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15TH NOVEMBER 2009
(60-MINUTE SPECIAL)
It may have been
a cold November night all those years ago when this roller-coaster
ride first started, but since Doctor Who’s revival in 2005 November
has been a pretty barren month for the show. That is, until now.
Billed as ‘the
beginning of the end’ for David Tennant’s tenth Doctor, The Waters of Mars
is a real departure from the joyous frivolity of the series’ Easter
special earlier in the year, Planet of the Dead. This sixty-minute
episode sees the Doctor arrive at the delightfully-named Mars
colony ‘Bowie Base One’ looking for “fun”, but lamentably for him he’s in
for anything but.
Set on 21st
November 2059, almost exactly fifty years from the special’s broadcast date
(I smell
a last-minute BBC schedule change!), The Waters of Mars is the new
series’ first foray into humanity’s near-future and, I have to say, the
picture painted is most certainly a plausible one. Remarkably little appears to
have changed since our day – the humans of 2059 just seem to have more
pixels and less food, but they still wear jeans. They still live in houses
with sofas, tables and chairs. They still use t’internet. And the clean,
white lines of NASA-descended technology are plainly there for all to see.
The Bowie Base
exterior is a gorgeous piece of CGI; one that makes me grateful that the
series is now being produced and broadcast in glorious HD. Clearly influenced by the real-life National Botanic Garden of Wales (where much
of this episode was shot), like its interior and its crew the Bowie Base
reeks of contemporaneousness. For all the ways in which the history
of Earth in Doctor Who has diverged from our own, the basics
are still the same.
“Ooh. I really should go… Whatever’s started here, I can’t see it to the
end.”
The story itself
is truly a tale of two halves, outgoing showrunner Russell T Davies and
his Sarah Jane Adventures cohort Phil Ford initially using their
script to tell a fairly traditional corridor romp. That’s not to suggest
that the subject matter isn’t inspired though because
it is – the
relatively recent real-life discovery of ice on Mars positively
begged the Doctor
Who treatment. More fundamentally though, water
is something that we encounter every-
day; something that we depend
on for life, and so to take it and make it the stuff of night-mares without
drowning a single member of your cast is a remarkable achievement.
“Don’t drink the water. Don’t even touch it. Not one drop.”
Introducing the
element of possession also ups the ante, particularly visually. Much in
the same way that the crew of the SS Pentallian in 42 were taken
over by the fires of a sentient star, leading to some spectacular Graeme
Harper visuals, here the crew of Bowie Base
One become
infected by the Martian water, one by one their pupils turning white and
their skin cracking as their faces begins to release torrents of infected
water. And all it takes to become infected is one drop…
The Waters of
Mars
isn’t all death and despair, however. Comic relief (and a bucket load more
besides) is provided by the base’s horrendously camp 1980s movie robot,
GADGET, which I was determined to hate but, ultimately, just couldn’t
bring myself to. The exasperating ‘Disney’ contraption is all that
prevents the episode from setting new records for gloominess, and without
him I fear that a great many viewers (viewers like my Mam) wouldn’t have
made it through the sixty minutes.
Furthermore,
Davies and Ford negotiate the series’ Martian continuity rather
dexterously, using the Martian Ice Warriors’ perceptible absence to lend
their story a little more weight rather than make it an encumbrance. The
Doctor’s lyrical dialogue about the “fine and noble race that built an
Empire out of snow” is delectably written and performed, and I’m
especially fond of the implicit idea that it was this aquatic infection
that caused the Martian exodus in the first place.
Nevertheless,
what sets The Waters of Mars apart from its fellow ‘base under
siege’ stories is the other half of the tale; the divisive part of
the narrative that sees the Doctor start down a very dark and disturbing
path indeed.
“...certain moments in time are
fixed. Tiny, precious moments. Everything else is in flux, anything can
happen; but those certain moments, they have to stand... What happens here
must always happen.”
From the opening
moments of this story, it is made plain that what happens on Mars on
21st November 2059 must always happen as it is a “fixed point” in time.
The pioneering Martian colonists must die and there is nothing that the
Doctor can do to save them without risking unravelling the sum total of
the web of time. And if the dialogue isn’t unequivocal enough for you, we
are also bombarded with some startlingly effective web-based obituaries
for each and every colonist. Born 1999. Died 2059. It’s fixed. It
happened. It will happen. You can’t cheat fate, and you certainly can’t
get one over on Time.
