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| An Ice Warrior |
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 Name: The Ice Warriors, AKA Martians
Format: Television
Show, Book and Audio
Time of Origin: Evolved on Mars in
the distant past and have existed into the far future.
Appearances: "The
Ice Warriors", "The
Seeds of Death","Lords of the Red Planet", "Wrath of the Ice Warriors", "The
Curse of Peladon", "The Prisoner of Peladon", "The
Monster of Peladon", "Ice Heist", "Forty - God of War", "Red Dawn", "The
Bride of Peladon", "The
Judgement of Isskar", "Mission to Magnus", "Cry of the Vultriss", "Legacy", "GodEngine", "Frozen
Time", "The
Dying Days", "The Resurrection of Mars", "Tenth Doctor Adventures - Volume Two" - "Cold Vengeance",
"The
Silent Stars Go By", "Cold War", "Empress of Mars"; technically alternate versions of them featured in "The
Last Resort"; they might have played an indirect role in the events of "The Waters of Mars".
Doctors: Second
Doctor, Third
Doctor, Fourth Doctor, Fifth
Doctor, Sixth
Doctor, Seventh
Doctor, Eighth
Doctor, Tenth
Doctor, Eleventh Doctor, Twelfth Doctor; The Tenth
Doctor encountered a semi-sentient virus that may have been created
or contained by the Ice Warriors.
Companions: Jamie McCrimmon,
Victoria
Waterfield,
Zoe, The
Brigadier, Jo Grant, Sarah
Jane Smith, Leela, Margaret Hopwood, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan Jovanka, Peri Brown, Erimem, Amy, Flip Jackson, Constance Clarke,
Ace, Bernice
Summerfield, Rose Tyler, Amy Pond, Rory
Williams, Clara Oswald, Nardole, Bill Potts; Adelaide Brooke may have
encountered their legacy, and Fitz Kreiner and Anji Kapoor faced what could be considered
alternate versions of the Ice Warriors, but none of them fought the
Ice Warriors
directly.
History: Of all of The Doctor’s alien enemies,
the Ice Warriors are unquestionably the race that has undergone the
most social development during his encounters with them, as they
are the only alien enemy The Doctor has fought who have also befriended
and aided him of their own free will on some occasions, rather than
simply working with him when the situation forced them to collaborate
against a more immediate problem. Another significant part of their
history is that they originate from the planet Mars, although they
have never been referred to as ‘Martians’ in any of The
Doctor’s interactions with them, with all who meet them referring
to them as Ice Warriors due to their greater comfort operating in
cooler temperatures than the average humanoid (Although fires are
not normally dangerous to them even if intense heat is far more fatal
to the Ice Warriors than it would be for humans) thanks to the cybernetic
suits they developed to cope with Mars’s lowering temperature,
the Ice Warriors having become so reliant on these suits that it
is regarded as dishonourable for them to leave the suits. Mars’s
lighter gravity means that they are naturally slower on a planet
like Earth than they would be on their homeworld, but they can still
move quickly if required- being particularly quick when outside their
suits ("Cold War") -, and Earth’s atmosphere causes
them to wheeze and express some difficulty while walking.
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The
Judgement of Isskar
(Simon Guerrier)
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The origin of the Ice Warriors was revealed in the audio "Lords of the Red Planet", when the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe - who had encountered the Ice Warriors in their past and the future of Mars - landed on the planet in its distant past, where they encountered the natives of the last city on Mars, the Gandorans. In the process, they also discovered that scientist Quendril was forcibly evolving a local life-form that resembled a giant turtle into creatures that the TARDIS crew identified as the early Ice Warriors (Which were ironically named as such by The Doctor when he saw them; initially they were just known as 'Saurian Evolutionaries'). Although the Ice Warriors had been created initially to act as servants and prepare the vital 'life-drink' - a serum that sustained the Gandoran natives after all of Mars' other natural resources had been exhausted - The Doctor soon learned that Zaadur, Quendril's genetically -augmented daughter, intended to destroy her people and then turn the Ice Warriors into her own army against the wider universe, her augmentation having left her with a heightened intellect and an overwhelming arrogance. Fortunately, recently-created Ice Lord Aslor 'imprinted' on Zoe as his mistress after she showed him kindness during the torturous experiments that elevated his mind, giving The Doctor and his companions a vital ally against Zaadur's Ice Warriors. After removing the eggs Zaadur had intended to use as the seeds of her new species from the rocket she was using to flee Mars, hiding the eggs in the mines to be destroyed by Zaadur's own bombs, Aslor sacrificed himself to turn up the city's heat generators, killing himself as well as Zaadur's Ice Warriors, while Zaadur herself was killed when Quendril's early experiment Risor sacrificed himself to destroy her ship. Although The Doctor was able to develop a substitute for the life-drink, the TARDIS crew all grimly acknowledged that the Gandorans were doomed as nobody knew of them in the future, even if The Doctor asked Zoe and Jamie to hope that they would simply die out while the local creatures became the Ice Warriors as nature intended.
Whether the Ice Warriors evolved naturally or the survivors of Quendril's experiments simply took over as the Gandarians died out, by the time The Doctor next visited the early days of Mars in his fifth incarnation ("The Judgement of Isskar"), the dominant life-form was the future Ice Warriors. However, it is likely that these creatures were natural evolutions as when The Doctor arrived on Mars, the species didn't even have a word for 'warrior' as their culture focused more on arts and crafts rather than soldiers and operated on a gift-based culture of exchange and cooperation with each other (Some speculate that their past abuse as slave labour for the Osirans ("Pyramids of Mars") prompted them to turn against violence). However, this lifestyle ended when the Fifth Doctor came to Mars as part of a quest for the decaying segments of the Key to Time, with the removal of the third segment resulting in the formation of a gravity plug. This distortion sent earthquakes and hurricanes across the planet for three decades, devastating the Martian civilization and forcing them to retreat underground or go into suspended animation on their moons and the asteroid belt.
