Written by Brian Hayles
This is a preliminary warning. PLOT SPOILERS reside beneath the surface of this review
“The mission must be carried out. The computer has ordered it.”
The Thing of It Is…
After ’The Tenth Planet’, barely over a year ago, ’Doctor Who’ decides to shamelessly rip off ’Thing from Another World’ (1951) for a second time.
Although it seems unlikely writer Brian Hayles re-watched the film, if he’d even seen it in the first place. That would have taken such time and trouble, in those far-flung days. He more probably worked from a kind of folk memory. Which allows for much more slippage and variation, without anyone involved even necessarily noticing. Let’s compare…
The film ends with the iconic “I bring you a warning” radio broadcast, the Red Menace encapsulated in one neat little clip. But overall, little of the anti-Soviet stuff gets said out loud. The Thing acts with malevolent intelligence but makes only animal noises rather which would be hard to interpret as diatribes on the benefits of command economies.
It’s seen solely through the eyes of the crew, at a distance or in darkness, or (more often) both at once. And the human characters are split between the airmen and the scientists, a division given a very white-versus-blue collar aspect. Chief Scientist Carrington insists “there are no enemies in science, only phenomena to study”. While the airmen instinctively understand the blood-and-claw nature of reality.
For, as was not uncommon for the time, the Cold War is seen less geopolitically and more as something innate. The Thing turns out to be a plant that lives on blood, hence its well-known description as an “intellectual carrot”. Reversed polarities which mean the film could as easily have been called ’Revenge of the Root Vegetables’. The Thing is other, just like the Soviets are, so exists in antagonism to us and we to it.
Now… none of that sounds very ’Doctor Who’, does it?
”Escapades in Computer Land”
’The Thing’ starts in a bar, establishing a normal world for the title creature to invade. ’Ice Warriors’ kicks off with a crisis in a computer room. In fact, the New Ice Age setting is so established it might almost have been a story on its own. (Compare it to, say, the Monastery we’ve just seen.) It would have been a solid story, if not a terribly original one. In that computer room, attendant staff talk in clipped tones. We then cut to a field party sounding more human, while scoffing at the computerised schedule.
“The mighty computer”, as its sarcastically tagged, soon becomes a synecdoche for a mechanised society. To the extent that base chief Clent himself defers to it. (“I must inform the computer immediately for its decision.”) Despite the line (yes, really) “the computer says no” it’s not one of those megalomaniac computers so commonly encountered in SF, which likes to say “I am now your maaaaaster” boomingly, while lightning blots fly out from its diodes. Instead it behaves pretty much like a computer would. And so it represents is a folly people have done to themselves.
As we discover, an over-reliance on synthesised foods has cut back on vegetation and so reduced the carbon dioxide in the air, triggering this freeze-out and impending threat of glaciers. (Just go with it…) Which seems to have only exacerbated the existing problem. The advancing glacier, intractable and unpredictable, becomes Clent’s adversary, his White Whale. He enthuses: “What a triumph! Science the victor over nature, and it happened in my sector.” (Prematurely, as you may have guessed.) His stick is simultaneously rod of authority, used for pointing at people, and walking aid.
By contrast, the Doctor refers to “creative scientists,” which would seem to apply both to himself and boffin-in-chief Penley, who’s absconded from Clent’s “escapades in computer land”. As is not uncommon in SF, science is seen as a creative art, progressing by flashes of insight rather than consolidated research. The computer’s not a problem in itself, but by itself it is inadequate. Hence nothing functions until the Doctor replaces Penley. But Clent’s Fordist, kit-part mind baulks at recognising this because it places elements of the process outside his control. (His slightly bizarre name perhaps suggests ‘clenched’.)
”Not Of Our Time…”
Hayles always claimed his inspiration for this story had not been Hollywood but news reports of mammoths frozen in ice. True, the Thing get frozen but only briefly, the notion of being stuck down there from one Ice Age to the next is Hayles’. (Not said out loud, but presumably to get around Mars now being a dead planet, as it was in ‘Quatermass and the Pit.’)
The helmeted warriors are first assumed to be Vikings, and while this is soon disproved in a more symbolic sense it never goes away. (Originally, they were more closely modelled on our helmeted invaders.) So we’re given the double-barrelled explanation they’re “not of our time, nor of this planet.”
In an almost complete reversal of ’Tenth Planet’, there’s a paucity of rule-book-bound guards. In fact there’s precisely one, Walters, who does perhaps two guard-like things and spends more time complaining he’s been conscripted. Instead, in a sexist era, most of Clent’s underlings are obedient women. No wonder the base is so easy for Penley to steal from. When The Ice Warriors enter the base, you half-expect them to say the door was open so they wandered in. But then ’Tenth Planet’ thrust a mechanised mind-set onto the Cybermen. Here the Ice Warriors get the militarism.
It’s Walters who first hits on their name - “Proper Ice Warrior, isn't he?”. After which they’re alternately called simply “warriors” or “ice giants”. Tall actors were sought out, and in repeated shots tower intimidatingly over others. And it’s commonly, if entirely inaccurately, assumed primitive people were bigger than us. These warriors are our tribal instincts and brutish urges, repressed, buried, now thawed out.
Storr, could not have been made any more of a stereotypical wild Highlander if… actually, he just couldn’t have been made any more of a stereotypical wild Highlander. (The actor Angus Lennie was brought back the next time they needed a stereotypical wild Highlander, in ’Terror Of the Zygons’.) Anyway, he tries to side with the Warriors, who are “against the scientists, that’s good enough for me.”
