Doctor Who – Thin Ice Review

The first trip into the past for Bill delivered yet another solid Doctor Who adventure.

I compared last week’s episode to 2010’s The Beast Below, however with a creature being held captive for the gains of the human characters Thin Ice managed to echo The Beast Below more in some ways!

Peter Capaldi once more shines as the Doctor. This series is just proving that – as I know some people have said – he was always going to be an amazing Doctor if he was just given good scripts. There’s a speech that the Doctor gives in this episode that I feel is going to end up ranking right up there amongst the very best of the Doctor’s speeches.

Thin Ice managed to balance how to show the Doctor’s guilt and shame over killing with the optimistic hero that he should be. I really don’t like it when the Doctor is written as a tortured hero, that’s not who he is! Yes he can get grumpy and angry but at the end of the day he is always a hero and an optimist. I know the counterargument is that because he’s lived so long and fought in the Time War he should be tortured however I think Thin Ice showed perfectly how to get the right balance.

Doctor Who has always been at its very best when the companion is allowed to shine and show off their strengths. Bill continues to be an interesting character to watch and a refreshing change after Clara Oswald’s more smug tendencies. She has some great one-liners that made me genuinely laugh out loud, however I think her strongest traits are her enquiring mind and her strong sense of compassion. It was interesting to see a companion actually struggling to deal with the fact that the Doctor’s adventures often involve death. I might be wrong, but I think this is one of the first times we have ever seen a companion be shocked at a death in Doctor Who.

Another thing that was refreshing to see in an episode of Doctor Who was an acknowledgement that racism is a thing that existed in the past. This episode wasn’t defined by dealing with racism but it was referenced and acknowledged. It makes sense to at least address racism in the past given that Bill is a black woman in Regency England.

Episodes where it’s the humans who are the real monsters are quite common within Doctor Who, 2008’s Planet of the Ood or the various Silurian stories being a couple of examples of that type of story. Thin Ice certainly falls into that bracket. This style of episode can either be really well done or come across as too heavy handed in its message, fortunately Thin Ice managed to do this story well. However I do still hope that soon we get an episode with a proper big bad monster.

The way that this series is all set around (or keeps referencing) the university that the Doctor is teaching at feels quite reminiscent of the way that UNIT kept reoccurring throughout the 3^rd Doctor era to me. In the 3^rd Doctor era the Doctor worked for UNIT as their scientific advisor and many stories would partially revolve around UNIT. This similarity to the UNIT era of Doctor Who is further heightened with Nardole’s frequent appearances and the way that Smile and Thin Ice followed on from each other. I personally am all for this sort of grounding and connectedness between the episodes.

I think that Thin Ice was another solid episode for this series that delivered on the emotional potential of its context and managed to rise beyond being just another historical episode.