Thin Ice
(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill, 29/4/2017, showrunner; Steven Moffat, writer: Sarah Dollard, director: Bill Anderson)
'Are you going to London's Frost Fairs?
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Fishflakes
Remember me to one who lives under the ice
She once was some fuel of mine'
Ranking: 201
Or ‘The Beast Really Below’ as they should have called it. Rather neatly the Moffat era nearly ends with a story that so closely mirrors where it nearly started, with another story about a massive whale-type creature in captivity at the whims of its very Human captors. Admittedly it’s in a story that’s set in the depths of the Thames in the past rather than deep space in the future and features one posh racist idiot rather than a corrupt regime, but it’s a very similar story that leads to the same debate of Bill ‘choosing’ to let it free or stay ignorant just the way Clara did. What with ‘A Christmas Carol’ as well it’s truly how odd many of the Moffat stories revolve around big sea creatures either under the water or in the air and makes me wonder if he used to ponder his script ideas over a fish and chip supper. Is this a story worth telling twice? Yes, mostly. Sarah Dollard has a very different feel to Moffat, telling a very simple (some would say slow) tale rather than one full of character and debate rather than mystery and jumpscares so that this sequel just about has a life of its own. It’s also a warm tale about cold people in Victorian England (in every way that sentence can be taken) rather than a cold tale about a society only pretending to be warm (as per ‘Beast’). Even so, this story is walking on ‘thin ice’ in many regards, just about getting away with the sense of déjà vu while the best bits all come from what’s ‘new’.
Let’s start with how this episode looks:
amazing. London in the 19th century should be old hat by now but
we’ve never had a ‘Frostfair’ before and the sight of an impressive amount of
extras dressed in Victorian finery ice-skating and doing acrobatics and selling
meat pies in 1814 is a whole new image the series has never done before. Though
the Thames being frozen over had been mentioned in the series before (in
Moffat’s ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ and a whole Big Finish story, see the ‘prequels/sequels’ column) it’s
nice to actually see it and was the suggestion of Dollard herself, having
researched the era thoroughly for her friend Lili Wilkinson’s book
‘Scatterheart’ (2007), about a rich girl who loses everything and gets deported
to Australia also set in 1814 (main character Hannah has much the same naiveté
and innocence than Bill but not the curiosity or the big heart). The sense of
the ordinary turned into the extraordinary is very Dr Who and looks
magnificent. How did they manage to recreate the Thames being frozen? (Specifically
the stretch from Blackfriars Bridge to New Lime Wharf). I’ve looked it up on a
few sites and nowhere tells me where this was filmed, which makes me think it’s
a studio set with CGI added in the background, but if so then it’s one of the
most convincing uses of it in the series. You totally believe that you are
there and looking back in time. I mean, there’s even an elephant at one point –
an elephant! It’s all true too by the way, it’s not like the set dresser
suddenly went a bit mad – it was a Victorian era stunt to show how thick and
safe the ice was. It seems unlikely, to say the least, that The Thames will
ever freeze over again thanks to industry and global warming so alas it’s
probably as close as any of us will ever come to being there at the real thing.
This is also the single
most Dickensian Dr Who story – despite being technically set in late Regency
period rather than Victorian times and yes, even compared to ‘The
Unquiet Dead’ which
actually has Dickens in it! Other stories set in this same period have touched
on the inequality between classes but it tends to be s background detail: ‘Thin
Ice’ is all about a different world that could have been. Not just freeing
‘Tiny’ from the ice and showing kindness, but the way the ‘Frostfairs’ were
pretty much the only time the lower and upper classes ever rubbed shoulders,
all of them enjoying the spectacle of ice-covered London in their own ways. We
see the penniless and starving, terrified of ending up at the workhouse, trying
to scratch out a living while the posh boys live off their family money and hoard
it all. It’s a story that both laughs and cries at the discrepancies of the day
in a Dickens way, with a moral ending that helps the poor and condemns the
rich. You might have noticed that we’ve had a lot of Victorian stories in the
Moffat era (there were only ever three in the ‘classic’ era): I don’t think
that’s a coincidence. This was the era of David Cameron’s ‘austerity’ measures,
when a monster from a posh Eton school started taking away from those in
society who had next to nothing in order to give more money to his rich mates.
