Doctor Who Series 10 First Impressions: Episode 9 (Empress Of Mars)

That's a marked improvement over last week. Thank goodness for it.

"Allow me to break the ice. My name is Iraxxa.
Learn it well, for it is the chilling sound of your doom!"

Mark Gatiss! He's probably Doctor Who's best mid-tier quality episode writer. Sometimes he pens a dud and sometimes he pens a classic of the series. I won't go over his Doctor Who stories in short summation, save for the two I've already looked at in the Capaldi era. Robot Of Sherwood was a fine bit of welcome fluff for the early Capaldi era when we weren't sure about this callous new guy. Not a classic of Series 8, but somewhere in the middle? Possibly lower back since Series 8 was really quite consistently good. Sleep No More is a little more interesting, as it's Gatiss getting a little experimental and doing Doctor Who: Found Footage Edition. Yeah, okay, walking snot monsters and all that but he tried something new and it mostly worked. Also I maintain that the twist ending is still one of the scariest bits of conceptual horror in recent memory on Doctor Who. And now Mark Gatiss is doing the Ice Warriors! Again! He brought them back in 2013 for the 50th after like 40 years and it worked. Now he's done it again and it doesn't work AS well as Cold War... but after the contemptuous dull dud we went through last week? I'll take a mid-tier Gatiss episode like a man dying of thirst. Let's take a quick stroll through... Empress Of Mars.

I'm not sure if it's the legacy B-list Doctor Who monster or the writer's own tastes, but somebody's classic Doctor Who is showing in this one. The Doctor is basically on this adventure as a lark, having found something weird on his day off while visiting NASA. That weird thing being "GOD SAVE THE QUEEN" spelled in rocks on the surface of Mars. It's a good hook! Within a few minutes the Doctor and pals are on Mars, and the companion gets immediately separated from the Doctor while the Doctor loses easy access to the TARDIS. Losing that access loses us some Nardole time in this one which is a shame... but why did the TARDIS freak out and not let Nardole back on Mars? There's no real explanation for it, no apparent fixed-point or timey-wimey malarkey to paper it up in the story itself. I'm fine with it, as it's basically an excuse for Nardole to have to let Missy out of the Vault (which will likely echo back to the finale) but it's just one of those things that you wonder about. Anyway, the separation doesn't last long as soon enough the Doctor and Bill meet up with... a bunch of Victorian soldiers who got taken to Mars to help out a lone Ice Warrior. So, before we go full plot summary all up in here, let's change our tune and talk about the two main factions in this one. I'll start with the Ice Warriors because there's some more interesting stuff going on with the Victorian-era soldiers.


I'm sure the Ice Warriors have been someone's favorite Doctor Who villains. Not mine, but somebody's. They were only in four stories in the classic era, but they show up all over the place in expanded universe stuff like the novels and audios and shit. Well... here they are again! Our main new wrinkle in this one is the introduction of an Ice Queen to their social structure. Maybe this is why I get such classic Who vibes from this; when you get down to it, it feels kind of like Tomb Of The Cybermen but for Ice Warriors. There are many differences, but the Queen is entombed along with her hive of Ice Warriors but then is woken up by a greedy boy and she goes off. Bad vibes go down between the two and then it's time for fighting. I have to give special attention to the sonic guns the Ice Warriors use in this one. They're a legacy weapon and in the old series they just did a distortion effect over some poor fool in post and then they went "AAARGH" and fell down. Now the sonic gun fucking folds people's bodies into flesh cubes. It is absolutely the gnarliest shit. See also: the Ice Warriors rising up from the ground to ambush the Victorian-era boys. We have now run out of things to say about the Ice Warriors offhand, but I do like their queen. Her big speech at the end to the Colonel about how he'll die in battle and not here gives me Klingon vibes, due to all the Star Trek I've been watching. I don't care much for Klingon stuff in the Star Trek world, but here it wasn't so bad.


The more interesting stuff, for me, were the Victorian-era soldiers and how they played in contrast with the Ice Warriors. The episode is a very surface-level "IMPERIALISM WAS BAD" sort of thing, and it shows; almost all of these people are utter shits. There's the greedy boy who drugs one of his fellow soldiers so he can nick all the jewels from the ice tomb, the foolish nervous one who accidentally shoots during the standoff and makes the Ice Queen mad... and then there's Captain Catchlove who is an absolute fuckerface. He's almost like Lord Sutcliffe in Thin Ice, only he doesn't say any racist bullshit to Bill. He is the worst example of humanity and the episode knows it. He's constantly trying to one-up the Colonel and give his own orders, eventually reveals that the Colonel was a deserter and starts a mutiny to take command so's he can KILL MORE CROCODILES, and then at the end he takes the Ice Queen as a hostage to escape himself and leave everyone else to die! Not 15 minutes after calling the Colonel out for being a deserter he's like HAHA WAR IS HELL WELL I'M GONNA LEAVE YOU ALL TO DIE NOW BUT IT'S OKAY 'CAUSE IT'S ME. There are more lines, like when the Doctor tells him he doesn't belong on Mars and he scoffs at the idea because he's British, he belongs anywhere he chooses because he's a conqueror. Or when the Doctor calls the humans "primitives" in front of the Ice Queen and he repeats it in indignation. He's a British subject! He's the highest form of life! A born leader! of COURSE he should get whatever he wants! He doesn't get punched in the face, though. Just shot. Still, you know, there's all that surface-level stuff crackling about. The Victorian-era conquerors are outmatched by the Ice Warriors, who are frankly better at conquering and war and whatnot. In that moment, they all know what it's like to be conquered like that. I guess. Again, it's all surface stuff but it does work.


And then there's just the asides. Bill's sci-fi savvy nature is back after a long absence as she's telling the Doctor all about cool sci-fi movies he's not seen, which sets up for a pretty good joke at the climax. You have an eye-rollingly cliche moment where the one soldier is telling another all about his pretty fiancee and how he can't wait to see her and OH NO HE DIED OH NOW YOU CARE MOOOORE oh christ give me a break. You might as well have said that the other guy was two days from retirement. I really love how the Ice Queen asks for Bill's opinion because she's the only one there who isn't a man, and that this gets used later when the Doctor needs a distraction. As aghast I am at references for reference's sakes, I admit I smiled at the end when fucking Alpha Centauri from The Curse Of Peladon showed up on the monitor. And that's that. That was Empress Of Mars. It's a perfectly acceptable mid-tier episode of Doctor Who, and will likely end up in the middle of the pack whenever I rank all of these. It's basically what I expected out of Mark Gatiss, and I'm thankful he didn't botch it. I needed this after last week. A perfectly okay episode which has an ounce of depth and interesting theming going on with it. Nice job.


Next time: Mmmm... light.