Doctor Who: Series 10 Episode 9 - Empress of Mars
"God Save the Queen" has been scrawled onto the surface of Mars. What are the Victorians doing on the home planet of the Ice Warriors? And what will they find beneath the Martian soil?
I suppose I should start of this review by saying that I thought "Empress of Mars" was fab. It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed the story on a whole, I just wish it could have been longer. This is when I think the monk story needed to be shortened by an episode and you could make this a two parter, that would have been even better.
The trouble with this is it's hard to structure a beginning, middle and end into a forty-five-minute format. It's a problem that most of the Matt Smith stories had, the fact that you have this good development at the start to get you interested, the story drifts off a bit in the middle and the ending is very rushed. I'm not saying that 'Empress of Mars' was rushed, I'm just pointing out that that is usually the problem with this kind of single episode structure.
I'd say that the story for me got off to a confusing start, the pre-title sequence scene didn't really make a lot of sense to me. I didn't see much point in having it in there, I think once they got to Mars, that's when things really started to take off and I started to get into the story a bit more.
It was one of those adventures which had a nice mix of ideas within it to keep you interested. Victorians and Ice Warriors on Mars. It's an interesting blend, the atmosphere of the caves and the giant gun which I forget the name of, that all reminded me of "Monster of Peladon" and there were nice continuity references to the old series in this story that weren't so hammered into the show, like the RHIP thing, Rank Has It's Privileges that's a nice nod to 'Day of the Daleks' and to UNIT.
The story for me was a bit like: The Ice Warriors, The Monster of Peladon, and Edgar Wright Burrows of daring adventure to me. There's a lot of Gatiss's Doctor Who fan boy in this episode. You can tell that he just loved writing this.
And of course, the new feature to this is the Ice Queen herself, she looks very appealing and very impressive. I liked all the makeup that was done on her, and the dreadlocks I think were an interesting feature, it made her look like Predator. The Ice Warriors themselves were good as well, I think after "Cold War' when we only had one Ice Warrior I've always said "There should be a proper story where there's lots of Ice Warriors" and this episode provided that splendidly, there must have been at least seven or eight including the Ice Queen. Numbers made up all the difference between the two parties.
And of course, we got to see Alpha Centauri. Which at the start I thought was Missy putting on a funny voice, and then I clocked who it really was.
Speaking of Missy, the ending right at the end between the two of them, I thought was a bit strange and awkward, the camera seemed to have maybe stayed on one frame for a bit too long which made the suspense of the scene between the doctor and Missy a bit strange.
I think this kind of fun was exactly what we needed after the monk three-parter, which was a more serious and darker type of story which dragged on over three weeks. This takes us all away from that and allows us to get caught up in the adventure and we can enjoy running away with it. It's relatable to the classic series, I felt like I was watching an episode from that era, whether it be the Second Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria or The Fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane and Harry, that kind of thing.
Peter Capaldi was excellent, Pearl Mackie was very good in this one as well.
A fun adventure story which needed to be longer. 8/10
Next Week: The Eaters of Light. Rona Munro's first Doctor Who episode in twenty-eight years! So I'm very excited about seeing that because I do really like "Survival" and I think to bring a writer who wrote for the original series back is well long overdue. So I'll be back next week to write that review.
Until then have a good week!
