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Frozen Time is the kind of Doctor Who story that makes you stare at the CD case, sigh deeply, and question every life choice that led you here. It’s the storytelling equivalent of grey slush. You can practically hear the creative meeting: “What if we did The Thing? But boring.” Cue polite nodding, the sound of a kettle boiling, and an hour and a half of absolutely nothing interesting happening.
So yeah. Antarctic expedition, early 20th century, bunch of explorers with moustaches, snow crunching, crackly radios. They find a buried spaceship, and inside, surprise, Ice Warriors. Because of course it’s Ice Warriors. They’ve been asleep since forever and now they’re mad, stomping around growling about war and honour and freezing the Earth, because apparently Mars still hasn’t invented hobbies. Enter the Seventh Doctor, who’s also frozen in the ice (sure, why not) and defrosted like a leftover fish finger. He wakes up with amnesia because the scriptwriter clearly hit a word count wall and panicked.
This is the part where I’d normally say “it’s trying to be…” but no. Frozen Time isn’t trying. It’s coasting. It’s like someone threw The Thing, Space Seed, and Encino Man into a blender, then poured out the first half and forgot to plug the blender back in. The Ice Warriors stomp, the humans shout, the Doctor vaguely remembers things, and the sound design valiantly tries to pretend something, anything, is happening.
Sylvester McCoy does his best, bless him. You can hear him fighting to inject wit and energy into the script, like a man trapped in a snow globe shaking himself for dear life. But even he can’t melt this permafrost of mediocrity. It’s all very… there. The kind of story where you can drift off halfway through and wake up later and nothing’s changed except you’ve lost ninety minutes of your life and gained a mild headache.
There’s a brief flicker of atmosphere early on, all that frosty ambience and isolation, but it evaporates fast once the Ice Warriors start doing their usual “honour and conquest” shtick. We’ve been here a thousand times before, and each time it was more interesting than this one. You could almost forgive it if it had any personality, camp, silliness, even chaos, but no. It’s just cold.
Final thoughts:
Frozen Time wants to be epic, but it’s just tepid. Like lukewarm tea served in an ice cavern. I genuinely forgot it existed while listening to it.
Rating: 1 out of 5 half-defrosted Ice Warriors still waiting for the plot to thaw.