Though Clent’s shown to be more at fault than Penley, the story also hints heavily the two need to reconcile to survive. Without Penley, or some other creative mind, Clent’s computations are useless. But without Clent, Penley’s attempts to acclimatise himself to the new realities of “an avalanche waiting on your doorstep” seem entirely dependent upon Storr, whose Highland brogue forever contrasts with Penley’s soft tone.
At one point the Doctor warns of another character: “He’s a scientist and a bit inclined to have his head in the air. You know what they’re like.” “Aye, I certainly do”, Jamie replies sagely.
In fact it’s effectively ’Tenth Planet’ in reverse, where it’s us humans who have become too mechanised, and this time what comes flying back at us out the ether is the buccaneer spirit. This may seem like the series is contradicting itself, but it doesn’t really matter much. Firstly, SF is really just a set of cautionary tales. More importantly, this is just a way of telling the same cautionary tale, just a different way up. The problem in both is the mechanised mindset. In one we see it from without, presented as an alien force. In the other from within.
And this is no hidden subtext. The story is insistent on it all, if not actively belligerent. ‘Characters’ tend to embody a position in a philosophical debate, and the dialogue tends to consist of them reiterating this. It’s not some backstory to fill the bits where a monster isn’t chasing Victoria around. This is in the great SF tradition of A Story About Something.
”…Nor Of This Planet”
As has been said, Red Menace stories try to ‘other’ Those Darn Commies and so fixate on creatures which skulk indeterminately in the shadows. In ’The Thing’, conversation with it not exactly flowing, the crewman merely guess the monster is from Mars. Here the Ice Warrior Varga (named, let’s note) has told us this five minutes after de-frosting.
But if the Red Menace trope really only occupied the early Fifties, the Cold War lasted longer with that, and so different ways arose to frame the earthly enemy. So, soon after explaining just why the Cybermen can’t be considered commie hordes, that’s pretty much exactly what the Ice Warriors turn out to be!
A kind of mutually assured destruction soon emerges. Clent can’t use the Ioniser on the glacier with their spaceship present, as it will trigger a nuclear explosion. While they call this a “secret weapon” which they fear he will use, melting the glacier and drowning their engines. In ‘The Moonbase’, the Cybermen are sneaking in the title base from the start… actually, probably before. Here the two sides mostly remain within their own camps, only outsiders like the Doctor and Penley venturing twixt the two.
And when Varga replies to Victoria’s offer of help (“They would not help me, they would keep me as a curiosity, and they would leave my warriors for dead, or destroy them”) it rings with more than a little truth.
The Klingons first appeared in ’Star Trek’ earlier that year. Similarities aren’t exact. They’re more caste-based and duty-bound, the Ice Warriors more utilitarian and calculating. (Accused of being “monsters” they reply “it was necessary.”) But they’re more similarity than with any other ’Who’ adversary. With the Daleks there’s the endless trope of their taking on allies, until their usefulness is over. Conversely, the Ice Warriors never lie or cheat, and take umbrage when they consider themselves betrayed.
There’s a sense they believe as fully in their wrong way of life as much as we do our right one, so in a way should be respected. Both were established as adversaries, but a future episode saw the two sides uniting against a common foe. (With ’Star Trek’ in ’Day of The Dove’ the following year, with ’Who’… well, hopefully, we’ll get that far.)
(Demonstrating their origins, New Who brought them back for a Cold War story, so much later that it counted as a historical setting. It was called ’Cold War’. Unfortunately, that proved the smartest thing about it.)
A show staple is medicalised garlic, a magic potion to defeat the monster dressed up as a chemical. The more everyday this is, the better. The nail varnish remover in ’The Moonbase’ is a classic example. Here, rather inelegantly, there’s three…
The first is the best, but alas is rather casually thrown away. Its ammonium nitrate, which as Victoria points out more is commonly known as stink bombs. Which has a particular effect on the Warriors due to the peculiarities of the Martian atmosphere. And defeating invading aliens with stink bombs seems quintessentially ’Who’, daft but possessed of a quirky charm. On a par with having a bright white computer room whose crew wear op-art uniforms, but which still has a chandelier.
The final one is the Doctor reworking the Warriors’ own gun against them. (Which has a particular effect on them as they’re mostly liquid. Not like us then…) Not bad. But the middle one, wait for it…
Penley turns up the heating on them.
Yes, Penley turns up the heating on them. Not endearingly daft, just plain silly. Worse, it exposes a fault-line in the story. The Ice Warriors are forever saying things like “ice is our friend”. But it’s not their natural habitat, Mars is no ice planet, they just got themselves stuck in it and then with their name. And it’s precisely because they’re cold-blooded that reptiles need heat.
As mentioned earlier, they were originally more akin to Space Vikings. The ’About Time’ guide says the idea to turn them reptilian arose during rehearsals. So perhaps as initially scripted they were acclimatised to cold to the point of being near-allergic to heat, were never fully rewritten.
We know the change was made largely to make them distinct from the Cybermen. And it could have been associated with their Martian origins, already known to be a desert planet. Shannon Sullivan credits the idea to Martin Baugh, the costume designer. But perhaps the impetus wasn’t visual.
Successful monsters on the show, at that point just the Daleks and Cybermen, had been given distinctly monstrous speech. You only have to hear them set against normal human voices, and much of the work is done. Whereas those beeping Zarbi never got a callback. The Ice Warrior rasp follows in this lineage, while actually sounding like neither. Ironically it was the last-minute thought, which actively screwed with much of the plot-line here, which went on to give the Ice Warriors their enduring appeal. The reason for their frequent reappearances? It’sssss probably thisssss.
Coming soon! Onto other things, but back to the good Doctor before long…
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