Dr Who 7.Y (231): "The Snowmen" Letterbox Hybrid

PLEASE NOTE: These caches were originally all letterboxes, with stamps that I personally painstakingly made. Unfortunately, they have proven quite popular, and with that comes muggling. Apparently a number of the stamps have gone missing, and as some have complained about this, and I haven't the time to go and check all 100+ of them on a regular basis, I will be converting them to Traditional caches as needed.

It pains me to make this decision, but it must be done. I recognize that with a powertrail, caches are bound to go missing (that is the nature of the beast), and I appreciate that many of you have helped out by bringing along spares. However, your average cacher does NOT carry around spare stamps, and even if you did, it wouldn't be the one that I originally and personally made for the cache.

So, I am asking for your help: please let me know in your logs which ones are indeed missing their stamps, and I will be changing them to Traditionals (the alternative is archival, unfortunately). Thanks for your assistance in this endeavor, and thanks for supporting this series. I am glad that I spent the many hours needed to create these. However, I cannot justify consistently having to make and then replace all the stamps, due to time constraints.

Sincerely, the CO, josephaw

9/27/15

First off, let me thank you for finding this geocache! I hope you enjoyed the experience of finding it as much as I enjoyed creating and hiding all of these letterbox caches.

This is just one of many such caches in my Dr Who Letterbox Series, made with the help and inspiration of friends. As a Letterbox cache, please leave the stamp for others to see and use, thanks! Each cache has a unique stamp, so bring an inkpad and collect them all! Have fun, and be safe!

"The Snowmen" is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, first broadcast on Christmas Day 2012 on BBC One. It is the eighth Christmas special since the show's 2005 revival and the first to be within a series. It was written by head writer and executive producer Steven Moffat and directed by Saul Metzstein.

The episode is set in the Victorian era and sees the Doctor (Matt Smith) brooding with the assistance of Silurian Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh), her wife Jenny Flint (Catrin Stewart) and Sontaran Strax (Dan Starkey), after the loss of companions Amy Pond and Rory Williams in the previous episode, "The Angels Take Manhattan". He is forced out of hiding to investigate mysterious, sentient snowmen that are building themselves and meets Clara Oswald (Jenna-Louise Coleman), a governess also investigating the snowmen. They discover that the snowmen are being animated by the Great Intelligence (voice of Ian McKellen) with the help of a man named Dr Simeon (Richard E. Grant).

Building upon the character's surprise introduction in "Asylum of the Daleks", "The Snowmen" introduces Clara as the Doctor's new companion, though ultimately it would be a third version of her character that would travel with the Doctor starting with "The Bells of Saint John". In addition to Clara, "The Snowmen" also introduces a redesigned TARDIS, revised title sequence and theme music, and sees changes to the Doctor's costume. The special was produced in August 2012, with location filming in Newport, Wales and Bristol. It received final ratings of 9.87 million viewers in the UK, becoming the fourth most-watched programme of Christmas Day. "The Snowmen" was met with mostly positive reviews from critics, most of whom received the introduction and character of Clara well. However, some felt that Grant and McKellen were underused as villains or the plot was slight because of the focus on characterisation.

Prequels

To promote the special, three prequels were released. The first was broadcast during the 2012 Children in Need telethon on 16 November 2012, titled "The Great Detective".^[1] The Silurian Madame Vastra, her human wife Jenny Flint, and the Sontaran Strax (all returning from "A Good Man Goes to War") describe a number of strange phenomena to a shadowed fourth detective. The fourth detective reveals himself to be the Doctor, and tells the group that he has retired.^[2]

A second prequel, titled "Vastra Investigates", was released online on 17 December 2012.^[3] At the end of a case, Vastra and Jenny converse with an officer from Scotland Yardand apologise for Strax's violent wishes for the culprit's punishment. Vastra explains Strax's alien origin as well as her own to the officer, much to his astonishment. Vastra reveals that she was awoken by an extension to the London Underground and initially disliked humans, though that changed when she fell in love with Jenny. On the carriage ride home, Jenny notices it is beginning to snow and Vastra notes that the snow should be impossible because there are no clouds in the sky.^[3]

A third prequel, titled "The Battle of Demon's Run — Two Days Later" was released on the United States iTunes and Amazon Instant Video stores on 25 March 2013.^[4][5] Two days after the events of "A Good Man Goes to War", Vastra and Jenny convince Strax that he is not mortally wounded and invite him to accompany them back to 1800s London. The scene had been filmed as an extra due to the anticipation that fans would ask how Strax was resurrected.^[6]

Synopsis

In 1842 England, a young boy builds a snowman, but refuses to play with the other children. The snowman starts speaking to the boy, repeating his assertions that the other children are silly. Fifty years later, the boy has grown up to be Dr. Walter Simeon, proprietor of the Great Intelligence Institute. He hires men to collect samples of snow, which he places in a large snow-filled globe in his laboratory before feeding the men to a group of animated snowmen. The Doctor, still despondent after losing his former companions Amy Pond and Rory Williams, has parked his TARDIS above Victorian London among the clouds. He uses his allies Vastra, Jenny, and Strax to keep people away from him. They also fill their time investigating mysteries throughout the city.