However,
when they attempted to return to the surface, the discovery that
Mars was now too warm for them to survive on it forced them to begin
a new policy of forced expansion, their old gift-based economy abandoned
as they resorted to increasingly more desperate and brutal methods
to survive, progressing into the conquering culture that we are more
familiar with, although some figures - such as Isskar, an Ice Lord
who put himself in suspended animation until he could confront The Doctor and his companions for their role in Mars’s destruction - still
favoured a return to more honourable and peaceful ways. Some of the
Ice Warriors in suspended animation were eventually able to claim
a new home on the planet Halcyon, which they renamed New Mars, although
the fact that they slaughtered the twenty billion previous inhabitants
to establish themselves makes this less positive than it sounds at
first.
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| The Ice Warriors |
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The Ice Warriors first encountered The Doctor
in his second incarnation, when he visited the Earth during a second
ice age just as a Martian ship that had crash-landed on Earth thousands
of years in the past was released from its frozen ‘captivity’ ("The
Ice Warriors"), their attempt to colonise ancient Earth having been
halted when the glaciers covered them. Despite The Doctor’s efforts
to stop them from launching an attack on Earth, he was eventually forced
to use the Ioniser - a means of intensifying the light from Earth’s
sun onto a particular location that had been developed to fight the ice
- in order to melt the Ice Warriors when they began to develop a sonic
cannon to launch a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against the humans.
The destruction of the Ice Warriors’ ship as it began to lift off
also halted an advancing glacier that threatened to destroy the base
that the TARDIS crew had been helping, allowing The Doctor and his companions
to depart in confidence that their friends would be safe.
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| The Seeds of Death |
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The Doctor faced the Ice Warriors for a second time as they
tried to take Earth from humanity when the attempted to use
the T-Mat - a matter transportation system - to disperse Martian
seed pods all
across the planet ("The
Seeds of Death"), taking control of
a vital T-Mat relay station on the Moon that allowed them control
of the entire T-Mat network. The resulting fungus dispersed
by the seeds released oxygen-destroying spores that could spread
across a large area
in a matter of minutes, the Martians intending for the fungus
to turn Earth into something that their systems could tolerate
(One
pod even
exploded near The Doctor, but he was able to survive due to
his respiratory bypass system, although he was still unconscious
for a while). Although
Zoe was
able to buy time by knocking the Ice Warriors out after turning
up the base’s temperature, they regained consciousness while The
Doctor and his allies were trying to stop a Martian who had
been sent down to a London weather station, The Doctor destroying
the Ice Warrior
with a solar energy transmitter. Refusing to allow the Ice
Warriors to destroy Earth, The Doctor was able to devise a
formula of hydrochloric
acid, sulphuric acid, nitric acid and water that could destroy
the pods, subsequently modifying a satellite signal that the
Martian fleet was
using to travel to Earth to redirect the fleet into the sun.
Despite being on opposing sides during their previous encounters, The Doctor actually allied himself with the Ice Warriors in his next encounter with them ("Prisoners of Time"). When Jamie was captured as part of an alien auction - the auctioneers regarding Jamie as a valuable item due to him coming from the past - The Doctor and Zoe managed to infiltrate the ship, but most of the other potential slaves were too broken to mount an effective resistance to their would-be ‘masters’ until The Doctor discovered a pair of imprisoned Ice Warriors. Releasing the Ice Warriors from the stasis chambers where they had been kept imprisoned, The Doctor explained the situation to them before they were attacked by the slavers’ robotic guards, the Ice Warriors’ quick defeat of the guards inspiring the other prisoners to riot. With the slavers driven off, the Ice Warriors claimed the ship as their own, assuring the other prisoners that they would return anyone who wanted it to their home worlds, while those who wished to stay would be welcome additions to the crew (Jamie expressed some doubt about the wisdom of this decision, but The Doctor reminded Jamie to have faith in people).
The Doctor’s developing dynamic with the Ice Warriors continued when he found himself facing what initially appeared to be another Ice Warrior invasion of Earth, when he and The Brigadier found a stealth escape pod with battle damage ("Wrath of the Ice Warriors"). Making contact with local artist Sheena Flynn, The Doctor and The Brigadier learnt that the pod contained the Ice Warrior Skaar, but he was taken by another group of Ice Warriors after UNIT managed to capture him. The Doctor was able to trace the new group of Ice Warriors to a cave network, but he and The Brigadier were captured by Lady Zelanda, an Ice Lady who had manipulated Sheena into aiding her by claiming that she and her people were refugees. In reality, Zelanda had been expelled for an attempted coup against her father, and Skaar had been part of a group trying to find her after she escaped her prison. Zelanda returned to Mars with The Doctor and Sheena as hostages, rendezvousing with her fleet of loyalists and mercenaries, but The Brigadier and Skaar were able to escape and follow her fleet using a salvaged alien ship. After The Doctor confirmed that Mars had been abandoned millennia ago, Zelanda’s mercenaries abandoned her as their contract specified payment if Zelanda’s coup was successful and it was now impossible for that to happen. Zelanda tried to regain control using Sheena as a hostage, but the outraged Sheena forced Zelanda off a cliff, leaving The Doctor to accompany his allies home before departing himself, Skaar leading the rest of Zelanda’s former followers to the new Martian colonies for trial.
