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Just in case you weren’t feeling cold enough already… 15 ice planets to make you feel all Christmassy. It’s an expanded, update feature from a couple of years back
1 The Oodsphere
From: Doctor Who “The End Of Time, Part One”
The icy home world of the Ood, located in the Horse Head Nebula, near to the Sense Sphere (the Sensorite home planet). Considering the Ood carry their brains outside their bodies, you’d presume someone on the planet makes a killing selling customised, heated brain-cosies.
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2 Unnamed Planet In The Takara Sector
From: Star Trek: Voyager “Timeless”
In an alternate timeline, this lonely, frozen planet became the icy tomb of the USS Voyager and all her crew (except Chakotay and Kim who were in the Delta Flyer at the time, and later manage to alter history so that the crash never happened). The crash itself must rate as the single most impressive FX shot ever attempted by small screen Trek .
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3 Frigia
From: Flash Gordon
Not really a planet, but one of the floating kingdoms of Mongo, and that’ll do for us. In the original comic strips it was actually a region of icy mountains and caverns on Mongo itself, ruled by Prince Barin’s cousin, Queen Fria. We don’t get to see much of its gravity-defying incarnation in the 1980 film – it’s just a frosty location that Flash threatens to crash Aura’s shuttle into.
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4 Unnamed Ice Planet
From: Farscape, “Die Me, Dichotomy”
Season two’s cliffhanger finale saw Crichton lose his mind (almost literally) and Aeryn lose her life (albeit temporarily) on this godforsaken sub-zero rock. There’s a great dog fight over the frozen wastes, which ends with Aeryn plummeting into a chilly lake.
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5 Djerba
From: Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome
Winter resort Djerba (coincidentally the name of a Tunisian island, fact collectors) was captured by Cylon forces during the first Cylon war and quickly turned into a research base. In caves beneath the surface there are labs experimenting on early organic-robot hybrids...
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6 Hoth
From: Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Sci-fi’s most famous winter wonderland, and over 30 years of advances in computer FX have yet to give us a better ice planet. So much so that any time you see an ice planet now, you immediately think, “Hoth!” The Tauntauns are great too (even if they smell bad inside and out) but you have to feel sorry for the poor old Wampa. He looked ’armless to us…
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7 EDN III
From: Lost Planet
For some reason, evil megacorporation Neo-Venus Construction (NEVEC) wants to colonise this planet, despite the fact it’s in the grip of an ice age, and one of the indigenous species is the aggressive, territorial, insectoid Akrids (who have the handy knack of generating their own, natural thermal energy).
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8 Rura Penthe
From: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
A frozen Klingon-controlled planet most famous for its penal colony with its harsh conditions and dilithium mines. Yep, it’s a gulag, basically, but with more exotic inmates (it’s actually named after a Siberian penal colony in War And Peace ).
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9 “Hoth”
From: Stargate Universe
One of the planets with a Stargate discovered by the crew of the Destiny, and christened Hoth by the ship’s resident geek Eli (the others wanted to call it Val D’Isère, because they’re not nerdy, but into sports and stuff). This Hoth has an average temperature of minus 47 degrees Celsius and a poisonous atmosphere – a bit like Port Talbot in January, then.
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10 Delta Vega
From: Star Trek (2009)
Delta Vega is an M Class planet, and the best place in the galaxy for a view of an exploding Vulcan. They tried to sell tickets to spectators, but the sub-zero temperatures and aggressive, giant, carnivorous life forms were a bit of a problem for the marketing guys.
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11 Narnia
From: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe
Narnia wasn’t supposed to be an ice planet, but under the rule of evil witch queen Jadis it was turned into a permanent North Pole. But did the locals knuckle down and make the best of the situation by mustering up an Olympic bobsleigh team, or phoning the office to say they'd work from home? No, all they did was moan and whinge… .
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12 Ice Planets
From: Firefly “Messages”
The Serenity crew hid out on an ice planet in “The Message” (below) but there were more tasty ice planet on offer in the show as well. An Ice Planet was a dessert created from a sphere of ice cream, suspended from a string attached to a stick. Guaranteed to make anyone eating one end up look like a toddler who hasn’t quite discovered where their mouth is yet.
13 Ice Planet Zero
From: Battlestar Galactica “Gun On Ice Planet Zero”
Long before Blood & Chrome (or is that long after? Depends which time line you’re working from, presumably) another Galactica crew was having trouble on a different ice planet. Y’see, the Cylons have built this bloody great pulsar cannon on a wintry planet (maybe it cuts down on coolant costs) that the Galactica can’t avoid because there are Basestars on its tail. So Apollo, Starbuck, and Boomer lead a fur-lined hood-wearing away team down to the planet to knobble the cannon. The Cylons, meanwhile, top up on ant-freeze and swagger around knowing they look really cool against the snowy backdrops.
14 Tau Volantis
From: Dead Space 3
The pant-wettingly terrifying Dead Space series is taking a break from relentless creepy corridors for the third entry in the franchise. Instead, hero Isaac Clarke and his fractured psyche will be taking a trip to (read: crash landing on) Ice Planet Tau Volantis, where Necromorphs, human enemies and city-sized alien nasties are only half the problem – surviving the harsh conditions is the real danger.
15 Unnamed Planet
From: Red Dwarf “Marooned”
When Starbug is hit by a meteor it crash lands on an ice planet, leaving Rimmer and Lister with only a Pot Noodle, half a bag of soggy smoky bacon crisps, a tin of mustard powder, three water biscuits, a brown lemon and two bottles of vinegar to survive on (and a tube of Bonjella if they get really desperate). To survive the cold, Lister starts burning Rimmer's collection of books (including Biggles' Big Adventure and The Complete Works Of Shakespeare ) but finally they have to make a crucial choice – either Lister’s Les Paul guitar or Rimmer’s collection of Napoleonic toy soldiers must go on the fire. Lister appears to make the ultimate sacrifice, but after they’re rescued, Rimmer discovers a guitar-shaped hole in his cherished camphor wood chest…
