The Snowmen (TV story)
The Snowmen was the 2012 Christmas special. It introduced Clara and Victorian era Clara Oswald, as well as reintroducing Vastra, Strax and Jenny. The Doctor also encounters the Great Intelligence for the first time since his seventh incarnation.
Like the previous two specials, it takes its name and some of its themes from a famous piece of literature, albeit altering the title slightly.
Synopsis
After losing Amy Pond and Rory Williams, the Doctor retires to Victorian England, where Strax, Jenny Flint, and Vastra assist him. The Doctor eventually meets Clara Oswald, a young barmaid with a double life as a governess, who he takes a liking to, but at the same time, a sinister plot is unfolding; snowmen are randomly appearing around London, growing in size and power. All they need to take over the world is some human DNA in ice crystal form, and the frozen body of a drowned governess can give them just that.
Plot
It is 1842. Children are playing outside. Standing away from the others is a little boy building a snowman. A woman asks him if he'd like to play with the other children. He says that he doesn't need anyone else. The woman tells a man that he's always so alone, and that it's unhealthy. As they leave, he says that he doesn't want to talk to them because they are silly. To his surprise, the snowman he is building repeats this. He runs away as it tells him not to believe anyone else. He starts to walk back to it and it tells him that it can help him. He asks it how.
50 years later, Walter Simeon is overseeing men as they carefully scrape snow from snowmen into glass jars. The jars are loaded into a carriage where they are driven to Walter Simeon's institute.
Doctor Simeon carries one of the jars up to a large crystal ball filled with snow. He tells it that the last of the arrivals have been sampled. The globe says that the swarm is approaching, and that as humanity celebrates, it will end. He asks if the final piece is ready, and Doctor Simeon says it's in hand. The globe asks how he will keep his secrets from getting out of the men who helped him. Doctor Simeon says it's been taken care of. He says he promised to feed them.
Back at the work site, one of the men says that he doesn't see any food. Doctor Simeon says he does, and as the men look around, the snowmen rise up and devour them.
At an inn called The Rose & Crown, a barmaid walks outside with a tray. She is surprised to see a snowman standing there that wasn't there before. She asks the Eleventh Doctor, who is walking past, if he built it. The Doctor says he didn't, and walks away, but stops when she tells him that it just appeared out of nowhere. He walks back and walks around the snowman, inspecting it. He says he wonders if the snow can remember how to build a snowman, which the maid thinks is silly. She makes the Doctor smile. He asks her what her name is. She says it is Clara, which he says is a nice name. He walks away, leaving her somewhat annoyed in the alley with the snowman. As she sees him drive away, she runs after him.
The Doctor locked Clara in the carriage, which made her furious and after briefly examining the mysterious alien snow, he ordered Strax to get a memory worm to erase her memory. After Strax forgot to wear gauntlets the highly amused Clara passed them to the Doctor and he shoved the memory worm into a jar. Then a snowman burst out of nowhere followed by several more. Realising that the snow was sentient and mirroring the thoughts of people around it, the Doctor ordered Clara to picture them melting. After the Snowmen melted Clara pointed out that he now couldn't erase her memory because if he did, she would forget how to protect herself from the Snowmen.
The Doctor then decides not to wipe her memory but warns her not to follow him and to forget about him. He sends her away in Strax's carriage but Clara sneaks off without Strax and The Doctor. Noticing and following the Doctor leads her to a hidden staircase in the sky reaching to the clouds. Clara then sees the TARDIS. Clara knocks on the door and hid at the side of the TARDIS just as the Doctor pops his head out saying "hello?" As the Doctor follows the sides of the TARDIS, Clara sneaks down the stairs. The Doctor hears her footsteps. The Doctor picks up a piece of cloth that dropped from Clara's dress as she sneaks away which he then smells. He saw her running down the spiral staircase which led up to the cloud, but dismissed her, still determined to stay out of what was happening on Earth.
The Doctor later receives a call from Vastra who had just concluded a meeting with Clara. Vastra tells him that Clara had said the one word that could get the Doctor to come and save the world again; "Pond". The Doctor was wearing Amy's reading glasses, which he had kept ever since his last adventure with her, and took them off and stared at them for a moment, finally deciding to investigate what was happening. He went to visit Doctor Walter Simeon in his institute, pretending to be Sherlock Holmes. After examining the large sphere Simeon had in his office and then seeing a newspaper article about a governess who had drowned in a pond, the Doctor realised why Clara had used that word to warn him of the danger. He went to Captain Latimer's house and examined the pond where the woman had drowned. After being visited by Strax who asked if he needed any "grenades" before admitting that Vastra had used the word "help", he saw Clara waving at him through a window and decided to go and visit her. He arrived in time to rescue Clara and the two children she was looking after from the Ice Governess, who had been created from the woman in the pond.
