Doctor Who: Empress of Mars
Director: Wayne Yip
Writer: Mark Gatiss
Starring: Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie, Matt Lucas, Anthony Calfe, Ferdinand Kingsley, Richard Ashton, Adele Lynch
Empress of Mars continues our regularly scheduled adventures as The Doctor, Bill and Nardole visit Mars in 1881 occupied by Victorian soldiers, looking for treasure, exploration and seeking to conquer. While they occupy the planet, they uncover an Ice Warrior spaceship and rescued one of it’s passengers they found in the wreckage named Friday, who has been asleep for 5,000 years. As the team explores, they uncover and unearth another piece of Ice Warrior history inside of a tomb. Once it wakes up, Bill and The Doctor have to figure out how to calm the conflict between Ice Warriors and invading Victorian soldiers in order to keep the peace.
Empress of Mars felt more like a filler episode. It completely separates itself from the trilogy before and moves on with the adventures. This episode doesn’t really have a rhyme or reason to it, but it’s a fun episode that only Mark Gatiss could have written and nailed. Gatiss’ writing has always been a bit of a hit 
or miss for me. If he’s not writing Sherlock, I never understand why he would be writing anything else. However, for Empress of Mars, he does a great job introducing a new audience to some classic Doctor Who creatures long time fans haven’t seen for a very long time. This is where he plays to his strength for writing in the series. The Ice Warriors, the humanoid lizard like cyborgs, were a recurring alien were introduced in the reign of the Second Doctor within the fifth season of Doctor Who. Gatiss’ is great at taking the classics creatures and bringing them into a new era of Doctor Who, telling a new audience, “I’m going to make this cool for you I swear” and actually accomplishing it without being over the top.
While Gatiss does a phenomenal job at bringing us some classic creatures, he kinda falters and shines within the script. I know that’s a bit of a double edge sword, but hear me out for a second. Gatiss lays down the groundwork for an exciting episode, especially with having the Ice Warriors be your creature of choice and trying to have Bill and The Doctor figure out a clever way to not get killed by them. However, it has an underlining messages with it though, the male ego, female compassion and warrior mentality.
As soon as we see the Victorian soldiers you roll your eyes. Their egos, ideals, greed and petty squabbles are not amping up their survival. In fact, it’s lessening it minute by minute. The main culprit of this is Catchlove (Ferdinand Kingsley), who needs to show dominance and strength by force instead of thinking first. He creates an opposite for the Doctor, but carries on to be the biggest of a**holes in the episode in keeping with the warrior mentality. Now that I’ve said warrior mentality, let’s get on that subject train, shall we? From the Ice Warriors to the Victorian soldiers, but it creates such a thick overlay to the episode that you have no choice but to dissect it. The Ice Warriors carry out their own warrior mentality that is completely the same as the Victorians. The messages of: “You will fight until death”, “You will not surrender or conceded”, “You will fight until you nothing more.” It’s a rough way to live, but The Doctor tries to rival that by saying that no one has to die, that everyone can live together. Yet, the male ego of it all overshadows and the fight to be the best and that warrior instinct must come out. The Doctor even said it best, “Always been my problem. Thinking like a warrior.”
The best thing to come out of this episode, even though it was so short, was the female compassion. Iraxxa, the Empress of the Ice Warriors, is pleaded to by The Doctor in order to live in peace and work together instead of there being other people to get hurt. She’s considering it, but her ultimate decision comes from Bill, the other female in the room. Bill asks, “Why me?” Iraxxa says, “We are both surrounded by noisy males. I value your opinion.” It’s a small moment, brilliant in it’s execution and so small that I WISHED it was throughout the rest of the episode. Bill continues to show her compassion and empathy, even if others aren’t very kind to her. Iraxxa, an Empress, needs the opinion of a woman in order to save the rest of the males around them. Again, it’s such a wonderful moment, this episode should have been littered with this kind of stuff, especially because The Ice Warriors are so advanced in their progression of roles for females, the Victorian’s are so far behind and Bill is smack in the middle.
Wayne Yip continues his venture into directing Doctor Who episodes and I hope they keep him around for more. He creates such a tone and vibrancy through his lens, really focusing on everything around the set no matter how small. I’ve noticing in his work for Class and Doctor Who, faces are his bread and butter. He has the magic of making a medium shot on a face
work so well for an episode and it’s absolutely amazing. He works so well in colored settings as well. This episode is bursting with reds and greens, from the landscape of Mars and uniforms of the soldiers to the Ice Warriors themselves. It’s such a colorful episode without being too bright, bringing in some rich colors to combine with the red that you see on the screen and it lets your eyes dance within the palette.
The best thing that saved this episode from leaning on just being another filler with no direction was the acting by the fantastic cast. I love when Doctor Who creates limited space, it allows it’s actors to shine in ways they didn’t know how. Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie are brilliant as always, hearing their characters banter over different movies was probably my favorite part about this episode, but I’ll have to give the performance of the week to Ferdinand Kingsley, who plays Catchlove in the episode. If you’re the son of Ben Kingsley, you better slay a performance in one of the biggest franchises ever and that he did, playing a complete a**hole who you just hate to love. He’s the testament to the problem with male ego, but you can’t tear your eyes away from that greasy smile and awesome mustache for a second.
Verdict:
Watch It! While this episode is straight up filler, fans of Doctor Who, new and old will appreciate a new creature coming into their life. It seems like the Ice Warriors are here to stay and hopefully, they’ll have another chance to shine and have more of their story told. Also, Empress of Mars gives us another massively cool cliffhanger for the next one. How come we always leave the cool scenes with Missy towards the end?
