Cold War

It issss once again time to analysssse another epissssode of Doctor Who! Thissss week it’ssss time to board a sssubmarine with an Ice Warrior! OK, enough of speaking like an Ice Warrior, it’ll soon get boring and I’ll wear out by “s” key. As usual there’ll be spoilers so if you haven't seen the episode yet I suggest you don’t read on!

Before anything else, I feel a little bit of history on the Ice Warriors is necessary. They first appeared in 1967 when the Doctor Who team weren’t allowed to use daleks as the pepperpots were being used in films. Various monsters were created and Ice Warriors were quite possible the best. In The Ice Warriors the Second Doctor and his companions Jamie and Victoria found the Ice Warriors frozen in ice in the Earth’s future where a new Ice Age had occurred. It was actually Victoria that named them Ice Warriors and the Martians don’t seem to mind. The trio faced them again in The Seeds of Death when they tried to use the trans-mat system to take over the Earth and then the Third Doctor bumped into them in The Curse of Peladon where they had renounced their old ways. In The Monster of Peladon though a rogue faction of Ice Warriors had gone back to the old ways.

That was in 1974 and the Ice Warriors haven’t been seen on screen since. Until now that is. Mark Gatiss had been desperate to bring the Icw Warriors back in the new series but showrunner and friend Steven Moffat wasn’t so sure. Then Gatiss came up with the idea that made the Ice Warriors scarier- they can come out of their armour. Yep, here Skaldak leaves his armour and runs around the Soviet submarine finding out about humans by killing them. The master-stroke was the creepy hands hanging over people’s heads. Suddenly the Ice Warriors have become a whole lot scarier!

I’ve been scratching my head trying to work out a timeline for the Ice Warriors. This is technically the earliest in time we’ve ever seen them and Skaldak had been in the ice 5,000 years. All the other episodes were set far in the future, though Varga and co in The Ice Warriors had been there for “centuries”. Maybe Varga and Skaldak come from a similar time? All we know is that they were once a great empire, they weren’t for a huge proportion of humanity’s life and then they were again. There’s still plenty of room for expansion of their story and I hope we get some of that in the not so distant future.

This episode is the first one where Clara was in real danger. It’s the first episode of Series 7 Part 2 where we actually had some deaths, and even then there were only three, a relatively low body count for the show. It was great to see how terrified by it all she was and how much she enjoyed the whole saving the world thing. There is pretty much no further clues to help solve her mystery. The only thing I picked up on was when the Professor asked her what hobbies she had and she couldn’t come up with an answer. Clara’s life before the Doctor seems disturbingly empty. She was quite scared at the time though so it could mean nothing!

I have noticed something which may be vitally important to the series arc or might be a coincidence. In this episode there is a direct quote from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”:

“What do you want from me?”

“Much”

In The Rings of Akhaten there was a quote from “Alice in Wonderland” and someone I was watching with reckoned there was a quote from “The Woman in Black” in the preview for next week’s episode, Hide. I don’t remember any book quotes in The Bells of Saint John although there was the obvious mention of the book by Amelia Williams. Are these book links a clue? Or is this just another Doctor Who coincidence?

For me the highlight of Cold War, apart from Skaldak of course, was David Warner’s professor. Most of the submarine crew weren’t particularly fascinating characters but the professor was great. He was good fun what with being an old Russian man who loved Ultravox and Duran Duran but he was also a caring character who was really sweet. The two-hander with him and Clara was brilliant! Definitely guest star of the week!

One final thing is when the Doctor talks about resetting HADS on the TARDIS he pretty much repeats what he said way back in the 1969 story The Krotons! Few other shows can do continuity like Doctor Who does!

That is it for this week but do join us next week for the creepy ghost story, Hide!