Doctor Who - Dead Pasts

So. The return of Alpha Centauri, complete with the original voice actress - something not even BF achieved.

I think it's safe to say I didn't see that one coming.

"Ha. 'See that one coming'. Eye-humor. Never gets old. Sheesh..."

As opposed to pretty much everything else about The Empress of Mars.

But, of course, it would be utterly hypocritical of me to actually complain. Certainly, Monsieur Gatiss' episode maintains the acceptable level he's reached since the crap-ectomy of The Idiot's Lantern, Victory of the Daleks and Night (spit) Terrors. It's not as effortlessly enjoyable as Robot of Sherwood, or as high-concept as Sleep No More, but it's certainly not a bad episode. It's just that it treads well-trodden ground so often it's no wonder Ice Warriors can easily climb through it.

Not only is this clearly in every way a sequel to Cold War, with morally-conflicted Martians and human soldiers trying to strike an accord, it's also a blurred rehash of Destination: Nerva, Imperial Moon, and any number of Torchwood tales. As it is 1881, barely three years after the institute's inception and Pauline Collins' portrait being standard kit on extraterrestrial redcoat missions, you think it might be mentioned that Victorian xenophobic jingoism might have some form for this. The expedition leader (did he have a name? He was the boss in New Tricks, too, and even less effective there) is so clearly a broken man yearning for a clean break that the biggest shock of the reveal he's a conscripted deserter is the idea we didn't guess already. Subtlety, never Gatiss' trademark, is in short supply.

"A blue crystal from Metebelis III... can I trade this for the sexual favors of a nun?"

There's no surprises here, all surgically removed in the pursuit of some idealized 1970s Saturday matinee First Men on the Moon style escapism. The characters are all black and white (or green), with women being smart and men either being good or irredeemable scum. They're jerks even by Victorian Value levels and the scene where expedition leader boggles at the idea a woman could be a police officer is certainly not as thought-provoking as Joan's racism in Human Nature. Indeed, Bill's skin colour is never mentioned, nor the other token black guy in the expedition (who, although he's bullied, is criticized for being the new boy and poor rather than of inferior genetic stock).

Compared to Gatiss' own adaptation of HG Wells' works, this is ready head-against-brick-wall stuff. The idea the British Empire would want to conquer Mars, enslave the natives and strip it of all mineral wealth isn't exactly novel, nor is it ridiculous. But there'd probably be a slight delay between the first Englishman on the red planet and adding Mars to the official British territories. NuWho has recoiled in total disgust from the parasitism of the colonial days, but this makes the bad guy of Thin Ice look cultured and nuanced. The British here aren't simply expansionist imperials, they're immoral conquerors and damned proud of it! They'd happily slaughter each other for riches and power, and ye gads man, they're BRITISH! WHY ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT THIS WHEN THERE'S VIOLENCE TO BE DONE?!!?

Theresa May campaigners build up her election profile the only way she knows how.

Frankly, it rapidly spirals away to the point the driving moral point - should the Doctor support his beloved humans even when they're in the wrong - vanishes and frankly the audience just waits for the ungrateful redcoat scum, all of them too violent and trigger happy to offer anything to the gene pool, to be wiped out. Even the Ice Warrior rampage loses any fear or anxiety because someone has decided that instead of the old "sonic beam bursts all your internal organs and shatters your bones" version is stupid and now people blasted by Mars' finest apparently undergoes an instantaneous Rapture and their empty clothes are bundled up into a neat ball and thrown across the set. If anything, you're left wanting them to suffer more.

The aliens come out of this story best, with Man Friday's calm glowering when - like the Daleks before him - he gets left to serve tea to male British cliches does NOT lead to him wanting a jihad against all mammals matching the titular Empress being so reasonable the explorers need to repeatedly shoot her in the head in order for negotiations to break down. Alpha Centauri's appearance, where s/he unhesitatingly welcomes both humans and Ice Warriors to a universe of multicultural tolerance, might as well wave a sign with hir six arms saying "VICTORIANS SUCK!!!" for the delicate subtext involved.

Neville Catchlove contemplates being crowned "Biggest Cunt Of All Doctor Who Villains Ever".

What is it about Ice Warrior stories that they bring out the utter bastard in their human foes? In Brian Hayles genesis story Lords of the Red Planet, they were mistreated zombie clones used to wage genocide by a scaled Servalan. Red Dawn similarly has a human astronaut prove to be ridiculously, needlessly ghastly when an attempt to defrost the Martians occurs. Zara and her boyfriend in The Judgement of Iskaar were so pigheadedly bigoted and back-stabbing it made a tale of already-dubious canonicity worse, and of course the Ice Warriors are the most likeable and politically correct characters in Mission to Magnus. When it comes to upright lizards disputing with mankind, the Ice Warriors seem to get more hits than misses than the Silurians when they try the same thing. Odd that.

The Ice Queen realizes she is the least cliched female character Gatiss has ever written.

Mind you, the Ice Warriors here do not have such unutterably pointless sequences ripe for mockery even in Gatiss' childhood. The scene where the Empress is awoken by a gold-digging soldier who drugs his superior officer while screaming at the top of his voice his intentions, long-term career goals and how he plans to somehow steer an alien space craft he can't fly or even get inside without a spacesuit he doesn't own, is soul-destroying. While anyone who can make it through Black Guy's "Hey, see this picture of my beloved I've never referred to before? I'm going home to Earth tomorrow to marry her and we'll be happy, so I sure hope nothing bad happens in the unfeasibly short space of time - oh wait, I'm dead" scene without vomiting blood deserves either a medal or a fullscale psychiatric assessment.

If you want to sum up the episode in the nutshell, the Doctor brooding in his cell that it's traditional for him at this point to say it's "too quiet" is it. This whole thing is a ritualized display with no real depth or point to it - bar, perhaps, pith-helmet British explorers were psychotic serial-killing racists who only lacked spacecraft to wage a cosmic war against all foreigners and grind any compassion or imagination into the dirt. Yet, hey, this is a one-episode-only story showing Bill meeting space monsters in Victorian times. It doesn't try to be anything else, and the awkward Nardole/Missy scenes simply restate why Gatiss would never even want to be showrunner. Ever since he perpetrated Invaders from Mars, this is a guy with no interest in other people's story arcs or long-running repercussions. Even though he would merely need to tardis.wiki Mars to fit his idea of Ice Warrior society with that established in the audios (which have been a really big part of the mythology by now, to stories even Moffat has heard), he won't.

It's far too much like hard work.

"Yeah, gotta admit the Martian Sphinx was not a good likeness..."

No wonder he went for this plot rather than trying to do a current-affairs-satire with a third Peladon story. That would need much more effort, research and serious analysis than someone who is still shocked folk were offended by his equity card joke (he's very sorry about it, but genuinely expected people to applaud).

All in all, I think I'd like a Mark Gatiss easy-going episode more if two-thirds of the series so far hadn't been trying to achieve the exact same thing

A radical paradigm-changing reinterpretation of basic Who concepts. (c) NOT Mark Gatiss

Oh, and Whovians - despite the undisputed awesomeness of Celia Pasqualia - was shite.