Day 793: Cold War

Cold War is actually quite an interesting story that I can appreciate very much. Writer Mark Gatiss wished to bring back the Ice Warriors for a new generation, making them genuinely threatening creatures again. The way in which he did this was to riff on 'Dalek', the brilliant 2005 episode, by presenting a scenario with one single Ice Warrior in a confined space, and putting it in the situation where it could destroy the entire planet.

Granted, it doesn't work as well as 'Dalek' because the Ice Warriors are entirely different beasts to Daleks. Unlike the Daleks, the Ice Warriors are not constructed to be purely evil, instead they have their own agenda and their own creed that, whilst different to that of humanity, is still recognisable enough as being able to speak common sense. That leads to the conclusion of Cold War, which isn't able to be as fundamentally powerful as the ending to 'Dalek' because the Ice Warrior is someone that can be talked with and reasoned with, meaning that he chooses not to blow up the world and leave humanity be for the time being, showing mercy on his prey. And whilst this makes for an interesting character decision, and I'm sure that it could have been used as an excellent jumping off point to any future Ice Warrior stories of a similar vein, it just lacks bite, which is what you'd kind of want after what has been a reasonably tense story.

Looking at it positively though, there's some excellent foundation for Clara's character which will become very noteworthy later on in the series. So much of the episode is dedicated to putting her into a situation where she's allowed to be afraid, so we can see how the character copes under that sort of pressure. And whilst that's fairly good in it's own right, I far prefer a brief exchange of dialogue that she has with the Doctor after she gets out of a sticky situation with an Ice Warrior. She asks the Doctor "How did I do. Was I OK?" and the Doctor responds by saying "This wasn't a test, Clara". It hints at this whole idea of Clara, subconsciously or not, attempting to emulate the Doctor, which will become more overt in later episodes. But that's a character arc for another time, for the moment we're just meandering through time and space from one adventure to another, and we'll see that next one tomorrow.