He’s the true villain, stealing money and liberty in a way that should get him
locked up but which only seems to bring him more prestige, while those stealing
to try and get by are the ones chased by the magistrates for daring to want to
live. I do wonder, too, if Dollard is responding to ‘The
Beast Below’ with its
oddly pro-monarchist tendencies (Liz 10 is the closest that story has a to a
hero, but undercover because she’s too scared of speaking out directly) and
doing that story properly i.e. by showing that the rich aren’t the heroes but
the villains and that the people in power are the ones who created our misery,
that the haves have a responsibility to the have-notes if they’re living off
the fruits of other people’s labour, whales or humans alike. It’s a very
Dickensian attitude and rather than attack it directly Who does what it used to
do during the days of Thatcher (especially the McCoy/Cartmel years) pointing
out all the ways its wrong in another context and letting viewers draw up their
own conclusions. The ‘heart’ of this story is The Doctor’s line about how
civilisations are judged by how they treat the people who work under them, a
message aimed as squarely at us in the present day as it is as Regency London.
Certainly Sutcliffe (a
chinless wonder who even looks a bit like Cameron) is one of Who’s biggest
boo-hiss baddies, with no redeeming features whatsoever (though officially he’s
based on a character of the same name in ‘Hannibal’, another of Dollard’s
favourite series). He might not have conquered worlds, destroyed empires or
killed anyone directly, but he’s clearly amongst the word of humanity, racist
bigoted loud-mouthed, arrogant and obnoxious. Usually the best baddies are the
sort that are intelligent enough to go toe to toe with The Doctor but even the
script describes Sutcliffe as ‘30s, snooty, pampered and rather dim’. Sutcliffe
is a symbol of the uncaring world who are only out for themselves, who don’t
have time to stand up for the ‘little people’ the way The Doctor always does. He’s
imprisoned ‘Tiny’ (also referred to as ‘The lochless monster’ and ‘The not so
little mermaid’ in Dollard’s best lines in the story) purely for fuel, feeding
it the homeless and un-noticed every decade to keep the cogs of industry
turning. He thinks as no one has noticed the whale and nobody will miss the unloved
and unwashed poor nobody will care. But as always in Dr Who every life is
sacred, from scared urchins to hundred foot whales. It’s one of the most
satisfying parts of any Dr Who story seeing him get his comeuppance in a story
that’s really about community, about people coming together, as represented by
the way all classes have come together on the frosted over Thames (give or take
the odd pick-pocket).
I love the way, too, that
‘Thin Ice’ juggles the sense of coldness with the very visual frost on the
screen and the cold way these people behave towards one another. Though we’re
in late Regency and Queen Victoria won’t be born for another twenty years this
is the acceleration of those Victorian ideals, of society demanding you be
distant to everyone around you and that demonstrating your feelings is somehow
rude and uncouth. Bill is one of the most naturally expressive companions we’ve
had in the series so seeing this world through her eyes, as she cuts through to
the horrors that even The Doctor is immune to, really works. This is a world
where children were statistically more likely to die than live so there was no
point getting attached to them. You sent you children to the nanny if you could
afford it or let them play in dangerous situations if you couldn’t. We’re
fifteen years before policeman (‘Peelers’ after prime minister Robert Peel) so
if something goes wrong, if your parents die, if you lose your job, if you’re
sleeping rough on the streets or if someone steals something precious from you
then there’s no one to turn to: you’re on your own. It all stems from the top
though not the bottom: Sutcliffe talks about helping society through industry
but he doesn’t care about his employees and certainly not the giant whale in
his care. The orphaned children, though, pull together and care for one
another. They’re the only people with any warmth this episode, Bill aside. And
on this day, rather than living on two separate worlds, all classes come
together to enjoy the novelty of ice skating over the river – the ice,
ironically, thawing the tension that exists between them. It’s a real shame The
Doctor doesn’t make it icy every year, as a memory of how much better it is
when people come together.
