Following on from the established tradition of Christmas specials featuring innocuous and pleasant winter things trying to murder the Doctor and friends, 2012’s ‘The Snowmen’ features the Eleventh Doctor in an adventure that may well have left scores of children utterly terrified of those jolly, anthropomorphic snow friends that festoon the front gardens of many a family home when we actually get proper snow in Britain.
(Like Sydney Newman before me, I come from Canada, where the snowbanks are piled so high that it’s safest just to stock up on tinned goods and hibernate in a blanket fort until April. I’ve seen barely a light dusting since moving to England. But I digress.)
We reunite with the Doctor while he’s still powerfully in the midst of moping over the loss of his best pals Amy and Rory.
Much to everyone’s relief, he’s snapped prematurely out of his sulk by an encounter with a nosey barmaid/governess named Clara – hang about, isn’t this that lady who attempted to make soufflés (which I promise are actually pretty easy to make, and you should definitely have a go if you’ve never made one) and turned out to be a Dalek?
These were innocent times, before the Clara mystery was solved – remember the many and various fun theories we bandied about for months on end?
This is a story with a lot going for it: it’s got the Paternoster Gang, Richard E Grant, the voice of Ian McKellen, the Doctor pretending to be Sherlock Holmes and the return of the Great Intelligence, an enemy first seen in Patrick Troughton’s ‘The Abominable Snowmen’, a wintry tale set in Tibet (which, it turns out, looks rather like Snowdonia).
The idea of alien snow that remembers seemed a bit preposterous when this special first aired, but then again, when the light dusting of snow freezes dangerously over the very morning you’d planned to go out for a drive, it’s easier to believe that it’s conspiring against you.
More importantly, there are a couple of surprising bookends to Clara’s story in this one: “Clara who?” asks the Doctor, just after trying – and failing – to erase Victorian Clara’s memory of him, which is quite directly echoed in Clara’s swan song, ‘Hell Bent’.
Indeed, it seems parts of this tale improve upon later viewing, matured like an especially moreish Christmas pudding. And that memory worm scene with Strax is still superb.
> Buy the Christmas specials box set on DVD on Amazon.
> Buy the Christmas specials box set on Blu-ray on Amazon.
What’s your favourite moment in ‘The Snowmen’? Let us know below…