Ice Warrior

Doctor Who alien
Ice Warriors
Type	Reptilian humanoids
Affiliated with	Ice Warriors
Home planet	Mars
First appearance	The Ice Warriors

The Ice Warriors are a fictional extraterrestrial race of reptilian-like humanoids in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. The race originated on Mars, and first appeared in the 1967 serial The Ice Warriors where they encountered the Second Doctor and his companions Jamie and Victoria. The name Ice Warrior is not the name of their species, but was applied to them by an Earth scientific team in the Martians' first on-screen appearance.

Physical characteristics

The Ice Warriors are reptilian humanoids, their scaly skin and features usually hidden under heavy armour. They have large, claw-like hands on which are mounted sonic weaponry, and their voices are a highly sibilant whisper, due to the different composition of Earth's atmosphere. Two types of Ice Warrior are seen in the series: the rank and file Warriors, and an officer class, which fan lore has christened Ice Lords (with at least one being referred to as a "Lord" on-screen). The main difference between the two is the design of their armour, with the Ice Lords wearing a lighter, more flexible version than those of the Warriors.

History within the show

Due to the time-travelling nature of the television series, the Doctor would encounter the Ice Warriors out of sequence relative to his timeline. Their first on-screen appearance was in the 1967 story The Ice Warriors, set at a time in the future when the world was in the grip of a new ice age. A scientific team sent to halt the advance of the glaciers discovered a spacecraft buried underneath the ice, where it had lain for thousands of years together with its Ice Warrior crew. The Martians revived and attempted to take over the scientific base, but were defeated by the Second Doctor and their ship destroyed as it tried to take off. No date is given for this story on screen, but the Radio Times listing for the serial placed it at the year 3000.

Their next appearance was in the 1969 serial The Seeds of Death, which took place in the mid-21st century. In that story, the world had grown dependent on the matter transmission system T-Mat. An Ice Warrior strike force seized control of the T-Mat relay on the Moon, using it to send the titular seeds to Earth, which were designed to alter the planet's atmosphere to be hospitable to Martian life, by reducing the atmosphere's oxygen content to one-twentieth, exactly like Mars. The plan was foiled by the Second Doctor and his companions Jamie and Zoe, and the invading Martian fleet was sent into an orbit around the Sun.

By the time of 1972's The Curse of Peladon, the Ice Warriors had renounced violence (except in self-defence) and become respected members of a Galactic Federation that included Earth, Mars, Alpha Centauri and Arcturus. When the Third Doctor encountered them on a diplomatic mission to decide the admission of the planet Peladon to the Federation, he was initially distrustful, believing them to be behind an attempted sabotage of the proceedings. However, the culprit turned out to be someone else.

In the 1974 serial The Monster of Peladon (which took place 50 years after Curse), the Ice Warriors returned to Peladon as Federation peacekeeping troops. The leader of the Martian troops, Azaxyr, was working with Galaxy 5, which was at war with the Federation. Seeking a return to the race's warrior past, he tried to impose martial law and take over Peladon, but was stopped by the Peladonians, who were aided by the Third Doctor. Curiously in this appearance, Azaxyr referred to his troops as Ice Warriors. Neither Peladon serials give dates, but the Virgin New Adventures novel Legacy by Gary Russell placed them as taking place around the 39th and 40th centuries.

A possible unseen adventure involving the Ice Warriors is alluded to in Castrovalva. The newly-regenerated and still unstable Fifth Doctor regresses to an earlier personality and memory, saying, "Not far now, Brigadier, unless the Ice Warriors get there first!". The final New Adventures novel, The Dying Days by Lance Parkin, features a 1997 invasion of Earth by the Ice Warriors, and also states that the Brigadier had not encountered them before.

In the 2005 episode, "The Christmas Invasion", Major Blake of UNIT comments that the Sycorax "don't look like Martians", a potential reference to the Ice Warriors, possibly the unseen adventure mentioned in Castrovalva.

In the 2009 episode, "The Waters of Mars", the Doctor mentions the legend of the Ice Warriors, calling them "a fine and noble race who built an empire out of snow." He also theorises that the alien entity that seems to be sentient water pursuing them in the episode was known to the Ice Warriors, who froze it in an underground glacier on Mars to prevent its escape.

Other appearances

The Ice Warriors are one of the "monsters" that have made repeated appearances in Doctor Who, as well as in the spin-off media. In the series itself, they made cameo appearances in the serials The War Games and The Mind of Evil, though they have yet to be seen in the latest series.

The Ice Warriors did not appear on television after 1975; two proposed reintroductions after this were abandoned due to external events. They were supposed to be featured in the never-produced Sixth Doctor serial Mission to Magnus which was commissioned for the cancelled 1986 season. Similarly, they were also supposed to appear in season 27, in the serial Ice Time by Marc Platt, which would have written out the Seventh Doctor's companion Ace. However, as the series ceased production in 1989, the story was never produced. The plot for Ice Time was to have a more fantasy-based take on the Ice Warriors, with an Ice Lord being reborn from his armour in Swinging London and fighting a rival Ice Lord that had pursued him through time.

The Ice Warriors have also appeared in numerous spin-off media, including novels, comic strips and audio plays.

The Ice Warriors make several appearances in the Virgin New Adventures. Transit, by Ben Aaronovitch, did not feature any Ice Warriors in a significant role, but its background included the aftermath of a Thousand Day War between Earth and Mars that had spun out from the events of The Seeds of Death and forced many of the Ice Warriors off Mars. The aforementioned Legacy was a sequel to the Peladon stories, and again featured the Ice Warriors as members of the Federation. It was also clarified that their home in that time period (stated as the 40th century) was a planet called New Mars.

