Besides show-runner Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss is the last original writer of the rejuvenated Doctor Who to be writing regularly for the show. He’s had his ups and downs over the past twelve years. Gatiss brought Charles Dickens to life in the first “Celebrity Historical” - an episode which helped to establish the structure of a modern day adventure. Since then he’s struggled to recapture the glory days because Gatiss is, despite his irrefutably lovely nature, a writer who excels in a very specific niche. He is like a tinkerer, a hobbyist like Arthur Weasley playing with Muggle artefacts in his garden shed. Gatiss loves horror and proper English culture especially if it comes from a century or two in the past. He adores stories and characters and understands how they fit together but when he tries to recreate them himself he paints his brush-strokes too broad. A suitable parallel can be found in his acting. He’s great as the oily, English gentleman Mycroft but this role is more caricature than character.
Gatiss is good in his niche. He can write Sherlock because, at the end of the day, Sherlock is a post-modern deconstruction of the Sherlock Holmes myths as much as it is an update of the source material. He won over fans with his Doctor Who scripts set in the English past like Robert of Sherwood and The Crimson Horror because these scripts set out to entertain and nothing more. It is when he tries to spread his wings and do something different that he falls short of the mark. Victory of the Daleks was an early failure in Moffat’s tenure as show-runner. The script attempted to offer relate-able characters with pathos and introduce a twist on the Daleks which saw them as servants rather than conquerors but the contrivances which brought these tenuous premises to the screen bent the story too far from believablility. The effects were worse when he took the Doctor to far-out space to confront eye-gunk in the much-maligned Sleep No More. He replaced all of his crutches with found-footage gimmicks, Peep-Show-esque cinematography and the result was one of the least-loved Doctor Who episodes in years.
But what of The Empress of Mars? It’s a promising concept - Tomb of the Cybermen for the Ice Warriors. A group of naive Earthlings (here soldiers of the British Empire) travel to the stars to claim knowledge and land in the name of the Queen but awaken something beyond their understanding - a foe, returning to The Doctor’s life worse than ever before. The Ice Warriors are iconic figures from the show’s past and it’s not the first time that Gatiss has combined them with another previous story. His Cold War script bares numerous similarities to the Series 1 story Dalek. A lone Ice Warrior is dredged from the depths of the frozen North Pole and awoken only to escape its tormentors and wreak havoc in an enclosed space. The Ice Warriors have the potential to be far more interesting than the Daleks, and perhaps the Cybermen, as they are not represented as wholly evil creatures. They are intimidating and dangerous but ultimately they are defined, not by extreme loathing of other races but by a sense of militaristic pride in themselves. They can be reasoned with and they can be useful allies. This was a helpful factor in the conclusion of Cold War (if a little too convenient) but Gatiss is wise enough to weave this trait into the fabric of his story this time around. It’s not his only display of inspiration either.
The opening stinger is the highlight of the episode. In true Moffat style, Gatiss begins the episode with a separate mini-adventure. The Doctor, Bill and Nardole invade and undermine the prestigious space of the NASA control room. It’s a delight to see the three bounce off each other with some TARDIS-team banter up to the quality of Jack-Rose-Nine or Amy-Rory-Eleven and it cements the audience’s affection for this strange line-up. They’ve been growing together, suffering together and apart and now it’s time to see them have some fun. Gatiss’ slow reveal of the presence of stones spelling out “God Save the Queen” on the (until recently) hidden surface of Mars is a display of the cheek and cheese that the show can do so well when it’s not moping about or being overly dramatic. If the rest of the episode had lived up to the tone set here, it would have been an absolute belter.
Unfortunately, as the episode goes on we start to see Gatiss’ limitations hold back his interesting ideas. This episode ticks lots of boxes for things which should make a great RusselTDavies-esque adventure. The scenes are constructed well on paper - no sooner have our heroes left the safety of the TARDIS do they find themselves separated and in immediate peril. Nardole is flown away in a moody TARDIS, Bill falls to a lower level of the cave and our point of view cuts between her tense meeting with a mysterious space-suited man and the Doctor’s encounter with an advancing Ice Warrior. The Doctor soon discovers that the Warrior is named Friday, an ally of the English expeditionary forces and one of the most engaging concepts of the episode.
Sadly, very little of the fun that was promised up to this point is delivered and part of the reason for this is a lack of peril (our heroes are split up and placed in danger but the very next scene shows them drinking tea and sharing a Victoria sponge) and the other reason is the lack of engaging characters. There are many memorable guest actors present. Each of them has a role - one is commander with a dark secret, another the treasonous second-in-command, there is a young, naive minority wanting to marry his girl back home, and a cock-er-ney thief oddly named Jackdaw. A regular criticism of Doctor Who is that the disposable side-characters are rarely offered enough personality that their deaths incur meaningful reactions from the audience so it is admirable that Gatiss attempts to introduce us to a bustling British platoon but none of them feel the slightest bit authentic. The naive one never displays a hint of bravery so we can’t get on his side, the second-in-command never displays the slightest bit of conflict over his devious ways so we can’t enjoy his villainy, and as for the Commander - whose big character moment serves as the climax for the episode - none of the revelations made about him or his decisions were ever satisfyingly set up so watching him is just watching a bunch of stuff happening after other stuff. It’s a list of points with nothing to connect them.
Gatiss’ big addition to Ice Warrior mythology comes in the shape of a shouty, dread-lock haired, plastic-clad queen who does little other than issue commands and hate people until she doesn’t any more. The titular Empress of Mars really should be more of a character than that. Much of the promotion focused on her and the promise of the drama she would bring but a 3 second shot of her in a trailer is about as much depth and understanding of her as you get from the entire episode. It’s that superficial. She does make a distinctive impression however, with her green scales standing out against the red rocks of Martian tunnels, but it’s not a believable look. One is intensely aware at all points that they are looking at a costume designed by a BBC production team standing in a set. If there was a little more variety of locations in the episode then this problem might have been ameliorated somewhat.
The Empress of Mars is, for me, one of Gatiss’ better scripts. He’s playing on his home turf. There’s English soldiers, Doctor Who lore to be played with and enough banter to have fun with. I will watch it again, it has a lovely Easter Sunday family-movie vibe. It’s a bit Indianna Jones and a bit Pirates of the Carribean, a bit Zulu, a bit Jewel of the Nile. It’s got a strong sense of adventure but it’s also fluff. There’s not much substance to it. I just wish that Moffat had given the whole thing a script polish, injected a bit of comedy, romance and danger to turn it from a Big Mac, fries and cola into a steak dinner, roast potatoes and red wine. Gatiss is delightful, he tinkers with stories and pulls them apart and puts them back together but he doesn’t forge them into something truly brilliant.
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