This week, Doctor Who's action movie, and a rather fine one at that. It's packed to the gills (and definitely merits a future rewatch). The TARDIS lands on a submarine - and a Russian one, in the middle of the cold war! Back in the day, that would be enough in itself - but here, it's a colourful backdrop for an alien menace which happens to be on board. They thought it was a mammoth... it's not!
Ultimately the setting of this story is uncontroversially spot on - you can't argue with confined spaces, water gushing in, the works. It's beautifully made - and shown off in a particularly beautiful episode. Warriors of the Deep this ain't - there's well controlled lighting, a dark spooky atmosphere, lots of steam and water.
And add into the mix a very cleverly redesigned version of an old enemy - the Ice Warrior! Some people have compared this episode to Dalek (I guess because it reboots a monster by putting it on its own in an confined space, and making it a killing machine) - but as the episode goes on, it reminded me more (certainly visually) of the stalking-on-a-spaceship action of 42. The Doctor's reaction is great - and establishes that this alien is not only dangerous, but also has a personality - something absent from the mysterious, parasitic monsters last week - and a history.
Perhaps its greatest moment was that twist, which I didn't see coming at all - that Skaldak the Ice Warrior had escaped his suit! (There I was thinking - they could have shown more shots of its mouth saying the lines!) From there on, it turns into a real monster movie, Alien style. The bony, green alien hands look excellently creepy - that'll be why they redesigned it, although they don't quite fit in with what we recognise already as Ice Warriors - but I was expecting to see the whole thing. I know there's a budget, but it returning to its suit out of shot felt slightly clumsy - there's keeping a monster in shadow, and then there's hardly showing anything at all. Nonetheless, it gave the suit (now a design classic) a tiny bit more screentime - something that perhaps this episode suffered from.
The atmosphere was tense - especially when it came to Clara, realising nicely that things might not work out so well this time. But I felt a feeling of unease, and not wholly intentionally I expect. There's a disorientating (but stylish) bit early on where Clara loses consciousness, and then wakes up to find everything happening. Okay, it's a pacy episode, and so it cuts out some of the real-time explaining, but it puts you on the back foot.
Similarly, as ever with twists, if you don't know where the thing's going, or think you do and something else entirely happens - like Skaldak escaping - you feel slightly out of the action. That's not to say it doesn't make sense - just that, when you build up a monster, for him to mostly skulk about in the shadows halfway through, it feels a bit mystifying.
The cast is strong, stronger than most - I love Tobias Menzies already, and then you've got Liam Cunningham and David Warner too, playing three very different characters
They aren't especially nuanced, though - see also Victory of the Daleks (except Churchill), although editing may have something to do with it in both - but then it's an action movie. It's still a nice set-up - and the Cold War provides not only weapons (nuclear - huge threat there, well explained) but imagery that contrasts with the big old Martian, a character in itself, separated by culture and suspicion. Red planet, red army, perhaps.
Does it provide a satisfying ending though? It's a happy one - not least because there's no armageddon - but I couldn't help feeling a little cheated. Dare I use a certain latin phrase describing godlike denouments? The giant (if pretty, and almost Nekross-like) spaceship wasn't the only problem though - the Mutually Assured Destruction threat felt slightly forced, and it was a shame that we never glimpsed the Ice Warrior after he had teleported away - a shot of him in the spaceship hesistating would have made the situation clearer. (And can submarines do trips from pole to pole?)
And we get a reference to Ultravox - hooray!
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