The Ice Warriors

Somewhere in the future of Earth, mankind has mastered control of the elements and perfected a means of synthetic food to feed Earth's increasing population. As a result of this, farmland and open space are all but gone, every centimeter taken up by housing, aside from a bare minimum of plant life. And then one year there is no spring, and massive glaciers begin to move across the world, triggering a new ice age. To combat the ice, scientists build emergency stations across the world equipped with ionizers, but in the Britannicus (aka England) base, the systems are falling apart due to unrest amongst the staff. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive just as one of the scientists free an apparantly dead creature from the ice face. The Doctor is all but drafted into service to assist with the ionizer problems, and the creature returns to life. The monster is known as Varga, a warrior from the planet Mars, who crashed on Earth millions of years before along with his crew. Varga revives the rest of his crew and the warriors go on the rampage, attempting to extort fuel elemts for their stranded ship from the ionizer base, regardless of the consequences to the Earth.

This is the first time we see what will be known as the Ice Warriors. As species go they should be called Martians, but their dependency on cold weather lends them the nickname which will become legendary in Doctor Who, even if they do only appear in four adventures. Physically they are very tall, once again adding to the theme of huge monsters for the season. With Patrick Troughton's Doctor being a bit on the shorter side, his confrontation scenes with them are made all the more tense, with him glaring upwards and them looming over him impassively. And they're green. Of course. They are armoured but visibly reptillian, speaking in a menacing hiss which is actually very effective. There appear to be different breeds of Ice Warrior as well; Varga and his lieutenant, Zondal, are the only two capable of speech, and both are of the classical design of the moster, while Turoc, Rintan, and Isbur are silent giants with the same body build but differently formed heads - a bit of cultural diversity that has not been seen with the likes of the Cybermen or the Daleks (the Cybercontroller and the Emperor Dalek aside).

Victoria spends most of the adventure as a prisoner of the Ice Warriors, being positively terrorized first by Varga, and then by the rest of his crew as they return to life. Her escape attempt from their ship and through the glacier's caverns is an incredible sequence, her fear and panic plain to see as she attempts to get away from the lumbering Turoc. The whole adventure is shot with incredible precision, with effective close-ups and a unique musical score. Even the opening credits after the normal title role are customized, with the title of the show and writer's credits superimposed over scenes of frozen desolation. Unlike the other adventures of the season, the episode numbering is done with a simple overlay of the the word, rather than the numeral, with "Episode 1" simply replaced by "ONE" and so on.

This is, alas, anotehr incomplete adventure, but it is not as decimated as others of its time. The Ice Warriors, like Tomb of the Cybermen before it, was completely missing from the BBC archive for years until episodes 1, 4, 5 and 6 were all found together. 2 and 3 still elude us to this day, but the BBC home video release comes with not only the CD audio version of the missing episodes (although with no linking narration, as with The Crusades) but a reconstructed presentation of the episodes in a 15 minute segment called "TWO and THREE" to bridge the gap. What images were available are used along with the audio clips to preserve the integrity of the adventure, and, of course, to make the tape more marketable. Don't expect this one on DVD for a while though; there are plenty of complete stories still waiting for release and hey, TWo and THREE might turn up one day. Still, it would be great to see these stylish classic episodes restored through the magic of VIDfire.

Every now and again, though, Doctor Who fails science. In this episode it is stated that the act of removing all the plants from Earth depleted the atmosphere of its supply of carbon dioxide, and thus there was no heat retention and the glaciers began to advance. Right. Last time I checked, plants actually produce oxygen and consume carbon dioxide, so realistically a world without plants would see the residents dying from asphyxiation rather than freezing under the ice. Indeed, with industry churning out all those new housing units and making synthetic food, there would be more CO2 than ever before, triggering a greenhouse effect and melting the polar ice caps. Of course there's also that science from The Day After Tomorrow where the melting ice caps redefine the ocean currents and weather patterns suffer as a result, and scientists snarked at that as well, so who's to say.

And who cares really. The story is not about the science of keep the Earth green and happy, but of a group of stranded aliens, desperate to get away from the humans, who they know will capture them and keep them prisoner as scientific curiosity. It's about how ruthless those aliens will become in order to survive, and, of course, how the Doctor will defeat them and save us all from another alien menace.

So the "monster season" rolls along. But the next monster is not an alien monster at all. He is human. He just looks like an alien, an alien we all know very well by now.

NEXT EPISODE : THE ENEMY OF THE WORLD