Thin Ice is a decent typical Doctor Who story, but that's it-- despite starring good old Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, it doesn't really feel like it picks up from when they walked off our screens in Survival all those years ago. The last two seasons of the McCoy adventures were loud, bold, different, exciting: we're talking about the two seasons that gave us stories as varied as The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and Survival, The Happiness Patrol and The Curse of Fenric, Remembrance of the Daleks and, er... Silver Nemesis. But Thin Ice is sedate, overlong, old hat. It's probably an insurmountable problem to be honest: new and exciting Doctor Who has been done many times and many ways in the 21 years since Thin Ice would have graced our screens.

It feels churlish to be slamming Thin Ice for not being The Curse of Fenric (what else is!?), but when you’re selling your story on the basis of nostalgia, I expect you to deliver on it. Despite its cliché title, Thin Ice is an okay story, but 1988-89 gave us not a run of okay stories, but seven of the best Doctor Who stories ever made. And Silver Nemesis, but let’s not talk about that.

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF.

Another of the Big Finish "missing stories", this one drastically expanded by Marc Platt from a note he did for Andrew Cartmel shortly before Old Who was cancelled. I find Platt's work a bit hit and miss, but this was a hit for me: the setting in Moscow in 1967, with the human side of Cold War relations between Britain and Russia colliding with Ice Warriors hunting a malevolent relic and also a plot line which I recognised from one of the later BBC webcast stories. There's a slightly dubious sfnal enhancement of the human reproductive process, and I also found the music occasionally intrusive and not a perfect match for the 60s setting (though an excuse for that is given in the commentary extras). Those points apart, it is so much better than last year's Sixth Doctor/Ice Warrior teamup, the dreadful Mission to Magnus, which should have stayed lost. Thin Ice was worth reviving. ( )