Although sometimes
characters don’t need a hug, just a slap. One of the best and most talked about
12th Doctor scenes happens in this story, when Peter Capaldi’s incarnation spends
a long time warning Bill about the dangers of travelling in time as a Black
lesbian girl in the Georgian era. She can’t re-act he tells her, no matter how
rude anyone is to her, repeating a moral code he’s been talking about since he
was William Hartnell, that the past is another alien place and what they
considered normal back then would be wrong in your time, but it was different
then and time travel is all about non-interference. Yet when they meet
Sutcliffe and he turns out to be your average obnoxious racist xenophobe with
money Bill remembers what she’s been told, bites her tongue and does everything
the Doctor tells her to do as he talks about how different times have to be
judged by different morals – then loses control and whacks the Lord one round
the face as everyone in the modern audience has been longing for him to. It’s a
brilliant, unexpected and very Who-y moment that tells us one thing and does
another, allowing Bill to keep her composure and letting The Doctor to speak
for us and prove what a big heart he has behind that brain. You sense even The
1st Doctor, the one most concerned with keeping u respectability and
not re-writing history, would have cheered him on (while the ‘Doctor stealing
from the market’ stalls recall ‘The Reign Of Terror’). This first go at ‘Dot and
Bubble’ (where the racism is
against The Doctor) gets round all the problems we had with Martha on trips
back to the past (it seemed odd and out of place when her colour was commented
on in stories like ‘Human Nature/Family of Blood’ and even odder when it wasn’t, in stories like ‘The
Shakespeare Code’) and
avoiding the ‘black girls can’t control themselves’ trope always thrown at
women like Serena Williams and co. There’s also a line which we should have had
years ago (and which ‘Shakespeare Code’ hinted at), that immigration has always
been different here, that being part of a world empire and a country that was
once invaded by Romans and Vikings means immigration has always been part of
British life (another dig at Cameron, who played into the hands of Nigel
Farrage and whatever his racist party was named that particular week, with the
idea that immigration is a ‘modern problem’ rather than part and parcel of
British life. Surprisingly The Doctor doesn’t mention that Britain was one of
the few ‘first-world’ countries where the slave trade was always illegal, even
before an 1807 act made it illegal it across large swathes of Europe).
Everybody comes out of this scene well except one particularly slimy posh
Victorian bully (of which we know there were many) and it’s notable that
everyone else in the story (read: everyone poor) treat Bill as one of them. For
an episode that was treading on thin ice with what it still could and couldn’t
do in terms of taking history in its own terms yet still being fair to modern
audiences, it’s a very clever way of making everyone happy, well everyone except
intolerant right wing loonies who are watching the wrong show (give or take ‘The Dominators’
anyway). It’s deservedly one of the most talked about scenes in modern Who, one
of those moments when the series really is speaking for ‘us’ and shows what
little thin ice society used to be based on and how easily it can crack then –
and now.
We get lots of talking
but we don’t really learn anything. This felt particularly odd at the time
after two similarly talking episodes in a row, though ‘Thin Ice’ holds up
better than it did on first transmission given that we know there are more
action-based episodes to come. What’s odd about ‘Thin Ice’ in particular though is that it’s a
story that feels like it needs more, that it’s somehow run out of space to tell
us what we need to know despite more dialogue than usual. By her own admission
Dollard was less interested in Tiny’s origins than the story of what he’s up to
in 1814 and that’s a shame. We don’t even get a decent close-up of him despite
the fact that what we fleetingly see looks really good, one of The Mill’s better
CGI effects. This story feels as if it’s going to be a story about whether the
ends can ever justify the means, in much the same way ‘Beast Below’ was but the
story ducks that question. They actually cut one of the best scenes in editing
too, one which sold the story’s moral even more: that Sutcliffe didn’t see any
difference in using whale blubber to the way all his rivals ran their
companies, with workers miners and even children doing back breaking work and
dying in accidents to keep the wheels of industry turning (‘progress requires
fuel and requiring it is a dangerous business’).
