Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Ice Warriors

Varga and Zondal are ssssslippery customers.

Doctor Who - Season Five, Story Three - The Ice Warriors
Written between the 14th and 15th October 2015.

This article would have been a lot more appropriate, I can now say with hindsight, in the Autumn of 2013, when the Ice Warriors returned to our screens in Series 7's Cold War.  Hindsight adds a lot to these Sixties reviews - especially when watching them in such quick succession. The Ice Warriors gained a place in Who folklore for the first, missing appearance of the titular monsters, who would recur in the show until Season 11. As with the Cybermen stories from last month, the missing episodes in this serial have been animated, although unfortunately this is a lot more Youtube Poop and less Infinite Quest.
     The plot follows yet another Base-Under-Siege format, with our base being Brittanicus Base, the stern leader being a bloke called Clent (insert your own rude innuendoes here), the voice of reason is Miss Garratt and the traitor is Peter Sallis' Penley. (Although he comes back.) Set in a far future where Global Dimming (oh, how I miss you) has caused the Earth to enter an early ice age, the Brittanicus Base exists to do some technical mumbo jumbo with lasers in order to prevent glaciers from rolling over the British landmass. On one of their surveys, they uncover a Martian Spacecraft, and the inhabitants, known only as the Ice Warriors, attempt to uncover their ship and fulfil their mission to conquer Earth.
     The story is written by Bryan Hayles, and like Malcolm Hulke's later stories The Silurians and The Sea Devils, the titular Ice Warriors are, despite being alien and aggressive, people worth talking to instead of simply trying to annihilate. There are times where they don't even feel like the villains of the piece - the emotionless Leader Clent is often in a position of antagonism, and the main threat against our characters is the icebergs fast approaching to consume Europe. It's in this where we find the story's main ideological dichotomy - science versus nature, logic versus emotion. Although many characters in the episode are against "science", their anger comes from the fact that in the background of the serial, there is the implication that by this point, the human race is controlled a centralised computer. It's a brilliant concept that doesn't end up skewing one way or another, with the overall message at the end being that a balance must be achieved between computer logic and human intuition. It's a little similar to the themes behind some of this era's Cybermen stories, except here it actually gets mentioned, discussed and thoroughly explored. For once, the six episode runtime feels entirely deserved.

This is ridiculous, if lovingly created.

     The second and third episodes of this serial have still not been returned to the BBC. The two episodes, which are the first to really show the Ice Warriors moving about and doing things, have themselves entered Who Folklore as "important" missing episodes, even going so far as to get a mention in Mark Gattis' comedy sketch The Kidnappers. The episodes were of course animated for the most recent DVD release, with less than brilliant results. The four other animated serials, animated by Cosgrove Hall and Planet 55 , did their best to recreate the shots from the original episode, retaining the subtlties of the original direction and the characters' real expressions. The animation for The Ice Warriors, on the other hands, done by a company called Qurios Entertainment, flattens the action to a 2D plane and has heavily stylised (and somewhat static) designs for each character. It makes certain parts of the episodes incredibly silly, and loses a lot of the atmosphere that the original director so carefully built up.
     Speaking of, the episode's direction and atmosphere is brilliant, tying into the overall theme quite nicely. The icy wastes are very well-made and they feel genuinely desolate, punctuated by a shrill, unearthly wail. And I'm talking about the deliberate one on the soundtrack, not just the increasingly unbearable screams of Victoria Waterfield, who screams at the slightest provocation. She's an unfortunate reflection of a few of the attitudes of this era, like those I discussed during Cybermen Month. Like those serials, there were a few jaw-drop moments - like Jamie leching over the station staff' short skirts, or Victoria's infinitely quotable reaction of "Oh no, not Africa!"

Aaand roll credits. (I need to stop watching CinemaSins.)

     The Ice Warriors is a tight, witty script with very well-developed ideas. The brief of creating an enemy to replace the Daleks didn't really reach fruition here, and they would be back in the show by 1972 until the present day, while to date the Ice Warriors have only ever made four more appearances. It's a shame that the first appearance of the Ice Warriors actually walking about now exists, in its most complete form, as a dodgy animation by the same people who did the sketches on Tracy Beaker, but it does allow the serial to feel a hell of a lot more complete. The Ice Warriors often does a few things here or there which make you gasp at how they got away with it, but they managed to create a very large-scale story on a very small budget, and create a Doctor Who classic which deserves the name.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: The Doctor and his companions get trapped in the Land of Fiction, in The Mind Robber.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Wheel In Space

This is the first appearance of the "teardrop" eye design,
which would persist for most future versions.

