By Rob McCow

A Cold Day In Hell
 

The Collector

It was a cold day in hell for readers of issues #130 – 133 of Doctor Who Magazine, chilling their bones through November to February, 1987-88. It’ll be a cold day in hell when this gets reprinted.
 

The World Shapers

Writer – Simon Furman

Pencils – John Ridgeway

Inks – Tim Perkins

Letterer – Zed

Editor – Sheila Cranna
 

Fellow Travellers

Peri is gone! She left with someone called Yrcanos - which must have baffled those three people who read the comic strip without watching the TV show. This leaves the seventh Doctor with Frobisher as his only companion. (More on the continuity problems this creates later!) Frobisher is quite at home in freezing conditions but less happy about crawling down steaming hot pipes carrying explosives. When they arrive on A-Lux, Frobisher starts building a snowman – just like he did back in Voyager.

Introducing the Seventh Doctor

We are introduced to Olla The Heat Vampire in this story. Olla is a Dreilyn, a race that thrives on absorbing heat. She has the physical appearance of an attractive human female, but her eyes have a grid-like patterning on them. She is able to absorb, store and re-direct heat. In order to survive, she draws on the heat of other people around her. When she is put in a situation where she has to save Frobisher’s life, she shows deep concern for the shape-changing Whifferdill from Xenon.
 

The Deal

The Seventh Doctor, trying to cheer Frobisher up about Peri leaving, arrives on A-Lux, which is supposed to be a warm pleasure planet. They find A-Lux to be a frozen, snow-ridden world. They investigate the automated weather control centre, where they are attacked by a Dreilyn, a Heat Vampire, which Frobisher knocks out with a metal pole. The Doctor explains that Heat Vampires normally only take a tiny amount of heat from the people around them, but this one is ravenous because of the cold.

Suddenly, the Ice Warriors arrive. The Doctor distracts them, allowing Frobisher and the Dreilyn to escape. They are pursued by the Warriors, but are rescued by a large, thick-set man who tells them to escape across the ice.

Ice Lord Arryx tells the Doctor that they are turning A-Lux into the new Mars, to serve as a base of operations in their war. Arryx knows that the Doctor stopped Azaxyr’s plans to secure Peladon’s Trisilicate mines. The Ice Warriors are being helped by a human medical man named Ross. Arryx sends the Doctor out into the cold without protection to make him talk.

The large man has an insectoid friend called Fubb. As the Ice Warriors are crossing the ice, Fubb sets off some charges that cause them to fall through into the water below. Frobisher thanks the man, but the man is furious because the trap took so long to set up.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has died of exposure.

Bidding farewell to the Seventh Doctor

Frobisher accompanies the thick-set man and his friends as they assault an Ice Warrior with explosives and shovels.

Ross is worried, because Arryx will kill him for letting the Doctor die. As he prepares to conduct an autopsy, the Doctor wakes up. He’s not really dead! He tells Ross that he will have to help him defeat the Ice Warriors.

The thick-set man, whose name is Korr, wants Frobisher to travel down a narrow pipe to the A-Lux climate control generator and destroy the Ice Warriors’ cold weather machine. Frobisher complains that the pipe is searing hot, but Olla the Heat Vampire will draw the heat from the pipe. Frobisher heads down the pipe with a pack of explosives. Korr and his men are attacked by Ice Warriors, forcing Olla to discharge the heat from the pipe into one of the Warriors. By doing so she has to let go of the pipe - but she doesn’t know whether Frobisher has made it.

Olla the Heat Vampire in action

The sun starts to rise on A-Lux. Korr and his men assume Frobisher has blown up the machine, but the Doctor had already turned the Doctor’s heat siphon into a heat generator. Frobisher listens to The Doctor’s explanation of what he did, but just feels dejected.

The Ice Warriors are attacked by the surviving population of A-Lux. The rising temperature makes it difficult for the Ice Warriors to put up a fight.

Arryx heads down to the generator with an Ice Warrior guard. Ross dispatches the guard with a surgical laser, while the Doctor opens a window and lets the full force of the sunlight in on Arryx, killing the Ice Lord.

As normality returns to A-Lux, Frobisher tells the Doctor that things haven’t been so much fun without Peri around. He decides to leave the TARDIS and help the people of A-Lux rebuild their planet. Olla the Heat Vampire asks to take Frobisher’s place on board the TARDIS and the Doctor accepts.

