1983 is just about the latest year that I can consider to be
historical. I was born in February 1984, so anything after 1983 feels like the present
to me, or at least the modern period. Even though I don’t remember much of the
first five or six years of my life (or much from the ages of about fourteen to
seventeen, come to think of it, although I think that might be more alcohol
related). The year of our birth is kind of hardwired into our perception of the
world, with anything that comes before feels somehow separate.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that tonight’s episode
of Doctor Who felt to me to have a
historical setting. The Cold War is a sort of backstory to my existence, over
by the time I became aware of the world at large, represented only by hazy
memories of a wall being knocked down on the news, the knowledge that there had
been until recently been something important called the Soviet Union, the
hand-me-down current affairs of my parents and a whole host of eighties movies
on the subject.
This means I lack the experience of Cold War paranoia that
would, I imagine, give this episode the frisson of urgency it lacks for me. Intellectually,
I know that if Skaldak presses the Big Red Button, a chain reaction of missile
launches will send the Earth into a new dark age. Nonetheless, I fail to engage
with the threat. It’s old news – the world didn’t end in 1983, after all, just
as Clara says. Maybe we need a Pyramids
of Mars moment in which we see a devastated world in 2013; or maybe I just
need to be five years older to fully appreciate this episode’s setting.
Which is a shame, since Cold
War, the episode, holds so much more for me to embrace than just nostalgia
for the Cold War, the lengthy threat to international peace. It’s all nostalgia for something, though. Nostalgia
is, as I’ve pointed out before, what Mark Gatiss trades in. It’s his medium. The
setting is recognisable to anyone who has seen any submarine drama, but
primarily evokes The Hunt for Red October.
It was probably a wise decision not to have the cast attempt Russian accents. It
makes the characters easier for us to recognise, avoids any embarrassing accent
anomalies, and further evokes Red October,
with Sean Connery’s famously Scottish Soviet captain.
Most of all, it’s about nostalgia for Doctor Who itself. After all, we’re all here for one thing really:
the big, green Martian. The Ice Warriors are one of the classic monsters,
despite lacking much in the way of a concept. They are just big, green
Martians, and, much like the Zygons (who are also set for a comeback), their
appeal lies in their striking appearance. Gatiss, a writer steeped in the series’
mythology, recognises that to make the Ice Warriors work now he needs to do
something new with them.
As such, we get a Warrior who the Doctor recognises as a
great war hero to his own Martian brethren, a Warrior with a reputation instead
of just a green grunt. Another reason the Ice Warriors worked well in their
four stories in the classic series; each had a leader or representative with a recognisable
personality. Added to the ranks of the thuggish Varga, the cunning Slaar, the
noble Izlyr and the traditionalist Azaxyr we have the vengeful Skardak. Skardak
has a personality, albeit a very one-dimensional one. While his desire to destroy
humanity is ridiculously over-the-top, we can at least understand why he’s so
pissed off with these aggressive, paranoid humans.
The designers have wisely stuck to the Ice Warriors’ classic
look, streamlining it while keeping it faithful to the original and retaining
its impact. Sure, it looks a little plasticky, but that’s unforgiving HD for
you. Spencer Wilding does a good job of animating Skardak, but it’s Nick Briggs
who deserves the credit for bringing him to life. The voice he uses for Skardak
is proud, arrogant and retains just enough of the Martians’ reptilian hiss. Having
Skardak escape from his shell is the one element of this episode that surprised
me, giving us something new while riffing on a well-remembered monster. Sadly,
it is also the element that works least well visually. While having the
reptilian creature slithering through the ducts picking off crewmen is
atmospheric in the extreme, the rubbery hands dropping down from the ceiling
are woefully ineffective. It really does look like an eighties movie.
The cast is uniformly impressive, but certain actors require
special mention. Liam Cunningham strikes a fine balance between the dutiful,
the fearful and the good-humoured as Captain Zhukov. Tobias Menzies is equally
as good as Lt. Stepashin, although he has less time to make an impressive
before he gets bumped off. It’s David Warner who steals the show, though. It’s
long past time that he made an appearance in Doctor Who, after years as one of Big Finish’s most celebrated
voice actors. The man is pure class, and his Ultravox-quoting scientist
Professor Grisenko is a delight.
It’s the plot that lets the episode down. Gatiss gets a hard
time from a lot of commentators, but I generally love his episodes. It’s
strangely appropriate, then, that the episode that everyone is raving about
immediately after broadcast is the one of his that didn’t impress me so much. While
I have no problem with a straightforward episode that uses tried and tested
elements (see my review of The Bells of
St. John), an episode this simple and predictable is something of a
letdown. The ending, in particular, deflates the drama rather than letting it
reach a climax, with the Martian ship arriving and basically switching off the
plot in time for the end credits. I’m sure I’ll come back to it again and again
for an easy watch, but it will never be a truly satisfying episode. Don’t get
me wrong; this was a taut, fun, pacy thriller with some fine performances,
excellent direction and a cracking monster. Somehow, though, I felt it was a
bit of a letdown. Would it be too glib to say that it left me a little cold?
Doctor Data: The
Doctor’s piloting is worse here than we’ve seen it in years. He’s aiming for
Vegas and arrives beneath the Arctic Ocean. Lovely to see the HADS in action
again; another nice shout-out to the past, as well as an effective way of
removing the TARDIS from the action to prevent it from spoiling the story. The Doctor’s
respectful attitude to the Martians is a far cry from his animosity towards
them in his second and third incarnations.
Monster Monster
Monster! It’s been almost forty years since we last saw the Ice Warriors
onscreen, although they have made many appearances in the spin-off media (they
even met the eleventh Doctor in Dan Abnett’s novel The Silent Stars Go By). Skaldak is a Grand Marshall, one of the
highest ranks in the Martian military, although he lacks the spangly caped look
that other high-ranking Martians have displayed in the past. What he was doing
on Earth 5000 years ago remains a mystery. In fact, Martian history in Doctor Who is such a hotchpotch that
Gatiss was never going to have much luck making sense of it in this episode,
and sensibly he sticks to the conclusion that the Martians are out there, just
not on Mars. This doesn’t fit with all their appearances, but it’ll do for now.
It’s good to see the biomechanical nature of the Warriors built upon; they’ve
been cybernetic since their first appearance, but it’s never been fully
explored.
(Pre)history: I
was a little confused that the Professor would think a 5000-year-old body might
belong to a mammoth, considering that the woolly mammoth common to Siberia
became extinct on the mainland about 10,000 years ago. However, a little
research shows that some remains as young as 4000 years old have been found on
Arctic islands, so it’s not impossible. Alternatively, perhaps the Professor
was kindly translating the timescale into Martian years.
Hanky-Panky in the
TARDIS: Clara arrives in a sexy party dress, and then gets absolutely soaking
wet. Oh my.
Best line:
“I’m always serious… with days off.”
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