Doctor Who - Season Five, Story Seven - The Wheel In Space
Written 30/9/15

Last week, I reviewed a story which had been recovered in its entirety, meaning that thanks to animation in The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase, I haven't encountered a single episode that didn't at least move. The Wheel In Space is the single exception to the Cybermen's completeness today, with four of its six episodes consigned to the scrap heap, leaving only telesnaps (essentially screenshots of the episode at different intervals) and audio. In order to watch these lost episodes, fans have compiled these two elements into creating Reconstructions, which mix the audio with a slideshow of telesnaps relevant to the action, and CGI where possible. Given all this effort has gone into making this story watchable here and now, what's the story actually like?
      The Wheel In Space is the final story of Season 5, and it's fitting that in a season where six out of the seven stories all follow the Base-Under-Siege plot structure, The Wheel In Space is not the exception - the difference being that the story plods along for six episodes as opposed to four. This structure seems fairly unnecessary, and the first episode ends up being fairly tedious as Jamie and The Doctor are stuck on a small spacecraft, with The Doctor ending up concussed and Jamie having to fight a "Servo" robot which then doesn't appear in the rest of the story. The following five episodes take The Doctor and Jamie to the titular wheel, a space station above Earth which uses its x-ray laser to deflect asteroids. As it turns out, the Cybermen have used a complicated plan involving exploding a sun in order to sabotage the base, aiming to use it to guide an invasion fleet towards Earth and conquer it. The Doctor manages to fix the laser and destroy the invading ships.
     The script was originally by Cybermen co-creator Kit Pedler from before he left the program and was edited into the six-part format by David Whittaker. Pedler's influence on the script is clear - this is a Base-Under-Siege story, with all the same archetypes as before. There are a few decent roles for women in this story, placing them in particular positions of authority, but there are still several misogynistic moments and when all's said and done the only female character who doesn't die is the new companion, Zoe. It gives the story something of a forgettable feeling, which is a real shame given the season began on such a strong Cyberman story.

Episodes 3 and 6 survive, and they are welcome.

     Zoe is an interesting companion, and her characterisation is very thoroughly explored here. Like the Cybermen she faces, Zoe (apparently) has a problem expressing emotions, going through life very logically. As opposed to Victoria, who left in the previous serial (the show is much quieter now, much less screaming), Zoe is from Earth's future, and thus forms a nice contrast to Jamie's more antiquated outlook on the world. Her intelligence and cunning help The Doctor to discover the threat here, and in later serials would be used to outsmart enemies in ways The Doctor couldn't. She's the saving grace of this serial, often providing some of the scenes with interesting moments that the usual collection of Base-Under-Siege archetypes cannot.
     Watching the recons was a novel experience, and now I've dipped my toes in I'm much more likely to go and watch some of the stories that have missing episodes. I will say that I enjoyed The Wheel In Space - it's Doctor Who, and it's the Cybermen, what's not to love? But a lot of the story did stretch on, and the characters struggled to break outside the archetypes which this story format forced them into. Base-Under-Siege can create a lot of interesting stories if they're actually trying to say or do something beyond the surface of that format - Dalek being the most notable example. The Wheel In Space doesn't live up to the story which began this season, and it would soon be dwarfed by the next Cyberman story, which finally moved from this mold.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Cybermen Month comes to an explosive end with the eight-episode adventure, as 1970s London is struck by The Invasion.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Tomb of the Cybermen (Revisited)

See here for my previous look at this story.

Despite the phallic design, the Cyber Controller adds an
interesting face to the Cybermen.

Doctor Who - Season Five, Story One - The Tomb of the Cybermen
Written between 27th and 28th September 2015

A question often arises when discussing The Tomb of the Cybermen - what makes this story so special? There are some who believe that the story's recovery in 1991 in its entirety was the miraculous reappearance of a bona fide classic, while others say that its reappearance is the only reason why people focus on it, and it's no different to any other Cyberman story from this era. There are elements of truth in both camps, as is often the case, and the reality is somewhere in the middle. It's true that Tomb has a great deal of similarities to the other Base-Under-Siege staples, but it also has a number of moments which raise it to another level.

Kit Pedler's last story had a black astronaut, so this comes
a little out of left-field.