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| The Curse of Peladon |
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The
Ice Warriors’ return to television was one of their most significant
encounters The Doctor, as it marked the moment when the Ice Warriors
made the transition from being The Doctor’s explicit enemies to
becoming his occasional allies. While taking a trip in the TARDIS, apparently
repaired after The Doctor’s forced exile to Earth ("The
War Games") - although it was later revealed that the Time Lords were
simply sending The Doctor to ensure that a pivotal moment in history
unfolded the way it should and he still had no actual control over the
TARDIS -, the Third
Doctor and Jo Grant landed on the planet Peladon
as it was beginning arrangements to join the galactic federation ("The
Curse of Peladon"), with the Ice Warriors being one of the races
who had sent delegates to oversee the proceedings, The Doctor taking
advantage of some confusion about his identity to pose as the Earth
delegate to the conference. Although The Doctor was initially suspicious
of their motives when he discovered evidence suggesting that one of
the delegates sought to sabotage Peladon’s admission, reflecting
that the Ice Warriors might be attempting to take control of Peladon
like they had once sought to conquer Earth, he and his companion Jo
Grant quickly realised that someone else was behind the attack, Ice
Lord Izlyr, the Ice Warrior delegate, even speaking in The Doctor’s
defence after he was accused of murdering one of the other delegates,
recognising that he owed The Doctor a debt of honour after The Doctor
had recently saved his life. Eventually, The Doctor and his allies were
able to determine that the attacks had been caused by an alliance between
Hepesh, the Peladonian High Priest, and Arcturus, an ambassador from
the Medusan race, Arcturus having convinced Hepesh that the Federation
would seek to exploit Peladon’s mineral wealth while intending
to do that himself. With the deception exposed, the deputy Ice Warrior
delegate Ssorg killed Arcturus, while Hepesh was killed when his attempts
to use Aggedor - the sacred beast of Peladon, long thought extinct -
backfired when The Doctor was able to tame the beast and turn it against
its original master.
When civil war erupted on New Mars, King Peladon opened his planet to refugees from the conflict ("The Prisoner of Peladon"), including the Ice Warrior Princess Lixgaar (Although she was hidden on Peladon in secret by Alpha Centauri). Although renegade Ice Lord Axlaar was able to track her down and tried to kill her, The Doctor and Alpha Centauri were able to keep Lixgaar safe, allowing King Peladon to deal with Axlaar himself and have Lixgaar moved to a new hiding place.
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| The Monster of Peladon |
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Unfortunately, despite the positive precedent set for Doctor/Ice Warrior cooperation during his previous visits to Peladon, The Doctor found himself fighting them once again when he visited the planet for a third time ("The
Monster of Peladon"), although these Ice
Warriors were clearly established as operating independently
from their people as a whole. With the Galactic Federation
currently at war with the mysterious Galaxy Five, a group of
Ice Warriors led by Commander Azaxyr betrayed the Federation
for the military glory of a new war, seeking to return the
Ice Warriors to their former ways of violence. Working with
mining engineer Eckersley, the Ice Warriors intended to take
control of Peladon and its supply of trisilicate, a valuable
mineral that served as a key factor in most Federation technology,
deliberately provoking strikes by convincing the people that
Aggedor had turned against them. Having learned about the current
crisis, The Doctor was able to disrupt Eckersley’s plans
by rallying the miners to his cause with the aid of both his
friendship with head miner Gebek and control of a holographic
Aggedor that the Ice Warriors had developed, Eckersley having
used the hologram to create discord by creating the impression
that Aggedor had turned on the people of Peladon. Although
The Doctor was able to take control of the hologram and use
it as both a symbol for the people of Peladon and a weapon
against the Ice Warriors, the hologram projecting heat-bursts at the Ice Warriors, but the fight resulted in a personal tragedy when the real Aggedor, believed to be the last of his race,
was killed (Although The Doctor would discover his mate and pups in a later visit).
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Ice Heist
(Guy Adams) |
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After an unrecorded encounter with the Fourth Doctor involving the Ice Warriors attempting to freeze Blackpool, The Doctor encountered them again when he took his current companion Leela and old acquaintance Margaret Hopwood ("The Ravencliff Witch") to an art auction in the twenty-third century on the ice world of Terra Glacier, wanting to show Margaret how her work would be remembered ("Ice Heist"). When the crew learnt that another item up for auction was a statue of Isskar (who The Doctor would meet in his personal future) organised by the Martian cultural attaché Kaltakk to help support Martian colonisation, The Doctor attempted to assure Leela that these Ice Warriors were from a time period where they were relatively peaceful, but it soon turned out that Kaltakk had hired a group of mercenary Ice Warriors to steal the statue for herself. Kaltakk was soon killed by the mercenary leader, a former general whose followers had been disgraced after a failed campaign, who intended to steal all the art to support his warriors, but the theft had triggered a security protocol that sent all the art to a vault deep in the planet’s core. The Doctor volunteered to help the general open the vault to save the other hostages, but this revealed that the temperature in the vaults was being deliberately kept at a higher level than reports stated.
