Written by Terry Nation | Directed by John Gorrie | Produced by Verity Lambert | Original air date 05/02/64
Barbara and Ian, delirious with cold, pass out on what we discover is a mountain. A creepy, bearded man discovers them and takes them to his hut. He is played as a creep almost immediately - when Barbara comes to, he's watching her, and explains that her hands are slightly frostbitten. He explains to her that she'll need to rub them to bring circulation back, and demonstrates. How Barbara doesn't recoil in disgust is beyond me. He asks her if she's afraid of him - implying that she probably should be (she should be). He claims to have killed a wolf with his bare hands, so he doesn't get many visitors because people are afraid of him. I'd say, even if that weren't true, I still wouldn't want to visit the beardy creep at his reclusive hut on the freezing cold mountain. He says his name is Vasor, and that he found the two of them on the side of the mountain, and with the help of some "madman," carried them to his hut. He says the madman was looking for two girls, which Ian and Barbara think is probably Altos looking for Susan and Sabetha. Ian wants to go looking for them, but knows he'll freeze quickly with just his regular clothes on. He asks Vasor for some furs, but Vasor claims to be a poor man and doesn't want to lose any money if Ian falls down a ravine or gets otherwise killed and doesn't come back with his furs, so Ian trades his travel bracelet for some clothes and takes off, leaving Barbara all alone with beardy creep.
As soon as Ian's gone, Vasor bolts the door shut, rubs his hand together, and approaches Barbara, saying, "There, we're alone." Barbara says Ian will be back, to which Vasor replies, "We'll see. I'll go get food, we must fatten you up!" How creepy can this guy get? They eat some food, and he tells Barbara to clean up, and when she does, she opens a drawer and finds a few travel bracelets and the keys of Marinus they've already found. Vasor roars in anger for her looking in the drawer, and explains that he traded food and flint for the keys and bracelets, which Barbara knows is a lie, since they'd never trade the keys. She accuses him of stealing it all, and Vasor laughs when Barbara says he'll be in trouble when Ian gets back. "He doesn't know what I've put in his bag," he says.
Ian comes across Altos, tied up and left for dead on the mountain. He frees him and Altos explains that he was attacked by Vasor. Ian realizes his mistake and they hurry back to the hut, but in their rush, Ian's bag opens and out falls raw meat, which Vasor put there to lure the packs of wolves (Vasor isn't the most intelligent hermit you'll ever meet - why he didn't just kill off Ian and Altos and take Barbara back to his house, we'll never know).
Just before Ian and Altos return, we see Vasor and Barbara struggling, and - in the scariest moment of the episode - Barbara is pushed onto the bed while Vasor looms over her, the closest I think the show has ever come to hinting that a companion is about to be raped (from what I can recall - it may not be sexual, but the Sixth Doctor's choking of Peri in Twin Dilemma is somehow harder to watch than this, and this is pretty intense for a 1960 sci-fi show primarily for children). Luckily, Ian and Altos show up before Vasor reaches her, and Barbara is able to fend Vasor off as she unlocks the door for them. They force Vasor to take them to the caves where he apparently left Susan and Sabetha.
They arrive at an ice cave (which is actually cellophane, adorably), and Vasor does not want to go in - he claims there's demons inside. We see Susan and Sabetha exploring deeper into the cave to try to find the exit, and they cross a rickety old rope bridge and find a weird room with four unmoving men guarding a block of ice (with one of the keys of Marinus frozen inside it, we later find out. It's hard to see, probably because suspending a piece of plastic in a block of ice is a bit beyond the BBCs budget for this episode). They double back, and everyone meets up at the rope bridge, which Vasor cuts down, trapping them all on the side with the key but, crucially, without their travel bracelets. Why the hell Ian didn't take all that stuff when they left Vasor's hut, I have no idea, it's common freaking sense. Barbara knew about them, too, so it's not like they were unaware of their location! They need to find something to cross the gap with, as Ian claims it's too wide to jump, mercifully saving us from another slog of a half episode of people jumping over a freaking chasm (which would have been the second time in the same season Nation pulled that same lame plot point. Hell, having to make a bridge across a gap isn't all that different. At least here it's not like twenty minutes of plot total).
When the arrive at the room with the four unmoving men, they notice a pipe surrounding the ice, with a valve attached to it. They turn the valve and notice it's getting warm, so they leave it on so the ice will melt and go back to build the bridge so they can get back to Vasor's hut to get the travel bracelets that they should have just friggin' brought with them in the first place. After they tie together some blocks of ice and lay it across the gap to freeze in place, they go back to collect the key, to see that the men have awoken and are attacking them. They grab the key and run back to the ice bridge, which Susan has successfully crossed, but it collapsed just after. She reattaches the bridge to the wall and everyone crosses. Once across, Ian detaches the bridge again to slow the "ice warriors" (as the subtitles call them - no indication here if they're from Mars) down. One falls down the crevasse as he does so. They all get back to Vasor's, get their stuff, and are about to teleport away when Vasor grabs Susan near the door - but before he can do anything, he is stabbed through the door by one of the "ice warriors" polearms. The group teleports away before the ice men get inside.
We then see Ian find a body on the ground, which he begins inspecting, as he's struck from behind by an unseen person wearing a glove. This person puts his weapon in Ian's hand, clearly intending to frame him for the attack, and opens the glass case behind Ian as an alarm goes off. He takes what will turn out to be the last key of Marinus and the episode ends.
Hartnell has been absent for a lot of the episodes, lately, which is odd to think about since this is the first season of the show in which he's the pseudonymous character. I barely noticed, though, because though these last two episodes have had their faults, I've largely enjoyed them. I can't help but make fun of Terry Nation sometimes, but he does know how to write for 1960s British television in a way that mostly holds up today. Some of his plotting and dialogue can be sloppy, but he usually has pretty good ideas. Vasor is an absolute creep and is way scarier and more devious than the frozen ice men in the cave and is the main reason why I like this episode so much (I hate the character, of course, but he's just so gross and awful that I find him compelling to watch). Still, I'm glad Hartnell is coming back in tomorrow's episode - we get few enough extant episodes with him actually in them, it sucks when non-missing episodes don't even have the main character.
"Doctor Who" puns so far: 2 | Tomorrow: "Sentence of Death"
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