Doctor Who - THIN ICE (S10E3) Review

Sarah Dollard returns and conquers with one of Doctor Who’s most confidently joyous episodes

Doctor Who seems to have a low-key fascination with 1800s England over the last few years, as it’s become one of the most visited non-contemporary time settings for the show. It’s this time period that we return to again for Thin Ice (specifically, Regency London), though we’ve never seen it look quite like this, or be used quite so thoroughly. Thin Ice lives and breathes like no other episode yet this series, carefully stacked with great character moments intertwined with terrific themes. Going beyond all that, it’s just great to have an episode that feels totally effortless, without once feeling lazy.

WARNING! SPOILERS!

Thin Ice’s plot, on paper, is the lightest of the series so far. Contrast it with an episode like Smile and there are far less moving narrative parts to it. Smile was piled high with undiscovered backstory and intricate sci-fi concepts that work together almost like a kind of puzzle box. Thin Ice, on the other hand seems pretty chill (sorry) about keeping things straightforward. The ice eats people. It turns out it’s a giant chained-up sea serpent that poops super-coal. The Doctor and Bill have to sort it out. It’s so comfortable with itself that there’s a good 10 or so minutes where the Doctor and Bill just sort of hang out at the ice fair and take in the sights. Neither of these approaches are necessarily good or bad and you definitely shouldn’t let the apparent lightness of Thin Ice fool you into thinking the episode is somehow uninteresting.

Like I said earlier, character and theme are the name of the game here and today’s choice selection is ‘slavery’. Well, actually it’s ‘the value of life’ if we want to be more specific, but I’d like to see you argue that those two aren’t linked. We see this throughout, starting with Bill’s pivotal conversation with the Doctor near the start when, after witnessing a boy being drowned, she asks how the Doctor finds it so easy to move on from the experience of seeing others die (or worse). The Doctor’s response – that if he doesn’t move on, more people will die – has echoes of Into The Dalek to it; namely the moment he allows the Dalek antibodies to attack and kill one of the soldiers so that he and the others can escape. It’s interesting that the show should return to this idea after Series 9 largely ejected a lot of the Doctor’s harsher personality traits that he embodied in Series 8, but here it is nonetheless and with a subtle but crucial difference. The Doctor of Series 8 was confused and enraged about who he was as a person and so his often disarming ways of defusing a situation tended to come across cold. Here, Capaldi reins the performance in, quietly answering Bill’s question instead of huffing and turning away. At first, the look on his face borders on obliviousness, but one scene later proves this wrong as the Doctor helps comfort the rest of the children. The Doctor may be quick to move on, but don’t mistake that for coldness. Don’t mistake obliviousness for quiet acceptance.

We have that coupled with slavery, which arrives in many many forms throughout Thin Ice. Bill quickly points out after stepping out of the TARDIS that “Slavery is still totally a thing.” Oh and then there’s the revelation that the coal-pooping Sea Serpent is actually chained to the floor of the Thames against its will. Plus a scene where Lord Sutcliffe barfs out all kind of racism towards Bill during the second half of the episode, which the Doctor has a very satisfying response to:

The two themes really intertwine with the Doctor’s speech to Lord Sutcliffe that pretty much everyone raved about after the episode had aired. I don’t know how many times that speech got reblogged and retweeted online but I'm going to stick it here again anyway:

"Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege. The boy who died on the river, that boy’s value is your value. That’s what defines an age, that’s… what defines a species."

About 10 minutes later, Lord Sutcliffe gets eaten by the very Sea Serpent that he enslaved. There’s the episode’s thesis in a nutshell: If you cast away your morals, compassion and decency then you walk on Thin Ice - don’t be surprised if it gives way beneath your feet.

If the episode’s themes are tightly stacked, then it’s a good thing that there's great character work to carry them. Thin Ice represents easily my favourite approach to Bill that the show has achieved so far, running her through the gamut from delight to anger and back to delight again. The Doctor is also at his most delightful throughout and there’s a sense after this episode that Bill and The Doctor’s dynamic is fully broken in. The training wheels have come off. It doesn’t hurt that Sarah Dollard dishes out some really witty and satisfying moments throughout, from various remarks during the opening segment (I really love the idea of The Doctor kicking back by taking in some zero gravity magic wrestling) through to the moment where the Doctor punches a racist. If there’s a funnier episode of Doctor Who this year, I’ll be very surprised.

All of this is bolstered not just by great production, but also by a fantastic story structure (if we’re gonna get down, dirty and nerdy with the writing here). Every bit of the episode is vital and the tone control is fantastic, given how the episode can veer quickly between “Oh man, that child just drowned” and “Okay, who wants pie?!”.

Have I been unapologetically slobbering here? Perhaps. A little bit. Yes. But for a very simple reason: With Thin Ice, the bar for Series 10 has been raised. Let’s see if any of the remaining 9 episodes can vault it.

★★★★½

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