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Showrunner Steven Moffat had originally been hesitant to bring back the Ice Warriors, worrying that they were seen as "the default condition for what people thought of as rubbish Doctor Who monsters - things that moved very, very slowly and spoke in a way that meant you couldn't hear a word they said".[4] Writer Mark Gatiss, however, was a fan of the Ice Warriors stories and had been campaigning to bring them back.[3][4] In a phone conversation with Moffat that was originally supposed to be about their show Sherlock, Gatiss pitched new and "very clever ideas" of what to do with the Ice Warriors, and Moffat agreed.[5] The submarine setting was Gatiss's idea, and executive producer Caroline Skinner described the story as "Letting a huge Ice Warrior loose at the heart of a classic Hunt For Red October style submarine movie".[3] Gatiss felt that the Ice Warriors had a lot of gaps in their timeline and had not been featured in a while, which allowed a lot of room to explore them.[6]

The episode was filmed in July.[7] For the submarine setting, the cast would be sprayed in between every take.[8] Coleman stated, "The whole make-up process was reversed as they would damp us down in the morning and rub my mascara off!"[8] Unlike some other returning monsters, the Ice Warriors were not heavily redesigned. Gatiss insisted upon keeping the fundamentals of the original[6] and Moffat explained that the original design was not well-known enough to put a new spin on it, and so it is just a "super-version of the original".[5] Of the original design, Millennium FX's Neill Gorton said, "My problem with the old ones is they had Lego hands and weird, spindly arms but a bulky body and these strange saddlebag hips, almost feminine. They had fur sticking out everywhere. So all of that together didn't suggest "ice warriors". They should be much beefier and stronger. We gave it more of a bodybuilder physique, changed the hands and styled the body to make it look more like armour-plating, even though it's reptilian."[9] The costume was made of flexible urethane rubber instead of the fibreglass like the original, as it would damage less easily and be more comfortable to wear. The costume was made to specially fit Spencer Wilding.[9]