The Doctor d-d-d-drops of a penguin
 

TV Action

The Ice Warriors are back! This story ties into Monster of Peladon with a generally benevolent Ice Warrior race forming part of the Federation, with a few breakaway factions inciting trouble. Arryx is a very Ice-Lord-ish name. Most of these Ice Warriors don’t seem to have sonic disrupters and instead they prefer to throttle people with their big clamps. The big clamps of the Ice Warriors are rightly feared by all men. They only whip out the disrupter when the tide turns against them and, appropriately for a sonic weapon, it makes the noise ‘SHUSH!’

Extreme measures are deployed at Sandhurst Library

The icebound tone of this story is slightly similar to Dragonfire, where the Doctor fought against Kane, a man who could freeze people to death with his bare hands. Kane would have got on well with Olla. Coincidentally, Arryx’s death is very similar to Kane’s, with the Doctor opening a window onto a blazing hot light.

The seventh Doctor is fairly similar to his TV counterpart. He’s impish, very physical and delights in baffling his enemies. He’s quite happy to grab the second Doctor’s old jacket (from The Abominable Snowmen) for the chilly climate of A-Lux. In a fortuitous bit of foreshadowing, he’s manipulative and quite dismissive of his companions. He shows almost no emotion when Frobisher leaves and is even quite callous in the way he murders Arryx. Although he does give Arryx a chance to surrender before springing his trap. This is comparable to the way that the tenth Doctor treats his enemies, in particular the Empress of the Racnoss.

There are severe continuity issues caused by this story. At the start of the sixth Doctor’s run he was still looking for The Moderator, a character he met when he was still the fifth Doctor. It was while he was looking for The Moderator that he first met Frobisher. Now the seventh Doctor and Frobisher are upset because Peri has left with Yrcanos. So where was Frobisher during The Trial of A Timelord? Why would the seventh Doctor still be upset when Big Finish and the original novels have crammed in four thousand adventures between Trial and the seventh Doctor’s debut? And where is Mel? The simplest explanation is that the Doctor was continuously dropping off and picking up his companions, but this seems unsatisfactory.
 

4-Dimensional Vistas

Ridgway gets to have a go at drawing McCoy and guess what – he’s very good! Although the likeness is a little variable, it’s generally recognisable. He does a lot better than most of the other artists of the late 80’s.

The Ice Warriors are spot on, very similar to Mick Austin’s efforts in 4-Dimensional Vistas. The battle scenes, between the lumbering Warriors and the hulking humans are rather static, but there’s a superbly dramatic moment when Olla discharges her heat into the head of one of the Ice Warriors.

The snow effects are quite good, A-Lux looks suitably nippy. Aside from that, there’s nothing really remarkable about the art in this strip.
 

End of The Line

As average Ice Warrior stories go, A Cold Day In Hell certainly stands shoulder to shoulder with The Ice Warriors and Monster of Peladon. The Ice Warriors have a fairly sensible plan, to convert a weather-controlled planet to their new home and they are defeated in a straightforward way when the Doctor rigs their equipment.

What’s really disappointing is the way Frobisher is written out. For a character who has lasted longer than Mel and Peri, he deserves better than this, leaving to help the people of A-Lux. He used to be a hard-bitten private eye, but he became a great wet penguin. It’s just so blatant that they decided to get rid of him. Worst of all, he didn’t need to be in this story at all. He could have just been forgotten about at the end of the sixth Doctor stories. There’s no point trying to tie into the TV show if there are all these confusing jumps of logic.

A Cold Day in Hell is fun but pointless. A writer like Simon Furman should have been able to produce something better.
 

Follow That TARDIS!

Ridgway was under the impression that Doctor Who Magazine was going to fold and left the comic strip after this story.

The Ice Warriors last appeared in the fifth Doctor comic strip, 4 Dimensional Vistas. The only other Ice Warrior to appear in the comic strip to date has been Hamma, Absolom Daak’s sidekick who appears to be dead in Nemesis of The Daleks, but is alive again by Emperor of the Daleks.

Medical Man Ross has a natty pair of glasses.

The Doctor has met many vampires, but Olla is the only Heat Vampire he’s encountered.

Frobisher eventually leaves because he feels ‘redundant’ now that Peri’s not around. He’s not nearly as redundant as Olla though, as the next story shows!