Will offered director Douglas Mackinnon a suggestion as a potential audience grabber for the submarine drama Cold War (2013). “I tried to sell the idea that we start with the tag line, so that the episode had a different style from the normal Doctor Who opener,” he says, describing the first cutting copy. This began with an alien alphabet offering the visual version of a phrase in a native Martian tongue, translated by subtitles as a prelude to Skaldak’s declaration of the ancient Ice Warrior code: “Harm one of us – and you harm us all… / By the Moons, this I swear.” The teaser was subsequently tightened to remove odd lines of dialogue (such as Captain Zhukov telling Professor Grisenko that he too preferred Ultravox’s “early stuff” to Vienna) and action such as Zhukov and his crew checking that their attack signals were genuine in a code folder.
The caption in Cold War (2013) gave the location and year as the North Pole, 1983.
Cold War’s Skaldak (Spencer Wilding).