now what can that mean?! It's better when the reveal is something even more intriguing that just a villain's identity. The end of City of Death part one has a nice enough monster reveal cliffhanger, though it's a bit nonsensical (why does Scaroth remove his mask and look in the mirror - vanity?). But the end of the second part is much more intriguing: he, or someone very like him, seems to be able to exist in different time zones. What can that mean?!

The earliest Doctor Who stories in the Hartnell era blazed trails, doing for the first time almost anything you could think of, so there's many an enigmatic cliffhanger, like the end of the first ever episode An Unearthly Child, where the shadow of an approaching figure falls over the incongruous police box exterior of the TARDIS transplanted to a barren landscape: the intrigue about what this might mean propels the audience into a 60+ year journey. Topping even that, though, and my personal favourite, is the end of A Battle of Wits, part three of The Time Meddler, where the Doctor's companions discover that the Monk has a TARDIS of his own. One thing that this era didn't ever really do - and it never really happened in any era of Who - was the fourth type of cliffhanger, the high-stakes choice. In the "Now Get Out of That" style cliffhanger, the Doctor or his friends might have to choose between the rock or the hard place, the lesser of two evils; but, that's more about the danger than the choice. A good example of a high stakes choice cliffhanger is the end of the third season of US Sitcom Friends. The character Ross has to choose between two loves, represented by the doors of two rooms before him as he stands deciding. He goes into one of the rooms, but the audience does not see which and has to wait until the next season's start to find out which he chose. The reason why this doesn't happen that often in Doctor Who is similar to why the game-changer cliffhanger is rare. Doctor Who's format is such that the adventures have to continue on and on, so fundamental choices - like fundamental changes - would undermine that. The nearest Who got to the high stakes choice is the "Do I have the right?" moment in Genesis of the Daleks: by touching two wires, the Doctor can change history and destroy the Daleks before they have become established; but, if he does, will he have lost sight of his own values?

Terry Walsh not Jon Pertwee

The Doctor pauses a moment, the two wires in front of him, almost touching; he doesn't know the right path to take. If the credits rolled then, it would be a great cliffhanger, but it comes a few minutes into the sixth and final episode; the actual cliffhanger at the end of episode five is just a bisected action sequence with a Kaled mutant trying to strangle the Doctor. This is an example of the first of two unfortunate cliffhanger types unique to Doctor Who: the mistimed cliffhanger. An episode has run short or run long, and no amount of editing can put the intended episode ending in the right place, so the programme makers end up with something sub-optimal and arbitrary. The most infamous of these is another Terry Nation story, Death to the Daleks - the story before The Monster of Peladon. At the end of part three of the story, the Doctor stops short of stepping on a mosaic floor. That's it! The music starts to play and we're into the credits. It's a bisected action sequence without any action. The second unfortunate cliffhanger is the one that brings undue attention to a production fail... twice. The audience gets to see the error during the exciting end to an episode, and then again in the reprise the following week. The co-pilot splits his trousers as he falls to the ground at the end of part two - and again at the start of part three - of The Horns of Nimon. The model tank looks pathetic at the end of part three, and the start of part four, of Robot. The Monster of Peladon has a great example of this type, at the fourth episode end. There's a fight between Ettis and the Doctor where the latter is mostly played by a stuntman. The wig is unconvincing, the voice is badly dubbed over the action, and in one shot the audience gets a face-on mid-shot view of someone who's clearly Terry Walsh doing Venusian Aikido, not Jon Pertwee. If by some miracle you missed all that, don't worry, it will be repeated in full the following week at the start of part five.

I've mistimed my own cliffhanger. I've run out of space without an interesting way to wrap up my discussion. All I can do is slap on a Next Time Trailer: in the next blog post's Deeper Thoughts section, there's always a Twist, there's always a Twist, there's always a Twist...

In Summary:

Like The Curse of Peladon but longer!

Cold War

Chapter the 269th, where it's cold and there's a war, during the Cold War. Funny how that happens.

Plot:

The North Pole, 1983. A Soviet submarine finds a prehistoric creature in the ice and the crew take it onboard. When defrosted, it turns out to be an Ice Warrior, Grand Marshal Skaldak. The Doctor and Clara arrive just as things are kicking off, and the sub is sinking. They are separated from the TARDIS which dematerialises without them because of a (frankly rubbish) defence mechanism. The Doctor helps the crew manoeuvre the sub onto an underwater rock ledge to halt their descent. Skaldak, at first disbelieving that he's been frozen for thousands of years, puts out a distress signal, but gets no reply. The crew attack him; he escapes by slipping out of his chained-up armoured suit, and kills a lot of the crew. Desperate and seeking vengeance, and having learnt about Mutually Assured Destruction from one of the crew,the warrior attempts to fire the sub's missiles to instigate a nuclear holocaust. The Doctor and Clara try to persuade him to show mercy, then the submarine starts to rise to the surface, caught in the tractor beam of a Martian spaceship that has arrived to take Skaldak home. There's also a lot of talk about honour and war, and much singing of 1980s pop songs. 

