Cold War: An Ice Warrior Out of His Armour

Put a monster in a submarine. It’s such an obvious idea that the surprise is how rarely this show does it properly, with a genuinely sealed environment, no corridors to run down that don’t loop back, no cavalry, and a hull that will kill everyone aboard if the fight goes badly. “Cold War” understands exactly what it has, and after the sprawling sincerity of The Rings of Akhaten it’s the most disciplined forty-five minutes Doctor Who has given us in some time. Nothing here is wasted, and nobody’s there to make a speech about it. After a run of episodes that have shouted their feelings across a planet, a story that keeps its voice down is almost startling.

It’s also the first Ice Warrior story in nearly forty years, and the return is handled with real care. I went in cautiously optimistic and with my expectations curtailed, because the Ice Warriors have always been shuffling green tanks that hiss, and they didn’t need to be curtailed. It’s a small, mean, claustrophobic story that knows exactly how much room it has and refuses to cheat. The submarine is lit like somewhere you wouldn’t want to be trapped for five minutes, never mind five days, and every set looks lived in and slightly damp. I was settled in by the first act, and it never let go.

1983, North Pole

The setting does an enormous amount of work. A Soviet nuclear submarine at the pole in 1983, crewed by men who are drilling for an enemy they expect to fight any day, with warheads aboard and a captain whose authority is one bad decision from evaporating. The period isn’t decoration. The entire back half of the episode runs on the logic of mutually assured destruction, the idea that the correct response to an unstoppable threat is to guarantee everyone dies together, and by putting that argument in the mouth of an alien rather than a politician, the episode gets to look at it without lecturing anyone.

There’s a nice, economical bit of stranding, too: the TARDIS’s Hostile Action Displacement System fires and removes it entirely, leaving the Doctor with no exit and no toolkit. It’s a rule the show has had on the books for decades and almost never remembers, and using it here to lock the door is exactly right. I’ll admit I didn’t expect the show to dig that out, and I loved that it did. Everything after that is about people in a sealed metal tube with nowhere to go, which is the right amount of story for forty-five minutes. It also means the Doctor can’t simply wander off to fix things, and the tension has to come from the room and the people in it. That’s the kind of limit this show does well, and it’s a shame it doesn’t set one more often.

Skaldak

Grand Marshal Skaldak has been in the ice for five thousand years. The crew thaw him out because a professor wants a look, which is a wonderfully human reason for a catastrophe. What the episode gets right is that Skaldak isn’t a beast. He’s a soldier of enormous rank and older-than-your-civilisation dignity, and every scene with him plays as a negotiation between officers. He announces himself. He states terms. He asks, reasonably, whether the crew that chained him considers itself at war.

When they hurt him, he doesn’t rampage, he calculates. It’s a very different kind of menace to the usual Doctor Who monster who just wants to eat or exterminate, and it gives the crew something to argue about rather than just shoot at. You find yourself half understanding him, which is the sign that the scene is working.

And then the episode does something genuinely new: he gets out of the armour. Forty years of Ice Warriors as shuffling green tanks, and here the shell opens and the thing inside goes hunting in the dark. It’s a good creature design and a better decision about shape, because it converts a slow, stately monster into something fast and unseen, and the crew spend the middle act being stalked by an enemy they can’t hear coming. The reveal that the armour can operate independently, reaching for its own occupant, is a nasty extra turn. It lands as a proper scare rather than a cheap one.

Stripping the Doctor of his advantages is the other choice that pays. No TARDIS, no sonic to hand for most of the runtime, no authority, and he’s an unidentified foreigner who has appeared inside a Soviet nuclear vessel during a standoff, so the crew are entirely correct to treat him as a threat. He spends the episode negotiating from a position of no power whatsoever, and Matt Smith is good at that: talking fast because talking is genuinely all he has, and visibly recalculating every time somebody points a gun at him. It’s a useful reminder of how much of this character’s usual competence is equipment.

The people in the tube

The guest cast is unusually strong and unusually well used. David Warner is a delight as Professor Grisenko, a Soviet scientist with an inexplicable and wholehearted love of British synthpop, who spends the crisis humming Ultravox and being decent to everyone. It could be a one-joke part and Warner plays it as a genuinely kind man who has decided that cheerfulness is a discipline. Liam Cunningham’s Captain Zhukov is the other anchor, a commander doing arithmetic about his own crew, aware that his officer wants to launch and that he may not be able to stop him.

Clara gets her best material yet, and crucially the episode lets her be out of her depth. She volunteers to talk to Skaldak, does it well, and is then confronted with the corpses of men she was speaking to an hour ago, and she’s shaken, properly, in a way that doesn’t resolve by the end of the scene. Jenna-Louise Coleman plays the moment where the adventure stops being fun with real precision. It’s the first time the show has treated her as someone accumulating experience rather than delivering quips, and it’s what makes her worth following now that the mystery of who she is has stepped aside for a week.

The 1983 detail is doing quiet work under all of it. Grisenko’s Ultravox cassette, the posters, the men who have spent their careers waiting for an order that would end the world, all of it sets up the episode’s actual subject, which is that everyone aboard this submarine already believes in the logic Skaldak is about to apply. When an alien announces that the correct response to being wronged is to guarantee mutual annihilation, he’s not introducing an alien idea. He’s repeating the strategic doctrine of both governments currently pointing missiles at each other above him, and the episode is sharp enough to let a Soviet officer be the one who recognises it. That’s a smarter bit of writing than it first seems, because it lets you feel uneasy about your own side of the argument without anyone stopping to point it out. It’s the sort of thing a lesser episode would have wrapped in a speech.

A hand on the launch keys

The resolution is where opinions split, and I think it just about holds. Skaldak’s people arrive, having heard a distress call he sent five thousand years too late, and he stands with his hand on the launch keys deciding whether to end the planet. What stops him isn’t a clever trick or a threat. It’s Clara, and Grisenko, and the plain observation that he’s about to do to a world what was done to him, and that his daughter, whose death is the whole reason for his fury, would not have wanted it.

Talking a monster down with an appeal to his own grief is a soft ending after a hard episode, and the pivot is quick. I’d have liked another minute or two for him to actually weigh it, because a man who has just killed his way through a submarine doesn’t turn on a sentence. But it fits the character the episode has spent forty minutes building: a soldier obsessed with honour and rank, who can be reached through obligation in a way he could never be reached through force. It reminded me a little of A Town Called Mercy, another story about a wronged soldier whose revenge the Doctor doesn’t get to settle on his own. And the Doctor, notably, doesn’t solve it. He stands there with nothing while other people do the work. This claustrophobic focus is what keeps the tension tight, because there’s no cut to a war room, no shot of the surface, no reminder that a world exists outside the hull.

Rating: 4/5. Really enjoyed this one, and it’s the first time in a while I’ve wanted to put an episode straight back on.

Would you have let Skaldak walk away after what he did to the crew, or did the Doctor and Clara get too much sympathy for him? Tell me in the comments.