Doctor Who - Ice Breaker

5/5. Average stuff. Usual content.

And so speaketh Mark "Emperor Fishface the Unlubricated" Goacher and, despite his rather odd dismissal of something worthy of a one hundred per cent score, he's not really wrong.

"...and you only tell me I'm eating a horse penis after I've taken a bite?"

Thin Ice cannot by any standard be dubbed a failure. It does exactly what it's meant to do, with Sarah Dollard rewriting Face the Raven (where the Doctor and companion encounter a community living in an archaic British historical quirk but being slaughtered by an amoral voiceless animal because the local ruler has a very ruthless definition of the greater good) from a depressing tragedy that destroys the lives of everyone involved to an optimistic celebration of Doctor Who.

Where once we had fearful, embittered alien refugees living in terrified squalor we now have charmed Dickensian street urchins who get to live happily ever after. Rather than the Doctor being tricked and betrayed by literally everyone, he is unquestioningly the hero who trusts others and is rewarded when they make the right choice rather than the easy one. Children are befriended rather than tormented, fun is had rather than torture inflicted, and the bad guys get absolutely everything they deserve.

Just one slight problem...

Well, not "nobody" but there was something curiously un-engaging about it. Perhaps it was the atrocious sound mix that meant 74% of all the dialogue was inaudible, and the stuff where the Doctor and Bill were in diving suits under the Thames in a curious deja vu moment of the one where the Goodies tried to catch the Loch Ness Monster was easier to understand. The Doctor's from the pumpers? Why does he want the fisherman to lose his job? What the hell is Bill saying?

Graeme and Bill explore the depths of a monster-filled river to find out just where Tiny Tim's got to...

 
And then the plot seemed to drag for some reason. It felt rather like it was a compilation of comic strip installments as the Doctor and Bill spend ten minutes moving from location to location, the only common factor as they go from the frost fair to the urchin lair to under the lake to the refinery to Sutcliffe's manor. No story time is devoted to showing anyone else on their own, it's all seen from the POV of the time travelers, keeping everyone at a distance as much as the muffled sound mix. We barely find out Sutcliffe's involved in the plot before seeing him for the first time and then he's instantly defeated right away.

And whereas Ashildr was a troubled, morally-ambiguous leader walking a tightrope between antagonist and protagonist who was of course confronting the Doctor with the consequences of his adventures, Lord Sutcliffe is a cunt. There are no redeeming features to him in any way, shape or form. There's no excuse for why he does what he does, no attempt to humanize him. He's pure, one-dimensional evil and if he ever finds himself unable to sleep at night it must be because there's been too few puppies kicked that day. He's not even clever or witty and it's made clear the most interesting thing about his entire life was the paparazzi campaign following his apparent love child scandal.

We're told rather than shown that one man is responsible for the chained serpent beneath the Thames, and also employing children and entertainers to get eaten so the serpent can crap out rocket fuel. The Doctor then does a speech that this is clearly one totally immoral scumbag with no morals of any kind.

And then he comes in starts hurling racist abuse at Bill for being black. Or a woman. Or a black woman. But basically he takes one look at her and reacts like Jimmy Saville just crapped on his brand new DVD of the next series of Game of Thrones.

So the Doctor punches his lights out.

"Take that, Mr. Quintessentially Englishness!"

Yeah, I think the audience have got the hint this is a bad guy.

Given this is the first villain of the revived series who is shown to be a complete fuckwit rather than the result of malfunctioning tech unwittingly causing chaos, I suppose the Doctor punching his lights out was fair enough. Certainly plotwise it was totally justified, given the Doctor was showing that for all his well-learned politesse and attempts to be aloof and rational he is not pleased when someone calls his friend sub-human scum. And all things considered, it was better the white guy punched the psycho racist than the black girl in terms of provoking the mass-murdering windbag.

Odd how this has put fandom up in arms, deploring the Doctor using violence as solution (despite the plot showing it actually ruined his plans, rather like Django Unchained would have ended a lot happier and neater if they hadn't used the racists as target practice) when they were previously applauding him being all dark and edgy and throwing people on church spires or shooting them in the head. In an episode where the Doctor admits he has killed more people than he can count, decking a posh twat seems small fry.

...and it's not like it's the first time.

As Whovians demonstrated, there's not much actually to this episode beyond the Doctor and Bill's relationship maturing as they reach the inevitable "this isn't always fun and games" moment which would weigh a bit more if Bill's anguish over seeing someone die for the first time contradict the way she's seen Movellans and human colonists being mowed down in front of her. Of course, yes, seeing an irritating artful dodger drowned and eaten alive before his seventh birthday would traumatize her, but you think it would be that specifically rather than someone dying. Or maybe being sucked into an alien puddle might upset her because of what happened to Heather.

Yeah, yeah, loose continuity, easier for the new folk to follow, no big deal.

But that's it. There's so little to this story that there's plenty of time to dwell on the flaws in logic. While not utterly brain-shatteringly tedious like Night Terrors (spit) it feels like a lot of padding has been shoved into it to make up for the lack of spectacle. The serpent of the Thames is not evil or alien or even doing much. The story isn't remotely interested in even discussing how a gigantic frost-creating snake has been sitting in the middle of London since the dawn of time, or how the hell the Sutcliffes discovered this, chained it down or what use they had for it until the industrial revolution meant its fish crap became useful.Even the way history ignored it - rather than being a joke and then plot point like the Cyber King or gigantic T-Rex in the same stretch of river - is just a dull "humans are morons" moment.

