Cold War: Ranking - 186

  Cold War

(Series 7, Dr 11 with Clara, 13/4/2013, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Mark Gatiss, director: Douglas MacKinnon) 

'What do you call this craft we're in, human?'

'A submarine'

'A sssssssssssssssubmarine? Are you trying to make fun of my sssssssssssssibiliance?!? Besides everyone knows this puny war between humans will come to nothing: I mean, everyone knows that of your current empire leaders Andropov is really an Androgum and that Reagan is a Sontaron'

Ranking: 186

In an emoji: 🛥

Everyone has a date when they knew they’d become, if not properly old, then not as young as they liked to think they were. For some people it’s their first grey hair. For others it’s the moment they started making noises when they got out of chairs. Or the day a hot trendy young thing gave up their seat on the bus because you obviously looked well old innit. For me though I’d already been through all that and was still in denial when my age hit me. The day was April 13th 2013 and the reason was that I was watching the first Doctor Who historical to be set during my lifetime. Not by much maybe (I was nine months old when this story is set) but it was still a shock. I mean Dr Who historicals were always from times that seemed yonks past, sepia tinged even when they were in the 1970s which, after all, really was ages ago (as with everyone, any time before I was born was ages ago). But the 1980s? That was yesterday, surely? I’m still getting my head round the start of the 1990s and here we are treating this as a moment of important historical importance full of the usual jokes we always get in Dr Who historicals about the characters in it not understanding a word of the modern lingo (‘karaoke? Hen night?!’) It didn’t help that ‘Cold War’ isn’t one of those trivial historicals about the people off the banknotes who weren’t really much like their public stereotypes anyway and so felt like fiction but a real genuine look at how different the world was between then and now. But, well, as all good Dr Who fans know time is relative and actually this is a story ripe for telling and like all Dr Who historicals particularly revealing for those who were too young to really be there. 

 As the title says it’s the height of the cold war, Russia and America are banging heads like they’re in a rap band, there’s a secret submarine full of nuclear missiles at the North Pole and everyone expects to be blown up any minute. It’s ‘Ice Warriors Of The Deep’ in other words, but done historically rather than contemporary and from a Russian rather than a Western poojnt of view (even if the actors don’t seem to play it any differently than they would if this was an American sub: it’s not until Clara starts asking about Tardis translation circuits that I even realised we were on a Russian sub the first time around. I mean, why is our latest mad professor, Grisenko, quoting song lyrics by Duran Duran and Ultravox? For a kick-off it would be far more in character if he liked music no one else did: he’s a post-‘Dare’ Human league fan if ever I saw one, still loyally buying their singles in 1983 even though the rest of the world have moved on to other things). What’s more this is ‘Warriors’ done properly, with lots of dark shadows, minimal stunt casting and no pantomime Myrka. Only, like many a Dr Who historical, it felt vaguely contemporary at the time too what with Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 (with what now seems like an opening battle in their war against Ukraine and after that who knows? No literally – he’s the only person who does thanks to the Tardis). 

Gatiss, who knows this period well, clearly set the story in 1983 to mirror some real life events that sound like a Dr Who plot already. This is the year we had at least three moments when the cold war could have been tipped over the edge into becoming hot and when the ‘Doomsday Clock’ that judged how close humanity was to nuclear annihilation was never closer to midnight whatever the scientists said (in 1984 they turned it from four minutes to midnight to three based solely on the events of this year; in 2013 when this story was shown it was five minutes; in 2024 they moved it to 90 seconds, mostly because of North Korea and Putin, just to terrify you). The first event was the ‘Abe Archer’ exercises of 1983 when the Americans ran an entire five-day nuclear weapon ‘scenario’ based on what they thought would happen if they took pot-shots at Russia with nuclear missiles. This took place in Belgium, not a million miles away from the Russia borders: not the best of things to do in such a jumpy time. The second was the equipment malfunction that led a Soviet computer screen in a Russian submarine just like the ones on telly to light up with the warning that America really had nuked their home; thankfully the person in charge was sensible enough to check first rather than simply pressing a button to retaliate without question the way he was trained to. Computer error compounding human nature: that’s a recipe for disaster in many a Dr Who story that is. Finally a Korean passenger plane got lost and accidentally dipped into Russian airspace and got shot down, leading to talk of immediate retaliations that thankfully, came to nothing when the mistake was pointed out. Even so for a moment there – for three moments there – we could have had full-on nuclear war. In context digging up a 5000 year old Martian reptile who holds both sides to ransom with our own nuclear weapons is just another one of those days. And we seemed to be in another of those years in 2013. 

