Mark Gatiss' first episode of New Who's seventh season marked the return of the Ice Warriors, one of the most fondly remembered creatures from the series' classic era. Taking on the traditional Who format of a base under siege, Gatiss offers the inspired twist of making the base in question a Cold War Soviet nuclear submarine. The Doctor and new companion Clara are not only forced to fight off the most fearsome figure in Ice Warrior military history, but do so in the claustrophobic confines of a badly damaged underwater vessel containing humanity's most devastating weapons and Eastern Bloc soldiers with their fingers on the trigger. The uncertain allegiances of everyone aboard give the characters a moral ambiguity rarely seen on Who. Despite being a high ranking Soviet official, Captain Zhukov (Davos Seaworth, aka Liam Cunningham) is an authoritative but rational man able to confront an unknown threat without resorting to violence with the unwise reflexivity of his second in command, executive officer Stepashin (Tobias Menzies, another Game Of Thrones vet). Ice Warrior Skaldak is presented with a degree of sympathy appropriate to a race which has been both friend and foe to the Time Lord in the past. As the Doctor immediately realises, it has Skaldak who has every reason to be angry: awoken after being frozen for five thousand years, his friends and family are dead and he has been forced to abandon his armour - a great dishonour - after being locked in chains. The folly of the mutually assured destruction philosophy is a theme throughout, and while the episode features one of Gattis' often frustrating 'power of love' endings, it is an appropriate resolution to an episode which posits that any conflict can be resolved as long as both sides are willing to empathise with the other's position.
28-year old English writer with a borderline obsessive passion for films, videogames, Chelsea FC, incomprehensible words and indefensible puns. Follow me on Twitter if you like infrequent outbursts of absolute drivel.
