Cold War

There we have it Doctor. Mutually Assured Destruction.

The second half of Series Seven, being the build up to the 50th anniversary, was replete with nods to previous Doctors. Cold War was Second Doctor reference and it had it in spades. A "base under siege" story with the enemy locked in rather than out, the Ice Warriors and even the use of the HADS were all strong flourishes towards the Second Doctor era. There is also a strong flavor of The Hunt for Red October and K-19: The Widowmaker in this story as well.

Plot Summary

A Soviet submarine in 1983 is conducting missile drills after hunting for oil deposits in the Arctic Ocean. While drilling, they recovered what they thought was a mammoth frozen in ice and one crew member begins to thaw it. Instead, it is an Ice Warrior who is revived by the application of heat. Bursting through the ice, he damages the control mechanism of the sub and it plunges into deeper water.

Into this, the TARDIS arrives with the Doctor having miscalculated their arrival in Las Vegas. Immediately arrested, although trapped on the bridge, the Doctor yells advice on how to stop the sub's descent. The captain takes it and the sub lodges on a rock outcropping with no major damage.

During the descent, the TARDIS HADS (Hostile Action Displacement System) accidentally engaged and the TARDIS disappears, leaving the Doctor and Clara trapped on the sub. Captain Zhukov prepares to detain the Doctor and Clara as Western spies when the Ice Warrior appears. He is General Skaldak, a great hero of the Ice Warriors who was frozen nearly 5,000 years ago. The Doctor offers to help him when the First Officer, Lt. Stepashin knocks him out with a cattle prod.

Terrified that Stepashin's actions will result in Skaldak declaring war on Earth, he insists that Skaldak be chained in the torpedo room. The Doctor knows he must negotiate peace with Skaldak but Captain Zhukov refuses to let the Doctor go. Knowing that no soldier can negotiate, Clara offers to go with the Doctor relaying words through a headset. Skaldak meanwhile, has recovered and activated a distress beacon in his armor.

Clara enters the room and begins to talk with Skaldak. Skaldak takes assessment of the situation by talking with the Doctor but when Clara approaches the suit, she notices that Skaldak has left it. She begins to panic and opens the hatch. Upon doing so, Skaldak leaps out and runs past her, into the rest of the sub. The Doctor is even more concerned now as leaving their suits is considered the highest dishonor for an Ice Warrior and that he stopped broadcasting his distress signal, a sign that Skaldak assumes that his people are no more.

Skaldak sneaks up on Lt. Stepashin who tries to form an alliance to save himself. Skaldak baits him for information before killing him. He then attacks and kills two other crew members, dissecting their bodies to get a better understanding of human anatomy. Captain Zhukov spies Skaldak through a grating and chases him to where Clara and Professor Grisenko are waiting for the Doctor. Skaldak tries to attack Clara but Gisenko gets him off by shooting at him. He then attacks Grisenko but Clara begs him to stop. Skaldak hesitates and both the Doctor and Captain Zhukov arrive. The Doctor again tries to talk to Skaldak but Skaldak summons his suit, forcing the group to face it. Skaldak reenters the suit and heads for the bridge.

On the bridge, Skaldak prepares to fire a nuclear missile, triggering a nuclear war that will destroy humanity. The Doctor again begs him to have mercy and announces that he will detonate the missiles and destroy the submarine if Skaldak tries to launch the missile. Skaldak is impressed with the Doctor's use of mutually assured destruction and seems amused as he asks the Doctor which of them will blink first.

As they face off, a Martian spacecraft appears having received Skaldak's signal. The ship tows the sub to the surface of the water and then transports Skaldak on board. Skaldak still has the power to launch the armed missile remotely and the Doctor waits to see if he will have to destroy the sub, now that Skaldak is no longer in danger. Skaldak sends a remote signal which disarms the missiles and the Martian ship flies away.

On the surface, Captain Zhukov oversees the further repairs to the sub while the Doctor searches for the TARDIS. He receives a signal indicating that it has reappeared at the South Pole and sheepishly asks Zhukov for a lift.