A subsequent escape attempt damaged the heating system and revealed that Terra Glacier’s native population were still alive, including their queen Pangladasha; when the company had discovered the planet, the natives had been in a form of stasis to protect themselves from a previous environmental disaster. Their unique state meant that the species could be declared legally dead so that the company could colonise a technically inhabited planet with no problems, but the species were kept in stasis in case the company could find a profitable use for them in future. Pangladasha and her immediate retinue attacked the Ice Warriors, but The Doctor was able to force all parties to flee by setting the heating system to overload. He speculated that Pangladasha and her people would survive by returning to stasis, while the Ice Warriors were confronted by a drone ship sent by the company to destroy the gallery to prevent the public learning about the attack. The drone ship and the Ice Warriors destroyed each other, giving the former hostages time to leave before the company could send another drone.
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Forty - God of War
(Sarah Grochala) |
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During a later trip that saw the Fifth Doctor being temporarily inhabited by an earlier version of his own consciousness, he arrived on an island near Iceland in the ninth century, where he discovered a Viking settlement populated only by a mother and her eleven daughters ("Forty - God of War"). This settlement had just discovered a figure that the mother believed was a manifestation of the Viking god Tyr, but The Doctor swiftly recognised it as an Ice Lord, the Martian having lost a hand and suffered damage to his armour when the ship crashed. While Tegan Jovanka and Adric tried to assist in finding the other lost Martians, Nyssa and The Doctor were able to repair Ice Lord Xasslyr’s equipment, but he swiftly proved himself hostile when he tried to rally his people to attack the village. Fortunately, The Doctor and Nyssa were able to escape as they had deliberately avoided repairing Xasslyr’s weapon, while Adric and Tegan discovered the Ice Warriors’ ship with the last survivor of the Viking settlement. Adric and Tegan were able to take the ship out of range of the Ice Warriors, and The Doctor and Nyssa tricked Xasslyr into dropping a special chemical concoction into the island’s dormant volcano, the chemical reaction reactivating the volcano long enough to generate sufficient heat to destroy the Ice Warriors.
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Red Dawn
(Justin Richards)
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While
on a trip to Mars during one of Earth’s first manned
missions to the planet in the mid-twenty-first century, the Fifth
Doctor and Peri discovered 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, in accordance with Martian respect for their dead ("Red Dawn"). Although The Doctor was able to convince the Ice
Warriors that the expedition as a whole had meant no harm,
it was later revealed that Paul, a representative of the powerful
Webster Corporation in the expedition, was attempting to provoke
war between Earth and Mars so that they could use a captured
Ice Warrior to produce hybrid super-soldiers for both sides.
As he forced the Martians to give him access to one of their
ships so that they could return to Earth, Paul revealed that
Tanya, another member of the expedition, was actually a human/Martian
hybrid clone created from the fragments of DNA recovered by
previous expeditions to Mars, giving her an instinctive knowledge
of Martian technology. Despite Paul’s efforts to escape
in the ship with The Doctor as a hostage, he was tricked when
Ice Warrior Zzaal, the leader of the Ice Warriors, offered
himself in exchange for The Doctor and Tanya; although Zzaal
gave his word of honour that his men would not harm him, he
subsequently deliberately sacrificed himself by exposing himself
to the Martian sun without protective clothing, the ultraviolet
radiation killing him and leaving his warriors free to destroy
Paul. Tanya decided to remain on Mars as Earth’s ambassador,
the Ice Warriors noting that, while Earth still had much to
learn, there was potential for the species.
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The Bride of Peladon
(Barnaby Edwards) |
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During
a return visit to Peladon ("The
Bride of Peladon"),
The Doctor once again found himself working with the Ice Warriors
to thwart outsiders’ attempts to use the planet for their
own gain. However, on this occasion the invader was Sekhmet,
one of the last of the powerful Osirans, sealed away by her
peers when her lust for violence and power grew out of control,
attempting to escape her prison by using the blood of four
royal females to break the ‘blood seal’ that was
keeping her trapped, the triscilate of Peladon having weakened
her prison enough for her to psychically influence people around
her. Requiring the blood of four royal females to break the
seal, Sekhmet was able to transmit a weak telepathic signal
that would lure the required females to her, her first victim
being the mother of Peladon’s current king Pelleas while
the second was Alyxlyr, a princess of the Ice Warriors who
had recently been appointed Peladon’s new ambassador,
and the third was the Earth princess Pandora, sent to Peladon
as part of an arranged marriage to Pelleas to grant Earth access
to Peladon’s mineral riches. Although Sekhmet attempted
to use the Fifth Doctor’s companion Erimem as one of
the Royals to break the lock - Erimem having nearly been appointed
pharaoh in ancient Egypt before political manipulations of
the time drove her to depart with The Doctor and Peri -, Erimem
was able to trick Sekhmet by poisoning her own blood with a
distillation of mandrake root, disrupting Sekhmet’s escape
long enough for Alyxlr’s brother Zixlyr to set off an
explosive device in her tomb, killing himself while burying
Sekhmet once again to avenge his sister’s murder, The
Doctor subsequently curing Erimem with a transfusion of his
own blood (Sekhmet’s attack having weakened him enough
to activate the regenerative palates in his blood without actually
triggering a true regeneration).
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Mission to Magnus
(Philip Martin)
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On
another occasion, the Ice Warriors allied themselves with the
Sixth
Doctor’s enemy Sil ("Vengeance
on Varos"),
as part of a plan to manipulate the divided population of the
planet Magnus Epsilon into war ("Mission to Magnus").
