They were originally created by Brian Hayles, first appearing in the 1967 serial The Ice Warriors where they encountered the Second Doctor and his companions Jamie and Victoria.

[citation needed] James Chapman suggests that director Derek Martinus drew from the Christian Nyby film The Thing from Another World in realising Hayles' scripts, particularly the concept of an alien frozen in ice near an isolated science base.

Peter Bryant, the producer of Doctor Who by 1969, also felt that a second appearance might better justify the expensive Ice Warrior costumes employed in their debut serial.

[8] Actors like Bernard Bresslaw (who portrayed the Ice Warrior Varga in their first appearance) used a sibilant whisper to demonstrate both the reptilian qualities of the monsters as well as to suggest that the Martian atmosphere is composed differently from that of Earth.

[10][12] Neill Gorton chose to make the creatures appear "beefier and stronger", redesigning the Ice Warrior armour to resemble plating.

In this story, the world has grown dependent on the matter transmission system T-Mat, which an Ice Warrior strike force intends to exploit to conquer Earth.

This plan is foiled by the Second Doctor and his companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Zoe (Wendy Padbury), and the invading Martian fleet is sent into an orbit around the Sun.

[18] When the Ice Warriors returned in 1972, in The Curse of Peladon, it was decided by the production team to subvert the audience's expectations, featuring them as allies of the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) rather than villains.

[citation needed] The serial depicts the Ice Warriors having renounced violence and become members of a Galactic Federation that, besides Mars, also includes Earth, Alpha Centauri and Arcturus.

[3] With the help of the Ice Warriors, the Doctor uncovers a plot by the High Priest, Hepesh (Geoffrey Toone), and the delegation from Arcturus, a world which is an old enemy of Mars, each with their own motives, to prevent Peladon's admission to 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.

[21] During the Third Doctor serial The Mind of Evil, when forced to confront his fears by the Keller Machine, he sees images of his past enemies, including the Ice Warriors.

The newly-regenerated Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison), during a moment of initial instability, makes mention of the Ice Warriors and the Brigadier in the 1981 serial Castrovalva.

[10][23] When confronted by alien sentient water in the 2009 episode "The Waters of Mars", the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) theorizes that the Ice Warriors froze it in an underground glacier to prevent its escape, testing the virus by addressing it in Ancient North Martian as it reacts to his words, referring to them as "a fine and noble race who built an empire out of snow".

After failing to communicate with his fleet for rescue or reinforcements, Skaldak leaves his armour and tears apart crew members to forensically study the weaknesses of human anatomy.

One crew member, Stepashin (Tobias Menzies), reveals to Skaldak that the submarine is armed with nuclear missiles that could destroy the planet.

[25] In the episode, a crew of soldiers in the Victorian era help an Ice Warrior who they nickname Friday to get home after his crashed ship is salvaged and he is awoken from suspended animation, only for him to discover the planet is dead.

Despite a rebellion by one of the soldiers, Colonel Godsacre, the mission's true commander, negotiates his death as long as she spares the rest of his men and the Earth.

It features the Doctor and Ice Warriors dispatched by the Galactic Federation to find a murderer hiding himself in the crowds of a Peladonian ceremony.

[30] Savaar was among a group of Ice Warriors who later attended Bernice Summerfield's wedding in the 1996 novel Happy Endings by Paul Cornell.

[31] The Dying Days depicts the Eighth Doctor preventing an Ice Warrior invasion in 1997, with the aid of the Brigadier and Bernice Summerfield.

The novel reveals that, after the Mars Probe missions, depicted in the 1970 serial The Ambassadors of Death, Earth made inadvertent hostile contact with the Ice Warriors, which was covered up by British intelligence services.

Lord Greyhaven, the minister in charge of the novel's missions to Mars, has been in contact with the Ice Warriors and aids in their take-over of the United Kingdom.

According to this story, previous uncrewed Mars probes had brought back fragments of alien technology and DNA, and scientists had gone so far as to create human/Martian hybrid clones.

This is difficult to reconcile with The Dying Days, and may support the idea that the novels and audios take place in separate parallel universes.

In this version of their origin, the Ice Warriors were the products of genetic engineering by the original inhabitants of Mars to act as a security force, augmenting a race of turtle-like creatures to serve the more lizard-esque Martians, but the research project that created the Ice Warriors was taken over by a psychopath who sought to create her own power base.

The last Ice Lord learns that some of his people survive on the colony below, living in the ghettos of the human city, but he attempts to destroy the Doctor with his suit's self-destruct systems rather than accept that his vengeance has been for nothing.

In the monthly Doctor Who comic strips, an Ice Warrior named Harma is part of Abslom Daak's Dalek-killing band, the Star Tigers.