Rather than go the obvious route and make the baddy an alien a megalomaniac Dobby the House Elf lookalike named ‘Vladimir Nitup’, though, this story replaces him with my favourite race of Who monsters, The Ice Warriors for a story that seems to exist mostly for a big pun. The Ice Warriors in the Cold War: how perfect! Except it’s an ironic title. Despite our Martian friends being naturally cold there’s no way they’d ever stop as low as the Human concept of a ‘cold war’. They’re an honourable race, who fight as hard as anyone when they have a good enough cause but they do it honourably, openly, fairly, by staring their enemies in the eye. Their idea of war is, well, ‘hot’ – the full-out battle everyone on this submarine (and over on the rival American one no doubt) fears: that a mistake, ‘human error’, can cause things to escalate without meaning to. The last thing an Ice Warrior would do is pilot a submarine full of nuclear missiles in the middle of a sea in preparation of blowing up the world, in retaliation for a rival bloc of Ice warriors intent on blowing up the other half of the world. Holding people to ransom, using their weapons as a deterrent rather than as a force is, well, positively alien to them. The easiest thing for the Ice Warriors to do in order to seek revenge against the humans is to set this war off and thaw them out properly. Throw in the gag about the 1980s being the perfect time for their ‘shellsuits’ and you have a story that’s build on a massive pun and I’m all here for it (all the more amazing, really, given that this story is two separate Gatiss submissions stuck together: it took showrunner Steven Moffat to see how clever they could be when paired together). 

 I’m here for the Ice Warriors too, my favourite of the entire branch of Dr Who monsters. Most Dr Who villains are black or white: usually they’re all bad or (more occasionally) turn out to be all good. The Ice Warriors, though, are opportunistic: their default setting is an honourable peace but they’re also happy as warriors and properly scary when they’ve been wronged. Always though, whenever we see them angry, it’s because the Humans have done something stupid to make them like that. Plus given the (admittedly rather limited) knowledge of what life might be lie elsewhere in the universe green reptilians in suits with breathing problems due to the gravitational effects of other planets are arguably the most likely way that alien evolution on another planet would develop, give or take amphibious creatures like Sil or Kroll the giant squid. There most certainly isn’t the same amount of bipedal humanoids walking around as there are in the Whoniverse (although they are much easier to produce on a budget). Someone else who shares my love for the Ice Warriors is Mark Gatiss. They are the last of the original ‘big five’ race of monsters that always used to get their own pages in guidebooks to appear in the 21st century series a full two years after The Silurians and five after The Sontarons (the Daleks and Cybermen, of course, having been there early on). Russell T just ran out of time to include them but Steven Moffat actively hated them, seeing them as the sort of slow limbering nit-very-menacing bug-eyed green aliens he was trying to move the show away from. However what with Gatiss being his close friend it became a running joke between them that for every new season Steven would ask Mark for his ideas and every year he got back a plot involving Ice warriors. Finally Moffat gave in, told his friend ‘if you can find something new to do with them worth doing I’ll consider it’, which is when Gatiss came up with two things we’d never seen before in the ‘old’ series: an Ice Warrior leaving its protective armour and a female ice lady (something only ever seen in the 8th Doctor comic strip that briefly ran in the Radio Times in 1996). The only question was, after mucking up the modern Cybermen and diluting the impact of the Silurians and giving us those odd clunky chunky colourful Daleks the odds of getting the re-design of my favourite monsters wasn’t great. 

