The TARDIS Project

The Ice Warriors episode 5 discussion:

R: This story is moving at a Glacial pace…

E: I just. Victoria. Just Victoria.

P: The humor of them trying to get the vial open… the humor of the alien like “give that to me” yeah, give that to him. He’s strong. He’ll get it open.

R: Here, give that to meeeee. You’ve got to get a good grip on the bassssse, as well as the cap. Then twisssssst.

Everyone: Ss-ss-ss-ss

R: Ice Warriors don’t laugh, they snigger.

Sp: Ice Warriors don’t snigger, they leak.

K: Nice to have you back, Spoo.

Sp: Nice to be back, Ketina.

R: This wasn’t a bad episode, but it was not a great one either. It had some good moments. For a moment there I thought Clent was going to break up with his girlfriend.

K: The computer?

R: Yeah. I thought that was a pretty cool scene. But then we had the baby bear attack.

K: Yes.

H: Interesting fact…

R: Interesting fact, the cast was actually attacked by a baby bear!

H: Okay, not that interesting. Interesting that it wasn’t stock footage, which is what you would have imagined. They actually specially filmed at bear at a zoo for this. I don’t think it’s a baby, it’s just a smaller bear than what we are used to.

R: That’s a damn small bear.

K: I was thinking “Oh cute, baby bear. Where’s the momma for the danger.”

E: I was too.

Sp: Jamie would make an awesome cyclops.

H: Elaborate.

Sp: As in the superhero.

H: Oh, with the goggles on.

Sp: He rocks a pair of goggles.

R: So yeah, the whole episode just kept tottering back and forth between “so this is kinda cool” to “okay… really?”

Sp: I actually liked the intercut between the cub attack and the menacing leaking aliens and the argument with the computer. Three individual scenes that on their own were just okay, it’s story. But the intercutting helped create some pace and tension that might not have been there otherwise. Great save, director.

R: So the moral of this story is, if you’re going to have filler, intercut it.

Sp: Why do you think she keeps going back and forth between you and being before getting to the Historian’s comments?

Everyone:

H: Now I have to think of something to say. Damn it!

Sp: Sounds like a cue for more filler.

R: Alright, I’ve got one. Soooo… Why have you not freed us before?. Because you’re douche nozzles? When have you ever given anybody a reason to ever do anything nice for you. The first thing they did was grab a young woman from the base and go . Most of my laughter this week was at the Ice Warriors expense.

H: I thought it was cool that they really managed to go alien and weird and other and it basically worked. Even the dubbing in of the voices…

K: They were dubbed?

H: Here’s how they did the Ice Warrior voices.

R: It was ADR because you wouldn’t have been able to hear the original guys from within the costumes.

H: That’s not the only reason they did it. The actors were really doing the Ice Warrior voices. They had a decision of whether to make the mask tied into the actors lips, but you couldn’t articulate properly with the mask being so close to the facial features.

R: That’s evident from watching it.

H: So the decision was made to have the voices dubbed in so they could have more movement of the mouth. Which is why the mouth movement doesn’t always match the voice, but the flapping still matches like in animation.

Sp: Yeah, which gives it that alien quality. The creepy face movement kind of looked like some obscure Russian puppet show, where they meant the puppets to be cuddly and human, but…

H: So, a Russian puppet show then.

Sp: But it ends up being just this latex mask that doesn’t really move like a person, and it’s spooky.

H: I loved the cool weird movement that they have when they’re talking among themselves. It’s very alien. And the costumes were extraordinarily heavy, so it’s not surprising. They were made of fiberglass!

R: Well, I still got plenty of laughs out of them.

P: It’sssss not nicccce to laugh at ussssssss.

R: Prepare to charge the cannon too… three hundred mega voltsssss. So, get ready to get ready to fire. Don’t actually get ready to fire. Prepare to charge? It’s amazing these guys conquer anything. Everything gets bogged down in committee. “Open an exploratory panel to prepare a ssssselection of posssssible megavoltagesssss to which we can charge the cannon.”

Sp: Thissss concludessss today’sssss ssssstandup meeting.

R: Didn’t we make Scrum jokes last week?

K: Two weeks ago.

H: Many times. But it was all at Clent’s expense that time.

M: You and your Scrumphobia, Spoo.

Sp: Scrumaphobia. The underrated Who album. Nobody thought Pete Townsend could whinge on about bureaucracy, but oh he proved them wrong.

H: I’ve heard the “prepare to do the blah blah blah” crap like that from Star Trek and other places lots of times.

R: There’s credible sounding BS, and there’s BS sounding BS. I fear this feel into the second category.

Sp: I was just amused that it was a sonic cannon. I appreciate the variety. It’s not a generic laser cannon. It’s not a ray gun. “I’m firing my sonic Reagan. ‘well… well… well’”

P: Oh, so you’re a Loyalist, huh?

R: Nice call back.