Analysis

Cold War is a very tense ride and a pretty good episode overall. Amusingly it also turned a couple of adages on their ear. Prior to the airing of the second half of Series Seven, a common trope had been that the new series would be winding down when the Ice Warriors reappeared. On top of that, Neil Gammon had stated that he was writing a episode for this same period with the intention of making the Cybermen scary again. It is the irony of the show that the Ice Warriors came out as menacing with Cold War being highly regarded and Nightmare in Silver dismissed as probably the worst episode of Series Seven, though the Cybermen were made a bit scarier. I'd still say that the Ice Warriors came off better on the whole though.

In addition to a good scary monster in a tense confined environment, this episode has some very good guest stars. The big one is David Warner as Professor Grisenko, but Zhukov and Stepashin are no slouches either. Zhukov was played by Liam Cunningham who is probably best known as Ser Davos Seaworth on Game of Thrones while Stepashin is played by Tobias Menzies, also of Game of Thrones (Edmure Tully) and Outlander (Frank Randall/Jack Randall). In many ways, there is almost too much talent in the guest cast as it feels a bit like a waste not to have them on the screen all the time and that shuns the Doctor a bit too the side. But one should not complain about wealth when one has it and I'd rather have an episode overflowing with acting talent than to be hanging my head at the tortured attempts at acting that occasionally manifest themselves.

Skaldak was a very effective villain and an excellent use of the Ice Warrior as a whole. The abilities of the armor were obviously improved since the classic era as Skaldak moved much more fluidly in his suit than had ever been seen before. But removing him from his suit also gave the story an Alien feel than could never be accomplished with a full suited Ice Warrior. Making Skaldak a member of the upper tier of Ice Warrior society also cut down on the hissing done in his speech pattern and has been repeatedly mocked through the years. This actually put Skaldak closer to Lord Izlyr (The Curse of Peladon) than the standard Ice Warrior soldier, but it was still effective. I also always appreciate an antagonist who plots and thinks rather than simply brute forcing his way through things.

The tenseness of the story was a double edged sword in this case. On one hand, the story grabbed you from the beginning and never let you go, keeping things tense and constantly in action. On the other hand, it also gave the story a slightly rushed feel. I think the story could have benefited from a small bit of padding to a couple of scenes. Not much, perhaps a few seconds here and there. But it would have given the audience a chance to breathe for a moment, but in that breath, tense up even further because they knew that something was going to happen. There was some of this in the first half of the episode, but once Skaldak left the torpedo room it just felt like there was no stopping and the final scene in the bridge especially just had a slightly rushed feel. A small bit of tweaking with the pacing would have pushed things from very good to excellent in my opinion.

My only other complaint about this story is one that the producers could not have done anything about. Watching this again, I'm not sure this was a good story for the Eleventh Doctor. He does well as I think any Doctor would have, but the best Eleventh Doctor stories, while filled with tense moments and lots of action, although have moments of breathing space where he can fill things with levity. This story had no breathing space and the few attempts at levity came across as forced or just out of place. I think this story would have been better served by a Doctor with a harder or more serious edge. The Twelfth Doctor obviously would have done well, but I think the Third, Fourth, or Sixth Doctors would also have done very well. In fact, there is much in the attitude of this story that reminds me of the Doctor's behavior in Pyramids of Mars where there is almost no joking and the outlook of the Earth is in actual peril unless the Doctor acts as an agent of stability. The Eleventh Doctor wasn't bad in this, but he did feel a bit out of place in this story and not up to his full potential.

One other small quibble was with the music. The music wasn't bad, but it seemed so much louder than the dialogue. When the regular dialogue was on, I felt like I had to turn it up to hear everything properly, especially with the background noise of the dripping water. But whenever the music kicked in, I had to grab the volume control and turn it down as it was blaring out at full power. There were moments, especially in the beginning where the sub is stuck in the dive that I couldn't completely understand the dialogue as the music was so overwhelmingly loud relative to it. Not a huge problem, but something that did act as a distraction rather than an enhancement.

Overall, a very good story. I think I would have liked it a touch better with a different Doctor, but still a very good story and one that I wouldn't have any problem watching a second time around. It would be interesting to watch this story with a Game of Thrones fan to see what they thought of the guess appearances and the overall tone.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5