THE DOCTOR WHO RATINGS GUIDE: BY FANS, FOR FANS
The Ice Warriors
Reviews

My favourite alien race by David Barnes 12/7/02

The Ice Warriors first appeared in a sixties story of the same name, battling the second Doctor. Now this wasn't my first story with the Martians (mine was Curse of Peladon) but this story encapsulates many of the Martian traits.

Now, Doctor Who was bound to feature Martians, but rather than use little green men, they used very large green men! The Ice Warriors (so called because of a scientist giving a name to the creature he has found in the ice; the term Ice Warrior is not used often by the Martians themselves) are a very noble race that usually get much better dialogue than Cybermen, Daleks, Sontarons etc. Quite often, nobility can be quite boring but the Ice Warriors never got boring (although there are several gaps in my knowledge of Ice Warrior stories; I have never read The Dying Days or Godengine and have never listened to Red Dawn).

The Ice Warriors features 5 Martians: the leader Varga (who gets most of the dialogue), Zondal the second in command who is notably more bloodthirsty than his leader and Turoc, Isbur and Rintan who just stand around making up the numbers and chase after people. The Ice Warriors are one of the first alien races to actually give names to each other (usually alien races have a name for their leader but that's it), although this approach was dropped for their later stories.

Now, The Ice Warriors is not a very good story really (out of the four TV appearances it is the worst) as it is a bit dull but the whole story does introduce the Martians wonderfully (aside from some dodgy lines such as "Your Doctor friend porked.")

Their next story was the far greater Seeds of Death. This introduces a proper caste system (although Varga was a leader he looked roughly the same as his warriors). An Ice Lord (never explicitly referred as such on screen) makes a first appearance in the form of Slaar. Slaar isn't very noble, he is very sadistic and arrogant. He doesn't consider the humans very strong at all, and even worse, underestimates the Doctor (which of course leads to his downfall). A Grand Marshall (sic) also makes an appearance on a screen, who is really in charge of the scheme.

Unfortunatly, with leaders being introduced, the other Warriors are neglected (as is always the case; notice what happened when Davros and the Cyberleader appeared) and are left to just standing around in the background and shooting people. But there is a marvellous sequence of scenes showing an Ice Warrior walking to the Weather Control Bureau (that shot of him standing in the trees is very creepy).

There is an odd bit in this story, that contradicts every other Martian story. An Ice Warrior is killed with a heat weapon and it seems that he melts! The Ice Warriors states that the Warriors are wearing armour and other stories make it blindingly obvious that the Warriors are not made of ice!

The Curse of Peladon was their next foray, this time with Pertwee's Doctor. This time, the production team made the clever move of making the Warriors goodies; throughout the story the Doctor is reluctant to trust them until it is obvious that they mean him no harm. This is my favourite Martian story. It is a really good story on its own but the warriors (only two this time, Lord Izlyr and a troop called Ssorg) are given marvellous dialogue and their honour and nobility shine. Izlyr is always trying to help the Doctor ever since the Doctor saved him from being crushed by a statue at the beginning of Part 2.

The Monster of Peladon, a sequel to Curse, is almost universally hated by most fans but I like it quite a lot! The Warriors first appear in a superb cliffhanger at the end of part 3. Again we have the Lord + Subordinate pairing (Azaxyr and Skell) but there is an army as well. Unfortuantly, with the exception of the main duo, the other Warriors don't seem to be in the best of nick. Many of the costumes are mismatched and one Warrior isn't even wearing the makeup around his chin. But luckily the lines given to Azaxyr more than make up for the other failings of the Warriors.

These were the only appearances on TV for the Warriors. A story was proposed, Mission to Magnus, for the 6th Doctor but was never realised on television. However it was released in book form. The Warriors are quite good but are somewhat underused, probably due to various other baddies in the story, such as the Mentor Sil.

Legacy was a New Adventure and is a cracking novel! This was the first New Adevnture I actually enjoyed. The Warriors are marvellous and are greatly expanded. The fact that this is another Peladon story (the third in a trilogy) makes it all the better. I really liked this book and I really want to get my hands on GodEngine but alas it is very hard to come by.

As I have said, I cannot comment on The Dying Days or Red Dawn as I do not possess them.

There was an Ice Warrior as a companion in a comic strip with the 8th Doctor at some point but I know little of him, other than his name is Ssard. He does make an appearance at the beginning of Placebo Effect but dosn't really contribute to the story, being as it is a story that already uses two past adversaries, the Foamasi and the Wirrn. Overall though, this is a very good book and is one of my favourite EDA's.

So, the Ice Warriors have made many appearances, on TV, on audio, in books and in comic strips. They are one of the big 5 adversaries of Doctor Who (the others being the Master, Daleks, Sontarons and Cybermen) even though they are not always the bad guys! The fact that you can't always tell whether they are going to be on the Doctor's side or not helps to make them a really 3 dimensional alien race. They are my favourite aliens of Doctor Who.

But after all this is said and done, what do I know? After all, I like the Gundan robots of Warriors Gate...

Resurrection of the Ice Warriors by Niall Jones 5/11/24

One of the things that the revived series of Doctor Who has done on a regular basis is to bring back old enemies. Over the course of the first five series, viewers experienced the return of icons such as the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, the Sontarans and the Silurians, all of them reimagined for the twenty-first century, but all still recognisably the same adversaries that battled previous incarnations of the Doctor.