This plan involved setting off several nuclear devices buried
under the planet’s surface in sequence, shifting its
orbit into a more distant position that would make the planet
far colder than its current temperature. Although the economically-minded
Sil had intended to profit from the disaster by selling cold-weather
items such as heaters and clothing to the population in the
aftermath, the Ice Warriors subsequently betrayed him and attempted
to secure Magnus for themselves. Refusing to accept their betrayal,
Sil revealed the existence of a second series of nuclear devices
that had been set up in case the first set failed, allowing
The Doctor to shove the planet back into its proper orbit,
killing the Ice Warriors and ending their attempt at conquest.
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Cry of the Vultriss
(Darren Jones) |
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Later in his life, the Sixth Doctor witnessed the first encounter between the Ice Warriors and the bird-like aliens known as the Vultriss when a temporal rift in the vicinity of Cygia-Rema, the Vultriss homeworld, caused the TARDIS to crash-land on the planet ("Cry of the Vultriss"). Unfortunately for the TARDIS crew, the planet was in the middle of a period of political turmoil, as Jabule, the previous Queen, had been deposed and replaced by Skye, a former commoner who appeared to possess the fabled 'Cry of the Vultriss', able to create a sonic scream that could kill enemies through intense sound waves. Although Skye believed that her opportunity to form an alliance with the native Martians was sheer chance, The Doctor soon realised that Vextyr, the alleged Martian ambassador, had actually betrayed the true ambassador in an attempt to gain access to Time Lord technology left on the planet to control the rift. Vextyr believed that she would be able to use the rift as a weapon against potential enemies, but in reality the rift was too powerful to ever be controlled in such a manner, and the destruction of the Time Lords' equipment would just lead to the rift growing out of control. Although two of the control stations were destroyed by Vextyr's forces and the Vultriss rebellion, The Doctor was able to release the real ambassador and perform a quick repair on the last control station to stabilise the rift, the TARDIS crew remaining for a few months to make sure everything was in order while the TARDIS repaired itself after The Doctor had to cannibalise a few components to perform his repairs.
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Thin Ice
(Marc Platt) |
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The Seventh Doctor had a personally significant encounter with the Ice Warriors when he arrived in Moscow in 1967 ("Thin Ice"), the Time Lords having chosen this trip as a final 'test' for Ace as part of The Doctor's decision to send her to the Time Lord Academy. Meeting the exiled Ice Lord Hhessh and a small team of British agent Markus Creevy and Soviet defector Lieutenant Raina Kerenskaya, The Doctor and Ace were part of a plan to break into a vault beneath the Kremlin and recover a lost Ice Lord reliquary that was being used by the Russians to try and reverse-engineer Martian technology. The actual raid was successful despite a betrayal, but when Raina was drawn to put the helmet on, the helmet attempted to download the memories of Sazhyr, a legendary Ice Lord tactician who had been the first owner of the armour, into her mind, as part of Sazhyr's attempt to save himself from death. Although the helmet accelerated Raina's metabolism to try and transform her body into a suitable form for Sazhyr, this had the unintended side-effect of accelerating Raina's pregnancy, incapacitating Sazhyr for a time until 'he' could give birth. Once the child was born, The Doctor took Creevy and the baby to Creevy's mother while Ace found herself dealing with the exiled Ice Warriors and the Russians' attempts to form an alliance with them. Fortunately, Hhessh had already begun to recognise that Sazhyr was more of a tyrant rather than the noble figure of Martian legend, Sazhyr dismissing his followers as cowards who fled Mars despite Hhessh's protests that their opponents had greatly outnumbered them, giving Ace time to acquire the Orb of Alikyr, a vital part of the process that had uploaded Sazhyr into Raina's body. Needing the Orb to stabilise his transformation, after he had killed Hhessh for defying him, Sazhyr used it on himself without realising that Ace had reprogrammed it, allowing Raina to take back control of her body while Sazhyr's consciousness was lost, the remaining Ice Warriors fleeing to go back to Mars now that their leaders were dead.
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Legacy
(Gary Russell) |
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The Seventh Doctor once again found himself dealing with the Ice Warriors
and Peladonian politics when he arrived on Peladon in his seventh
incarnation ("Legacy"), The Doctor having been called
in to help search for the Ancient Diadem, a crystal tiara inhabited
by an evil intelligence that had once triggered centuries of
war on the planet Pakha, rumoured to have been recently discovered
by an archaeological thief and taken to Peladon. Travelling
to Peladon with the Ice Warrior delegation to witness the king’s
reinstatement ceremony, The Doctor learned that Peladon was
facing a difficult time as the mines were now all but exhausted
and their future economy seemed destined to focus on the planet’s
tourist appeal, only to find himself facing more personal matters
when he was found over the body of Lianna, mother to the High
Priestess Atissa holding the murder weapon (Albeit because
he was trying to pull it out), prompting Ice Lord Savaar to
demand the right to execute The Doctor after his trial in response
to The Doctor’s past defeats of the Ice Warriors. However,
this was actually part of The Doctor and Savaar’s plan
to reveal Atissa’s plan to discredit aliens and force
Peladon to return to its traditional ways, Atissa tipping her
hand after The Doctor was apparently executed when it was really
only a hologram. Although the Diadem thief attempted to steal
Peladon’s sacred relics to exert control over the planet
and broadcast the Diadem’s influence across the Federation,
the Diadem’s ‘instinctive’ attempt to escape
The Doctor due to his previous near-destruction of it in his
third incarnation gave The Doctor’s allies a chance to
destroy the ship that it was on before the thief could escape.
