History Within The Show
Due to the time-travelling nature of the television series, the Doctor would encounter the Ice Warriors out of sequence relative to his timeline. Their first on-screen appearance was in the 1967 story The Ice Warriors, set at a time in the future when the world was in the grip of a new ice age. A scientific team sent to halt the advance of the glaciers discovered a spacecraft buried underneath the ice, where it had lain for thousands of years together with its Ice Warrior crew. The Martians revived and attempted to take over the scientific base, but were defeated by the Second Doctor and their ship destroyed as it tried to take off. No date is given for this story on screen, but the Radio Times listing for the serial placed it at the year 3000.
Their next appearance was in the 1969 serial The Seeds of Death, which took place in the mid-21st century. In that story, the world had grown dependent on the matter transmission system T-Mat. An Ice Warrior strike force seized control of the T-Mat relay on the Moon, using it to send the titular seeds to Earth, which were designed to alter the planet's atmosphere to be hospitable to Martian life, by reducing the atmosphere's oxygen content to one-twentieth, exactly like Mars. The plan was foiled by the Second Doctor and his companions Jamie and Zoe, and the invading Martian fleet was sent into an orbit around the Sun.
By the time of 1972's The Curse of Peladon, the Ice Warriors had renounced violence (except in self-defence) and become respected members of a Galactic Federation that included Earth, Mars, Alpha Centauri and Arcturus. When the Third Doctor encountered them on a diplomatic mission to decide the admission of the planet Peladon to the Federation, he was initially distrustful, believing them to be behind an attempted sabotage of the proceedings. However, the culprit turned out to be someone else.
In the 1974 serial The Monster of Peladon (which took place 50 years after Curse), the Ice Warriors returned to Peladon as Federation peacekeeping troops. The leader of the Martian troops, Azaxyr, was working with Galaxy 5, which was at war with the Federation. Seeking a return to the race's warrior past, he tried to impose martial law and take over Peladon, but was stopped by the Peladonians, who were aided by the Third Doctor. Curiously in this appearance, Azaxyr referred to his troops as Ice Warriors. Neither Peladon serials give dates, but the Virgin New Adventures novel Legacy by Gary Russell placed them as taking place around the 39th and 40th centuries.
A possible unseen adventure involving the Ice Warriors is alluded to in Castrovalva. The newly-regenerated and still unstable Fifth Doctor regresses to an earlier personality and memory, saying, "Not far now, Brigadier, unless the Ice Warriors get there first!". The final New Adventures novel, The Dying Days by Lance Parkin, features a 1997 invasion of Earth by the Ice Warriors, and also states that the Brigadier had not encountered them before.
In the 2009 episode, "The Waters of Mars", the Doctor mentions the legend of the Ice Warriors, calling them "a fine and noble race who built an empire out of snow." He also theorises that the alien entity that seems to be sentient water pursuing them in the episode was known to the Ice Warriors, who froze it in an underground glacier on Mars to prevent its escape.
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