The Ice Warriors (TV story)

Bad Guys
Ice Warriors

Influences
The most obvious influence on this story is John W. Campbell's short story "Who Goes There?" (1938) which has twice been filmed as "The Thing From Another World" (1951) and "The Thing" (1982). This features an alien found frozen in ice who is thawed out and comes back to life to threaten an Antarctic research base. In the original story the "thing" is a shape-changer that absorbs knowledge from its victims, themes exploited many times on Doctor Who, but lack of technology to realise these ideas meant that the 1951 film has the creature merely a large aggressive plant-man (used again in "The Seeds of Doom") and "The Ice Warriors" follows this model by making the Ice Warriors large agressive green creatures. The major difference with the basic plot of the film and "The Ice Warriors" was that in the film the alien spaceship is destroyed while the scientists are trying to remove it from the ice. In "The Ice Warriors" fear of destroying the spaceship prevents the use of the weather control system.

Archeological discoveries of the time, notable the Sutton Hoo dig, also influenced the idea of a buried body proving to be an alien, with the Ice Warrior's space helmet being mistaken for a ancient helmet. Again, Doctor Who would return to the theme in "The Daemons".

Notions about Mars, current in 1967 but now known to be false, also inform the programme, such as the nitrogen atmosphere of Mars which causes the Ice Warriors breathing difficulties on Earth.

Finally, the theories of a "nuclear winter" and "a New Ice Age" are the basis for the setting of the story. The disputes between the scientists seems to represent the debate amongst scientist over the validity of these theories. The idea of weather manipulation had appeared in "The Moonbase" and was also reappear in "The Enemy of The World", which followed from it.

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