After The Seeds of Death, it’s another story that’s concerned with the realities of space travel: this time, the vast distances, and long journey times between locations – mostly through an empty void. While that makes this episode a bit plodding, it also helps to set the scene quite well so that the end of the episode – with help at least 90 minutes away, and no way back to the TARDIS – we feel the isolation of the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe. It’s creepier and more hopeless than any number of cliffhangers where a monster threatens to shoot them, because this time it’s physics they’re up against.

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Maybe Terrance Dicks was channelling his anger about the amount of rewriting the scripts needed, but this is surprisingly bloodthirsty stuff. Not only does the lovable old second Doctor rig up a solar ray gun to roast the Ice Warriors alive, but he condemns the Martian refugees to burn in the Sun’s orbit before calmly revealing to Slaar the extent of his genocide, and tops it all by killing off the last survivors. Priti Patel would be impressed. But then, the Ice Warriors were evil men.

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Terrance Dicks’ love of continuity is starting to crop up in the scripts. Here, when the Doctor comes round he rambles about Victoria. Later, he tries sulfuric acid on the seed pods, which feels like a call-back to The Krotons. We’re moving from the Doctor being a wanderer in the fourth dimension with, aside from the Daleks and Cybermen, few links between stories, to a series with a recurring guest cast, and greater interconnectedness.

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Due to problems with Brian Hayles’ scripts, apparently script editor Terrance Dicks wrote episodes three to six of the serial. Certainly, while it’s quite entertaining this is very thin stuff, replaying a lot of the more effective moments from the first two episodes – such as the vaporisation of an attacking Ice Warrior by solar power, and lots more scenes of the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe trying to fly a rocket – rather than genuinely advancing the story.

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It’s 1969, the year of the Moon landing, so naturally this episode focuses on the process of actually getting there. It’s not exactly realistic – but there’s more focus on the dangers and technical difficulties of space travel than in any story since The Tenth Planet. No tea-trays shoring up pressure dome punctures here. Instead, a rocket launch complete with mission control countdown; the effects of G-force, and the importance of radio communication and telemetry. Arguably this just slows down the story, but I’m sure in 1969 it gave it a real contemporary buzz.

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Oh goody: just what we’ve been waiting for – a sequel to perhaps the worst Doctor Who story so far. Except The Seeds of Death is immediately much better than The Ice Warriors, despite containing very similar plot beats – a tyrannical commander, his efficient female second, a quickly-established threat, and a warning against over reliance on technology and planning over human endeavour and inspiration.

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Again, whenever Holmes focuses on the regulars the story just works. The Doctor telling Jamie, stuck under a door, that he’s getting fat, and their little comic exchange:

DOCTOR: How are you feeling?

JAMIE: Well…

DOCTOR: Good!

Is wonderful. As is the moment where Zoe asks the Doctor if she can borrow his braces to strap Thara’s Leg. As is Jamie and Beta having fun making gallons of sulfuric acid. As is the climactic confrontation with the Krotons, where the Doctor and Zoe play for time by mucking around discussing where they want to stand as the increasingly irate Kroton leader loses its patience. Continue reading →

Again, all the time spent with the regulars – which is again the bulk of the episode – is good fun. Jamie gets more action this week: trapped in the Dynatrope with the Krotons, he discovers they’re actually quite chatty. Robert Holmes writes them almost as his trademark fusty bureaucrats following the rules rather than being actively malevolent. ‘All waste matter must be dispersed. That is procedure,’ the Kroton Leader tells Jamie. Their heads also spin quite sweetly when they’re agitated.

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Again, while this is by no means a classic episode it moves faster than any of the individual episodes of the previous serial, while finding time for glorious character moments between Troughton and Padbury and revealing the monsters ready for the second half of the story. Continue reading →