Ice Warrior - Other Appearances

Other Appearances

The Ice Warriors are one of the "monsters" that have made repeated appearances in Doctor Who, as well as in the spin-off media. In the series itself, they made cameo appearances in the serials The War Games and The Mind of Evil, though they have yet to be seen in the latest series.

The Ice Warriors did not appear on television after 1975; two proposed reintroductions after this were abandoned due to external events. They were supposed to be featured in the never-produced Sixth Doctor serial Mission to Magnus which was commissioned for the cancelled 1986 season. Similarly, they were also supposed to appear in season 27, in the serial Ice Time by Marc Platt, which would have written out the Seventh Doctor's companion Ace. However, as the series ceased production in 1989, the story was never produced. The plot for Ice Time was to have a more fantasy-based take on the Ice Warriors, with an Ice Lord being reborn from his armour in Swinging London and fighting a rival Ice Lord that had pursued him through time.

The Ice Warriors have also appeared in numerous spin-off media, including novels, comic strips and audio plays.

The Ice Warriors make several appearances in the Virgin New Adventures. Transit, by Ben Aaronovitch, did not feature any Ice Warriors in a significant role, but its background included the aftermath of a Thousand Day War between Earth and Mars that had spun out from the events of The Seeds of Death and forced many of the Ice Warriors off Mars. The aforementioned Legacy was a sequel to the Peladon stories, and again featured the Ice Warriors as members of the Federation. It was also clarified that their home in that time period (stated as the 40th century) was a planet called New Mars.

GodEngine by Craig Hinton was set shortly after Transit, and concurrently with The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It introduced a non-martial culture within Martian society. In this novel, a group of religious pilgrims (who worship the Osirians) attempted to make peace with humans, while a group of Warriors secretly worked with the Daleks.

As mentioned, The Dying Days featured an Ice Warrior invasion of 1997 Earth. The novel also revealed that, after the Mars Probe missions (seen in The Ambassadors of Death, 1970), Earth accidentally made hostile contact with the Ice Warriors. Earth brokered an agreement to never return to Mars, with the British intelligence services covering up the fact that Mars had a breathable atmosphere so as to discourage further exploration attempts.

The BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Last Resort features numerous conflicting alternate timelines in which the Martian race has either been enslaved by humans or else has exterminated all but a select human elite to prevent their enslavement. In these realities Martian life began as a result of bacteria from the decaying corpses of millions of temporal duplicates of a time-travelling teenager called Jack Kowaczski, arriving from millions of parallel timelines on the uninhabitable surface of Mars and dying, changing the Martian atmosphere and evolving.

The Past Doctor Adventures Fear Itself (which is set shortly after humans colonise Mars) mentions that native Martians (never named explicitly as Ice Warriors) have been forced into poverty and homelessness by humans, except for a few who have resorted to terrorism to reclaim their planet.

In the Doctor Who comic strip published in the Radio Times in 1996, an Ice Warrior named Ssard became a companion to the Eighth Doctor, together with the human Stacy Townsend. Ssard's introductory strip dealt with a "medieval" period of Mars's history. Stacy and Ssard reappeared in the BBC Books novel Placebo Effect by Gary Russell, where the two were married. In the monthly Doctor Who comic strips, an Ice Warrior named Harma is part of Abslom Daak's Dalek-killing band, the Star Tigers. Another Doctor Who Weekly back-up strip, Deathworld (#15 and #16), featured a conflict between the Ice Warriors and the Cybermen. In the story 4-Dimensional Vistas (Doctor Who Monthly #78-83), the Fifth Doctor and his new companion Gus Goodman discover the Ice Warriors at an Arctic Base, allied with the Meddling Monk and planning to use a giant crystal to create a sonic cannon.

In the Big Finish audio play Red Dawn, NASA's first manned mission to Mars encounters a small band of surviving Ice Warriors who had been placed in suspended animation to defend the tomb of Izdaal, the greatest warrior of the Martian race. According to this story, previous unmanned Mars probes had brought back fragments of alien technology and DNA, and scientists had gone so far as to create human/Martian hybrid clones. This story, set in the 21st century, appears to depict the first full contact between humans and Ice Warriors. This is difficult to reconcile with The Dying Days, and may support the idea that the novels and audios take place in separate parallel universes.

Another audio play, Frozen Time, sees the Seventh Doctor and a human expedition discovering a group of Ice Warriors frozen in the Antarctic. These are revealed to be criminals deliberately imprisoned there as punishment. Also The Bride of Peladon saw the Fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem encountering an Ice Warrior.

The Ice Warriors made an appearance in the Bernice Summerfield audio The Dance of the Dead, and the new gardener on the Braxiatel Collection is an Ice Warrior named Hass.

The Fifth Doctor meets the Ice Warriors yet again in the audio play The Judgement of Isskar. This serves as a sort of origin story for them. The Doctor lands on Mars, looking for a segment of the Key to Time. At this point, Martians are a peaceful communal community who do not even know the meaning of the word "warrior". But when the segment is taken away, the Martian atmosphere slowly erodes. They become desperate scavengers and, eventually, Ice Warriors.

In Deimos / The Resurrection of Mars, it is explained that many Ice Warriors went into cryogenic suspension after Mars was rendered inhospitable. Some of these vaults were on the Martian moon Deimos and others were in the Asteroid Belt. Centuries later, some of these Ice Warriors were revived and eventually discovered a new home world. The planet was a beautiful, civilized utopia called Halcyon. The Ice Warriors killed all of the twenty billion inhabitants and renamed it New Mars.