     The Doctor has just picked up Victoria Waterfield, a now orphaned child of a Victorian scientist who fought against the Daleks. The Doctor and Jamie take her on her first trip, and end up landing on the planet Telos, where an expedition is attempting to excavate and find the legendary Tombs of the Cybermen, who at this point in history have been missing for several hundred years. The expedition is backed by the suspicious Klieg, his assistant Kaftan and her hulking slave Toberman. The Doctor is cautious about exploring the Tombs, but eventually leads the group the sleeping Cybermen. Klieg awakens them, revealing that he wishes to use them to rule the Earth. However, the newly awakened Cyber-Controller soon sets about the agenda of restarting Cyber-conversion. Klieg is defeated, and despite the efforts of the Cybermen and their adorable rodent-like servants the Cybermats, Toberman sacrifices himself to shut them away once more,
     The Cybermen here retain their design from The Moonbase, with a few extra additions made to their general lore. The Cybermen's use of refrigeration devices and their second home on Telos went on to become a key part of their mythology, as was the existence of the Cybermats (retired in Revenge and brought back in Closing Time), cute little creatures apparently capable of killing. Their threat here feels a lot more tangible than in the Moonbase, as they're present as a great evil locked away than as an outside invader. The harsh, cold architecture of the Tomb, coupled with the death traps and puzzles, do a lot to beef up the Cyber threat, and their desire to convert people is specifically pushed and discussed as the danger behind them. (Even if we won't see the Conversion process until the 1980s.)
     Most episode guides classify this as a Base-Under-Siege story, and it's not hard to see why. The character archetypes of the tough leader, the voice-of-reason scientist and the traitor are all there, as is the claustrophobia that comes with fighting the Cybermen in such a small, inescapable space. However, I think that there is a major difference - whose base is under siege, here? Usually the Base-Under-Siege story features a group of humans minding their own business before being attacked, and yet this time these explorers have sought the Cybermen out to their base. The Control Rooms of the Snowcap and The Moonbase were fairly mix and match, but the central vestibule in this serial is cramped and metallic and more innately inhospitable than simply bland.

There are some sweet moments with Victoria, and her
screaming isn't grating... yet.

     Of course this is the Sixties, so I have to discuss some of the less favourable aspects of the serial. All of the human villain characters have thick accents and darker skin, even though they are (with the exception of Toberman) played by white actors. Klieg and Kaftan are not exactly trustworthy in their initial appearance, but the episode builds around their villainous nature by having The Doctor be suspicious of them. Toberman was originally meant to be mute and deaf, with his hearing aid being a nod to the Cybermen's origins, but this was left out and so the only black character in the serial is portrayed as a noble, if terrifying, savage. Elsewhere, and both female characters are actually banned by the male exhibition leaders from even entering deep into the Tombs, and there are several similar comments made throughout. Victoria at least fights against a few of these jabs, and her characteristic screaming is actually used as a clever diversion, but it's still jarring to see this in a story supposedly set hundreds of years in our future.
     So, to answer my original question - what makes Tomb so memorable? It's certainly not some narrative masterpiece, and it's not very progressive with its characters, most of whom are either vaguely racist or are taken from previous Base-Under-Siege stories. But the story's setting, mythology, and expert sense of tension helps to sell a setup which without that would be rather menial. It is true that a lot of the focus on this story comes from its status as one of the seven complete Second Doctor stories, and one whose appearance seemed to arrive most miraculously, but that's almost incidental when you actually compare this episode to the stories that came before and after in this era. It doesn't just stand out, it shines. And that's why it's so cherished.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: A serial which now exists as 1/3rd actual episode and 2/3rds static images and dodgy CGI from 2010. It's The Wheel In Space.

FTA: Doctor Who Classic: Edge of Destruction, Galaxy Four and Tomb of the Cybermen

When I was involved in Lewis Christian's amazing fan-created book Celebrate, Regenerate, I submitted 29 articles, a whopping 25 of which got published within the beautiful, non-profit book. Unfortunately, very soon after the book was published on Lulu, Christian's website was taken over and the book disappeared from Lulu altogether. Since the book, both digital and physical, is effectively out of print, I thought I'd publish all of the articles that I have stored away in my archives, staggered across the weeks (due to the sheer amount of text involved.) I hope you enjoy them, and I hope that through this, the spirit of Celebrate, Regenerate lives on. I'll also be including "See More" links to where I've previously written a full review of that story, and images to break up the text. Enjoy. :D

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The Edge of Destruction (Extra words)
By Andrew Smith

Doctor Who proves to be incredibly divisive as early as its third story. Granted, The Edge of Destruction’s rather odd plot and performance does mean that it doesn’t attract a lot of followers, but at heart it’s the finale to a 13-episode long arc that cements the personalities of our initial TARDIS team as well as introducing us to the concept of a sentient time machine. Its slightly stage-play like construction allows us a wonderful amount of tension compared with the speed of its production, and the solution is a wonderfully unassuming joke that relieves the tension of the instalment with incredible ease. The Edge of Destruction, despite the way it was cobbled together on an almost absent budget, is a masterpiece that perfectly caps the series’ opening arc and ensured the success of the series for years to come. (See more.)