The Doctor, Clara and the children ran down the stairs and met Captain Latimer. The Doctor hastily explained his presence in the house by saying that he was Clara's "gentleman friend" and they had been upstairs kissing. Vastra, Strax and Jenny arrived and Jenny trapped the Ice Governess behind a force field. Strax then said that Captain Latimer's office was a strategic place to make their stand and everyone hurried inside. After explaining Simeon's plan, the Doctor ordered everyone to stay in Latimer's office but Clara disobeyed him and kissed him in the hallway. After recovering from the surprise he confronted Doctor Simeon at the front door. Simeon warned that the Doctor had five minutes to give him the Ice Governess, which he needed to allow his Snowmen to evolve into an army of ice that would allow him to take over the world.
The Doctor seized an umbrella and used his sonic screwdriver to deactivate the force field that trapped the Ice Governess. He and Clara sprinted up the stairs towards the roof. At one point Clara grabbed the Doctor's hand and took the lead which the Doctor was unused to since he was usually the one who did the hand grabbing. The Ice Governess followed and Clara quickly realised the Doctor's plan. Using the umbrella the Doctor had taken from downstairs, she pulled down the ladder that led up to the spiral staircase. The two of them ran up the staircase with the Ice Governess in pursuit. After reaching the Doctor's cloud, which had been blown there by the wind, the Doctor showed Clara the inside of the TARDIS which had changed since Amy and Rory had left him. He expected Clara to say the thing most people said when they entered the TARDIS "It's bigger on the inside" but instead Clara said "It's smaller on the outside" which the Doctor noted was a first. Clara then asked if there was a kitchen, saying she liked making souffle's... a remark which catches the Doctor's attention. The Doctor then gives Clara a key to the TARDIS, having decided to take her with him. However, just after taking the key Clara was grabbed by the Ice Governess. While she struggled, the Ice Governess fell off the cloud, and Clara went with her, falling to her death in the Latimer's courtyard.
The Doctor used the TARDIS to get Clara's body into Latimer's office where Strax used alien technology to revive her. However Clara's injuries were fatal and even the resurrection technology wasn't enough to save her. The Doctor asked the dying Clara if she would travel with him and she agreed. Then he stormed out to face Doctor Simeon and his Snowmen, taking a box which he claimed contained the shattered remains of the Ice Governess. He told Simeon he would "see you at the office" and he and Vastra took the TARDIS to Simeon's institute. Vastra wondered if the Doctor was making a bargain with the Universe and the Doctor said that the Universe owed him for all the times he had saved it. He was hoping that if he saved the world, the Universe would allow Clara to live.
The Doctor and Vastra met Simeon in his office and the Doctor revealed that the giant snowglobe was actually a reflection of Simeon himself. Simeon explained that the snow had spoken to him as a child when he was building a snowman and the Doctor informed him that he had accidentally started putting all of his deepest, darkest thoughts and feelings into the snow, making it as intelligent as it was fifty years later. Although Simeon was shocked to learn that he was the reason the snowglobe was sentient, this didn't stop him from attempting to continue his plan and he grabbed the box containing the Ice Governess from the Doctor. When he opened it however he found the memory worm instead and it bit him, erasing all the memories of his adult life.
However by that time, the snowglobe had gained enough independence to survive without having to reflect Simeon's thoughts. Unable to understand how the entity still existed, the Doctor learned that the "dream had outlived the dreamer". Simeon then rose to his feet revealing that the entity was now controlling him not the other way around. After hurling Vastra aside, the possessed Simeon attacked the Doctor but then pulled back in apparent pain as the snow in the globe turned to rain. Simeon perished as the entity was defeated and the Doctor said that all the snow at the Latimer house was mirroring the grief of Latimer and his children as Clara got closer to death. Rushing back to the house, the Doctor stood beside Clara as she died. Before she passed away however, Clara murmured words that another version of her had said once before; "Run you clever boy. And remember."
During Clara's funeral, the Doctor learned that the entity he had faced was the Great Intelligence from Simeon's card about his institute. He then went to Clara's grave, which contains her full name... Clara Oswin Oswald. The Doctor remembers that name from the woman he had met in the Dalek Asylum who went by the name Oswin Oswald and also enjoyed making souffle's (having not noticed the connection before since he never met Oswin face-to-face). However this leaves the Doctor confused, as Oswin died in the asylum just like Clara died here. Eager at solving the mystery of the woman who has died twice at completely different points in space and time, the Doctor heads for the TARDIS.
