Ice Warriors

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.

Empress of Mars: God Save the Queen, Buried on Mars - Doctor Who episode still

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.

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.

Cold War: An Ice Warrior Out of His Armour - Doctor Who episode still

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.

Empress of Mars: God Save the Queen, Buried on Mars