11.39: Cold War
In which Who suffers from klingon envy.
Broadcast: April 2013
Watched: January 2022
Very few quotable lines, unsurprisingly. “It’s in the walls!” tells us what kind of episode this is, but probably the best summary feels like this, from the BBC subtitles: “WATERY GROWLING”.
So: Vigil, episode 0. The Hunt For Red October crossed with Dalek.
I don’t hate it nearly as much as a lot of people in my corner of fandom seem to. It’s well made. The intro sequence, flying over the ice and then diving down while a caption reads “North Pole, 1983” looks great. Starting with the nuclear drill is pretty cool, too. Ditto the fact the monster escapes before the TARDIS even arrives: we’re straight into the action, and then stay there for 40 minutes. It even nods at a theme – by making it explicit that the Ice Warrior is only on the warpath because the humans attacked first, there are hints at parallels with the Cold War setting.
But of course, being a Gattiss one, all this is massively underdeveloped. The fact it’s a Soviet sub is pretty much irrelevant: you could change it to a western one and only need to change a few names and the word “motherland”. It is, charitably, unclear why a 70 year old Russian would be a fan of British pop music in 1983.
And a load of things don’t make sense. It’s not clear why the Ice Warrior is meant to be more dangerous outside his impenetrable armour (I assume this is because it can now move more easily, but it still sounds stupid when said out loud). In the same vein: one minute it’s scary that the monster called for reinforcements, the next it’s scary because it thinks reinforcements aren’t coming. The bit where the Tobias Menzies character offers a deal and is immediately killed off is annoying because it’s a waste of Tobias Menzies, but I can’t decide if that’s a waste of potential story or just avoiding a cliche.
So it takes the least interesting option every time… but I’m mostly willing to forgive that because it’s Gatiss, you know what the deal is, and unlike Victory it doesn’t feel like there’s a more interesting episode that we’ll now never see. But then, it has a truly abysmal ending: some other Ice Warriors arrive as a deus ex machina to rescue the monster, and the story just… stops. Then the Doctor makes a reference to the HADS, last heard of in the f*cking Krotons, and the only people left alive fall about laughing. There’s no reference whatsoever to the cost of what they just went through, or the fact they probably don’t have enough people to operate a submarine.
The really weird thing about this episode is that it has one of the best casts ever assembled for a Doctor Who story: Menzies, Liam Cunningham, David Warner, with pre-fame James Norton and Josh O’Conner in minor roles. It’s mental that a story this underpowered had a cast that good.
Other thoughts, but not many of them because I’m in danger of thinking about this episode more than the writer did:
This was set 30 years before broadcast, which means it was nearly as far in the past as The Abominable Snowmen was when that came out.
Were the Ice Warriors always cybernetic? Was this established in their earlier TV stories? [Lance Parkin reckons it’s from the novelisations, rather than TV stories.]
Also, he keeps banging on about honour, I'm sure they never did that before. I think that's from the books, which got it from 90s Star Trek: it's basically Klingon envy isn't it? [Not entirely: Lance, again, reckons it’s in The Curse of Peladon.]
Some of those sets are very clearly too big for a submarine.