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.
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.
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.
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