And so with this
in mind, I was expecting a future Pompeii; a grim and cheerless – though
utterly compelling - affair that would segue thematically into Tennant’s
final two-parter. After all, in the television series at least, the Doctor
has always sought to uphold the Time Lords’ Laws of Time with fervent
zeal. Indeed, in preceding episodes - most notably in The Fires of Pompeii and Father’s Day - his ferocious devotion to the same has
been the root of many
a furious moral debate with his well-intentioned
companions. In the end though, the Doctor would always remain steadfast.
If it were up to him who lived and who died - as Mr Copper
astutely observed in Voyage of the Damned - that would make him a
monster, and surely that’s the one thing that he would never let himself
become.
“It’s taken me all these years to realise the Laws of Time are mine, and
they will obey me!”
However, The
Waters of Mars sees the Doctor waver. Retreating from the doomed
colony he is knocked off his feet by a tumultuous explosion, and as he
stirs amidst the flames in
one of Harper’s most
exquisitely-shot
sequences yet, he finds himself ruminating on the demise of his people and
the implications of this. There is something in Tennant’s eyes – you can
almost see those almighty cogs turning – as the realisation hits him that
the Laws
of Time don’t apply to him anymore. They aren’t immutable,
physical constants; they never were. They’re just a code. A code that died
with his homeworld.
The
transformation in the Doctor’s character is both instant and majestic, but
it makes for
the most unsettling sequence that I
can recall seeing in the
series. Buoyed by Murray Gold’s grand score, the Doctor tears into the
moribund Bowie Base like the proverbial Oncoming Storm and starts to do
what he does best – save people. But whereas the Doctor’s actions usually
appear slick and effortless, here is visibly desperate and, for want of a
better word, drunk with illicit thrill of it all. Tennant’s feral
performance borders on disturbing as, almost maniacally, he strives to
save the remaining humans - not for them, but to prove that he can. The
Waters of Mars isn’t one of the series’ scariest episodes because of
the monsters; it’s one of the series’ scariest episodes because the Doctor
– the one and only constant in an otherwise hostile universe – has been tainted.
“For a long time now I’ve thought I was just a survivor, but I’m not.
I’m the winner. That’s who I am. A Time Lord Victorious.”
Now whilst I can
understand how this turn of events could
alarm some viewers (after all,
that’s the idea!), I have to confess to being tremendously excited by it;
the multitude
of possibilities that it opens up are mind-boggling. And
what’s more, I don’t subscribe to the idea of the Doctor
being a flawless
and unwavering force for good because,
simply put, he isn’t.
Previous incarnations - most notably
Sylvester
McCoy’s seventh Doctor - have strayed into very
grey territory indeed, and that’s before we
even get to the
‘Valeyard’ pseudo-incarnation (The Trial of a Time Lord)
and the terrible
truth that he could represent. I’m also mindful
of River Song’s
description of her [ future ] Doctor; a Time
Lord who can
open his TARDIS’ doors with just a click of
his fingers. Now
that doesn’t sound like a man who allows
himself to be
bound by an archaic code to me.
What I find
particularly alluring is the delicacy of it all; that fine line between
good and evil. Darth Vader – in my view the greatest movie villain
of all time - only became the monster
that he did
because he wanted to be a force for good; he wanted to put paid to the
Clone War that was tearing the galaxy apart and to save the life on his
pregnant wife.
However, there
is inevitably a ‘but’ coming. Simply put, I don’t
find the chain of events that lead the Doctor to his life-changing
epiphany all that convincing. The Doctor has been in
the type of situation
that he is faced with on Mars before on any number of occasions –
‘historicals’ such as this were William Hartnell’s bread and butter - yet
he’s never broken before. So why now?
“Three knocks is all you’re getting.”
The script
places a lot of reliance on the absence of a companion to ‘reign the
Doctor in’ as it were, and this at least makes a lot of sense. In
School Reunion, for instance, were it not for Sarah Jane’s impassioned
plea, then the Doctor might well have helped the Krillitanes
to crack the
Skasas Paradigm and unlock the sort of power that in this special he
wields. In itself though, this isn’t nearly enough.