In an unspecified time period, Clara (a woman identical in appearance to Clara Oswald and Oswin Oswald) and her friend walk into the cemetery. Clara walks by Clara Oswald's gravestone as her friend begs her to leave because she thinks the graveyard is creepy, but Clara states, "I don't believe in ghosts."
Back in the TARDIS, The Doctor yelled "Clara! Oswin! Oswald!" and pulled up a picture of Clara from 1892 on the TARDIS video screen. Then he exclaimed, "Watch me run!"
Cast
- The Doctor - Matt Smith
- Clara - Jenna-Louise Coleman
- Captain Latimer - Tom Ward
- Dr Simeon - Richard E Grant
- Jenny - Catrin Stewart
- Madame Vastra - Neve McIntosh
- Strax - Dan Starkey
- Digby - Joseph Darcey-Alden
- Francesca - Ellie Darcey-Alden
- Alice - Liz White
- Uncle Josh - Jim Conway
- Walter - Cameron Strefford
- Walter's Mother - Annabelle Dowler
- Bob Chilcott - Ben Addis
- Lead Workman - Daniel Hyde
- Clara's Friend - Sophie Miller-Sheen
- Voice of the Great Intelligence - Ian McKellen
- Voice of the Ice Governess - Juliet Cadzow
Notes
In the programme information for BBC iPlayer, The Snowmen credits Ian McKellen as "Voice of the Snowman". Sophie Miller-Sheen's character is "Girl".
Crew
| Executive Producers Caroline Skinner and Steven Moffat |
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| Not every person who worked on this adventure was credited. The absence of a credit for a position doesn't necessarily mean the job wasn't required. The information above is based solely on observations of the actual end credits of the episodes as broadcast, and does not relay information from IMDB or other sources. |
References
Cultural references
- Simeon suggests that Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes on Madame Vastra.
Communications technology
- Vastra has a telephone that can call the phone in the Doctor's TARDIS.
The Doctor
- The Doctor pretends to be Sherlock Holmes.
- The Doctor has kept Amy Pond's reading glasses and seems to be using them to read.
- Though the Tenth Doctor was able to erase Donna Noble's memories using just his telepathic abilities, the Eleventh Doctor attempts to use a Memory worm to erase Clara's memory.
Individuals
- The Doctor is convinced to investigate the snow after hearing Clara's one-word plea to Vastra - "Pond."
- Strax was revived after the Battle of Demon's Run.
Locations
- The Doctor uses a tin with a map of the London Underground on it.
TARDIS
- Upon first entering the Doctor's TARDIS, Clara describes it as "smaller on the outside" (which the Doctor describes as a first), and then asks if it has a kitchen (another first).
Story notes
- This episode is noteworthy for three big changes. The first is a new companion, Clara. The second of these is the change to the TARDIS interior and the final change is an update to the title sequence, which now includes the Doctor's face for the first time since Survival in 1989. To go along with the new titles, a new variation of the theme tune was used.
- Like all previous opening titles of Series 7, this episode's "Doctor Who" logo texture matches with the theme of the episode; the letters appear to be made of ice and snow.
- As is routine for Christmas specials, a "COMING SOON" trailer for the next series is shown at the end of the episode. This "COMING SOON" trailer features clips from the second half of Series 7.
Ratings
to be added
Filming locations
- Fields House (The Orphanage)
Production errors
to be added
Continuity
- Clara mentions baking soufflés as Oswin did in TV: Asylum of the Daleks.
- Strax still has confusion over the difference between human females and human males as he did in TV: A Good Man Goes to War and PROSE: Devil in the Smoke. Another Sontaran, Linx, was initially confused when he encountered Sarah Jane Smith in TV: The Time Warrior.
- The Great Intelligence has previously appeared in TV: The Abominable Snowmen, TV: The Web of Fear, HOMEVID: Downtime, and PROSE: Millennial Rites.
- The Doctor shows the Great Intelligence a lunchbox with a map of the London Underground, circa 1967. In The Web of Fear, which was filmed in 1967 and 1968, The Great Intelligence lures the Doctor to a trap in the London Underground. The Web of Fear may be set in the 1960s or 1970s, depending on one's view of the UNIT dating controversy.
- The Doctor uses Amy Pond's reading glasses which she last wore in TV: The Angels Take Manhattan. He seems to use them as his "brainy specs", as related between the Fifth and Tenth Doctors in TV: Time Crash.
- The Doctor reiterates that bowties are cool (TV: The Eleventh Hour et al.) It is implied through dialogue that he has not worn bowties in a while.
- This is the second Christmas special in a row with a character named Digby, after the unseen Uncle Digby in TV: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe.
- The Doctor previously dressed in Sherlock Holmes type attire in TV: The Talons of Weng-Chiang, set in 1889.
Home video releases
to be added
External links
to be added