Context:

I watched this one Sunday afternoon with two of the kids (boys of 17 and 13) from a disc in the Complete Seventh Series Blu-ray box set; the youngest was out at a friend's birthday party. The eldest commented at the start that the random number selection method had a sick sense of humour (we watched it when the news of the search for the lost submersible Titan, and its tragic conclusion, was fresh in everyone's mind).

First Time Round:

I first saw this story on the day of its debut broadcast on BBC1, 13th April 2013. It's over a decade ago now (somehow) so I suppose I could be forgiven for being hazy on the details, but I can remember specifics of first seeing Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant episodes. It's only from Matt Smith onwards that my recall fails. This could be because the returned series was a tad less special for me, having become part of the televisual furniture, or it could be that I had more going on in my life outside of favourite programmes, with the day job busier and having three kids by 2013. Or both. In the past, I've shared different anecdotes about watching Doctor Who in other periods instead, but I've pretty much run them out now. Coincidentally, though, we're in the process of clearing out the garage. Disposing of lots of junk,I came across a cache of old journals. I've kept them periodically through my life, and happened to be doing so in 2013. I looked at the relevant date and found this entry "I've worked from home all week; should I be going into the office more? Knackered though - [Third child's] teething. Work's going okay, anyway." I checked back for the previous two weeks, and forward for the next five, and there was no mention of watching any Doctor Who story of the run. I then realised I already knew this but had forgotten (dodgy recall again) as I'd dug out the same journal for reference in a blog post years before (in 2017, for The Crimson Horror). On balance, I'm glad. Even for an enthusiast like myself,I think it would be a bit sad to be writing about watching TV in a diary; not that my life was scintillatingly interesting or anything, as you can tell from the entry quoted.

Reaction:

This will seem a bit off topic at first, and it's maybe because they had a Greatest Hits just come out at the time of watching, but I kept thinking of the Pet Shop Boys when I viewed Cold War. They are one band originating in the 80s that wasn't name-checked by the Walkman-wearing comedy professor played by David Warner who has a healthy appetite for decadent Western pop; the 1983 setting is just a little too early. Nonetheless, there's an echo in my reactions to this and writer Mark Gatiss's other Doctor Who stories and reactions to the music of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. My fandom for ver Pets is the only thing to reach anything like the fervour of my obsession with Doctor Who. As someone in possession of a great and detailed fan knowledge of the synth duo, I know something that may surprise those without such knowledge: they mean it, man. Many think that they are arch, dead-pan comedians who record, say, a kind of anti-Presley version of the Elvis number Always on my Mind (which they covered in 1987) with icy reserve as a statement somehow subverting rock n' roll and its icons. In his novel About a Boy, Nick Hornby demonstrates this attitude, having his commitment-phobic protagonist at one point shut himself off from the feelings and compromises of other people and take solace in Pet Shop Boys music as "he wanted to hear people who didn't mean it". This is a false impression. Neil Tennant felt he put lots of feeling into the vocal of Always on my Mind, he wasn't trying to subvert anything - he just has one of those voices.

I think I've previously been guilty of thinking the same of Gatiss, that his stories were pastiches, cover versions of Doctor Who stories past (in this case, 1967's The Ice Warriors), superficial without deeper resonance. Now, I'm thinking maybe he's just got one of those (authorial) voices. It's a very well made story, and what appears on screen is glossy. The physical model work of the submarine is superlative; the cast are amazing. As well as Warner delivering the goods in a gift of a role, Liam Cunningham is more than dependable in the role of the sub's Captain; then, pretty much every other role is an early or at least earlier appearance for someone who's now a TV household name (James Norton, Tobias Menzies, Josh O'Connor). All men of course, but that's forgivable this time, given the setting.It's a clever setting too; Doctor Who's done sequences on a submarine once before (in The Sea Devils) but not for a long time, and the interiors in the studio create a sublime verisimilitude (with an impressive amount of water being tipped onto the cast). The modern version of the Ice Warrior costume is a solid, faithful recreation, but then depicting the (CGI) Martian creature outside his armour does something new with this old enemy. The regulars are generally well served with Jenna Coleman particularly given some nice scenes to be plucky and brave. It's probably not fair to call this a pastiche cover version, clearly a lot of work has gone into it, including in the scripting; but, I still feel it's lacking something.Am I getting it wrong like those people doing a hasty surface read of Pet Shop Boys songs? Let me look a bit deeper.

