Story 232 - The Snowmen

In which a lonely, antisocial boy named Walter Simeon discovers that the snowman he has made can communicate with him. 50 years later Simeon is head of the Great Intelligence Institute. He employs a group of men to gather snow which has recently fallen. When they demand their payment from him, a number of snowmen spring up and devour them. Simeon deposits the snow in a huge glass globe in his Institute. He has aroused the suspicion of the Paternoster Gang - Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint and Strax - and they have begun following him as he prowls the alleyways of London.

The Doctor, meanwhile, remains in self-imposed isolation in the city. He has become intrigued by the recent strange fall of snow, and one evening he encounters a barmaid in the lane outside the Rose & Crown pub. She remarks that the snowmen in the lane were not there a few moments ago. The Doctor ponders if the snow can remember, recreating snowmen that were in the alley the previous winter.

The Doctor hurries away but Clara, intrigued by his ideas, decides to follow him, jumping onto his carriage, which is being driven by Strax. The Doctor attempts to use a Memory Worm on Clara, a parasite which causes people to lose their memories, but it affects Strax instead. They encounter more snowmen, which come to life. Urging her to imagine them melting, they collapse. The Doctor manages to give Clara the slip, but she secretly follows him.

Simeon, meanwhile, visits the home of widower Captain Latimer, and insists that the contents of his frozen pond should be handed over to him.

Clara follows the Doctor to a city square, where she sees him pull a ladder down from amongst the trees. He ascends and she goes after him. The ladder leads up to a spiral staircase, which goes up above the city to a cloud. Sitting on this cloud is the TARDIS. Clara leaves before the Doctor notices her.

The next day, Clara leaves the pub for a few weeks. She heads off in a coach and changes into smart clothing on the way, before arriving at the Latimer household. She has been leading a double life, working in the pub and acting as the Latimer children's governess. Captain Latimer has a secret crush on her. The children - Digby and Franny - tell her of their old governess who they were scared of. She fell in their pond the previous winter and drowned, and they fear she will come back to haunt them.

Clara examines the pond and notices something growing within the ice.

She goes to the square in search of the Doctor, and is met by Jenny, who takes her to Vastra. The Silurian detective gives Clara a challenge - say one word which will give her a reason for contacting the Doctor. Clara gives the word "Pond"...

Intrigued by the coincidence of this, the Doctor goes to the Institute posing as Sherlock Holmes, to confront Simeon. He discovers the huge snow globe and detects an alien presence within. He also notes Simeon's interest in the news of the governess' death.

Going to the Latimer home, he is just in time to see Clara and the children being attacked by an ice avatar of the dead woman. The Paternoster Gang arrive. The Doctor and Clara escape up to the roof and the Ice Governess follows. The TARDIS cloud has been moved here, and the Doctor and Clara ascend to it. The Governess follows and seizes Clara. Both fall to the ground. The Governess is smashed to fragments, and Clara is critically injured. Strax uses alien medical tech to try to save her life, but holds out little hope. Simeon sends an army of snowmen to besiege the house.

The Doctor and Vastra use the TARDIS to travel to the Institute and confront Simeon. Here the Doctor discovers that it is the Great Intelligence which has created a form for itself in the globe.  It needs a body to establish itself physically on Earth, and this is why it was growing the Ice Governess. The Doctor claims to have brought the fragments in a biscuit tin - a souvenir of the London Underground of the late 1960's. It really contains a Memory Worm which bites Simeon. This backfires, though, as it allows the Great Intelligence to fully take over his mind and body, rather than co-habit with his own suppressed personality.

Clara is somehow psychically linked to the snow, and grief at her death causes it to melt - expelling the Intelligence into space. Simeon dies.

At her funeral, the Doctor sees her full name - Clara Oswin Oswald - and realises that her voice had been familiar to him. Is she the same young woman whom he encountered on the Dalek asylum planet? He is determined to find out...

The Snowmen was written by Steven Moffat, and was first broadcast on 25th December, 2012. It marks the first proper appearance of Jenna Coleman as Clara, though we only see her in the closing moments as she passes the grave of her namesake in the present day.

We are initially led to believe that the new companion is going to be a Victorian, who works both in a pub and as a governess. This derives from initial ideas for the character - she was going to be a Victorian barmaid named Beryl Montague. It was decided not to have a character from history for the same reasons that they decided against Katarina back in 1965 - that the Doctor would have to keep explaining everyday things to her.

