Starring: Matt Smith, Jenna-Louise Coleman.
Writer: Mark Gatiss.
Director: Douglas Mackinnon.
This is an episode that I can safely say I have been immensely looking forward to. The return of a fan-favourite enemy tends to make for an excellent episode of Doctor Who, and this is an enemy that has been out of the limelight for the last 39 years. What with the already-seen return of the Great Intelligence, and the upcoming redesign of the Cybermen, Series 7 is a good, good series for that sort of thing. So how does this episode fare? Read on. This is ‘Cold War’.
STANDARD-AT-THIS-POINT-WARNING: Here thar be (possible) mild spoilers!
The episode opens in a rather interesting way, throwing us into the action aboard a Russian submarine in 1983. The stern commander of the submarine, Zhukov, is barking orders with great urgency, and the crew are rushing about pressing buttons. The submarine’s nuclear weaponry is unlocked, and Zhukov’s finger is on the button, ready to unleash hellfire. It’s all very serious, but the whole thing is interrupted by the entrance of the submarine’s scientist, Professor Grisenko, singing cheerfully, and revealing everything to be a drill. However, this submarine has an even bigger problem than the Cold War aboard.
The submarine has acquired a block of ice, in which is contained a ‘specimen’, suspected by the crew to be a mammoth of some sort. It very much is not. The crew find themselves under attack from the ‘specimen’, who casually begins murdering his way through them. The submarine is sinking, the engines are clogged, and everything is going wrong! Perfect time for the Doctor and Clara to make their entrance, stumbling out of the materialising TARDIS under the assumption that they were in Las Vegas. Tensions are high, and the Doctor is worried. He’s very well-acquainted with this particular enemy. With the fate of humanity literally at risk, the stakes are huge.
All in all, it’s very much an episode of Doctor Who.
First things first, we’ll address the obvious point: the return of the Ice Warriors to the series. This is the first time that the Ice Warriors have featured since ‘The Monster of Peladon‘ in 1974, during the Third Doctor’s run on the show. Their representative in this episode, Grand Marshall Skaldak, does them great justice. He is a truly intimidating enemy throughout the episode, whether inside his armour, practically invulnerable and firing off his sonic weaponry, or outside it, never seen fully, darting about and picking off the crew one by one as they try to track him down. He’s well-characterised, to boot, not merely a mindless villainous monster. He has a good backstory, filled in by the Doctor, that establishes not only how terrifying he is, but also gives him good motivation. A worthy villain indeed. Aside from all of that, he looks fantastic. The redesign of the classic Ice Warrior armour is very visually imposing, it very much makes them look the part of a fierce warrior. Out of his armour, we don’t see too much, in the ‘nothing is scarier’ sense. Seeing an Ice Warrior out of their armour is quite a treat, but we mostly see only his arms, with vicious-looking talons, and his head, which is very cool, with glowing red eyes and a brutish structure. This is a redesign that did its job excellently.
Speaking of design, the episode’s looks serve its purpose excellently throughout. ‘Cold War‘ takes more than a few nods from the Alien movies, and it does it justice. The submarine is a claustrophobic nightmare of vents and corridors, any of which could hide a lurking Ice Warrior. It’s all very dark and intimidating, and while it’s not a visual spectacular, such as last week’s episode, it lends the episode an eerie and unnerving feel.
As ever, Matt Smith and Jenna-Louise Coleman are on top form throughout, playing their parts well and continuing to show us why they make such a good duo, although the two don’t have quite as much interaction with each other as usual in this episode. Smith plays off against Skaldak very well, showing us right off the bat that the Ice Warrior is a foe to be feared. 
His interaction with Zhukov, too, is engaging, with Zhukov (understandably) not quite trusting the mysterious man who has appeared on his submarine, but working with him nonetheless. Meanwhile, Coleman has a lot of interaction with Professor Grisenko during the episode, and we see some more interesting facets to her. Clara is genuinely scared in this episode, seeing such a brutal and powerful foe cause so much destruction right in front of her, but she remains plucky in the face of it. She plays Clara’s bravery very well, and she’s very watchable (obligatory weekly “Jenna-Louise Coleman is gorgeous” statement can be applied here, if you wish).
The other cast members, notably, do an excellent job as well. Zhukov comes off as a good captain, butting heads with his first mate and refusing to back down from his principles, even in the face of danger. Meanwhile, Grisenko is a more light-hearted character throughout, listening to his Western music and keeping Clara’s spirits up throughout. It’s interesting to see them dealing with the threat of the by-now simmering Cold War, as well as the threat of the rampaging Ice Warrior aboard their vessel.
To conclude, ‘Cold War‘ continues the series trend of getting big thumbs-up from me. It has a very Classic Series feel to it, while feeling a little like Alien at the same time. It’s dark, it’s intense. It has several nods to the past, such as the return of the TARDIS Hostile Action Displacement System. It was a good old monster-of-the-week episode, and there wasn’t much it did wrong.
I give ‘Cold War‘ an 8.5 / 10, a fantastic episode throughout!
Come back next week, when we’ll have the truly-scary looking ‘Hide‘…