I can see that playing with old elements in a new scenario was something that was very important to Gatiss - he went to great lengths to persuade an unconvinced showrunner Steven Moffat on the benefits of bringing back the Martian turtlenecks after so long, when Moffat only saw them as the epitome of the slowly lumbering retro Doctor Who monster. Gatiss does a good job of countering that, showing that they can be nimble and wily. The Ice Warriors come with a bit more baggage from Who history than other monsters (which I'll go into more detail on in the Deeper Thoughts section below), as they have been - almost unprecedentedly - allowed to develop. In their 1970s stories, they turned against their monstrous ways, and became peaceful. Because of this, Gatiss didn't have a lot of wriggle room with forming the story.To justify bringing them back, he couldn't just structure a fun race-against-time actioner where the monster could be any interchangeable menace. So, he has to have characters bang on about codes of honour at least for a bit. It's a good choice to generate this material out of the contemporary events in the wider world in 1983, but it's still not as interesting as action scenes with people trapped on a sub with a monster. This is probably the reason the story doesn't quite work for me. It's too good a premise to use with an Ice Warrior - it needs a monster without that baggage, so it can be focussed and have a purity of purpose. Famously, in a singles collection in 2003, the Pet Shop Boys divided their songs into those that they thought were pure pop, and those that aspired to be art. Cold War tries in its way to be both,when it probably needed to pick a side. It's not lacking something, it's doing too much. I'd have preferred, in this instance at least, a story that was more superficial. 

Connectivity:

Cold War and The Krotons are the only two TV Doctor Who stories thus far to refer to the HADS (Hostile Action Displacement System) that can be set for the TARDIS. Both stories also feature aliens that have been stranded on a planet for generations.

Deeper Thoughts:

What took you so long? As mentioned above, the Ice Warriors had not appeared for a good while in Doctor Who before their 2013 return in Cold War. The gap since their most recent previous appearance (way back in 1974's The Monster of Peladon) was 39 years. This is by my reckoning the Silver medal winner, the second-lengthiest return thus far of any monster or villain to TV screens in Doctor Who's history. Nothing's ever that simple with Doctor Who stats, though, so it could be classified as Bronze - if you assume that the Yeti in The Five Doctors was not animated by the Great Intelligence as it usually is, then the Intelligence was away for 44 years between 1968's The Web of Fear and 2012's The Snowmen. If not, then Gold goes to the Macra. Thanks to a throwaway joke by Russell T Davies in his script for Gridlock,making the fearsome creatures stalking the motorways of New New York the same creatures that featured in one early Patrick Troughton story, there were four decades between the two (and to date only two) attacks of those giant crabs, pipping Mars' finest by a year. Davies could have picked almost anything, though - the story wasn't about the Macra, and indeed the script has to briefly explain why they don't act anything like they did in 1967. Generally, though, returns in that period were more planned and integrated: in the early days of the returned series from 2005, Davies tended to bring back one or two old monsters or villains a year to provide a big event story in the middle or at the end of the season, with modern redesigns perfect for marketing and merchandising opportunities.

The producer in the 1980s, John Nathan-Turner, had done something similar in that decade. As such, the gaps were often not that lengthy, as the monster or villain had been rebooted before. The shortest gap for someone between popping up in the classic and then new series would be the Master, as he appeared in the Paul McGann TV movie in 1996 before returning in 2007, only 11 years between them. I don't really count the Daleks' appearance in that story (they aren't shown, and the voices heard sound nothing like Daleks), but they and the Cybermen were around towards the end of the 80s anyway, so they were only away for a relatively shirt 17 and 18 years respectively, not much longer than the show itself was unavailable as an ongoing series in which they could be showcased. Beyond those big three,who are likely always to crop up eventually in any new era of the show, it comes down to how popular characters might be to a writer or producer, or how good a fit they were for a particular story idea: Davros (20 years away between 1988 and 2008), the Sontarans (23 years, 1985 to 2008), and - usually treated as villainous by the series - the Time Lords (23 years, 1986 to 2009) are next most popular by this measure. The Sea Devils were away for 38 years before returning in 2022, the Zygons were away the same length of time before returning in 2013 for the 50th anniversary. The Autons were not seen on screen for 34 years before kicking the relaunched series off with Rose in 2005.

There was a near miss in the 1980s when the Autons almost made a comeback; like The Ice Warriors, they were lined up to be in stories before the 1986 season was postponed and rethought. It's hard to see why a great concept like the Autons feature so rarely in Doctor Who (unless I'm missing anything, they have only featured in four stories in 60 years). The Ice Warriors haven't fared much better, but with them it's a bit easier to understand.  It's the baggage I mentioned in the Reaction section above. They were once warlike, though bound by various codes of honour, then later turned to peace and became members of united galactic groups; there are still some breakaway groups who do not follow the peaceful leadership that most do, and are not above killing and enslaving people.Notwithstanding the time it would take to cover all that in a story, it would anyway seem like they re a rip-off of the Klingons from Star Trek who went through the same development, word for word, in the 1980s. Of course, that was over a decade after it was done in Doctor Who (it's most likely a coincidence). It's just personal taste of course, but I always found the Klingon-centred episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation the most boring; perhaps too many Ice Warriors stories might have ended up the same. As it is, nobody but Mark Gatiss has written a story for them in the new series era and he's only done two.All that could change in the next few years of course. We could see large green men from Mars back in Doctor Who again in the Ncuti era.

 

In Summary:

It's a MAD MAD MAD MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) world!