Elsewhere, barmaid Clara Oswin Oswald investigates a disturbance outside the tavern she works at and finds the Doctor walking by. He attempts to leave discreetly, but Clara follows him to a coach. Not wishing to become involved in matters, the Doctor instructs Strax to bring him a memory worm that will erase the last hour of Clara's memories with just a touch. Before they can do so, they are surrounded by snowmen created from snow with psychic properties who attack the group. The Doctor realises that Clara's thoughts are creating the snowmen and ends the threat by instructing her to think of them melting. Clara cautions the Doctor that if he wipes her memory, she will forget how to deal with the snowmen. The Doctor reluctantly allows her to go and ascends a staircase to the sky to return to the TARDIS. Clara follows him and knocks on the door, but she hides and flees down the staircase when the Doctor answers. Clara returns to her other job as governess for the children of Captain Latimer. She learns that Latimer's daughter has been having horrible dreams about their previous governess returning from the dead. Clara realises that the pond that contains the old governess' body is the only thing still frozen around them. She attempts to track down the Doctor but instead attracts the attention of Jenny, who takes her to see Vastra. Vastra tells Clara she gets only one word to impress the Doctor with if she wants his help. Clara chooses the word "Pond", which shocks the Doctor and arouses his interest.

Acting on a tip from Strax, the Doctor visits the Great Intelligence Institute posing as Sherlock Holmes. He confronts Dr. Simeon and find a large glass globe in Simeon's office that contains psychic snow. The Doctor speaks to the Great Intelligence, the entity that has been speaking to Dr. Simeon since he was a boy. He learns that the Great Intelligence has been controlling the snowmen and has taken interest in Latimer's pond. The Doctor visits the pond and deduces that the Great Intelligence is using the old governess' body as a DNA blueprint to form an ice creature that will retain its form and not melt. While Clara is putting the children to bed, the frozen body of the governess breaks into the house. The Doctor fights her off and is joined by Vastra, Jenny and Strax. Dr. Simeon arrives with more snowmen and tells them he wants the governess' ice body. The Doctor flees with Clara to the roof of the mansion and then to the TARDIS hovering overhead. They are pursued by the ice governess, whom the Doctor traps under a layer of frozen ice crystals. Inside the TARDIS the Doctor gives Clara a TARDIS key, but the ice governess arrives and pulls Clara down off the cloud.

The Doctor picks up Clara and takes her back to Latimer's mansion, placing her under medical care of Strax. He collects the ice fragments from the governess and places them in a souvenir London Underground biscuit tin. He and Vastra travel to Simeon's lab, where the Doctor notes the Intelligence's plan to replace humanity with ice creatures and holds up the tin with the necessary DNA. Dr Simeon grabs the tin and opens it only to find the memory worm, which latches on to him. The Doctor states that the Great Intelligence, which has been existing as a mirror of Dr Simeon's thoughts, will vanish with the erasure of Simeon's memories. Instead, the Intelligence reveals that it existed long enough that it can now control Simeon's body, which it uses to attack Vastra and the Doctor. The influence of the Great Intelligence quickly wanes, and Simeon falls dead. Outside, a salt-water rain has started, and the Doctor sees that another psychic ability has taken control of the snow from the Great Intelligence: the Latimer family, crying for Clara. Strax informs the Doctor upon his return to the Latimer mansion that Clara only has moments left, and she passes away as the Doctor returns the TARDIS key to her. At her funeral, the Doctor reads Clara's full name on her tombstone and realises she is the woman he met in "Asylum of the Daleks" who became a Dalek, whom he refers to as "Soufflé Girl". He gleefully announces that a person dying twice is an impossibility and, bidding farewell to his allies for now, the Doctor departs in the TARDIS to investigate and find Clara. The episode concludes in contemporary times, where a young woman resembling Clara walks through the same graveyard, pausing by Clara's tombstone.

Continuity

The Second Doctor previously encountered the Great Intelligence in the serials The Abominable Snowmen (1967), set in the 1930s, and The Web of Fear (1968), set in the 1960s.^[7] In these stories, the Great Intelligence usesrobot Yeti as its physical presence. The events of The Web of Fear are alluded to by the Doctor in "The Snowmen" when he presents the London Underground biscuit tin to the Great Intelligence in Dr Simeon's laboratory; the Intelligence states, "I do not understand these markings", in reference to the 1967 London Underground map design on the tin. The Doctor remarks that the Underground is a "key strategic weakness in metropolitan living", referring to (and possibly setting in motion) the future Yeti attack on London via the Underground.^[9]

Coleman previously played Oswin Oswald in "Asylum of the Daleks",^[10] though the connection between the two characters is not clarified until Clara reveals she has an interest in soufflés, a trait that Oswin's character also had.^[11][12] The final scenes at the graveyard establish that Clara shares the same name as Oswin, leading the Doctor to surmise they are the same person. As seen on her gravestone, Clara's birthdate is 23 November, the dateDoctor Who was first transmitted in 1963.^[13]

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