Confirmation that the Ice Warriors will return...

Photo courtesy of the BBC

SFX bagged themselves an exclusive earlier today by posting confirmation that the Ice Warriors will return in Series 7B.  Speaking to SFX, Caroline Skinner said:

"We’ve got the most fantastic episode by Mark Gatiss where we are bringing back the Ice Warrior… on a submarine! It’s a really wonderful kind of ‘bunker’ episode, and a classic monster which Mark has brought his own inimitable twist to.”

Their return has long been rumoured - with Matt Smith dropping the odd hint at the "11th Hour" convention last year - but it's nice to finally get confirmation.  If you look closely in the "Coming Soon" trailer you can see a clawlike hand gripping a chap's throat:

It's been almost 40 years since we last saw them - in 1974's "Monster of Peladon" - and they've been a bit unpredictable ... sometimes they're the out and out villains but occasionally they've been "friendly".  Caroline Skinner goes on to say:

“We wanted to bring them back because they’re wonderful!  In the mix of stories that we were planning for this year it felt as if doing something very bold with a monster that hadn’t been seen for a while would be really cool. Mark is an enormous fan of the Ice Warrior stories and came up with the idea. The sense of a monster of that scale and that size trapped in a really small, contained environment such as a submarine was a really brilliant story to be able to tell. And obviously we’ve had a huge amount of fun going back to the traditional designs and recreating them, bringing the Ice Warriors back to life again."

I've loved the Ice Warriors for years - I really can't wait to see their return.

Read the full article in SFX.