Sp: So, are we going to bother with the computer room subplot?

R: The slap fight you mean? The whole Clent verses Penley in a beard to the death.

Sp: So, story wise, and philosophically, that dialog served its purpose. Those two characters needed to have that conversation, and I think it worked well. Up until the point where they actually moved. When there was physical combat… it wandered a bit.

R: I didn’t think the fight was that bad. When you’ve got four people in a small area, and a gun, things get weird.

H: It wasn’t a fight. What happened was Clent tried to walk away, Jamie grabbed his arm, Clent started to go bananas, because he is a physical coward like he said, Penley just tried to stop them, essentially. And Clent yelled “Stun them” and the guard stunned them.

K: The gun was “on the wall” when Clent told the guard to stay in the room. You knew something was going to happen.

Sp: One hopes that gun had multiple settings. Wasn’t it used to stun a bear a few scenes ago.

K: He had to shoot the bear twice. And it was a “stun gun” not a gun with a stun setting.

R: I did think that Clent’s speech ran off the rails a bit when he got to “at least I don’t cower away from moral judgment” and I immediately thought what, Penley’s gay? What moral censure is Clent talking about?

H: That’s been pretty well trodden ground from previous episodes. Clent feels that Penley’s walking out was a betrayal both to him personally, and to Penley’s moral duty to the project and the Earth. He absolutely sees Penley as an ideological coward.

R: Fair enough.

H: Moving on to final thoughts?

Sp: How have we not covered Victoria? Wake up Ezio!

A: I handed her a game, sorry.

E: Hang on. Yeah. Victoria’s little false crying fit while talking to the Doctor is easily my favorite part of this episode. At first I was a little bit confused as to what the Doctor was trying to pantomime to her, but when he started to make tear motions on his face it became a little bit clearer to me. And when she started fake crying I found that endlessly amusing. She’s a very good actor.

Sp: Yes. Deb Watling…

E: And also Victoria herself.

Sp: Oh quite. Deb Watling is definitely Pat Troughton’s equal for physical comedy. They play off of each other very nicely.

E: Oh yes, they do.

H: What I said when we got to the end of the episode is that I’m so glad that this one exists. It gives us an idea of all the things that we’re not able to see, and I don’t have any idea how a reconstruction could have conveyed that well enough to be as funny as it was.

P: Which makes you wonder how much you miss out on the episodes that are recons.

H: Exactly. So, final thoughts now?

E: Well, that basically was my final thought. I’m waaay ahead of you people.

H: Okay.

A: Good cliff hanger.

MS:

K: Not even your usual?

MS: Okay, it was awesome.

P: Sssssimply ssssublime. The weakness of the dependency of the computer as the sole arbitrator because of the weakness of Clent and his assistant is such a moving point in this episode, that I think it’s actually worth repeating this same error again. It was good that the Doctor got a well timed shift in the ice as part of his argument to the Ice Warriors. I thought it was well played.

K: In regards to the computer bit, there was a moment when the assistant was practically worshiping the computer. It was creepy. And cool in a creepy scifi plot way.

H: She actually said that they must place their trust in the computer.

P: And all the software testers in the room went “nuh uh.”

Sp: So the business with the communicator. The aliens knew that the communicator was on. And they were trying to be intimidating through it? Or they didn’t know it was on, and the Doctor was being clever by passing on instructions to Clent and company?

H: A little bit of column A, and a little bit of column B. The Doctor’s plan was to leave the communicator on. The Ice Warriors figured it out a little bit into that scene. They didn’t know immediately. So a little bit of both.

Sp: They just didn’t seem to go for grabbing the communicator away quickly enough to make it seem like they knew they were being listened in on.

K: That was intentional. They were given the base a message. You don’t know. Hahaha. No messages.

H: Not hahaha.

Entire room: ss-ss-ss!

Sp: It didn’t hit me, in the only other episode of this story that I’ve seen, but the Doctor’s coat is fabulous.

H: It’s the same coat he wore in the Abominable Snowman.

K: But there are more moving pictures in this one, so we see it more.

Sp: Yeah. But in this one it just seemed fluffier.

A: It seemed like it had just been dry cleaned or something.

Sp: I kept expecting him to bring out one of those bullhorn cone things and croon at us. It looked like a raccoon coat. That’s all I got.

R: ss-ss-ss-ss-ss. Now we have two hosssstagessss. And two issss more that one.

K: Most of what I’d talk about has already been covered. I liked this one better than last week, and I can’t even blame the moving pictures. More seemed to happen. It went fast in a good way. More silly parts were good. The bear was really unnecessary, but the rest was pretty well done.

H: Love the Ice Warriors. Love the characters, especially Clent. Next week is the big climax of the story, the end. Hopefully you guys will like where everything ends up. I know I’m enjoying it.

P: I’m in sssssupensssssse

Entire room: ss-ss-ss-ss-ss

MS: Not entire room! I didn’t do it!