Ice Heist

Fourth Doctor Adventures #12.1

Released: 2 March 2023

Listened: 5/5/23

This particular series brings in Nerys Hughes as Margaret Hopwood, introduced a while back in “The Ravencliff Witch,” but not invited as a companion. Back then, the Doctor was alone, but this time Leela is also present. She’s pretty experienced by this point, and almost immediately takes Margaret under her wing. A bit unusual, as Leela doesn’t really care for people who flap around and panic, but she knows Margaret helped the Doctor before. He’s picked her up to bring her to an art auction a few hundred years in the future, where one of her sculptures is going for an absurd amount of money. He thinks of it as a treat, but Margaret sees it as a sign of her own mortality and blows a fuse, which sets off Leela’s protective instincts. The Doctor spends an unusual amount of time being wrong in this story, and also spouting nonsense as he does when he wants to impress a new friend, which Leela isn’t willing to let him get away with. There’s some actual story going on as well, with Ice Warriors who are also present at the auction for nefarious reasons. Writer Guy Adams deliberately wanted to subvert the idea of Ice Warriors as honorable Klingon-types, and he succeeds here. The only flaw is that results in a lot of Martian bickering, which means lots of hissing Ice Warrior dialog. Nick Briggs normally does monster voices extremely well, but when he’s got a lot of exposition to fire off, you can tell it’s him. Adele Lynch, who played the Ice Warrior empress on TV, returns here as a different Ice Warrior, and she’s clearly enjoying herself. There are also quite a few memorable secondary characters, including a curator who’s completely determined to ignore anything that might be going wrong, her laconic head of security, a pompous artist who holds the buyers in contempt, and even a guard with a remarkably upbeat outlook on life. The story gets a little hard to follow at times, especially when so many characters are around, but ultimately it's worth it.