Doctor Who - 'Thin Ice'

Poster, as always, (c) Stuart Manning

"I don't know the answers. Only idiots know the answers.”

This review will contain some spoilers.

The TARDIS delivers Bill and the Doctor to the last great Victorian frost fair, but beneath the festivities something is stirring, a great and hungry something that feeds on those who stray from the crowd. The Doctor is intent on learning what it is, and who brought it there, but Bill might just be a little preoccupied with how little she actually knows about her travelling companion.

The Good

Another top-notch speech from the Twelfthish Doctor.

The Doctor punches a Victorian racist, which is basically like punching a Nazi if you got in early to avoid the queues.

While still leaning a little towards a negative interpretation of the Doctor's character (I really find him hard to stomach as an antihero) this episode had one of the better examinations of his pragmatism. "If I don't move on, more people die" mostly works for me.

The Bad

Once again, there's a sense of déjà vu at play, with distinct echoes of 'The Beast Below' and 'Kill the Moon', as the Doctor once more handed a life or death choice to his human companion.

While the point was to convey the distance between the Doctor's detached warning to remain diplomatic and his anger over Lord Sutcliffe's racism, the upshot of the scene was to turn Bill into a damsel to punch for. I'd rather have seen her do the punching and the Doctor acknowledge the validity.

The Ugly

The charitable interpretation is that the Doctor tried to save a child from drowning, but was only able to fix on his stolen sonic screwdriver. The uncharitable is that he was only trying for the screwdriver.

Theorising

So, the thing in the Vault can knock (although only three times.) My first guess would be the Master, but I'm not convinced. Aside from the fact that pounding on a door doesn't seem Missy's style (maybe Saxon, but still not really,) the Doctor would be more likely to undertake custodianship of the Master as an intrinsic duty, rather than an oath, and to have a sort of X-Men plastic prison arrangement for tea and verbal sparring. It feels like it would be more in keeping for the being in the Vault to be some colossal power that the Master, an inveterate absorber of energy fields bigger than his or her own head – will try to control.

Top Quotes

The Doctor: Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege. The boy who died on the river, that boy’s value is your value. That’s what defines an age, that’s… what defines a species.

Bill: No time for outrage? You've never had time for anything else, right?

Doctor: All right. You guys, hang tight! Laters. I was being all 'down with the kids' there, did you notice?

Bill: Yeah, my hair was cringing.

Bill: Yeah, that was pretty convincing racism for an extra-terrestrial.

The Verdict

'Thin Ice' doesn't exactly take a long, hard look at historical racism and elitism, but it does at least glance in that direction without feeling it needs to pretend it was just looking for the toilets and manages better than most nuWho episodes that have tried to examine the Doctor's troubled relationship with compassion. Unfortunately, the fact that so much of the narrative meat in the episode shows signs of being salvaged from earlier offerings leaves the social commentary looking a little exposed and obvious.

Score - 6/10