FEATURE BY ALAN BARNES
Of course, the eponymous Empress, she “of ” the Red Planet, isn’t necessarily the Ice Warrior queen Iraxxa, rudely awoken from her sleep of five millennia. The presumed Empress of Mars could also be a certain royal personage who, five years before, had formally adopted the title ‘Empress of India’ – to wit, Alexandrina Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837 until her death in 1901. That’s why Colonel Godsacre, Captain Catchpole and their regiment of Redcoats have come (by means of a restored Martian vessel) to the fourth planet of the solar system in the year of their Lord 1881: “To claim Mars in the name of Queen Victoria,” realises the Doctor.“To loot it of its riches, stake a claim. The red planet turned pink.” Traditionally, countries claimed by the British Crown were coloured pink on maps, in atlases and on globes; and the wholly rotten Catchlove will later tell the Doctor, explicitly, that “Mars is part of the Empire now”.