Thin Ice

If I don't move on, how many more will die?

Thin Ice is the second offering of Sarah Dollard after Face the Raven. Her first script did fairly well, having been granted the notoriety of also killing off Clara. Face the Raven went up another notch in my book after Steven Moffat elected to use a cheat to keep Clara around in Hell Bent as I appreciated Clara's death that much more. Of course, outside of that, Face the Raven was a very straightforward story so without the benefit of high stakes, how will this story do?

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Bill have arrived during the last days of a Frost Fair where the cold has caused parts of the Thames to freeze over and various circus performers have set up on the ice. The Doctor and Bill make their way through the fair and as they do, they become aware of a set of bioluminescent lights swirling under the surface. When a person becomes isolated, as a man who has become drunk does, they swirl around and then a small hole is punched, allowing the man to fall into the icy water below.

While investigating the lights, Bill and the Doctor are stopped by a girl named Kitty who claims to be looking for a lost dog. While distracted, a boy named Spider picks the Doctor's sonic screwdriver out of his pocket. The Doctor and Bill give chase across the ice until Spider becomes distracted by the swirling lights. A hole is cut in the ice and he falls through, although his hand sticks up. The Doctor recovers his sonic just before the hand gets sucked below.

Bill appeals to the Doctor to save the boy, but he knows that he is gone. Bill stomps off angrily and the Doctor appeals to Kitty for help but she drifts into mist. The Doctor goes to see Bill who confronts him about being callous towards death. The Doctor reasons with her that inaction leads to more deaths. Their argument is interrupted however by Kitty coming back and overhearing about avoiding more deaths.

Kitty takes the Doctor and Bill to her hideout where several urchins live under her eye. They have been hired by a man with a ship tattoo on his hand to get people to come to the fair. Once there they pickpocket for extra money. The Doctor gives them fish pies that he nicked and elects to study the creatures under the ice further.

As night falls, the Doctor and Bill dress in diving suits and walk out on the ice. The lights appear and begin to circle Bill. She gets the Doctor's attention just as she falls through. He dives after her just before the opening closes. On the bottom they see a large fish-like creature chained to the bottom. It eats those that fall through the ice, with the holes being cut through by angler fish type creatures. The creature sees them but doesn't advance on them, instead continuing to wail while trying to get free.

The Doctor and Bill head back to the surface, emerging from a hole where the fish pie merchant is catching the angler fish for his pies. He tells the Doctor about other activity going down around the docks downstream.

The Doctor and Bill head down to the docks in the morning where the Doctor poses as an agent of the owner, Lord Sutcliffe. The foreman shows their progress as they are harvesting the excretions of the creature which burn hotter than coal and in worse conditions. Knowing that the creature is likely of alien origin, the Doctor and Bill head to Sutcliff's mansion to see if he is an alien as well, using the creature to collect spaceship fuel.

Upon meeting Sutcliff, the Doctor immediately determines he is not an alien and punches the man after he insults Bill with a set of racial slurs. Sutcliff's men grab the Doctor and tie him up, including the man with the ship tattoo on his hand. Sutcliff's family captured the creature and have known about it for generations, using the fuel it excretes to power factories and avoid using coal which costs more and is less efficient.

Sutcliff arranges to have the Doctor and Bill taken and tied in a tent with explosives. He intends to arrange a "fireworks accident" which will break the ice and send all the fair goers into the depths to feed the creature. While alone in the tent, Bill manages to pull the Doctor's sonic out and he uses it to help free himself from the ropes. The sonic also attracts the angler fish who begin to swirl. This attracts the tattooed guard who grabs the sonic. The fish start circling him and in a panic he throws the sonic back at the Doctor. The Doctor shuts off the sonic and the guard drops through the hole in the ice.

The Doctor sends Bill who finds Kitty and together they and the other urchins send a panic through the fair goers that the ice is thawing. People flee, though a few remain behind. Sutcliff sees the stream of people and tries to detonate the explosives. However, the Doctor has redirected the charges and placed them around the chains of the creature. As they go off, the creature is freed.

Bill gets the urchins off and sees the emerging from the ice in a dive suit near the dock. Sutcliff meanwhile, hops onto the ice and runs to the tent to find out what went wrong. The creature comes up to the surface and cracks the ice in multiple places. Sutcliff looses his balance and falls into the water. Bill, having run to the Doctor, is pulled off the ice by him just before it cracks under her feet. The creature then swims down the Thames and makes for colder waters up north.

The Doctor invites the urchins to Sutcliff's mansion for a feast. While there, he alters Sutcliff's will in favor of the other boy urchin, allowing him to become the new Lord Sutcliff. They return to the Doctor's office where Bill looks up to find that their plan worked and that the orphans took over Sutcliff's estate.

Nardole enters with the tea he had left to make at the beginning of Smile but realizes they've been off adventuring. He chides the Doctor but the Doctor tricks him into leaving them alone. Annoyed, Nardole goes to check on the vault where a series of knocks begin to come from it. He calls out that he is not going to open the vault just because of the knocks.

Analyis

I am of mixed mind on this story. To be fair, I was very tired when I watched it so this is one of the first stories where I'm looking forward to watching it a second time to see if my initial impressions are valid. On one hand, the story had some decent ideas, nice dialog and a fairly straightforward story. On the other hand, some of flow of certain scenes seemed off either due to writing or direction and also the story was so straightforward as to be almost comically predictable, which in turn led to the latter half of it being a bit boring.