 I needn’t have worried (instead I should have saved my worries for what Russia was really up to in 2013). The new-look Ice Warriors are amazing, by far the best of all the ‘old’ returning monsters that were given substantial changes. They feel exactly like the olden days, all big and green and powerful and reptilian, but who also seem like something that an enterprising production team could have conceived in 2013 too. with more malleable mouths and more movable bodies. The CGI on the ice warrior is truly a thing of beauty. Part mollusc, part green alien, part knight in armour, part Oil of Ulay advert, yet still recognisably the way Bernard Bresslaw was when dressed up in carbon-fibre in 1967, it’s a gorgeous design. We really really really need the Ice Warriors back in Who again, preferably for that ‘Peladon Brexit’ story that would be so timely right now. While I’m sorry that we’ve lost the tufts of fur down the limbs (originally to cover up the joins – the costume designer thought it was a stupid thing for a cold-blooded creature to have but I disagree: that’s only on Earth, who knows what strange quirks other species can possess out in space?) and the Ice warriors now have ‘proper’ claws instead of lego-arms everything else I loved about the originals is there, from the body armour to the wonderful hisssssssssing voices. Skaldak is a foe worthy of the great Ice warriors of series past, but more agile and blooming scary when lurking down a dark submarine with nowhere else to run. He’s well catered for in terms of dialogue too, with the Ice Warriors still a noble warrior race re-acting to events rather than creating them and every bit as wary and suspicious of the Humans as they are of it, even (spoilers) proving to be more noble than the Humans by the end. The moments when a base of jumpy navy personnel are playing hide and seek with a being that looks on them as mere insects are some of the most terrifying in modern Who because for once The Ice Warriors really seem as dangerous as the Doctor says they are. What’s more, upping the ante by making Skuldak a legend in his own lifetime, a warrior lost in battle, whose secretly been snoozing in the ice on Earth for 5000 years and who knows that every person he ever met has died a long time ago, and therefore giving him nothing to lose if he commits suicide and takes the Humans with him, is gripping stuff that makes you feel both sympathetic and scared. That’s why the Ice Warriors work you see: only The Cybermen feel like legitimate victims of Human shenanigans in quite the same way and it’s still hard to feel for a bunch of circuitry, even if you’re sorry for the people the Cybermen used to be. One thing that admittedly doesn’t quite work (and which is copied from the 19802-90s ‘New Adventures’ books) is the idea of the Ice Warriors having a caste, a class system which always felt intrinsically ‘wrong’ to me: I mean, Ice warriors are probably the least prejudiced ‘monsters’ we ever meet; the only people they look down on are those that run away in battle, not those born on the ‘wrong’ side of the red planet. Thankfully, though, that’s an incidental detail rather than a driving force of the story. Mostly what we have is a classic alien in a classic scenario that’s well suited to them and well made, in a plot that recycles heavily from ‘Das Boot’ (sorry…Dassssssssss Boot’) just with reptiles instead of Germans, what’s not to love? 

 The problem is…after such a great setup Gatiss has nowhere to go and once Clara has been sent in to talk to the Ice Warrior about ten minutes in its all vamping and delaying tactics until the big ending. Basically script-wise, for all the brilliant way its shown on screen, it’s the tale of a man and an alien pointing big weapons at each other until one of them gives up and we get enough of that on the news. This episode starts with such a bang that’s it’s a shame to see this end up a sort of détente of its own, as Skaldak onomatopoeically skulks in the shadows. For half an hour. Admittedly he’s very good at it, with Spencer Wilding excellent casting as the body of Skuldak, whose very much in the grand tradition of past greats like Alan Bennion and Bernard Bresslaw, menacing but in a very empathetic honourable way (though for me Nicholas Briggs never sounds as comfortable unleashing his inner Ice Warrior as he does his inner Dalek). So much so that I’d like to pitch ‘Skulking with Skuldak’, a new reality show version of hide and seek, to Russell T Davies as one of the potential spin-offs he’s looking for. It could be fun – and I certainly know some celebrities who deserve disintegration. Even so, hiding in corridors doesn’t make for the most gripping TV. The extra time does allow us to get to know the characters, but they aren’t all that interesting or well drawn: they’re your usual base-under-siege humans, a mixture of the best and worst of us, who have been sent out to fight a war bigger than them and are trying to do the right thing but secretly all want to go home and wish they’d never come. Gatiss tries hard to look at the cold war and how we ended up, in 1983, pointing big shooty things that could annihilate us in an instant at each other, but he only has half an hour to delve into the ins and outs of one of the most complex and confusing periods of Earth’s history, something most of those of us who lived through it don’t properly understand ourselves. I mean, I’ve sat through dramas trying to do in twelve hours what this story has a go at in 30 minutes and they didn’t get any closer to understanding how we ended up here either. So ‘Cold War’ thaws out from its eye-grabbing starter to being just another bunch of humans talking and running down corridors – and given that we’re in a (surprisingly plush and wide lookingnot to mention tall – you’d think a 7 foot Martian would have to duck at the very least) submarine there’s only one corridor to run down anyway, with the Doctor’s big moral and philosophical debate with Skaldak delayed as far into the episode as possible so as not to reach the big showdown too early (there’s even a false start when Clara tries to do it). 

