Varga: I see things differently.
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Two, 18 November 1967
Three, 25 November 1967
Four, 2 December 1967
Five, 9 December 1967
Six, 16 December 1967
Episodes in italics have been lost.
Written by Brian Hayles
Directed by Derek Martinus
Script editor: Peter Bryant
Producer: Innes Lloyd
Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield (later extant appearance)
In the distant future, Earth has entered a Second Ice Age. We have brought this upon ourselves: as our population expanded in the late twentieth century, we deforested the planet in order to create enough space in which to house our increasing numbers. This vastly reduced the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (!), thereby initiating a period of massive global cooling (!!).
Most of the population has been relocated to temperate Africa. The glaciers are swallowing much of the northern hemisphere, held back only by a series of undermanned bases that use a technology called the ioniser to raise the temperature at the glaciers' perimeter, thereby preventing them from expanding.
In the ice, a survey team from one of the bases has found a frozen prehistoric man. Only it's not a man--it's an alien. When defrosted, he reveals himself to be Varga, an Ice Warrior from the planet Mars, who has been frozen beneath the ice for millennia. He kidnaps Victoria and has her help him find his ship, also buried in the ice, and revive three more members of his crew, so that he will then have the resources to decide whether to go back to Mars or stay and conquer the Earth.
The Doctor and the staff of the base realise that they can use the ioniser either to free the Ice Warriors' ship from the ice, or destroy it, but there's an issue--they don't know what sort of drive the ship has. If it has an atomic drive, the ioniser could well cause an explosion, destroying the base along with the spaceship. The Doctor sets off for the ship to try and find out what the situation is.
But while he's gone, the Ice Warriors stage a takeover of the base and proceed to steal the ioniser's fuel cells to replenish their ship's power supply--though of course, that will result in the destruction of the ioniser and the overrunning of Europe by the glaciers. Before they can make their getaway, though, the Doctor--now at their spaceship--is able to reconfigure the cannon they have pointing at the base, restructuring it the beam it projects so that it is destructive to Ice Warriors but not to humans. The Ice Warriors therefore have to flee the base, abandoning the fuel cells.
It's now been determined that directing the ioniser at the spaceship could indeed result in an atomic explosion. The staff's human crew have been accustomed to turning all decisions over to their control computer, but the risks here are so finely balanced--directing the ioniser at the glacier, leading to atomic explosion, or not doing so, leading to the base being swallowed by the glacier--that it refuses to make a decision. The base's staff are paralysed by fear, until ultimately their rogue lead scientist, Penley, chooses to risk attacking the Ice Warriors. Their spaceship explodes--killing the aliens--but the explosion is contained within the glacier and does not harm the base. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria slip away while the base staff celebrate.
What Lisa thought
She wasn't too impressed with this one. It's pretty thin on plot--I managed to detail the entire six-episode storyline in six paragraphs, after all, and even that was stretching it. Essentially, the plot of "The Ice Warriors" is Ice Age, aliens pulled from glacier, aliens threaten the Earth, the ioniser can stop them, the ioniser does stop them. To draw this out, seriously four episodes are devoted to debating whether or not to use the ioniser.
Besides the first appearance of the Ice Warriors, there are a couple of noteworthy elements here. The first is the appearance of a young Peter Sallis ("young" being a very relative term for an actor whose main claim to fame is forty years as the star of Last of the Summer Wine) as the renegade scientist Penley. Then there's also the quaint expectation that the Earth's rising population would actually lead to a loss of carbon dioxide, triggering another Ice Age
And finally there's the prediction of us growing to rely on computers so much that we need their assessments to make all our decisions for us, and are paralysed by indecision when they prove incapable of doing so. It's easy to dismiss that as being just as incorrect as the idea of global cooling, but I'm not so sure--I think that might really be a pretty solid extrapolation of where we're going, with our drive to renounce responsibility as much as possible and our reliance upon computers to make determinations in situations where variables change too quickly for the human mind to keep track of them.
The next serial after this is "The Enemy of the World", in which the TARDIS team fight Salamander, dictator of much of the world in the early twenty-first century--and the physical double of the Doctor.
Then comes "The Web of Fear", in which the Yeti that the Doctor fought in "The Abominable Snowmen" invade the London Underground. The Doctor is assisted in combatting them by the British Army, led by a mysterious colonel by the name of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, making his first appearance on the programme.
Then is "Fury From the Deep", in which hypnotic evil seaweed attempts to take over a North Sea oil rig. The Doctor realises the seaweed is susceptible to high-pitched sound, so he defeats it by amplifying the sound of Victoria's screams of terror, in what must undoubtedly be Doctor Who's most metatextual climax until 2011's "The Wedding of River Song". (How, how can this story by missing and unavailable to us?) Victoria leaves at the end of this one, staying behind with the family of one of the rig workers, Harris.
And then there's "The Wheel in Space", in which the Doctor and Jamie defeat an attempt by Cybermen to take over a human space station, the Wheel. When they depart at the story's end, the Doctor and Jamie take with them one of the station's crew, a young mathematical genius named Zoe Heriot.
All these stories are, sadly, lost, so we'll pick up our rewatch with the next story after "The Wheel in Space", "The Dominators".
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