There was very nice interaction between the Doctor and Bill and I found the Doctor to be especially engaging. In fact, there were scenes where he seemed to be cutting in or out (such as with the fish pie seller) where I would have liked to have seen more just for the pleasure of the scene. It even worked well when you knew what was coming as in the case of where the Doctor warns Bill not to rise to the insults of Lord Sutcliff and then he goes and punches him for his attitude. You know it's coming but it is still very enjoyable.

Bill was enjoyable and her comments about race both in her fears and the reality were done quite well. I was a bit mixed on her freak out after Spider's death because it was an understandable reaction and one that needed to be done from a character point of view, but it also felt like a hard freeze in the action for a philosophical discussion. The discussion itself was quite good but there was something about the hard shift that felt just slightly odd. I also think that Bill isn't quite the right character for interacting with children. She's still a bit too young and doesn't quite give off that maternal vibe to be natural with children. She still feels a bit like the older sister who has to watch the younger kids because it's her job.

The kids I thought were pretty good. I couldn't help but love the little blonde one as she was very cute with that "little old me" grin. Kitty was also good, although I think she should have had a slightly harder edge to her. That's very hard to ask a child actor to do but a bit more world-weariness would have sold her character even more. I also really appreciate the fact that they killed off Spider. In many family dramas, you know that whomever else may be killed, the children will get out. Not here. Granted, Spider had actually committed the theft so he had lost his true innocence, but it still is quite a step to go ahead and kill a child character. That also plays in to how a harder edge would have benefitted with Kitty as most of her dialogue has a "Spider's dead so don't worry about him anymore" feel. As the Doctor said, "you move on."

I think my biggest disappointment actually came with the creature. The predictable thing in a normal story is just that there is a creature who is using creatures to pull people through the ice and eating them. Simple. But, the misunderstood monster has become such a trope in Doctor Who that you almost expected to find the beast chained up and forced to eat people just to survive. That it made no effort to eat Bill and the Doctor because it could sense they were still alive took almost all of the menace out of the creature and defused the one major point of tension in the story. I won't even go into the logistics of how Sutcliff's ancestors captured the creature and managed to forge and install a chain to keep it restrained.

Sutcliff himself was also something of an anticlimax. He's a normal aristocratic asshole who simply gathers the fish excrement to make a ton of money through selling it as a coal substitute or using it in his own factories as a coal substitute. No great plan or complex scheme. Yet, despite being a straight forward villain, he still has moments of extreme mustache twirly-ness ("that would work on a man with an ounce of compassion") and over complexity in dealing with the Doctor and Bill. Why take any risk at their escaping by keeping them alive to blow up in the tent? He could simply shoot them and then blow up their dead bodies along with the rest of the fair to feed the beast. He goes extra cartoony as well by walking out on to the ice to examine the explosives after they fail to detonate on the surface and is then killed by falling in when the creature breaks the ice. You could almost imagine a Wile E. Coyote moment where he sees the sonic, his eyes go small and he holds up a sign saying "Yikes!" as the explosions go off under the surface. It just gets overly comical and didn't sit that well with me.

I thought the overall direction was a bit limited. I don't know if there were problems with the stage on which this was filmed but there seemed to be a pronounced effort to not give away how small the set was by having a lot of tight shots on the actors. It made things feel a bit cramped and confusing whenever it did revert over to action, such as when the Doctor and Bill went down to the depths to see the creature. As noted above, I also felt that things were a bit disjointed in how the scenes connected, as though we were coming on a scene a line or two after things had started. I could still follow the scene but I felt like there were a few scenes that just didn't connect as well as they should have.

It is rather interesting when you look back at the casting done in stories like The Girl in the Fireplace, The Shakespeare Code and The Vampires of Venice that the subject of a more multi-ethnic history hasn't come up before. I did enjoy that Bill brought the issue up (why didn't Martha) and that the Doctor dismissed it so easily as how the white upper class did just white-wash most of the non-enslaved minorities out of existence from history. No beating about the bush but also no great lament about it either. It happened, history is not quite what we read, acknowledge that and move on.

I get the feeling that the idea of moving on is sort of a theme for this story and possibly the series as a whole. The Doctor is doing something he normally doesn't do and that is to stay static for a long period. He continues to lecture at the university and is guarding the vault as a promise. He also has Nardole watching over him to ensure his compliance. Yet in the few adventures he has, he continues to express the theme than you can't stay still. Heather had to move on from her promise to Bill, the colonists had to move on from the idea that nanobots were their servants and here Bill has to move on from the idea that everyone can be saved. You can try and you should always work towards saving who or what you can (even if not your own species) but if things don't work, you must move on or other people may die. Yet the Doctor himself is not moving on. That he keeps pictures of River and Susan as well as a cup of old sonics suggests he is mentally dwelling in the past rather than looking forward.

So, how to grade this one? Ultimately, it's just how much you enjoyed the episode overall. I can't help it, I was bored by middle and underwhelmed at the end. There were some nice moments and I liked the characterization between the Doctor and Bill, but the monster bored me, the villain was one-note and cartoonish and no one else really stood out to me as interesting. I might change my mind on second viewing but overall, a bit of a meh.

Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5