The story marks the return of the Great Intelligence, which featured in two classic stories of the Troughton era, but hadn't been seen since (although a lone Yeti did feature in The Five Doctors).

Two innovations are a change to the opening credits, and a new TARDIS interior. The Doctor has now dispensed with his short tweed jacket.

The opening credits depart from the Time Vortex look of previous ones and go for a journey through space instead. We also see the Doctor's features, for the first time since the Sylvester McCoy era.

The new TARDIS interior is a great improvement on the rather jumbled copper coloured one. It has a more symmetrical look, with the console once again in central position, flanked by other technology. The lighting is rather cold, however, with shades of blue and green.

The Doctor's quest to find out who these two, apparently identical, dead women are forms the next story arc.

The main guest artist, playing Walter Simeon, is Richard E Grant. He has form with Doctor Who, having played one of the future Doctors in the Comic Relief adventure The Curse of Fatal Death (written by Moffat), and then he voiced a new Ninth Doctor in the animated story Scream of the Shalka (a project which was abandoned once the BBC announced that the series was returning to TV).

Voicing the Great Intelligence is the even more famous Sir Ian McKellen (Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings / The Hobbit trilogies, Magneto in the X-Men series, and many more). McKellen and his friend Derek Jacobi had once claimed that their main ambition in life was to appear both in Coronation Street and in Doctor Who. McKellen was first to have appeared in both. To hide its involvement, McKellen was only credited as the voice of the Great Intelligence in the closing credits. The Radio Times had him as "Voice of the Snowmen".

The other main guest is Tom Ward (Silent Witness) as Captain Latimer. The Ice Governess is voiced by Juliet Cadzow, best known for CBBC series Balamory.

Overall, one of the better Christmas Specials, with lots of nods to the series' history. The major let-down is the conclusion, where people crying can somehow destroy the Great Intelligence. Maudlin nonsense.

Things you might like to know:

• As well as links to the two earlier Great Intelligence stories we have a nod to The Talons of Weng-Chiang, as the Doctor mentions last wearing his deerstalker hat and cape in his Fourth incarnation.
• The title of this story is the link to the first of the Troughton stories - The Abominable Snowmen. The Doctor describes the map of the Underground, circa 1967, as a potential weakness of Metropolitan London - actually giving the Great Intelligence the idea of using the Underground to attack the city in The Web of Fear, which follows this in the Intelligence's chronology. Note the year - 1967 - adding to the ending of the Great UNIT Dating Controversy.
• Strangely, the Doctor never quite makes the link between the Intelligence here and the two encounters of his Second incarnation. It only rings vague bells in his mind. And yet he picked that particular biscuit tin to carry the Memory Worm.
• Moffat's other popular series is referenced as the Doctor pretends to be Sherlock Holmes. Simeon claims that Conan Doyle based his detective on Madame Vastra.
• Starting at 5:15pm, this had the earliest start time of any Doctor Who episode (excluding regional variations) since An Unearthly Child, the very first episode back in November 1963.
• For the first time ever in the series, we have a continuous shot of someone entering into the TARDIS interior from an exterior location. This had only ever been tried once before - in the 30th anniversary documentary Thirty Years In The TARDIS.
• It was originally planned not to give this story any opening credits. Once they decided to have some, they then decided to devise new ones for the remainder of Series 7.
• There's some inconsistency with the spiral staircase leading to the TARDIS, varying from clockwise to anti-clockwise depending on whether it is CGI or the base of the physical set in studio.

Not much on the horizon...?

 

It's a bit frustrating that we have so little to look forward to at the moment - at least for those of us who concentrate on televised Doctor Who. There's the multi-platform "Time Lord Victorious" thing going on now, which requires you to buy books, comics, audios, and games, plus watch on-line animated Dalek mini-episodes, to get the full experience. Some of these publications don't come out until well into 2021. I'm not sure there are all that many people who will be able to afford that complete experience, what with job losses and reduced wages across the board. Personally, I'm avoiding it as I do limit myself to the programme, though I will probably watch the Dalek animations because they are free, or read a comic strip if it's in a publication I buy anyway, i.e. DWM.

What about the forthcoming Christmas / New Year Special, I hear you ask? We've just had two images released for it, and they must be the most boring images ever intended to elicit excitement for something. One shows the Doctor in prison marking the days spent on the wall, suggesting a long boring period of incarceration. The other is an image of the companions sitting round a kitchen table.

Hardly the stuff to get viewers worked up, unless it's a negative response you're striving for.

