Doctor Who: "Thin Ice" Review

“Thin Ice” continues with the feeling that showrunner Steven Moffat is returning to the template that served the revived series so well in its early years, following Bill’s first journey to the future with a historical story with a sci-fi element. Whilst the episode has a lot of good in it, it also has a fair few problems… and unfortunately, unlike last week, these are some pretty big problems that I can’t really overlook to say I overall enjoyed the episode.

The story centres around the last of London’s great frost fairs at the River Thames – a concept that seems so fundamentally right for a Doctor Who story it seems surprising it’s taken this long for a television adventure to use it (it’s previously been the subject of a Big Finish play). This being Bill’s first trip back in time, the episode hits many of the beats you’d expect it to (including a discussion about changing history uncannily similar to one from “The Shakespeare Code”, although it does manage to put a new twist on things at the end) until the moment a small child is killed.

Children dying in Doctor Who is a fairly rare thing. Even if I include spin-offs and the expanded universe, I can only think of three or four examples (only one of which is from the TV show itself), and all of those sort of carefully tiptoed around the fact that a child had died. Now, the episode itself deals with the fallout of this very well as far as Bill’s reaction goes, and I’ve often complained about the lack of characterisation or consequences in Moffat’s Who so this was a welcome change from that… but it does bring us onto the main flaw of the episode. Which is that Doctor Who himself doesn’t seem to much care, and the only thing he does is take the opportunity steal back his sonic screwdriver from the hapless Spider seconds before he snuffs it. And then, later on, he’s directly responsible for the death of another character in a similar manner, and he doesn’t seem to be too concerned about that either. Between that and a reference to the genuinely dreadful “Doctor Disco” stuff from Series 9, this episode feels like it’s being written for the version of Capaldi’s Doctor from his first two series, and it doesn’t work well with the Doctor we’d seen in the previous two weeks. I didn’t have the problems with the ‘Darker Doctor’ that other people did, but this version definitely works a lot better for me, and this episode makes the show feel tonally unsure of itself. Especially when there’s lots of other little character bits between the Doctor and Bill that work really well (“You can see lights under the ice”, anyone?)

Anyway, the plot itself is fine, the main villain is fairly unremarkable but his plan is quite clever and straightforward which helps given the episode is more interested in the emotional side of things, there’s some interesting if heavy-handed commentary on racism and human morality, Pearl Mackie is consistently brilliant, it all looks lovely and there’s a great underwater sequence (involving a monster that I'm sure we've seen the concept behind several times before, but is still a nice idea). I’m not sure there’s all that much to this episode, really, but that’s fine… or it would be if there wasn’t that whacking great problem at the heart of it. I came in expecting to like this episode a lot more than I actually did, and instead it just left me feeling a bit confused. There were bits I really liked, and one or two bits I really didn’t and couldn’t see where the show was coming from at all.