Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors
- greatbigquiveringp
- Mar 18, 1976
- 2 min read
I was initially very underwhelmed by this but writing about it and stretching and stretching and stretching what could be read into it I found myself quite admiring it. It takes a simple clash of personalities from the broadcast episodes and, through the tiniest tweak, becomes a commentary on the clash of global and historical clashes of political ideology.
In the cold light of day, I'm not wholly sure it does actually do this. If that was Hayles's intention, there are a lot of inconsistencies I had to casually sweep under the rug but I guess this gets to the heart of the point of Doctor Who. It lingers on in the mind once the immediate experience of it has faded.
Obviously, it was very good at this on TV - what with memories of 'Tomb of the Cybermen', this and many other stories painting a long-lost age of glory to those who were children at the time. But the novelisations do this too. The Pertwee era and Malcolm Hulke in particular are so influential because they were when the Target range was born. And this really shows through in Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors.
As shown on TV, Storr is just a forcefully-backwards thug who can't tell the difference between preserving his own autonomy and rejecting every scientific advance there has ever been. In the novelisation, his intractable position is a response to an equally unyielding force and becomes another example of noble, if flawed, individuals asserting their humanity in the face of a corporatist future that seeks to steamroller everyone into utility to global head.
The Doctor might just walk away from this dystopia at the end but, here, Penley is more closely allied with his values suggesting he might just have laid the seeds of World Computer Control's downfall through assisting Penley's in-base victory. To see me stretch this point even further and at even greater length, click on the cover above right...
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