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 is the most disciplined forty-five minutes Doctor Who has produced in some time. It’s also the first Ice Warrior story in nearly forty years, and Mark Gatiss treats the return with real care.
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 is not 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 placing that argument in the mouth of an alien rather than a politician, the episode gets to examine it without lecturing. 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.
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 Gatiss gets right is that Skaldak isn’t a beast. He’s a soldier of enormous rank and older-than-your-civilisation dignity, and the episode plays every scene with him 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. 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 it means 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.
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.
The 1983 texture 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 is not introducing an alien idea. He is 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.
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 is 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. 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. And the Doctor, notably, doesn’t solve it. He stands there with nothing while other people do the work. It’s worth noting how much of this works because the episode refuses to widen its lens. There is no cut to a war room, no shot of the surface, no reminder that a world exists outside the hull. This claustrophobic focus keeps the tension tight.
Rating: 4/5. Tense, tight and confidently old-fashioned, with a returning monster given genuine dignity and a guest cast that plays the period completely straight. The de-escalation at the end arrives a beat too fast for the pressure it’s releasing, and the Doctor is largely a bystander in his own episode, though that turns out to be a feature. Easily the best-constructed hour of the season. Five thousand years in the ice, a distress call nobody answered, and a soldier with his hand on the keys being asked what his daughter would have made of it.