Doctor Who The Ice Warriors

It is the far future and because everyone eats food in the form of pills people stopped growing crops (?) this reduced the carbon monoxide in the atmosphere and heralded a new ice age. To stop the onslaught of the ice the world government have created the ioniser an…. um… ill defined…thing that uses energy in the form of heat to melt ice. (duh)

Unfortunately like much new and interesting technology the ioniser requires a genius scientist to keep it from not exploding and killing everyone. I’m not sure how the salesperson spun that as a feature not a bug but Europe apparently bought one anyway. It is made clear that this is a very computerised society with people so used to having computers check their actions that they have become totally reliant upon them. It is here that the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria land. Coincidently just as a strange creature has been found encased in ice during a routine scientific survey of the glacier. The creature has been in the ice for thousands of years and yet the Doctor spies electronic connections on its helmet. This is an Ice-warrior and as we quickly learn it is from Mars. It immediately kidnaps Victoria, hides her in a cupboard and starts interrogating her, somehow it gets information out of her through all the screaming and moaning and decides that it will get its brothers out of the ice and take this world for its own.

There is a lot to like about the Troughton era, the obvious affection that Jamie and the Doctor share is heart-warming, Troughton’s nuanced portrayal is a good enough reason alone to watch the episodes and the Ice Warriors are an interesting if flawed enemy that do get much better in later serials. But whilst it’s possible to empathise with Victoria her complete uselessness in the face of any kind of opposition and her proclivity to scream should anything even remotely strange startle her is grating here. She really is much better in Tomb or the Cybermen where she shows some backbone. No, I wouldn’t like being kidnapped by a Martin either but I think I’d stop whining about it eventually.  

Audio: Is quite good, sometimes suffering from someone being a little off-mic it’s still really quite good

Video: Picture quality is excellent but of course what everyone wants to know is, is the bloody animation any good? The BBC have been fairly inconsistent with their release of incomplete serials, the fans want them and until we have the technology to reanimate the actors involved and get them to recreate it then unfortunately animation is really the way to go. Although my mind was almost changed on this when I saw what passed for animation on Reign of terror earlier this year. When  “The Invasion”  came out 2006 I thought “great this is really good, not perfect but it will get better”. Unfortunately it’s just been getting worse as Cosgrove Hall the company who did that animation went out of business and apparently unnamed flash animators had a go at Reign of Terror.

Fortunately The ice warriors is no-where near as bad as reign of terror, it’s not perfect, but it’s probably on par or better than The invasion and is a step back in the right direction and looks like it has been animated by someone with a passing understanding of anatomy, lighting and movement.

Now we have also seen the new animation for the 10^th planet and that looks different in style again with a slightly Manga feel. It’s this inconstancy that might make the fans turn back to the audio versions of adventures.  

Special Features:

Two documentaries are on here one focusing on the making of the Ice Warriors and what a terribly ambitious script it was for the money that the BBC was prepared to lavish on Doctor Who and another about the process of animating the missing episodes which is actually fairly good.