Galaxy Four
By Andrew Smith

Perhaps I'm not an expert here. My first interaction with Galaxy Four came just after I'd started looking into the Classic Series, when I bought the Titan Books publishing of the serial's script. The idea of the Chumblies fascinated me; the first time in my experience where there had been a deliberate dissonance between the idea that the most alien looking ones were the baddies. I was fascinated by the commanding female presence in the Drahvins, held my breath as Steven Taylor suffocated in the air lock, and felt slightly sad when the Drahvins were left to die on the exploding planet. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I learnt for the first time about the great burnings, and that the story had been entirely destroyed.
     Until the very recent discovery of the third episode, this was something of a Ghost story, one which had very little record at all post-transmission. It wasn't alone, of course, but it wasn't exactly a high-profile loss. People were more concerned with William Hartnell's last episode, or Troughton's first story. The Highlanders, The Macra Terror, The Web of Fear. Why should anyone care about a little old story with Amazonian aliens and cute little robots, when so much of Doctor Who's most important moments are completely missing? Well, for a very good reason. What's left of Galaxy Four is a decent little story, and one that packs a lot of great sci-fi ideas into an interesting premise. For a bit.
     Ok, the elephant in the room time. Galaxy Four is a tiny bit tedious in its way, and for the experienced viewer who knows the ins and outs of TV, this is pretty much the equivalent of watching an episode of Merlin where they try to spring the surprise that Morgana is evil. But for me as a child, reading this wonderful old script... everything was fresh, everything was new. Suddenly the black and white era wasn't this impenetrable fog, but this exciting and wonderful series of stories that were just as good as the stuff I was used to. Galaxy Four was the story that let me go one step further to becoming a Doctor Who fan, and for that I am truly grateful.

Tomb of the Cybermen

By Andrew Smith

The story of Tomb of the Cybermen and it’s history in Who fandom is the result of a long saga that began and ended many years before I was even born, but it never stopped me from appreciating the story in new light. At the end of the day, when we look at Tomb, we have to wonder why exactly it’s so special. After all, it’s a fairly standard story of that era. It takes character roles from previous Cyberman stories, with the confident expedition leader, the nervous guy on the edge, and the base under siege story is almost endemic. So what makes it so… so memorable? 

     Aside from the story’s size, which is the perfect configuration for most Classic Who fans, the story is also famous for having been fully recovered after the great burnings of the 1970s. As well as large swathes of Doctor Who, shows like Dad’s Army and nearly Monty Python had their master tapes burnt. For years, even after the program ended, people lamented the fate of Tomb of the Cybermen, oft remembered for the scenes in the second episode in which the Cybermen awaken from their sleep. And then, when all hope was lost, the entire story was recovered in 1992 from a Chinese TV station. Despite sharing a lot of the Second Doctor’s era’s tropes, the story feels more modern and the four-part structure means that it might as well be a Pertwee story someone lost the colour spots for.

     The Cybermen were always one of my favourite monsters because of the fact that they weren’t fundamentally malicious in nature. Modern media often feels the need to distinguish goodies and baddies, right and wrong, the compassionate and the evil. As a child, I loved the fact that the Cybermen were the product of a society, not unlike ours, whose desperation to survive turned them into a force of evil. The fear that they provoke is not from their appearance, nor their voice, but their motives. “You will become like us.” This story takes the more conceptual Cybermen from their first story and compacts it into a more public-friendly form, creating the monster that would go on to become the Daleks’ main competition as the series’ most well known monster.

     There’s been a lot of backlash to Tomb of the Cybermen’s popularity over the years, as you’d expect. The (human) villains are all minorities, the only black man is a mute who sacrifices himself at the end to save the day, and the only reason anything happens is because The Doctor is a bit too nosy. But people are able to ignore that with Tomb of the Cybermen in a way that other stories don’t manage. And that’s simply because Tomb, if you ignore all of the rascism, is a very well crafted Who story that takes the Cybermen and shoves them into a better, scarier new direction. It’s got Cybermen, Cybercontrollers, Cybermats and even a Cyber-manakin, and if I wanted to introduce a Not-We to my favourite monster, this would be the story I’d choose. (See more.)

Thanks.