WARNING: SUBTLETY!!

And it becomes hard not to wish there was perhaps another element to pop up the narrative. Looking at other stories set on the Thames in frost fairs, we need only notice that the very first companion chronicle - Vicki Pallister telling the tale of the Frostfire - couldn't cope with a wander through the showground and had to add a murder mystery, a predestination paradox and a celebrity cameo from Jane Austen to support the "frozen Thames is because of alien life form freezing things and once it's gone, the frost fairs end" premise.

A plume of icy fire spouted into the air and the next moment the crowd parted and the Dagenham Dragon himself, wreathed in a halo of blue flames, came lurching through. He stumbled towards poor Miss Austin who, to our amazement, gave him a sharp hook to the jaw and knocked him flat!

It’s the sort of thing that Steven does, not a middle-aged lady novelist!

The Dragon shuddered and shivered on the ground and then lay still. His flames died. Miss Austen just stood there, massaging her gloved hand, looking completely bewildered...

Of course, RTD's "celebrity historical versus 60s B-movie horror monster" concept never really took off under the Grand Moff, did it? The first attempt had a comic-strip Winston Churchill share one scene with some comic-strip Daleks, a far cry from Charles Dickens and the Zombie Apocalypse, Queen Victoria and the Werewolf, Shakespeare and the Witches, and Agatha Christie and the giant wasp-man. The latter attempts were even dumber - Van Gough versus an Invisible Space Chicken, or Captain Avery (who?) versus a green ghost lady thing who sings a lot, to Hitler getting pawned by Rory and the Numbskulls from the Whizzer Comic. By the time you have Robin Hood fighting Terileptil robots and Lizzie from Blackadder II facing off to Zygons, it's clear that on some level everyone's given up.

Which instead why the Paternoster Gang were invented to brighten up the increasingly tedious historical stories (tell me that The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe was better without Strax trying to kill everyone and Vastra and Jenny bonking each other senseless!). Ah, but, I hear you cry, this story is set in 1814 and specifically on my birthday, and thus eighty years before the Paternoster Gang were active. Or Jago and Litefoot for that matter. Because this is the last frost fair ever, that's the point!

"Ewen Campion-Clarke's birthday today? Oh, dash it all, if only I had any fucks left to give..."

Except Silhouette saw the Twelfth Doctor and Clara meet up with their interspecies pansexual team to do just that and thought "sod the historical accuracy!" and also The Similarity Engine tossed aside such concerns to have Litefoot chasing a wooden duplicate of Jago through a fair across the Thames because it was way more exciting and interesting that way!

So, no celebrities, no aliens, only a cameo from a villain and an elephant (Matt Smith would totally have ridden her to safety, carrying that poor contortionist with him, I bet) and Bill going through the basic refresher course of being a companion that, while well-done and totally necessary, is ultimately less engaging than waiting for her to twig that the TARDIS was smaller on the outside. Couple with the STORY ARC moments of Nardole blubbering in front of a vault where the caged occupant is KNOCKING FOUR TIMES (well, once... possibly...) we're left with a story that doesn't have much to say about it. Everything we need to know or remember was all summed up in the previous Next Time trailer.

Once again the TARDIS notices something too late. At least it wasn't lethal radiation this time.

The big surprise of this episode was that there weren't any real surprises. Probably the biggest shock was not the Doctor pointing out that Jesus was a black man, but the first bald statement that a Christian leader of that name is a real person in the Whoniverse. I mean, they could have told the same joke about Hannibal, and it feels like we're meant to take it seriously rather than the nudge-nudge-wink-wink of the RTD years where the Doctor got the last room at the inn and helped out at the resurrection...

So, in short, this is an episode without much to comment on and discuss.

Frankly I don't think Stuart Manning is really inspired this year.

Meanwhile, my hopes for Whovians are fading fast. It must be clear by now that the amount of popular celebs who have an affection for the show is inversely proportional to the anorak-clad wankers who can appreciate jokes about John Nathan-Turner. The biggest fan this weak couldn't remember the title of that episode with the star whale or the fact there was a bloke called the Master involved in the show previously (yet mentioned Toclafane without blinking!) and getting Cal Wilson - always good entertainment value - made it clear that while she enjoyed watching it, found amusement in pointing out some plot holes, she's not a fan either. Add to this an episode where the only obvious topic was the Doctor thumping people (and a youtube montage that inexplicably misses anything Sixie did but portrays Tom Baker as a fucking psycho killer in comparison!) leaves a show that switches between top-heavy and borderline eventless.

And has Adam Richards really watched a single damn episode? Certainly he doesn't understand the concept of "fixed points" if he's burbling out every episode is the Doctor rewriting history so he wins this time, a theory even Cal Wilson wasn't impressed by. Rove bluffing a Chaser style stunt is only slightly more bearable, until I realized he wasn't going to bump into a famous sixties guest star running around offering cold pies from a top hat to unimpressed passers-by.

Sheesh.

Oh, and didn't the sonic screwdriver look totally like a cheap plastic toy this week?

'Hey, Ellie, what does "(C) BBC Worldwide Enterprises" mean?'