Story 268: Thin Ice

In which the Doctor and Bill discover that the TARDIS has materialised on the frozen River Thames. It is February 1814, and one of the famous Frost Fairs is taking place. These occasional events happened when the river froze over - allowing temporary entertainments to be set up on the ice. The Doctor shifts the TARDIS onto the riverside and they don appropriate period costumes to go outside and explore. As a woman of colour, Bill is concerned about the racist attitudes of this time, but the Doctor points out how cosmopolitan the Fair's visitors are. Back in the ship, a reading on the console shows a large lifeform, stretching the entire length of the river at this location.

They are both impressed by the flavour of a fish pie being sold. The Doctor then becomes curious about small lights which seem to be moving around just under the ice.

A group of street urchins is working the fair, picking pockets and stealing from food stalls. Whilst an older girl named Kitty distracts them, a boy named Spider steals the Doctor's sonic screwdriver. He accidentally activates it, and the Doctor sees the lights swarming in a circle below the boy's feet. He is then sucked down through the ice. The Doctor is able to retrieve the sonic, but is too late to save Spider.

The Doctor and Bill track down Kitty and the other children to a derelict house by the river. He produces pies from his top hat, stolen from a stall earlier, to win their trust. From them he learns that a man with a ship tattooed on his hand had given them all flyers to encourage people onto the ice. The Doctor suspects that there is something living in the river which must be fed - and someone is luring people onto the Thames to achieve this. The strange lights must be part of this feeding process - identifying isolated individuals like the unfortunate Spider.

He and Bill locate diving suits and that night they descend to the river bed. They see Spider's distinctive red hat, then come across a gigantic marine animal. It is like a huge eel, more than a mile long, and it has been secured to the river bed by heavy chains.

Returning to the surface, they find the pie stall owner fishing. The fish he has been catching are an unusual species. They generate light by bioluminescence, and the Doctor deduces that they live symbiotically with the huge sea creature. They lure the creature's food - humans and other animals - and dissolve the ice beneath them, then live off the scraps.

The next morning, the Doctor and Bill set off to locate the man with the ship tattoo. They trace him to a factory in the East End, where thick mud is being harvested from the river. Tricking the man, who is an overseer, into believing they know what is going on here, the man reveals that the mud is turned into bricks which can be used as fuel. The Doctor realises that it will be many times more efficient than coal - and that it is the waste product from the marine creature in the Thames. Properly exploited, it could alter history. People would be able to propel themselves to the Moon 150 years early.

The factory belongs to a man named Lord Sutcliffe. The Doctor and Bill go to his mansion and gain entry. Sutcliffe proves to be an odious man, launching a sexist, racist attack on Bill. This prompts the Doctor to punch him in the face. Captured by his men, they learn that Sutcliffe's family have owned the creature for generations, and now he is exploiting it on an industrial scale. It needs feeding, and he plans to use explosives to shatter the ice when the Frost fair is at its busiest. 

The Doctor and Bill find themselves tied up in a tent full of explosives out on the ice. He tricks their guard into giving him the sonic screwdriver after it attracts the lure fish. The man is sucked under the ice whilst the Doctor and Bill free themselves.

They locate Kitty and the other children and have them urge everyone to get off the ice - claiming a thaw has come on.

Seeing many people starting to leave, Sutcliffe attempts to detonate the explosives but finds nothing happens. He goes to the tent and discovers some of the gunpowder is missing. The Doctor has donned the diving suit once more and used the explosives to break the marine creature's chains. Now free, it cracks open the ice and Sutcliffe disappears beneath the surface.

The creature swims out of the Thames and away to the open sea. Before returning to the TARDIS, the Doctor forges documents to show that one of the urchins - a boy named Perry - is Sutcliffe's heir.

Back at St Luke's, Nardole is upset that the Doctor has clearly used the TARDIS as he sees them both still in their period costumes. Bill looks up the Frost Fair of 1814 on-line and is surprised to see no mention of a sea monster in the river. They do note that Perry was eventually accepted as Sutcliffe's heir.

The Doctor decides to take Bill on another trip in the TARDIS. Nardole checks on the vault, and is concerned to hear someone, or something, knocking from within...

