17 August, 2023

Grip of ice, you're willing to sacrifice our thought cubes

Having survived the nightmare planet of Korad, the TARDIS lands on a Hoth-like planet of snow and ice. Zoe and Jamie don some funkadelic silvery planetary uniforms(?) and head outside to investigate while the Doctor attempts to fix the ship. As the beloved companions approach a crevasse in the ice, a breeze springs up which Zoe deems as being very odd: "Doesn't it strike you as unnatural..a breeze in these conditions?"

Living in Wisconsin, I must admit a breeze when it's all ice and snow outside is not only not unnatural, but par for the course. Not having the wind chill you to your bone is what I'd find unnerving.

This breeze menacingly blows our companions perilously towards the crevasse.

When the Doctor is finished repairing the ship, he goes out in search of Zoe and Jamie. He finds one of Zoe's buttons in the snow near the crevasse which now has a handy-dandy snow bridge spanning it. The Doctor walks across only to have the bridge go poof! and return to a dusting of snow. He continues on and finds a city. 

He enters a building and discovers a bunch of cubes - thought cubes, that is. These square thingies are all the remains of a race called the Morrains. You see, when their sun exploded, things got chilly so their head boffin, Cosmos, transformed them into thought cubes but he remained in humanoid form to watch over his fellow Morrains. Well, as it turns out, Cosmos wasn't such an altruistic chap after all. He was building a spaceship to leave the icy planet and was attempting to use the cubes' collective thought power to propel it to the nearest beach planet.

So, how many pounds of thrust per cube?

The Doctor is told that Zoe and Jamie's thought power were exactly what's needed to get Cosmos' ship up and away. Our hero, a.k.a - "the scientist", hops into a nearby scout car and heads to local version of Barad-dûr where Cosmos readies his ship. The Doctor offers his mega brain power in exchange for Zoe and Jamie and the rogue scientists agrees.

Zoe and Jamie take the scout ship to safety and await the arrival of the Doctor so they can head for the TARDIS. They hear an explosion from the tower but their friend is safe. He reversed the polarity of the neutron flow his thought-power which caused Cosmos' equipment to overload or some such thing and blow up real good. The villain was killed and the Doctor emerged unscathed.

And they all lived happily ever after.

While I thought that the thought cubes were a neat idea and I found it cool that Cosmos had 3 arms rendering him bilaterally asymmetrical, this was just another hokey Annual tale for 10 year-olds.

The TARDIS doors are described as "great doors" but I never thought of them as being these huge things. Also, Cosmos has "slant eyes". Is this an appeal to the notion that East Asians are crafty and evil? Or just a more generic description that has taken on racist overtones when none were meant?

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