Who Review: Cold War

In November of 1984, shortly before Gorbachev came to power, a Typhoon-class Soviet sub surfaced just south of the Grand Banks.
It then sank in deep water, apparently suffering a radiation problem. Unconfirmed reports indicated some of the crew were rescued.
But according to repeated statements by both Soviet and American governments, nothing of what you are about to see...

ever happened.

 

Wait, sorry, where was I? Oh, right, Davos Seaworth is a Soviet submarine captain, Edmure Tully is his political officer, and Chancellor Gorkon is some random scientist who likes listening to degenerate imperialist music. Oh, and he's dug up an Ice Warrior.

Gee, first the Great Intelligence and now the Ice Warriors. Hey, 2013 wouldn't happen to be, say, an anniversary year, would it? What's next? The Black Guardian? Yartek, leader of the alien Voord? Sutekh? Magnus Greel? (Downside to nuking Gallifrey: traditional anniversary villain Omega has to be a no-show, although he did get a shoutout in The Day of the Doctor.)

So it turns into Alien on a submarine, and the weirdest thing about the cast isn't the fact that the three main guest stars are extremely recognizable, but that they don't do frickin' Russian accents. But then, neither did Sean Connery, but then, Sean Connery was James Bond.

I'm going to review The Aztecs soon, and I was going to hold off on mentioning it until then, but it comes up in this episode: in very early Classic Who, before the Doctor was really a hero (remember, in the very first serial of the show, he was all set to bash a caveman's head in with a rock in order to get back to his ship*), every serial had to come up with some sort of contrivance to keep the Doctor and company from leaving before the plot was resolved. They'd be captured by cavemen, captured by Daleks, captured by Marco Polo, locked out of the TARDIS by a telepathic forcefield, lose the TARDIS in some Indiana Jones-style tomb, etc. So here as soon as the Doctor and Clara hop aboard the Red Onion, the TARDIS activates its emergency displacement system and jumps away to the south pole. (In 1983. Not sure how time works, but if I were the TARDIS, I wouldn't go to the place where my owner was destined to die for the first time three years hence. Wouldn't that leave a wound in time or something?)

*Yes, One called it "the Ship" far more often than he called it "the TARDIS."

The Ice Warrior gets loose and everything goes to hell. Edmure Tully turns out to be just as much a screwup in this universe as in Game of Thrones and gets himself offed, but eventually the Doctor and Clara are able to make the Ice Warrior understand this thing called mercy, so when his ship comes to get him he refrains from using the sub's nukes to start Operation Planetary Eradication. (OPE - yup, that's a Doctor Strangelove reference thrown in among my Hunt for Red October references.) In the process, the Doctor once again rehashes the whole Time War Thing And How It Relates To This Episode, just in case we'd all forgotten in the long gap since "A Town Called Mercy."

Let's get the obvious comparison out of the way. It takes place in XX83, during a cold war, underwater, with a returning foe, and has some sketchy effects. It is, basically, Warriors of the Deep done "right." (I confess, while the rest of Warriors was a mess, I liked the way it ended: with everyone dead. The Doctor's moral high ground can't save everyone if one side has no interest in salvation.) I disagree with the idea of doing the Ice Warrior's head in shockingly obvious CGI, especially when his hands were animatronics. We're twenty years on from Jurassic Park, which flipped between the two flawlessly, and yet you can still tell the difference on a TV budget. 

It is Doctor Who's most blatant attempt to do Alien ever, which is a) a good thing, because I was really afraid it was going to be "Dalek on a submarine" and b) quite amusing when you consider the following things:

• Ridley Scott was this close to being the production designer for Doctor Who's second serial ever. You know, The Daleks.
• Doctor Who did a serial in 1974, five years before Alien, with basically the exact same premise (minus Alien's most famous scene)
• Speaking of Alien's most famous scene, John Hurt shows up at the end of this season.

This is a tough episode for me to grade because I like The Hunt for Red October and I like Game of Thrones and there's plenty of appeal for me in it. But as I hinted above, the Doctor basically gets to do the exact same thing he did in "A Town Called Mercy." There's more for the companion to do this time (and Jenna Coleman looks damn fine in a military jacket), but... something just doesn't quite click.

5 out of 10.