LEGION OF IMPOSSIBILITIES

 

Saturday 2nd May 1964 - Doctor Who - The Snows of Terror

 

 

"Are you afraid of me?"

 

A claustrophobic, threatening episode that has a fairy-tale, nightmarish quality. An episode full of snow, woods, wolves, frozen caves and ice soldiers. Events take place in darkness of the course of a few hours. 

 

It is the character of Vasos who seemingly rescues Barbara and Ian that dominates this episode. A large, bearded hunter clad in furs, Vasos uses the situation the in which the travellers find themselves for his own advantage - to aquire the valuable their valuable belongings and for sexual gratification. (Although the show has so far hinted at sexual threats towards Barbara in particular, here we have here explicitly having to defend herself with a knife from Vasos' assault.) He is monstrous and menaces throughout until he is eventually killed by the "demons" he fears.

The plot is quite limited: Ian goes in search of Althos, returns to save Barbara from Vasos, searches for Susan and Sabetha, finds the next key they are searching for, fights the frozen ice soldiers and escapes. I doubt I'm the first person to notice a similarity with the Crystal Maze. The production team make a good effort of using their limited budget into building sets that are effective. I'm not sure that a hot water pipe would resurrect the frozen ice soldiers. (And I'm not even going to question why an alien world has medieval knights and wolves.)

Once again, the Doctor is missing (gone ahead in the story) and the episode suffers from not having him present. Everything is a little rushed and frantic.

The cliff-hanger has Ian discovering a body and knocked unconscious while a mysterious figure steals what looks like the final key.

Much like the last episode, The Screaming Jungle, there's a sense here that the storytelling is too condensed. Rather than rush through some very interesting characters and situations, it's almost that a multiple-episode adventure would have been better.  

 

Next episode: Sentence of Death