With Peladon now temporarily withdrawing from the Federation
to stand on its own - thus ensuring that it would be safe from
an upcoming war with the Daleks -, The Doctor departed, although
Bernice
Summerfield remained with the Ice Warriors to join an archaeological
expedition to an old Martian city for a time.
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GodEngine
(Craig Hinton) |
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During
a visit to the twenty-second century, The Doctor had a particularly
interesting encounter with the Ice Warriors, as he found himself
dealing with the conventional Ice Warriors - currently allied
with the Daleks during their invasion of Earth ("The
Dalek Invasion of Earth") - and a group of pacifist Martians
who worshipped the Osirans while still recognising the need
to avoid a complete devotion to the art of war. While trapped
on Mars during the time period when the Daleks controlled Earth
("The
Daleks' Master Plan") after a disruption
in the time vortex apparently destroyed the TARDIS, the Seventh
Doctor ("GodEngine") was forced to take a group of
human colonists into the old Martian tunnels to escape the
harsh weather above ground, resulting in them encountering
a group of Martian pilgrims. Dealing with increasing tension
between both sides due to past terrorist attacks on Earth in
the name of Martian freedom - although many of the terrorist
attacks were the work of alleged Martian sympathisers rather
than the Martians - and the knowledge that the vortex rupture
that destroyed the TARDIS would originate from Mars’s
North Pole within a week, The Doctor and his companions Chris
and Roz discovered that the Daleks had made a deal with an
Ice Lord to delay their invasion of Mars long enough for him
to finish the GodEngine project, as well as the disturbing
discovery that the Martian’s holy city was protected
by an Osiran WarScarab. Entering the city - although they were
only just saved from death thanks to the betrayal of one of
the group by a ghostly version of the TARDIS blocking their
path long enough for the danger to pass -, The Doctor learned
that the GodEngine was an Osiran creation capable of turning
stars into subspace plasma projectors by manipulating the subspace
manifold... and realised that, while the device would only
work on Mars due to Mars’s lack of a bipolar magnetic
field, once the Daleks had completed their plan to remove Earth’s
core they could transfer the GodEngine to Earth and use it
for themselves. As one of the Martians attempted to activate
the GodEngine to destroy a human colony - unaware that the
weapon couldn’t target anything that relatively small
with the precision required, meaning that he would destroy
Mars as well -, The Doctor was able to disrupt the GodEngine
by throwing a human transit-web transmitter into the GodEngine,
the competing subspace interfaces destroying each other (Also
restoring the TARDIS as the subspace rupture that destroyed
it would now never take place with the loss of the GodEngine,
the ship using the GodEngine’s power to put itself back
together).
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Frozen Time
(Nicholas Briggs) |
|
While
travelling alone, the Seventh Doctor helped to thwart an attempted
coup on Mars led by renegade Ice Lord Arakssor ("Frozen
Time"), helping Ice Lord Geldar establish a prison for
Arakssor and his followers in the Antarctic on Earth. However,
when a riot broke out in the prison, The Doctor was forced
to trigger a mass cryogenic freeze to keep them contained,
resulting in him and the Ice Warriors being frozen in the ice
for centuries until an expedition arrived searching for what
had happened to a previous expedition. Although he was thawed
out after they discovered him, the cryogenic suspension had
left The Doctor so confused that he was initially unable to
recall his name or what the Ice Warriors were doing there,
and was unable to stop the expedition leader unthawing the
Martians; having read his grandfather’s accounts of lizard-men
with advanced weapons, he was certain that the Ice Warriors
knew what had happened to his grandfather and wanted to trade
for their advanced technology, despite The Doctor’s warnings
against such a course of action. While The Doctor tried to
get the humans safely back to their ship, Arakssor set out
to use the Martian sonic cannon to alter Earth’s atmosphere
to make it suitable for Martian life, but The Doctor was able
to take a helicopter back to the base after returning the humans
to their ship, exploiting the time provided by the cannon’s
need to charge to reactivate the heat emitters that had been
used to release the Martians while distracting Arakssor with
claims that a Martian ship had been detected, Arakssor so focused
on investigating The Doctor’s claims that he didn’t
pay attention to the heat until it was too late. With the ship
having been alerted to Arakssor’s escape, the commander
bombed the area, destroying Arakssor and his followers while
The Doctor and the remaining humans in the area retreated to
the TARDIS.
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The Dying Days
(Lance Parkin) |
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The
Eighth Doctor had a particularly interesting encounter with
the Ice Warriors shortly after his regeneration, when he was
visiting Benny in the twentieth century ("The
Dying Days").
This story also revealed that, after a close call with Martian
ambassadors during an encounter between the two planets in
the seventies ("The
Ambassadors of Death"), Earth
accidentally made hostile contact with the Ice Warriors, but
made a deal to never return to the planet, with the British
intelligence services covering up the fact that Mars had a
breathable atmosphere so as to discourage further exploration
attempts. Unfortunately, the Argyre clan attempted to launch
an invasion of Earth after a later, independent expedition
landed on the tombs of Martian warlords, the Argyre clan nominally
taking over the United Kingdom and using human collaborator
Greyhaven to form a mutually beneficial trading relationship,
but with the Martians actually intending a mass terraforming
of the planet to make it like Mars. Despite the Martian attempt
to release a chemical weapon known as the Red Death that would
destroy all human life, Benny and The
Brigadier were able to
rally resistance against the Martians while The Doctor - who
had faked his death during an early test of the Red Death -
rescued prisoners from the Martian death camps and delayed
tests of the weapon. Although the Martian Ice Lord Xznaal nearly
destroyed Earth after Greyhaven destroyed the Argyre clan on
Mars, The Doctor was able to delay Xznaal long enough for The
Brigadier to launch an attack on the Martian ship before it
could release the Red Death, The Doctor surviving the subsequent
fall by assembling various objects in his pockets into a parachute.