One good bit of news is that they have actually started filming Series 13. Nothing official, of course, but some people have gone on Twitter to say they've seen it filming. To have begun filming in October does mean that it is possible to have the next series debut in the winter of 2021, rather than the spring of 2022, meaning yet another gap year. The caveat is that the Virus means that film and TV productions are having to go much slower and can be halted by cast or crew testing positive. There is also the unique Welsh dimension, with stringent local regulations about travel between local authorities (and a potential stricter travel ban on the cards). Does making a TV show constitute essential travel?

Talking of the Virus, I'm assuming we have that to blame for the lack of news about DVD / Blu-ray releases. It's ages since the Season 14 box set was released, and Fury From The Deep has been in the shops for a few weeks now. This looks like being the longest we've ever gone without knowing about planned releases of any classic Doctor Who content.

The odd thing is that the DVD / Blu-ray market hasn't been unduly affected by lockdown anywhere else. We've had a lot of big releases over the last few months, with more planned. It just seems to be the BBC who have completely shut up shop. My guess is that there is very little forward planning on the Blu-ray releases - they put them together as they go along, rather than have a range of extras already lined up for the next two or three box sets. Had they been better organised we might have had two further box sets before the end of this year.

A couple of stories have been mentioned when it comes to animating lost adventures, but nothing confirmed. It was a newspaper reporter who mentioned Evil of the Daleks and The Abominable Snowmen, even if that reporter has tended to be fairly accurate in the past.

Even if they're not going to be released until next year, it would be nice if the BBC could let us know what the next releases are going to be - for both animated stories and for season box-sets. It's always nice to have something to look forward to - and that's something we could all really do with right now.

What's Wrong With... The Power of the Daleks

 

William Hartnell has now left the TARDIS, so sadly that means we won't be hearing any more of his famous fluffs from this story onwards. Patrick Troughton has arrived, and he doesn't suffer from the same problems Hartnell had. The series is still being made one episode per evening each week, recorded as though it were live. The cast are either taken out of rehearsals to do pre-filming, or have to give up their day off for it. This will pose problems as the Troughton tenure proceeds.

A delay in working out the personality of the new Doctor will also mean that for the rest of this season, there will only be one week between recording and broadcast.

A lot of people give David Whitaker considerable credit for the personality of the Second Doctor, but he hardly had any input. He concentrated only on the Dalek story, writing for a generic Doctor. It was his successor as story editor, Dennis Spooner, who was brought in to personalise Troughton's parts of the script to the actor, after Troughton and Gerry Davis had met to discuss how he would interpret the part. Spooner also carried out rewrites on the main portion of the script.

The first thing we need to talk about is the regeneration. Never referred to by that word until years later, it is here described as a "renewal" - suggesting that the new Doctor is just a younger version of the older one we've been used to. The Doctor claims that it is to do with the TARDIS, as if it triggered and oversaw the process. However, we'll later see that regenerations can take place anywhere, even if there isn't a TARDIS present.

At first glance it looks like the Doctor is wearing the old Doctor's clothing, but this is clearly not the case on closer inspection. The only similarity is a black coat and checked trousers, but there the similarity ends. How can clothes regenerate as well, especially if they are going to end up in a distressed condition?

At the end of The Tenth Planet, it looked like Ben and Polly were in the TARDIS when the Doctor collapsed. Indeed, we saw Polly move the Doctor's scarf away from his face just before it changed.

Why then, do Ben and Polly (especially the former) have such a hard time accepting that this is the still the Doctor? They saw him change. You can understand them asking how he changed, or why he changed, but not questioning who he is.

The Doctor rummages through a chest, which we've never seen before. It has a number of items he has collected on his travels - including a Saracen blade. The Doctor suggests he got it from Saladin (in Whitaker's earlier story The Crusade) - but in that the Doctor never met Saladin.

It is a bit of a stretch that he just happens to pick up a Dalek key, which we've never seen before - just when he's about to encounter the Daleks again and they are using such keys. Quite a coincidence.

Talking of Daleks: according to Ben the Doctor does nothing but talk about Daleks. When was this exactly? There have been no breaks between stories since Ben and Polly came on board the TARDIS, with them going straight to Cornwall, then to the South Pole. The last time the Doctor mentioned Daleks was to Dodo in Fitzroy Square, before he met Ben and Polly.

The Dalek ship is supposed to have been buried in a mercury swamp for 200 years. How can it have spiders' webs inside? And how can the colonists know it's been in the swamp for such a precise length of time? You can't do carbon dating or similar with mercury, and the colony certainly hasn't been in existence that long to know it predates it.