Ah yes, Clara: this is only her third story but already Moffat is trying a new approach to the character and still can’t quite find a way to make her work – as well as Amy at any rate. There’s a vocal part of the fanbase who find Clara irritating, more of a puzzle than a person. By and large I’m not one of them: I enjoy Jenna Coleman’s subtle portrayal a lot and find there’s more than enough vulnerability and feeling there hiding behind the false bravado and smart alecky dialogue. Here, though, Clara is at her worst. Split from the Doctor she alternates between being a wet blanket who can’t cope without the timelord holding her hand (even though she’s proved often that she needs him less than most companions), even getting David Warner to fill in that role for her, and then being overly bossy and over-confident despite being way out of her depth. You get the impression Mark Gatiss doesn’t like her very much compared to Rose, Martha, Donna or Amy. Like a lot of the fanbase for me she never feels like a complete rounded person – although unlike a lot of the fanbase I do think she gets there in the end it’s stories like this one that don’t quite know what to do with her. She ought to be amazing, the closest the modern series has come to giving us a second Sarah Jane, brave as you like one minute and terrified the next, her morals and curiosity in constant battle with her nerves. Except they don’t know how to write that as well, so we lurch from scene to scene where Jenna Coleman is asked to be either terrified or strong, with nothing in between. Oh except flirty, in the most unlikely situations: mercifully they cut a scene where she tells the Doctor that a submarine in 1983 is a ‘weird second date’ (the Doctor’s sarcastic but rather odd response: ‘Would you have preferred we’d have gone to the pictures?’) 

 We still have the mystery of who she really is and why she kept dying as different people when the 11th Doctor first met her, but this is the start of her ‘other’ arc, of her trying to become like the Doctor and not having the experience yet. She’s quick to volunteer when the Doctor tries to argue with the Humans that Skuldak will ‘smell’ the soldier in them and Captain Zhukov in turn replies that the Doctor is more like a soldier than he realises and the Doctor is too quick to let her (honestly, can you imagine Jo or Jamie given this responsibility on story three? The world would be in ruins in five minutes, not least because Jo would have tripped over and started the war by accident!) Remember, at this point the Doctor still doesn’t know who or what Clara is. He might have brought an assassin or a ticking time bomb or Russian spy on sub with him. Clara does well, if falteringly, when she’s taking instructions from The Doctor on what to say and do, but comes a cropper when she starts improvising and doing things for herself. Given that there doesn’t seem to have been much time between ‘Saint John’ ‘Akhaten’ and this Clara really is adapting to her new life very quickly and already taking charge in things slightly out of her control. Future stories will portray her as a bit of a control freak, unable to cope with events that don’t follow a pattern or which don’t go how she wants them to – in ship terms she's a submarine herself, pushing through the waters and surprised when events make her submerge and sink her, while the Doctor has the experience to flow over the top like a sailing ship, taking the punches and rolling with the tide. In time that aspect will get irritating (to the point where Clara seems to have left all sense behind in her final year, paying for her life – sort of – in ‘Face The Raven’) but here, in a story about cold versus hot wars and the importance of caution in things you don’t quite understand it fits. The 20th century Clara also finally becomes as interesting as her Victorian nanny and future Dalek personas in the scenes where she becomes a double act with Professor Grisenko. 