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The Last Resort
(Paul Leonard) |
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Although
the Eighth Doctor did not explicitly encounter the Ice Warriors
again in his lifetime, during "The
Last Resort",
where time-travelling tours created multiple alternate timelines
after reality was damaged by a black light explosion ("Time
Zero"), The Doctor encountered another race of Martians
created due to the flawed time-travel experiments of Jack Kowaczski,
a young boy from a timeline where the ‘new’ Martian
race had been enslaved by humans. Travelling back to Mars in
multiple timelines created by his own minor changes to history
in his homemade time machine, some versions of Jack indirectly
created these Martians as they evolved from the bacteria that
were left behind by his corpse as his various selves died of
asphyxiation upon his arrival on Mars in the past. Although
these Martians were conquered by the humans in some realities,
in others Jack’s affection for his family’s Martian
servant resulted in him going back just far enough to warn
the Martians about humanity’s invasion before it happened,
resulting in the Martians attempting to conquer Earth themselves.
The Doctor was eventually forced to erase this timeline - although
the Martians accepted their fate as they recognised that their
paradoxical existence must be averted to save the universe
- by kidnapping Jack as a baby and taking him into the past,
preventing him from ever creating the time machines in the
first place.
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Cold Vengeance
(Matt Fitton) |
|
The Doctor faced the genuine Ice Warriors once again when the Tenth Doctor, attempting to take Rose Tyler skiing, accidentally materialised in the middle of one of several asteroids of compressed ice, used as cold storage for the planet Enyo by the ColdStar corporation ("Tenth Doctor Adventures: Volume 2" - "Cold Vengeance"). At the same time as The Doctor and Rose arrived on the asteroid, it was subject to a raid by space pirates Brona Volta and her son Callum, intending to steal some of the asteroid's more expensive frozen foods, as well as refuse collector Lorna who had come there to collect the week's recycling. When the Voltas turned off the asteroid's freezer unit to try and blackmail the management to accede to their demands, the defrosting also freed a group of Ice Warriors who had been trapped in the ice when it was originally salvaged from the planet. As The Doctor and his allies learned, the Ice Warriors had established a colony in this solar system before humanity had done so, but this had led to a brief period of war between the two that ended with the Ice Warriors' defeat and apparent death, but a few Ice Warriors had frozen themselves in their planet's polar regions, with ice salvaged from this region being used by ColdStar for the asteroid freezers. Ice Lord Haaskor intended to send the asteroid crashing into the capitol city of Enyo to avenge the apparent death of his people, but The Doctor was able to program the asteroid to head towards the system's sun, prompting Haaskor to take Volta's Pearl with the goal of using it in the same kamikaze attack. However, The Doctor, Rose and Lorna were able to retreat to the TARDIS while Lorna and Callum sacrificed themselves to destroy the Pearl and most of the revived Ice Warriors. Although Haaskor tried to kill The Doctor, Rose and Lorna by following them into the TARDIS and setting his armour to self-destruct as he died, The Doctor was able to eject Haaskor's body into space. After The Doctor took her back to Enyo, Lorna revealed that actually the Ice Warriors had since been 'adopted' into the human civilisation, with many of them living in the ghettos but subtle steps being taken to fully integrate them with the existing human population.
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| Cold War |
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During The Doctor's next encounter with the Ice Warriors, the Eleventh Doctor faced the Ice Warriors again in "Cold War", when he and new companion Clara Oswald arrived on
a Russian nuclear submarine in 1983 carrying out drills in
the Arctic. Shortly before The Doctor’s arrival, the
submarine had discovered a frozen Ice Warrior - kept in the
ice for five thousand years - while drilling for ice and brought
it on board for analysis, unable to determine what it was in
the ice, with one of the crew thawing the Ice Warrior out while
the submarine was still in the Arctic. As the Ice Warrior rampaged
through the sinking submarine, the TARDIS materialised on board
- The Doctor had been aiming for Las Vegas and set the coordinates
incorrectly -, The Doctor managing to save the submarine crashing
by suggesting that the crew try and turn the submarine as the
ship’s sideways propellers were still operational, allowing
it to ‘land’ on a nearby ridge rather than hit
the sea bed and explode. As the Ice Warrior arrived in the
room, The Doctor attempted to negotiate, but when the Ice Warrior
introduced itself as Grand Marshal Skaldak, a famous Martian
hero, The Doctor realised that he was in trouble even before
one of the crew attacked Skaldak with an electric cattle prod.
Forced to lock Skaldak up due to the threat he posed now that
humans had attacked him, The Doctor attempted to negotiate
with him once more, only for Skaldak to leave his armour -
a strategy that The Doctor had never seen the Ice Warriors
attempt before due to the grave dishonour in such an action
- and escape to the rest of the submarine while attention was
focused on his suit. Concluding that he had been abandoned
by his now-extinct people and had nothing left to lose, Skaldak
attempted to take control of the ship’s nuclear missiles
after learning about Earth’s precarious current cold
war and returning to his suit. However, although Skaldak came
close to launching the sub’s missiles, The Doctor was
able to delay Skaldak long enough for a Martian ship to respond
to his earlier distress signal, the ship rescuing the submarine
and Skaldak before disabling the armed missiles, recognising
the wisdom of The Doctor’s earlier words to Skaldak about
the honour of mercy against the human race who had intended
no actual harm to the Martian race.