If you look at the above list, you could be mistaken for thinking that the order of return of these adversaries corresponds to their position in a cosmic 'best of' list, with the Daleks being the greatest Doctor Who monsters, the Cybermen the second greatest and so on. Nevertheless, the fact that the Daleks appear first in the list, returning in Series One and featuring in its finale, is important. The significance of the Daleks to Doctor Who cannot be overstated. Their instant popularity changed the trajectory of the series forever, pushing it away from its Reithian roots and towards a mode of storytelling in which battling monsters was the norm. In fact, they proved such enduring villains that every single classic Doctor fought the Daleks at least once. The Daleks are so synonymous with the show that Doctor Who without them would be genuinely unthinkable.

The same can't quite be said for the Cybermen, although the series would be weaker for their absence. Similarly, none of the other names on the list have had quite such an impact on the show as the Daleks and could very easily have been left in the past.

The problem with the idea that the New Series of Doctor Who has to consistently bring back the most iconic of its classic adversaries -- leaving it scraping the barrel after a couple of years -- is that it isn't true. Except for the Daleks, no past adversary is guaranteed a return, and there is no order of precedence based on the number of previous appearances. After all, the first classic monsters to return in 2005 were not the Daleks but rather the Autons, who only made two appearances in the Classic Series but were perfectly suited to Russell T Davies' script for Rose. Similarly, no one would have predicted that an obscure monster from a lost Patrick Troughton story would re-appear before the Doctor's archenemy, but this is precisely what happened. The question of whether or not to bring back a classic adversary has less to do with how many times it has appeared previously and more with how well it is suited to the story that the writer wants to tell.

Conspicuously absent from the first six revived series of Doctor Who are the Ice Warriors, one of the most prolific monsters from the Classic Series, who made four appearances between 1967 and 1974. Affection for them also lingered long beyond their final appearance in The Monster of Peladon; had Series 23 not been unexpectedly junked by the BBC in favour of The Trial of a Time Lord, they would have faced off against the Sixth Doctor, while there were also plans to bring them back for the un-made Series 27. Post 1989, the Ice Warriors appeared in numerous books and audio dramas, yet they didn't return to our screens until 2013. Standing in their way: one Steven Moffat.

'I'll be honest', he confessed to the Radio Times in February 2013, 'I thought they were maybe the default condition for what people thought of as rubbish Doctor Who monsters: things that moved, very, very slowly and spoke in a way that meant you couldn't hear a word they said.' For Moffat, the Ice Warriors simply weren't good enough to return, despite their popularity. Fortunately for them, however, they had a champion in Mark Gatiss, who was able to persuade Moffat to let him write their return to the series thanks to 'some very clever ideas'.

What Gatiss does in Cold War, the episode that finally brought back the Ice Warriors after an absence of 39 years, is to show one out of its armour for the first time. For an Ice Warrior to be so exposed is the greatest of shames, but for Grand Marshall Skaldak, a Martian war hero adrift in time and trapped on a Soviet nuclear submarine, survival necessitates such a desperate move, and he becomes both hunter and hunted. He is simultaneously a dangerous enemy, able to forensically dissect a human with his bare hands, and a proud opponent, able to be negotiated with.

Gatiss's approach to bringing back the Ice Warriors in Cold War resembles Rob Shearman's approach to bringing back the Daleks in Dalek. Both introduce a single character, trapped by humans in a claustrophobic environment and emphasise how dangerous and frightening they can be. In both episodes, the approach to bringing back an old enemy is to go back to basics, preserving a classic design and presenting them in a straightforward, but tense, plot.

The extent to which Cold War goes back to basics, despite its innovations, can be seen in the extent to which it borrows from the Ice Warriors' eponymous debut story. In both, there is a scene in which a frozen warrior is revived, and both take place in cold environments in which humans find themselves besieged by the elements. In emphasising Cold War's continuity with the past, it's as if Gatiss is trying to prove Moffat wrong, to prove that the Ice Warriors work and that they always have.

Moffat must have been impressed, because, four years later, the Ice Warriors returned for a second time, this time in number. While Empress of Mars doesn't include any of Cold War's innovations, it does break ground in other ways, by introducing the series' first female Ice Warrior, Queen Iraxxa, and by setting the story on their home planet. Empress of Mars further emphasises the individuality of different Ice Warriors, presenting their society as one in which differences of opinion and personality are the norm. In both stories, references to the 'songs of the Red Snow' and the 'Phobos Heresy' hint at the intricacies of Mars's history and culture, presenting its societies as just as complex as those found on Earth.

This points to what makes the Ice Warriors interesting and why their return to the show was justified: they are individuals. In The Ice Warriors, the soldiers who attack the Brittanicus Base all have their own names, and there are some differences in costuming. Although little is done with this idea in the serial, with them being uniformly presented as villains, 1972's The Curse of Peladon does develop the idea, with the Martian delegation defying the Doctor's prejudices by turning out to be allies rather than enemies.

Curiously, this great strength of the Ice Warriors is predicated on their greatest weakness: their lack of any real purpose. The idea behind the Ice Warriors -- ancient Martians -- is so flimsy as to be almost non-existent. They are the most basic of bug-eyed monsters, initially presented as cardboard cut-out villains for the Doctor to battle and defined entirely by their design. The upside of this is that it allows writers an unusual level of flexibility in how they present them, as well as space in which to develop their culture. Whereas the concepts underpinning the Daleks and Cybermen mean that they must almost always play the role of villain, the lack of any real concept behind the Ice Warriors means that there is no one 'Ice Warrior story' as there is for, say, the Silurians, and that they can be characterised in different ways and play different roles.

As a result, while the proud Martians have already made six onscreen appearances in Doctor Who, as well as several more in other media, there is always room for them to make another return.