Mark Gatiss’s last script for the programme is exactly the sort of thing he does well: an unashamedly traditional adventure with a striking central image, a returning classic monster treated with respect after he put the Ice Warriors back on the board in Cold War, and absolutely no interest in being clever. After the weight of the Monk trilogy, “Empress of Mars” is forty-five minutes of Victorian soldiers shooting at Ice Warriors in a cave, and it is a considerable relief. It’s slight. It’s also very likeable, and it has one genuinely good idea about empire buried in the middle of it.
The hook
The opening is the best thing in the episode: NASA, present day, receiving imagery from a probe beneath the Martian ice cap, and finding the words GOD SAVE THE QUEEN carved into the rock and clearly visible from orbit. That’s a superb cold open, funny and arresting and immediately generating the only question that matters. The Doctor and Bill go back to find out how it got there, and the answer is a detachment of Victorian soldiers, in full redcoat kit, mining Mars in 1881. The explanation is nicely economical: they rescued a stranded Ice Warrior in South Africa, he offered to take them somewhere with gold in exchange, and a colonel with a secret and a company with nothing to lose said yes. The image of scarlet tunics and pith helmets against red rock is a genuinely great one and the production makes the most of it.
The empire bit
Underneath the runaround is a sharper idea than the episode’s reputation suggests. These men are conducting a colonial expedition, using an indigenous population’s labour and technology, on the assumption that finding something means owning it. Their Ice Warrior, whom they’ve named Friday, which the Doctor points out is not his name and which nobody has ever thought to ask about, has been playing along the entire time, letting them dig, because he wants them to reach the tomb and wake his queen. It’s a good reversal. The soldiers think they’re the expedition; they’re the labour. And the reason they were never in charge is that they never once asked the person helping them what he actually wanted. Gatiss doesn’t lean on this heavily, which is probably correct for a Saturday teatime, though it is fair to complain that the script defines the moral problem and then declines to do much with it. It’s still there, and it’s the reason the episode has some weight. When Iraxxa wakes and looks at a room full of armed Englishmen standing in her tomb, the audience knows precisely how this looks from her side.
Adele Lynch is good as the Empress: imperious, ancient, and genuinely dangerous, with none of the Ice Warriors’ usual shuffling. The design work is strong, since the female Ice Warrior armour is a real departure and looks superb, and the show is careful to make her a sovereign rather than a monster. She has woken to find her world dead and her tomb full of trespassers, and her first instinct is entirely reasonable. The human side belongs to Godsacre and Catchlove. Colonel Godsacre was hanged for desertion and survived it, and has been carrying the shame ever since, while Catchlove is the bright, ambitious, entirely amoral subordinate who knows about it and uses it. Anthony Calf plays Godsacre with real quiet decency, and the arc of a coward getting one more chance to stand is predictable and lands anyway. His resolution is the right one: he offers Iraxxa his life in exchange for his men’s, and she takes the offer as a soldier rather than an executioner. Two officers recognising each other’s rank across an entirely alien gap is a much better ending than a battle would have been.
Gatiss clearly knows the Ice Warriors well and the episode is full of small corrections to how they’ve been used. They’re given their proper hierarchy, their own honour code, and, most importantly, a reason to be sympathetic that doesn’t require them to stop being dangerous. The tomb itself is a good piece of design, a hive of sleeping warriors around a sarcophagus with the Empress woken first because that’s the correct order of precedence. The sonic weaponry, which crumples a man inward into a small package, is the most unpleasant thing the species has ever been given and is used sparingly enough to keep working.
Where it’s thin
The plot is a corridor. Soldiers advance, Ice Warriors advance, someone gets sonic-cannoned into a compressed cube, repeat. It’s competently staged and never surprising. Bill is badly underserved, spending much of the episode being shepherded from room to room, and her few good moments are the film-literate ones, narrating the situation through the war movies and westerns she’s watched and being genuinely delighted to be in one. It’s a nice character note the season has used before, and it’s about all she gets here, which is a shame in a run that has otherwise used her superbly. The Nardole subplot is pure mechanism: the TARDIS malfunctions, takes him back to Earth, and he has to fetch Missy out of the vault to fly it. It exists solely to advance the vault story, and it shows.
This is Mark Gatiss’s last script for the programme, and it’s a fitting one to go out on. His contributions across the revived era have been consistently the most traditional things in it, from The Crimson Horror to Cold War, a run of stories built out of Victorian melodrama, Cold War thrillers and Hammer horror rather than out of clever ideas about shape. None of them are the best episodes of their seasons. Several of them are the ones that most obviously understand what this show used to be, and there’s real value in having someone in the writers’ room whose instinct is a monster in a cave and soldiers with rifles. Going out with redcoats on Mars fighting Ice Warriors over a tomb is about as complete a summary of that instinct as anyone could ask for.
Rating: 3/5. Handsome, good-natured and pleasingly old-fashioned, with a terrific hook, a strong Ice Warrior design and a guest cast playing it entirely straight. The plot is a series of corridors, Bill has almost nothing to do, and the Nardole business is naked plumbing for the finale, but as a piece of traditional Saturday adventure it’s perfectly judged. They went to Mars for gold, dug where they were told, and never once asked the man helping them what he was digging towards.