Doctor Who A-Z #39: The Ice Warriors (1967)

There’s a case you could make against the Second Doctor’s era, that it represents a retreat from the wide-open possibilities of the Hartnell years into formula. Previously, the series could and did go from telling a story about a planet inhabited by giant psychic ants to a sober drama about the Crusades; by now, it’s mostly an anthology of different remote bases being attacked by different monsters. Yet if the Troughton years represent Doctor Who made to a formula, it is at least a formula that works. This serial, the last to be produced by Innes Lloyd, sees the production team hitting every note perfectly. It’s not the greatest product of its era, but that’s actually part of what’s impressive about it – if this is how satisfying Troughton-era Who is when it’s just chugging along, doing what it normally does, that in itself is a defence of the era’s formula.

To start with, this week’s monsters have one of the show’s most original bases to besiege. It’s a research station in a future Britain that’s been transformed by a new Ice Age. The research station seems to have been an English country house at one point, a wonderful design choice that wordlessly tells you so much about how far these glaciers have advanced. The characters are similarly vivid, with Peter Barkworth providing a masterclass in gradually softening an initially dislikable character as the stern base leader Clent. Even before the titular Ice Warriors turn up, the base has its enemies. Outside is a gang of survivalists led by Penley, played by Peter Sallis, who has never been less like Wallace. It’s a small cast, but they feel emblematic: you get a sense of a whole society here for once.

The TARDIS regulars are no less enjoyable. Watching Jamie and Victoria kill time around the base by flirting with each other, you recognise how very different they are from previous companions. Patrick Troughton, as ever, is immaculate. I watched a version where the missing second and third episodes were reconstructed with animation; without wanting to criticise the animators’ work, you do feel a sense of relief when the real, flesh-and-blood Troughton returns. There are so many grace notes here that must have been added by the actor, like his tiny, apologetic mouthing of “sorry” to Victoria after a plan fails. The Second Doctor is unusual in that he often seems to be frightened of the monsters himself, and every time director Derek Martinus dollies in on the Ice Warriors’ crusty, crocodilian lips, you understand why.

The Ice Warriors are infamous in some quarters as the epitome of the slow-moving, slow-speaking classic Who monster – certainly Steven Moffat, who had to be lobbied extensively by Mark Gatiss to bring them back, is of this mind. Still, if you’re going to have a slow-moving monster they might as well be in a six-parter, and they have considerable heft and menace here. What’s more, the actors playing them – including Carry On star Bernard Bresslaw and Troughton-era Who‘s go-to giant Sonny Caldinez – give them real personality. Bresslaw’s Varga has some wonderful mannerisms, like a laugh that consists of three sharp hisses. Another Ice Warrior sinks his head into his armour as he contemplates death, like a giant turtle. Barring the regrettable retread The Monster of Peladon, every future Ice Warrior story will add some new caste or gender or social code to our picture of their society. Here, they’re more straightforward baddies than they would become, but you can see the seeds of this unusual complexity being planted.

It’s a surprise that they work so well, considering their original reason for existing was cut out in pre-production. In Brian Hayles’s script, they were cyborgs, which is why the Doctor, trying to persuade the base crew that their discovery isn’t a Viking, points out its electronic gadgets rather than the more obvious fact that it’s covered in green scales. Presumably the point was to show Clent, mocked by the Doctor and his own staff for his obsession with computers, the error of his ways in the form of actual inhuman machine men. At some point, though, someone noticed that this was essentially a retread of the Cybermen and the Ice Warriors became cold-blooded reptiles, a change which annoyed Bresslaw, who hadn’t signed up for full-body prosthetics.

If anything, though, this helps Hayles’s script by making the theme of mechanical logic versus human ingenuity less on-the-nose. It still demonstrates the limits of Clent’s data-driven reasoning simply by having it repeatedly confronted by things it isn’t prepared for, whether that’s the Martians or Troughton’s mercurial, capering Doctor. Add in Martinus’s punchy direction and Dudley Simpson’s bonkers uneasy-listening score, and you’ve got formula delivered with flair. It doesn’t bring much new to the series – other than debuting a new race of monsters, a priority for the show while Terry Nation was withholding the rights to the Daleks – but it does old tricks surpassingly well.

Next: The Enemy of the World (1967-8)

Graham’s Archive – The Ice Warriors

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