 He’s played by distinguished actor David Warner, in what seems rather a waste of his talents (although the actor was happy: he’d been asking to be in the programme on the fringes of being in Who for years, following his work for many Big Finish ranges including being Steel in the company’s deeply odd revival of ‘Sapphire and Steel’, a voice-over in 10th Doctor animation ‘Dreamland’ and an ‘Unbound’ Doctor from a parallel universe, while he’s also due to appear alongside the 9th Doctor in a box set out very soon - Christopher Eccleston nominating him as his 'favourite actor' when asked at a convention - and was beyond thrilled to be playing a ‘goody’ after being typecast as a baddy in practically everything – well, one of his breakout roles was The devil in the magnificent ‘Time Bandits’ film opposite Ralph Richardson’s God. However am I alone in thinking that they should have made him the honourable-but-deadly Ice Warrior rather than the eccentric pop culture-loving mad Russian?) Liam Cunningham tries blooming hard but Captain Zhukov is such a clichéd captain of a doomed ship (think the Titanic) he has nowhere really to do – odd, perhaps, that the Russians should have such a stiff-upper-lip Brit in command of their sub but it makes sense they’d have someone so calm under pressure (much like the sub itself in fact). The other humans don’t get anywhere near enough character and are most interesting for the choice of character names, all taken by Gatiss from real life Russians. ‘Stephasin’ (the trigger-happy lieutenant) was Russian prime minister under Yeltsin but opposed and toppled almost immediately so even people who remember 1983 well don’t recall his name without a nudge. Actor Tobias Menzies, incidentally, is who Matt Smith ‘regenerated’ into in his part of Prince Phillip in Royal soap opera ‘The Crown’. George Zhukov was a leading figure in the Russian Army in World War Two. ‘Onegin’ is the title character of a novel by Alexander Pushkin that also sounds a bit like ‘Onedin’, the water-based series on in the 1980s (the star of which, Peter Gilmore, ended up guesting in ‘Frontios’ in 1983, at the peak of his fame). Unfortunately they all feel a bit generic, soldiers first and not much else second.One of the strongest elements of the story, that I wish they’d made more of, is that actually Skuldak has more in common with Grisenko than Zhukov: he’s not a straightforward soldier doing his duty, he’s an anachronism, a man out of time struggling to cope with all the changes that have happened since. Grisenko might collect contemporary pop records but everything else about him screams pre-World War Two, when Russia was minding its own business on the intergalactic stage and wasn’t a super-power but a country in the cold trying to get by (and if we take his character as being the same age David Warner is in the serial – 72 – that means Grisenko was born in 1911, right at the heart of the Russian Revolution that changed everything, potentially the last Russian born there before things went mad fast and still trying to grip onto the life his parents and grandparents led). 

 Skuldak is like the Doctor too, of course, the last of his kind, everyone else dead, turned into a warrior by circumstances not nature. Giving Skuldak a family is a great move (female ice warriors!) and his return to his people at the end a delight – I just wish the story had been a bit less clumsy before we got there. I wish for instance that the script had made more out of the fact that the Doctor is so clearly scared of Skluldak not because he’s a monster but because he knows what it’s like to feel you have nothing to live for and wanting to take the people who caused the hurt in your heart along with you. This story could have been another ‘Dalek’, but with Skuldak doing the Christopher Eccleston type rages and the Doctor in the ‘Rose’ role trying to calm him down. Instead the Doctor’s almost an ineffectual presence in this story: yes he gets the one good speech in but really Skuldak works out the ending all by himself (spoilers) saving the humans by not using the nuclear missiles on the submarine at the last minute out of a mercy humanity never showed him. There’s a bit too much emphasis on the ‘I’m the last of my kind’ back and forth going on between the Doctor and Skaldak too. I mean, the Doctor’s got a time machine, so it’s not as big a thing as it would be, for, say, the last American and Russian talking to each other - which is clearly what the metaphor is meant to be. But still, it’s a hard job writing, keeping all the plot elements needed to be juggled, so it’s no surprise that a few things get lost in the mix sometimes. At least, unlike some other plots in Who, it’s an idea worth pursuing even if they could and should have pursued it further. 

 One idea they tried in the original draft and discarded was making Skuldak a time-traveller from the 31st century who aimed from the first to start a nuclear war between the humans rather than stumbling across the weaponry by accident, all because he knew that in the future mankind and the Ice Warriors would be an cold war of their own. In this version the humans on both sides find they have a common enemy and come together, blowing him up instead of themselves, the Russians fleeing onto a waiting British submarine and vowing to stay clear of Mars altogether in the future. I’m rather glad they changed it though: in the final version Skuldak is victim as much as aggressor, working out of self defence not offence and he only starts talking about blowing things up when he thinks all is lost to begin with. The theme of the final script is that if mankind is going to play with nasty killer toys they shouldn’t leave them lying around for aliens to find and use against them: after all, the Doctor’s shut whole species down for doing far less than the first shot a nervy naval personnel shoots off here. The best part of the script by far is the idea that everyone is sleepwalking into a war that nobody really wants – everyone’s going through the motions because they’re afraid of what their rivals are doing. It takes a real soldier, like an Ice Warrior, to show what fighting really is – and why pointing weapons at each other and hurling insults, assuming the other side is never going to retaliate, is a stupid idea. In the climate of what was going on in the wider world in 2013 it’s a worthy plea and one we (or at least Putin, who admittedly doesn’t seem a natural open-minded warm-hearted Whovian) should have paid more heed to. 