GodEngine by Craig Hinton was set shortly after Transit, and concurrently with The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It introduced a non-martial culture within Martian society. In this novel, a group of religious pilgrims (who worship the Osirians) attempted to make peace with humans, while a group of Warriors secretly worked with the Daleks.

As mentioned, The Dying Days featured an Ice Warrior invasion of 1997 Earth. The novel also revealed that, after the Mars Probe missions (seen in The Ambassadors of Death, 1970), Earth accidentally made hostile contact with the Ice Warriors. Earth brokered an agreement to never return to Mars, with the British intelligence services covering up the fact that Mars had a breathable atmosphere so as to discourage further exploration attempts.

The BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Last Resort features numerous conflicting alternate timelines in which the Martian race has either been enslaved by humans or else has exterminated all but a select human elite to prevent their enslavement. In these realities Martian life began as a result of bacteria from the decaying corpses of millions of temporal duplicates of a time-travelling teenager called Jack Kowaczski, arriving from millions of parallel timelines on the uninhabitable surface of Mars and dying, changing the Martian atmosphere and evolving.

The Past Doctor Adventures Fear Itself (which is set shortly after humans colonise Mars) mentions that native Martians (never named explicitly as Ice Warriors) have been forced into poverty and homelessness by humans, except for a few who have resorted to terrorism to reclaim their planet.

In the Doctor Who comic strip published in the Radio Times in 1996, an Ice Warrior named Ssard became a companion to the Eighth Doctor, together with the human Stacy Townsend. Ssard's introductory strip dealt with a "medieval" period of Mars's history. Stacy and Ssard reappeared in the BBC Books novel Placebo Effect by Gary Russell, where the two were married. In the monthly Doctor Who comic strips, an Ice Warrior named Harma is part of Abslom Daak's Dalek-killing band, the Star Tigers. Another Doctor Who Weekly back-up strip, Deathworld (#15 and #16), featured a conflict between the Ice Warriors and the Cybermen. In the story 4-Dimensional Vistas (Doctor Who Monthly #78-83), the Fifth Doctor and his new companion Gus Goodman discover the Ice Warriors at an Arctic Base, allied with the Meddling Monk and planning to use a giant crystal to create a sonic cannon.

In the Big Finish audio play Red Dawn, NASA's first manned mission to Mars encounters a small band of surviving Ice Warriors who had been placed in suspended animation to defend the tomb of Izdaal, the greatest warrior of the Martian race. According to this story, previous unmanned Mars probes had brought back fragments of alien technology and DNA, and scientists had gone so far as to create human/Martian hybrid clones. This story, set in the 21st century, appears to depict the first full contact between humans and Ice Warriors. This is difficult to reconcile with The Dying Days, and may support the idea that the novels and audios take place in separate parallel universes.

Another audio play, Frozen Time, sees the Seventh Doctor and a human expedition discovering a group of Ice Warriors frozen in the Antarctic. These are revealed to be criminals deliberately imprisoned there as punishment. Also The Bride of Peladon saw the Fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem encountering an Ice Warrior.

The Ice Warriors made an appearance in the Bernice Summerfield audio The Dance of the Dead, and the new gardener on the Braxiatel Collection is an Ice Warrior named Hass.

The Fifth Doctor meets the Ice Warriors yet again in the audio play The Judgement of Isskar. This serves as a sort of origin story for them. The Doctor lands on Mars, looking for a segment of the Key to Time. At this point, Martians are a peaceful communal community who do not even know the meaning of the word "warrior". But when the segment is taken away, the Martian atmosphere slowly erodes. They become desperate scavengers and, eventually, Ice Warriors.

In Deimos / The Resurrection of Mars, it is explained that many Ice Warriors went into cryogenic suspension after Mars was rendered inhospitable. Some of these vaults were on the Martian moon Deimos and others were in the Asteroid Belt. Centuries later, some of these Ice Warriors were revived and eventually discovered a new home world. The planet was a beautiful, civilized utopia called Halcyon. The Ice Warriors killed all of the twenty billion inhabitants and renamed it New Mars.

Appearances

Television

• The Ice Warriors — November 11–December 16, 1967
• The Seeds of Death — January 25–March 1, 1969
• The War Games — April 19–June 21, 1969 (cameo)
• The Mind of Evil — January 30–March 6, 1971 (cameo)
• The Curse of Peladon — January 29–February 19, 1972
• The Monster of Peladon — March 23–April 27, 1974

Novels

• Mission to Magnus - Target novelisation of the unmade serial by Philip Martin — 1990
• Legacy (Virgin New Adventures) by Gary Russell — 1994
• GodEngine (Virgin New Adventures) by Craig Hinton — 1996
• The Dying Days (Virgin New Adventures) by Lance Parkin — 1997
• Cold (Doctor Who Storybook 2009) by Mark Gatiss — 2008
• The Silent Stars Go By by Dan Abnett - 2011

Audio plays

• Red Dawn — 2000
• Bang-Bang-a-Boom! (cameo) — 2002
• Frozen Time — 2007
• The Bride of Peladon — 2008
• The Judgement of Isskar — 2009
• The Prisoner of Peladon — 2009
• Mission to Magnus — 2009, audio adaptation of the novel
• Deimos / The Resurrection of Mars — 2010
• Thin Ice — 2011

• Professor Bernice Summerfield: The Dance of the Dead — 2002

Video games

• Destiny of the Doctors

External links

• Ice Warrior on TARDIS Index File, an external wiki
• The Ice Warrior page