We see the full extent of the spaceship in the confines of Lesterson's lab - yet it can contain a vast production line for new Daleks. Have the Daleks secretly knocked through a wall or two to some abandoned section of the colony? OK, so it may be dimensionally transcendental like their time-space capsules, but you would have thought that someone would have mentioned this if it was.

If Daleks need their casings as life support units, why is one of them running around their ship at night in the nude, as it were?

Either they need static electricity or they don't - the story seems mixed up about this. They go to great lengths to get a static electric circuit set up, despite being able to get by perfectly well without one beforehand - and anyway, they haven't needed static since their very first story.

I'm no physicist, but isn't static electricity generated by two surfaces rubbing against each other? You don't need to lay a power cable ring.

Lesterson seems happy to pump the Daleks full of power, but hasn't thought to open one up and take a look inside?

At one point a Dalek nudges a camera (in one of the very few clips still existing for this story).

A pedantic note to end on, but the Doctor identifies the rebels' secret code - the first letter of each line of writing making up words - as an anagram. It's not - it's an acrostic.

Inspirations - Paradise Towers

Paradise Towers is the first story which Andrew Cartmel commissioned and saw through to completion, and therefore provides an idea of what his vision for the programme was to be. He was the first script editor on the series to be inspired as much by comics and graphic novels as by films and books.

The idea of a dystopian tower block where all the children have formed feral gangs, and some of the old people resort to cannibalism could have come straight from the pages of 2000AD.

The author of this story is Stephen Wyatt. He had written a play about the backstage shenanigans of a cat breeders club, called Claws, which had gone down very well. JNT loved it, and so invited Wyatt to offer a storyline idea prior to Cartmel's arrival.

The basic set up for Paradise Towers is that all of society lives in one vast tower block. All the young men went off to fight in a war and none have returned. The female children have formed colour-coded gangs - Red, Blue and Yellow Kangs. What men do still live in the Towers are all caretakers, led by the officious Chief Caretaker, who is hidebound by his rule book. All the other tenants are older people.

The architect of the Towers, Kroagnon, disappeared after being attacked by the residents, as he did not want any people messing up his lovely design. There's more cannibalism going on, as his brain survives in the basement and he's in league with the Chief Caretaker to obtain enough genetic material to make himself a new body. The Towers' robot cleaning machines are killing Kangs and others to feed him.

The usual starting point when it comes to looking for inspirations for this story is writer JG Ballard, and his novel High-Rise.

Architecture had gone through a negative phase in the 1960's and 1970's as the ideals of the tower block had been proven false. New communities - "streets in the skies" - had failed to materialise. Instead, there was only feelings of isolation and of the elderly trapped in their homes. The blocks themselves proved often to be made from substandard materials and were prone to damp. Some famously collapsed. Others were condemned after only a few years. Lifts didn't work and bored youngsters scrawled graffiti on every surface. Come the 1980's Architecture was beginning to fight back, with a move away from the concrete blocks.

Ballard's book tells of a luxury apartment block where society breaks down as the building suffers technical faults. The most affluent tenants at the top of the tower want the swimming pool etc. for themselves and try to stop the less affluent from the lower floors from accessing facilities. Even the lifts are claimed by rival floors, as the society collapses into violence. Instead of leaving, the tenants instead become used to life in the block and try to adapt to it. The architect is finally confronted at the top of the building.

The notion of someone being murdered in secret by a group of adults, but whose children then come under attack by him is strongly reminiscent of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies - the first of which debuted in 1984.

The Chief Caretaker is a "Jobsworth" - a phrase coined by the BBC's That's Life team. They would award a "Jobsworth" trophy each week to the most pointless and frustrating bit of bureaucracy reported to them by the viewing public. The name derives from "That's more than my job's worth...".

Playing him is Richard Briars, who was well known at the time for playing the pedantic Martin Bryce in the sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles (1984 - 1989). He portrays the character as a cross between Adolf Hitler and Blakey, the Jobsworth inspector in ITV sitcom On The Buses.

There is one male character in the story who isn't a Caretaker, and that's Pex. He was supposed to be a lumbering Stallone / Schwarzenegger sort of character, who looked tough but was really a coward. Unfortunately this intended juxtaposition between image and reality was ruined through miscasting for the part.

The Kangs speak in slogans they have heard - "build high for happiness" etc, and have names deriving from urban architecture and their surroundings - Bin Liner, Fire Escape and so forth. They are supposed to come across as quite feral, but are too well groomed and well-spoken and so the effect is lost.