 The result is one of those Dr Who curate Slitheen eggs then: there are some things it gets so right (the Ice warriors, the cold war setting) and other things it gets very wrong. The dialogue could be better, particularly for the Humans (always Gatiss’ weakest link, especially when it’s Moffat not Davies editing him), the acting could be stronger (nobody really gets more to do than look constantly shocked) and the sets could be a lot more interesting (this submarine never feels quite real somehow and while the constant water dripping adds atmosphere – and to be fair it’s a wonder the actors are giving any half-decent performances at all given what they’re going through and the fact that the water is every bit as real as it looks, not added in post-production, which meant everyone was soaked for days) while everything is so dark you can’t properly see it anyway (a problem for many a Moffat era episode, even if the lights being off at least makes more sense in this one: honestly, you wait thirty years to correct the lighting problem from ‘Warriors On The Cheap’ and then you go too far the other way). Honestly, once Skuldak gets out of his suit there’s nothing the nowadays much-maligned ‘Ice Warriors’ debut didn’t do better, even if the difference in production levels and budget between the two stories is night and day. In the end this story does what it needs to do, like a tub of vanilla ice cream, making The Ice warriors a threat, summing up the era its set in well and adding to what we know about the Doctor and particularly Clara – it’s just a disappointment because for a while there, with that brilliant dramatic opening it looked as if the story was going to be a lot more special, like a Neapolitan ice cream in a cone with a flake and all the extras. The result is an episode that’s easy to like but hard to love, which manages to be warm and emotional when it wants to be but also ice-cold in all the right places, that does a good job as a drama set in 1983 (it’s actually better at summing up the era than ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ – a story actually made in 1983) or a documentary on Ice warrior habits and which falls apart mostly on pacing. There’s nothing here an extra re-write and a couple of sharper characters couldn’t have saved anyway and there are no greatly embarrassing moments like the last time we did the cold war on Who anyway. Just, please, do me a favour and give it another decade at least before we start getting Dr Who ‘historicals’ about the 1990s or later; I know time is relative but I feel old enough as it is already… 

 POSITIVES + I’m amazed they hadn’t tried a submarine in half a century of Dr Who before. I mean, it’s the ultimate in ‘base under siege’ stories: a confined space that no one can escape from and the idea that the humans can’t run away because the Ice Warrior is in there with them is classic Who. I had the idea for a script for ‘Submarine Cybermen’ in my childhood (just think of it, amphibious Cybermen that swim underwater!) and this story is still the closest I’ve come to seeing my dream come true on screen. Admittedly it’s a very luxurious submarine that doesn’t look at all like the 1983 model if Russian subs but even this is done one hell of a lot better on a confined Who budget than, say, wretched 2021 series ‘Vigil’ (where an Ice warrior would have been the most plausible part of the story).

 NEGATIVES - The part when Grisenko, played by beloved leading actor David Warner, tries to get new companion Clara, played by promising newcomer Jenna Coleman, to sing ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ to keep their nerves away is one of the real ‘what the?’ moments in the modern series. For a start its drawing attention to themselves when they need to be quiet. For another it’s completely the wrong moment (its as if an AI bot read all of Russell T Davies’ scripts, saw how many pop songs are in those and added it in). For another: who the hell knows the words to ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’? Why not go for a song more suitable for the action on a sub (like, I don’t know, Status Quo’s ‘Deeper and Down’ or Iron Maiden’s ‘Two Minutes To Midnight’ about the change of the doomsday clock at the start of 1983?) 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘5000 years! That’s one hell of a nap…’

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: While ‘Cold war’ features the first female Ice Warrior on screen the 8th Doctor comic strips ‘Descendence’ and ‘Ascendance’, which ran in the Radio Times in the wake of the TV Movie across the rest of 1996 (before being quietly dropped when it became clear it was going to a full series) features Luass and is as un-honourable an ice Warrior as we ever see, plotting to get her husband Uzoxx on the Martian throne. Frank Bellamy’s illustrations don’t look that much like what we get on screen though, with Luass looking more like a lizard. As for the story itself it’s almost this story I reverse, as the Doctor and companion Stacy turn up in the middle of an ongoing conflict between two different sects of Ice warriors and has to teach them to be ‘honourable’. None of the Radio Times comic strips quite hit the spot, not understanding the Doctor or the series that well, but this one at least has the flavour of a Dr Who story, albeit not a very deep or convincing one. 

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