A quartet of men who were dressed in the style of Teutonic knights, encountered by the Doctor's companions on the planet Marinus. This was at the location of the third key they had to find, to operate the Conscience Machine. The soldiers were frozen into immobility in a cavern in the mountains of a snowy region, standing guard over the key, which was embedded in a block of ice. Each was armed with a different weapon - sword, mace, battleaxe and lance.
When hot water from a thermal vent was used to melt the block, it raised the temperature in the cavern as well and brought the soldiers back to life. Charged with protecting it, they gave chase through the ice tunnels. One fell to his death down a ravine. The remaining three pursued the companions back to the hut of a sadistic fur trapper named Vasor, where the travel dials they needed to escape were to be found. They hurriedly left just before the soldiers broke in, though one of them had killed the trapper when he thrust his sword through the wooden door.
Played by: Michael Allaby, Alan James, Peter Stenson and Anthony Verner. Appearances: The Keys of Marinus (1964).
- The exact nature of the Ice Soldiers is never explained. They appear to be human - we see a close-up of a very human eye under his helmet as one of them wakes up, and another screams when he falls into a ravine - and yet they survive being frozen for centuries. The 1979 Target non-fiction book The Adventures of K9 and other Mechanical Creatures, written by Terrance Dicks no less, lists them as robots.
- The scripts referred to each of them by the particular weapon they wielded, to help identify who was who in studio.
- Stenson appeared in three different roles in this story. As well as an Ice Soldier he also played a Voord and one of the judges in the city of Millennius.
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