Some of the dialogue
really falls flat too: given the theme of coldness this is the ‘wrong’ story to
have The Doctor go all alien and cold. Dollard’s not good at writing for
Capaldi’s Doctor, taking the character synopsis that he’s old and grumpy at
face value, without the twinkle underneath (‘Face The Raven’ is even worse in that respect). The scene of him looking after the
children is meant to undo all that, to show that he’s been listening to what
Bill’s told him, but for that to work we need a ‘Runaway Bride’ style tag of
him telling Bill she was ‘right’ and ought to remind him to care. That sense of
disdain never rings true though: The Doctor snaps that ‘I’m two thousand years
old and I’ve never had the time for the luxury of outrage’ but we just know
that isn’t true; ever since The 1st Doctor went back to help find a
truce between the Humans and Sensorites he’s been driven by outrage and correcting things that are wrong. Who
is he lying to? Bill has already seen enough to see through him and this front
across series ten is usually reserved for Nardole, in a promise to stay home
and guard the ‘mysterious’ vault in the college basement, but Nardole’s not
here. Capaldi at least looks as if he’s having fun though and looks good in the
sort of stove-pipe hat his second incarnation would have loved. As for Bill,
Pearl Mackie is as always terrific at being lost and out of her depth (which
happens a lot in this story) but she struggles with the sort of fierce anger
Clara would have made her own. Bill also has some odd dialogue too, in shock at
seeing ‘the first person die in front of me’, which is technically true, but
surely not all that much of a shock for someone who’s walked through a city of
dead bodies and seen her ‘girlfriend’ abducted, possessed and turned into a
‘wet’ hologram. The over-long diving scenes too don’t add much: The Doctor is
usually more observant than this without having to put Bill’s life in danger
alongside his own and also seem more ‘fake’ than the Frostfair ones.
Overall, then, this is a
mixed bag of ice, a heartwarming tale in the coldest setting since the Tardis
left The North Pole. Some scenes (especially the punching ones or scene setting
ones) work really well, while others just fall through the ‘cracks’, without as
much emotion or realism as they could have done. The idea that capitalism is
built on ill-treated whale poop somehow makes perfect sense, a great idea they
could have done even more with, but the story spends so long putting The Doctor
and Bill at odds that it loses sight of its main target, with a rushed ending
that doesn’t deliver the justice Sutcliffe deserves. There’s no one thing this
story does better than anywhere else: for all its clumsy execution ‘Face The
Raven’ made a serious moral point about Humans taking responsibility for their
own planet where this album flops, you felt a lot more sympathy for ‘The
Beast Below’ than you do
for Tiny because you understand it’s situation better (and the fat it’s there
by choice in the end, not slavery) while ‘Dot and Bubble’ is far braver in speaking out against racism. This is a story that’s more
than just an abstract idea though: as shallow as it might sound this story looks
more magnificent than almost any other story, right up there with ‘Warrior’s
Gate’ and ‘Keeper Of
Traken’ as Dr Who’s prettiest
looking stories. This is a rare story too (along with ‘The
Shakespeare Code’) that
absolutely has to be set in London, rather than just happens to be set there, a
love song to the city which has been a little bit overlooked since the show
ended up based in Wales. It also feels very much like a Dr Who episode, which
was a relief after ‘Raven’ (an episode so out of kilter with everything else it felt as if Dollard
had never seen the show before). For that alone ‘Thin Ice’ deserves praise and
together with the political point is nudged up a shade higher than ‘The Beast
Below’, but really both stories come as a pair: flawed but watchable
stories with strong but muddled moral points to make. You’re on ‘Thin Ice’ if
you stop to think about this story too hard as it’s not the deepest nor the
best story out there, especially in the extra-strong 10th season, but it’s
hearts are in the right place. To quote some of the better dialogue from
this episode, it’s up to you whether ‘passion or reason wins’. At least I had
half a ‘whale’ of a time, even if ultimately ‘Thin Ice’ is another ‘one that
got away’ (and it could have been so big too!)
Unfortunately the story then gets too stuck in the absurd and fantastical with a weird subplot involving novelist Jane Austen that just doesn’t go anywhere. Full marks for the ending though (spoilers) – it turns out that Vicki has kept the creature safe all these years and took it with her when she left The Doctor (that’s why she was being so shifty round the Tardis in one of the few bits of moving footage we have of ‘The Myth Makers’). Odd the 12th Doctor doesn’t fill Bill on this detail really, it’s the sort of thing she’d have enjoyed (and in many ways Bill is the companion most like Vicki since she left, with the same wide-eyed innocence and idealism. At first anyway…)
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