The robotic cleaners didn't feature much in Wyatt's initial drafts, but emerged as JNT insisted on a monster of some sort.

Next time: bad aliens, good aliens and rock 'n' roll aliens all converge on a 1950's holiday camp, after first encountering Ken Dodd...

The Snowmen Prequel 3 - The Great Detective

In which Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax seek out the Doctor. Depressed after the departure of Amy and Rory he is living in Victorian London as a recluse, and they are concerned about him. They seek to remotivate him by informing him of a number of potential threats to the planet. Vastra tells him of a shower of strange meteorites, whilst Jenny informs him of an invisible man and a scientist's plans to drill into the core of the Earth. Strax informs him of a threat from creatures who live on the moon, and that he has declared war on the Earth's satellite. The Doctor is unmoved by these tales, determined to be left alone. As they drive away in their carriage, Vastra and Jenny are intrigued to see that it is snowing, despite there being not a single cloud in the sky...

The Great Detective was written by Steven Moffat, and was first shown as part of the annual BBC telethon Children in Need, on 16th November, 2012.

The events seen here lead directly into The Snowmen, though this prequel was shown first in order for it to be included in CiN.

It features only the Paternoster Gang, and Matt Smith as the Doctor, sporting the Victorian costume he will wear in the Christmas Special.

Things you might like to know:

• The title here refers to the Doctor, but was also the title used to describe Sherlock Holmes.
• All of the threats mentioned by the Paternoster Gang refer to the works of writers HG Wells or Conan Doyle:
• The meteorite fall is a reference to Wells' War of the Worlds, first published in 1897.
• The man who may be invisible refers to Wells' The Invisible Man, also published in 1897.
• The scientist drilling into the Earth is Professor Challenger, in Doyle's 1928 story When the World Screamed.
• Strax's "Moonites" are the Selenites, from Wells' First Men in the Moon, first serialised between 1900 and 1901 in The Strand Magazine.

The Snowmen Prequel 2 - Vastra Investigates

 

In which Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax assist Scotland Yard in apprehending a murderer. They have helped Inspector Gregson solve a particularly baffling case involving identical twins, unknown poisons and an ancient Egyptian curse. He, however, is more interested in the crime-solving trio - their strange appearances and - to him - even stranger relationships...

Vastra Investigates was written by Steven Moffat, and was first released on-line on 17th December 2012. It is actually the second of the two prequels made for The Snowmen to be released, though it is set prior to the first prequel which was shown.

The Paternoster Gang, as they are known, are joined by Paul Hickey as the bemused Gregson, who will make a further appearance in Deep Breath.

Thing, singular, you might like to know:

• An Inspector Gregson features in the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - first appearing in A Study in Scarlet, then reappearing in The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter, The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge and The Adventure of the Red Circle.

The Snowmen Prequel 1 - The Battle of Demons Run: Two Days Later

 

In which we return to the aftermath of the battle on Demons Run, where the Doctor, Amy and Rory discovered River Song's true identity. 

Sontaran Commander Strax had apparently been killed in the fighting. However, two days later he came round, and was informed by Madame Vastra and Jenny Flint that he had merely been injured and had passed out. They tell him that alien technology has been used to repair his wounds, and he has been in an induced unconscious state for two days while the technology did its work. The Doctor and his companions have long gone, and now the station is being fully evacuated. They offer Strax the opportunity to come with them, to the London of 1888. At first he refuses, but they manage to convince him otherwise...

The Battle of Demons Run: Two Days Later was written by Steven Moffat, and was first released on-line on 25th March 2013. It was a sequel to Series 6's A Good Man Goes To War, but was also designed as a prequel to The Snowmen, as it tells of how Strax came to survive his apparent demise, and how he came to be part of Madame Vastra's household in the 2012 Christmas Special.

It was 3 minutes in duration, and featured only Neve McIntosh as Vastra, Catrin Stewart as Jenny, and Dan Starkey as Strax.

Things you might like to know:

• It is River Song who returns to Demons Run to transport the trio back to Victorian London, as by this stage the Doctor has set off to find baby Melody Pond.
• The alien resurrection technology used to revive Strax is the same he will use to try to save Clara in the Christmas Special.
• This prequel, which is available on the Complete Series 7 DVD / Blu-ray box set, was released as part of the promotion for the second half of the season, just before the broadcast of The Bells of Saint John, though it has nothing to do with that story.
• It was first released in the USA.