The Eleventh Doctor faced the Ice Warriors once again during the Siege of Trenzalore, when The Doctor discovered that Trenzalore was the location of a crack in reality that would allow the Time Lords to return to this universe, leaving him trapped on Trenzalore as various races wanted the planet destroyed to prevent the return of the Time Lords - and thus potentially start the Time War all over again - but couldn't force The Doctor to leave in case he spoke his name and released them ("The Time of The Doctor"). Although Trenzalore was surrounded by a barrier that prevented technology from entering the planet, Ice Lord Ssardak was able to reach the surface by cocooning himself in ice and sending himself, his troops, and the components for a sonic gun through the barrier, appearing to be nothing more than conventional meteors ("Tales of Trenzalore: Let It Snow"). Although they were able to assemble the sonic gun with the aid of Christmas resident Elias, they learned too late that Elias was actually the Eleventh Doctor (Who had concealed his identity despite the truth field by avoiding ever explicitly answering the question of his identity), The Doctor using the sonic screwdriver to amplify the power of the sonic gun and trigger a powerful backlash that killed Ssardak and his men when they refused to spare Christmas.
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Empress of Mars |
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When visiting NASA as an outing for his current companion/student Bill Potts, the Twelfth Doctor witnessed a satellite video feed displaying the message 'God Save the Queen' written on the surface of Mars ("Empress of Mars"), prompting him to take Bill and Nardole back in time to investigate the origin of the writing. When Bill fell down a hole and the TARDIS took off on its own accord with Nardole inside it, The Doctor and Bill found themselves facing Victorian soldiers allied with an Ice Warrior known as Friday. Having dinner with the soldiers, The Doctor learned that an Ice Warrior ship had been salvaged on an expedition with 'Friday' in suspended animation, the Victorians taking the ship back to Mars using Martian-designed mining equipment to stake their claim, but the ship had crashed upon landing and there were no resources on Mars to make the expedition worthwhile. Shortly after this, the expedition discovered what appeared to be a Martian tomb, but The Doctor realised that it was actually a stasis chamber for Ice Queen Iraxxa, who was 'woken up' when one of the soldiers attempted to steal a gem from the tomb for himself. Faced with conflict between the two sides, The Doctor attempted to appeal and ask for mercy for the British, arguing that both sides had to cooperate to survive on the barren wasteland Mars had become, but matters quickly degenerated when Sergeant-Major Catchlove of the expedition mutinied and took command of the British, exposing the fact that Colonel Godsacre had nearly been hung for desertion, certain of British superiority over 'upright crocodiles' despite The Doctor's warnings. As Iraxxa woke up even more of her Ice Warriors to attack the British from underground, The Doctor, Bill and Godsacre were able to escape their cell when Friday emerged in their cell, seeking The Doctor's aid to establish peace. While Bill distracted Iraxxa, The Doctor took control of the British force's main weapon, a vast laser they called the Gargantua, threatening to fire it at the ceiling to unleash the frozen water from the ice cap above them. As Iraxxa talked with The Doctor, Catchlove attempted to retake control of the situation by taking Iraxxa hostage so that she could repair the ship and allow him to return to Earth, only for Godsacre to shoot Catchlove himself. When Godsacre conceded to his presumed execution, his only request being that Iraxxa recognise that he and Catchlove did not reflect all of humanity, Iraxxa agreed to spare him if he would offer his pledge of loyalty to her and her world, acknowledging that humanity and the Ice Warriors could be friends. The Doctor sent a message into deep space so that another deep-space traveller could make contact and help the two sides depart the dead planet, the message being received by Alpha Centauri and The Doctor, Bill and Godsacre writing the message that had originally attracted the TARDIS crew to Mars to provide a landmark for Alpha Centauri's forces to focus on. With humans and Ice Warriors now working together, The Doctor and Bill departed in the TARDIS when it returned to collect them with Nardole and Missy (the female incarnation of The Master ("Dark Water/Death in Heaven"), subsequently being kept in a Vault to give The Doctor a chance to redeem her ("Extremis")), The Doctor hopeful that these events would mark the start of the Ice Warriors' more positive role in the wider galaxy.
Even
before the Ice Warriors returned to the modern series, an indirect
reference was made to them in "The
Christmas Invasion",
when a UNIT colonel commented that the Sycorax - an alien race
who had just made contact with Earth, their ship having emerged
from behind Mars - weren’t Martians because Martians looked
completely different. The Ice Warriors were more explicitly
referenced in "The Waters of Mars" when the Tenth
Doctor aided the crew of Bowie Base One - Earth’s first
offworld colony, stationed on Mars in an elaborate bio-dome
using water from a vast underground block of ice - in investigating
a mysterious water-based infection, known as ‘The Flood’,
that had been trapped in the underground ice they were using
for water. While it was never explicitly stated that the Ice
Warriors were the ones who sealed the Flood away, at one point
one of the Flood’s victims seemed to respond to The Doctor’s
attempt to communicate with it in Ancient North Martian, apparently
recognising the language. Not only does this recognition create
the idea that the Flood had an intelligence beyond that possessed
by its host, but it also suggests that the Ice Warriors had
some kind of contact with it, although this still leaves such
questions as whether the virus was a natural life-form or an
artificial creation unanswered. |
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