039 The Ice Warriors

Started 20-Oct

We watched the vidfired dvd version with animated eps 2 and 3.

This is the start of a run of 18 (!) eps in a row which all have moving pictures. The long dark night of the telesnap is drawing to a close...

The technobabble in this one is ridiculous.

I have a great deal of trouble with the Doctor's scripted lines in ep1 where he expounds on the reasons for the ice sheet advance.

He makes a very correct statement about the level of carbon dioxide in the lower atmosphere determining the retained heat at the surface of the Earth. Svarte Arrhennius published this about 1890. Even climate deniers can't argue with this idea. It's like water running downhill. It's true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect

But the next bit about lack of plant life leading to carbon dioxide starvation (and consequent failure to retain heat) is f$%#ing bonkers.

Complex ionisation technicko-flibbly wops are not even needed.

Just oxidise a load of carbon you mad retards!!!

Or to put it another way, set fire to some stuff.

Or use microbe vats to rot loads of vegetable matter and create great bubbles of methane... do you have any garbage? Bin it, warm it up a little (or just bury it in the sun) and let the bugs get to work....

Also the ice sheets are advancing, there's no populace present (they must be evacuated already) and all that's in the way is a crappy old mansion (which no one seems to care about). What (apart from the burial of old buidings) is under threat? What's the crisis again?

Clent's worldwide crisis is artificial, spurious, contrived and completely unnecessary.
The story falls apart like a climate denialist's webpage on this problem... in episode one!!!.


Who wrote this? Brian Hayles... I might have known. Mr Celestial Toymaker and The Smugglers... Currently last and second last place on our survey.

So what else have we got?
The Tardis team are decidely more light hearted and light weight in this story compared to the last one. It seems odd but I suppose that wild veering contrast is normal for DW (due to change of writers every story). Again not a thing I'd noticed so obviously before this current marathon watch-in-order project.

The Ice Warriors are weirdly simplistic monsters. Their characters are supposed to honourable but to me they simply come across as primitive warrior types but from outer space with ray guns. Contrast this with, say, Teripleptils: aggressive and violent but at least trying to claim beauty, culture and sophisticaion or victims-of-injustice-hood. It is very telling. These 60's Ice Warriors are presented like dumb Indians from a (rascist) Western.

Peter Barkworth as Clent is trying to push all the sliders to maximum on the testy, grumpy, man-in-charge meters. Is this to mask all the now cliched "man in charge of the base" tropes that are obviously present? Compared to the pressured Cutler or the incompetent Hobson he at least manages to cope with his problems eventually. But he's a right sh*t about it... *all*the*time*.
I'm left wondering why more of his staff don't side with Penley.

The plot is pure base under siege, admittedly from dual threats (the advancing ice sheet and the aggressive Ice Warriors). The themes are either the rejection of advanced technology or the importance of individualism. Neither is fully served by the story.

So that's three more things which are wrong, boring, aggravating or all three about this story.

The costumes are very spacey... The patterns are original and asymmetric. The collars are unusual. The technicians' 'glasses' which look like a plastic shelf from the fridge stuck on their head are way out (man). The set design is trying hard for the odd but familiar by contrasting the techo stuff with the classical sculptures (boobies!) and the Rococo wall panels of the old mansion house.The techo stuff looks old fashioned analogue to me (maybe cause I recognise the equipment, I think. It must look like a loads of buttons to most people).

The episode 4 end is really poor. Apart from the plot and the acting the threat is nuts. The Doctor walks into the Ice Warrior spaceship bured in the ice and Varga threatens him with reducing the air pressure to zero since it's an 'airlock'. How? With a pump? How fast? In half an hour? An as for the Doctor's line "But I'll explode..." Well, mate, luckily you'll get the bends before that happens.

Also the Ice Warriors spend most of the next two episodes worried that the Brittanicus Ioniser is gonna melt the glacier and 'flood' their spaceship... their airtight spaceship that can withstand both glacial ice pressures and the vacuum of deep space without fracturing.... and then what... free the spacecraft to fly away? Why aren't the Ice Warriors using their 'tactics' to make the Ioniser guys do this for 'em (as either a favour or a lucky mistake)? The conflict doesn't make sense.

There is some really bad science in this Science Fiction serial but there's some really bad plotting as well. There's all sorts of terrible decision making and process control errors made by the 'scientists' of Brittanicus base in most episodes. It makes The Moonbase look ok.

The very silly, old fashioned, smartalec attitude everyone has to computers is something of an issue. It sounds like a relic of the 60's that only pensioners and morons express these days.

The writing seems to have a quite naive view of exactly what a computer does or is for. In the 60's I imagine that computers were mostly pretty mysterious to most people. There's a weird scene in ep5 where during some new crisis Clent runs around reading dials and jotting figures on a clipboard before deciding whether to 'accept' the computer's 'decision'. The 'decision' is more sensibly called a result and it depends on what it was programmed to do, buddy. And I don't understand why the system isn't designed to monitor data values on those dials. (The numbers on the clipboard thing should be completely unnecesary.)
Clearly the crisis is not a physical problem with ice sheets or evacuations but one of a fundamental inability to understand science, physics, computer engineering and apply basic crisis management.


Perhaps this is an attempt to portray the ionisation base staff as being meekly technologically dependent on their computers ? Something like Internet Addiction Disorder? Unlike the brave, independently minded (and vaguely educated) Penley? Or am I reading a 2018 social problem into basic 60's technofear?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addiction_disorder

Obviously computers are not gods or oracles. They are tools. The very same Doctor makes this point most eloquently in The Invasion (next series). Unbelievably the attitude to computers presented in the Ice Warriors is actually less sophisticated than in The War Machines (which was technologically primitive).... just let that sink in..

Not my favourite episode...



ABM Rating 1.99/4.00 
LJM Rating 1.25/5.00
SPJ Rating 4.30/10.00

No. 32 (out of 39)

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