New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

One of the more publicly-touted creative decisions that Steven Moffat made going into the seventh series of New Who was to shift away from big arcs and to focus on single, high-concept episodes. High-concept, to paraphrase Don Simpson, basically means that an idea for a story can be reduced to such a level that it can be held in the palm of your hand. An easy example would be the sheer number of action movies whose premises can be summed up as "Die Hard on a [insert location or mode of transport]."

It's an approach that could work for Doctor Who because it's essentially a show built on pursuing "What if?" scenarios to their full potential, but it hadn't worked out terribly well so far. Whilst the show could still make the small, character stuff work, it struggled to make the more conceptual ideas work quite as well, a problem typified by the most high-concept of the series, the underwhelming "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship". It had a great hook, it had game actors, but it just didn't cohere into anything other than an hour of television built around a title. But as blockbusters have taught us time and again, if you try enough high-concepts, eventually one will stick, and such was the case with "Cold War", a terrific episode which could just have easily been titled "Martian on a Submarine".

As so often happens, The Doctor and his Companion wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time. They want to be in Vegas so that they can have some fun, but they wind up on a Soviet submarine in 1983. Incidentally, it's always amusing to me how the typical Who story structure makes The Doctor into basically a tourist whose leisure time is constantly interrupted by death and destruction.

Being a Soviet submarine at the height of the Cold War, things are not going well. In addition to being in a constant state of deadly readiness, prepared to rain nuclear fire down upon the world at a slightest provocation, the men of the submarine have recently taken on board some unusual cargo. They have excavated a chunk of ice containing what they believe is a mammoth, but since this is Doctor Who and not that barely remembered SyFy original movie starring Summer Glau, it turns out that the creature in the ice is, in fact, an Ice Warrior, a member of a proud warrior race who once ruled a vast Martian empire. Kind of a badass, basically, and not the sort of creature you would like to be trapped in an enclosed space with for any period of time.

Unfortunately for everyone on the submarine, this particular Ice Warrior is Skaldak, a great and powerful hero who is considerably disoriented from having spent 5,000 years trapped in the ice. The Doctor initially manages to convince Skaldak that they mean him no harm, then is forced to watch as one of the Soviets does considerable harm to him using a cattle prod. It's an act of aggression that goes against the Martian code of war and, coupled with Skaldak's belief that his people have all died and left him with nothing to live for, this makes him hellbent on wreaking furious vengeance upon not just The Doctor and his comrades, but all of humanity. And thanks to the copious weapons of atomic warfare around him, he is well-placed to do it.

Continued:       1       2