Thin Ice was written by Sarah Dollard, and was first broadcast on Saturday 29th April, 2017.

This was her second story, following Face the Raven in the previous series.

The first part of the episode is pretty much a retread of The Shakespeare Code - even down to the concerns by the companion about her ethnicity, and the references to Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder in their worry about inadvertently changing history.

The Doctor leaves it to a human to decide the fate of a seemingly monstrous creature - just like in Kill The Moon, though this time the Doctor is prepared to offer some advice rather than simply abandoning them to make the choice alone.

There's nothing original about the Frost Fair setting, either - having already been mentioned in A Good Man Goes To War when River mentions the Doctor having Stevie Wonder play for her under one of London's bridges. The setting had already featured in other Doctor Who media.

The 1814 fair was the last ever to be held on the Thames. It was set up between Blackfriars and Old London bridges. The river was wider before the building of the embankments, and therefore slower flowing - enabling it to freeze over in extremely cold weather. An elephant had been paraded on the ice, to show the suspicious citizens that it was safe to walk on it.

The fairs were run by the Thames Watermen, who normally acted as a river taxi service. Unable to work with the river frozen, managing the fairs gave them some income until the thaw came.

Critics praised the episode for its handling of racism in history. As we've said, Gareth Roberts and RTD had already got there first as far as the companion is concerned. The episode goes out of its way to show a more diverse population attending the fair, and it is only Sutcliffe who is openly racist. The episode is unsure if it is his class that is behind this, or simply his own personal nature.

Whilst the episode does have a monster, it appears to be a terrestrial one, though of unknown origins. The Doctor naturally suspects an alien presence behind the scheme to advance technology - or perhaps a time-traveller. However, Sutcliffe is a purely human villain. The idea that the worst kinds of monsters can be human ones isn't exactly original.

Playing Sutcliffe is Nicholas Burns, who was well known for a regular comedy role - as Martin in the ITV sitcom Benidorm. He has also featured in The Mighty Boosh, The IT Crowd and Nathan Barley.

The Pie-Man is Peter Singh and Simon Ludders plays the factory overseer.

Of the urchins, Kitty is Asiata Koroma, Spider is Austin Taylor, and Perry is Badger Skelton.

It is an unusual episode of Doctor Who which features the death of a child - especially one clearly eaten by a sea monster.

Overall, an okay episode, with some plot elements best not looked into too closely - like how a mile long sea serpent could have gone unnoticed in the Thames for centuries (despite it having various bridges built over it through the years) - and how it was captured and secured in the first place.

Things you might like to know:

• Steven Moffat had always thought that the Thames looked like a giant snake when he saw the opening credits to EastEnders.
• The Power of Kroll also deals with a gigantic marine creature whose waste products are being exploited by humans - in this case its methane gas emissions. On the Third Moon of Delta Magna, the humans are unaware of the substance's origins, however.
• Dollard named Sutcliffe after the character Dr. Donald Sutcliffe, from serial killer drama Hannibal. She was writing some Hannibal fan fiction at the time she wrote this episode.
• She clearly has a love of Regency England, as she is one of the producers on Bridgerton.
• The Doctor reads a story to the urchins - one of the nightmarish Struwwelpeter tales. These were cautionary stories, designed to discourage children from bad behaviour. The Doctor relates The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb: "Don't suck your thumbs while I'm away / A great tall tailor always comes / To little boys who suck their thumbs / And ere they dream what's he's about / He takes his great sharp scissors out / And cuts their thumbs clean off..."
• Bill uses the internet search engine search-wise.net - which is the same one Rose Tyler used to look up the Doctor way back in Rose.
• This episode was, for a couple of weeks, the joint lowest watched story of the revived series. It tied with Sleep No More, but both were beaten into lowest watched episode by Oxygen.
• Mike Tucker's Model Unit created a small model of the Doctor in deep sea diver suit for the diving scenes. Veteran BBC VFX designer Colin Mapson was also involved. Peter Capaldi's features were modelled by Stephen Mansfield, who had worked on some Sylvester McCoy stories - sculpting the melting Kane, the Haemovores and the Destroyer amongst other creatures.
• The Doctor in diving suit model featured in the recent Worlds of Wonder exhibition: