| abstract
| - The very first scene opens with photographs of icicles, crooked titles and wordless reverbed singing that’s all a bit eerie and actually effective, so of course they don’t use it again. Some future scientists (one of whom I suspect to be a Romulan) inside a small base wearing some ca-RAZY Peter Max outfits have a computer that’s really hard to understand when it speaks. They use it to keep the glaciers (don’t say “glay-shers,” it’s “glassy-ears”) of the new ice age from crushing them and a lot of the Earth (thanks expository dialogue!). Before five minutes have gone by, they find a pot bellied, hairy-shelled turtley-looking Ice Warrior frozen in a glassy-ear and dig him out to wacky effect! The TARDIS materializes on some ice, laying on it’s side - go home Tardis you’re drunk. There’s ice and snow everywhere and the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are wearing coats but Jamie’s still in his kilt so I figure he must have been no more than about an inch long underneath it, if you know what I mean. The Doctor agrees to help the scientists turn off the ice but says he doesn’t like computers (remember that this programme was made back when computers all spoke like Daleks, wanted to take over the world tand rule those who were not a number but free men, rather than gave us porn and episodes of Doctor Who whenever we asked). On the site where I watched this story, the second and third episodes were still missing and replaced by narrated reconstructions lasting but fifteen minutes combined, which sucked because I was afraid I might have missed a scene or two with a bear in it in the stuff they cut. The Ice Warrior wakes up and attacks the Scotsman (who doesn’t?) and is all whispery and ssspeaksss like a cartoon sssnaaake, yet also sounds like the Martian flying wings from the 1953 movie version of “War of the Worlds,” in which Martians invade Earth - completely a coincidence I’m sure. The Ice Warrior needs a car battery to give his spaceship a jump and to revive other Martians. Everyone of them have mouths like Muppets, I swear I kept thinking Guy Smiley. Soon we have three more whispery Martians to try and understand when they whiiisssspeeeer. The lame base commander is a bit shouty, perhaps to make up for the whispering. At one point the Ice Warriors capture Victoria and then appear to have killed Jamie so Victoria sobs “you’re monsters!” Ha! And yes, this totally is when Jamie died and left the show it turns out, which comes as a real shock, sorry for spoiling it for you. Later on, getting captured is part of the Doctor’s plan. To keep things interesting, the ice caves are always in danger of collapsing and are likely to drop Styrofoam on an actor or actress at any moment the script needs it. An Irish Michael Palin in a beard (“it’s!”) gets soniced to distorted-death after trying to talk to the Martians to ally with him against the scientists he hates. Jamie spends some time paralyzed from the waist down due to the Ice Warriors’ sonic weapons and also uses the phrase “lead on, MacDuff,” which is a common misquote of Shakespeare's “Lay on, Macduff // And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'” (STAGE: Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 8). This misquote didn’t come about until the late 19th century, while Jamie is from the 17th century; this seemingly sloppy anachronism can be explained however by the fact that Jamie’s based character appeared in more episodes of Doctor Who than any other companion. The live bear shows up in episode five and sounds like a pig at first, I didn’t like that at all, but it was still pretty cool to see a REAL LIVE BEAR. I mean, he was obviously shot elsewhere, not on set, and he didn’t interact with any of the actors, just came walking along towards the camera making his pig noises and then the actors were intercut reacting to the footage of a bear walking towards them but still - a real bear! The Doctor and Victoria defeat one of the Ice Warriors with a stink bomb. The Ice Warriors invade the scientist’s base to use their glassy-ear control technology to free their ship from the ice, so the scientists fight back by turning up the building’s heat so high that everything gets wavy and looks like a dream sequence is about to start. The scientists later turn their technology on the Ice Warrior spaceship, making couple of control panels burn and things get smokey inside the ship before another dream sequence appears to start. The camera man loses control of the camera and the Ice Warriors stop all that damn hissing about a “beat” too long after we cut away from them. The Tardis looks transparent in front of a photograph of icicles before vanishing, then the end credits blow their cue by appearing too early and crouching at the bottom of the screen before scrolling upwards.
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