The Waters of
Mars
also places a lot of emphasis on the tenth Doctor’s foreknowledge of his
impending demise, heavily suggesting that he is a man with little left too
lose and that
as such he’s something of a loose cannon. I’m not sure that I accept this
though, particularly given how cryptic the Doctor’s warnings about the end
of his “song” have been. How soon
is “soon” to a Time Lord?
“The woman with starlight in her soul…”
Taking
everything into account, the principal reason that I think the Doctor
behaves as he does here is the reverence that he has for the colony’s
mission captain, Adelaide Brooke. To the Doctor, she’s as much a
cornerstone of history as Dickens, Shakespeare, or even Queen
Victoria and so he holds her in high esteem in any event. But in getting
to know her over the course of this episode – which, admittedly, can’t be
long as events seem to occur
in or around real time – he is really impressed.
Lindsay Duncan’s
(Rome) character is hardly endearing by any objective standard, but
she is undeniably brilliant at what she does; inspirational, even. Every
bit the obdurate Captain Picard-like leader, Duncan’s performance is
astonishing throughout the episode. She is able to keep pace with Tennant
during their – many! – running scenes, and is equally adept when
she has to turn her hand to action (I love the ‘GADGET escape scene in
particular).
However,
where Duncan really shines is in her
portrayal of her
character’s dawning realisation
of her own
importance. The character is given
such a romantic
back story – her parents were
killed fifty
years earlier in the Dalek Invasion of
2009 (or 2008,
if we are to believe the web
page stills.
Looks like we have another ‘UNIT
dating’-style
debacle on our hands…), but rather than leave her bitter, the reveal of
alien life
actually
inspired her to reach for the stars. And as the enormity of what she has
achieved
and what her
lineage will go on to achieve begins to dawn on her, she is resigned to
her
daunting but
noble fate. And the real irony of it all is that it is probably Brooke’s
ability to
appreciate her
part in events and her solemn resignation to death that makes the Doctor
want to save her
so desperately.
But even given
the Doctor’s patent respect for Brooke, for me things still don’t quite
add up.
I would have
thought that it’d take something monumental; perhaps even something deeply
personal for the Doctor to overreach his power in such a way as he does
here. Whilst the absence of a companion at his side leaves him open to
such bouts of irresponsibility, I am sure that a story could have
been forged whereby the Doctor were travelling alone but it was the life
of, say, a former companion that were at stake. A companion who were the
‘fixed point’, perhaps, Charley Pollard-style. This would have had real
resonance after the loss of Donna and I’d have bought it hook, line, and
sinker.
“And there’s no-one to stop you.”
Even had The
Waters of Mars been, say, the eleventh episode of a run of stories in
which the Doctor had faced a series of similar mounting dilemmas, then I
would have found his
turn much more credible. But as a stand-alone special devoid of
satisfactory context, I feel that the Doctor’s actions in The
Waters of Mars are precipitous, to say the least.
However, the
reasons behind the Doctor’s fall from grace notwithstanding, the fall
itself is agonising to behold. As Tennant struts out of his TARDIS on
Earth with a Masterly omni-potent swagger, clearly expecting an almighty
pat on the back, he is quite clearly changed
by what he’s
accomplished. Changed, I fear, for the worse.
“Different details, but the story’s the same.”
And what irks
most of all is that the Doctor’s actions were wantonly excessive. There
was
no need for him to aggressively defy Time by taking Brooke, Kerenski
and Bennett back home to the Earth of their time; instead, he could
have dropped them all off in the year five billion, their roles in history
preserved but their lives saved. But that wasn’t enough for him – for some
reason the Doctor wanted to prove a point, to himself more than anyone
else.
Time’s Champion no more.
What stung
more than anything else though was the Doctor’s use of language – derogatory phrases and
terms like “don’t you get it?” and “little people” prevail; at one point
he even misquotes Gallifrey’s reprehensible Celestial Intervention
Agency’s motto. It’s painful to
listen to.
It is only when
Brooke commits suicide in a bid to reclaim her part in history that the
Doctor appears to realise just how far across the line he’s strayed. He
robbed Brooke of her rightful place in history. Even a Dalek – a creature
born to hate and to kill – had far more respect for Brooke and her legacy than
he did.
“And if my family changes, the whole of history could change;
the future
of the human race. No-one should have that much power.”
The closing
moments of the story are both intriguing and bizarre, and inevitably beg
far more questions than they answer. Is Ood Sigma physically waiting
beside the TARDIS, beckoning Ten towards his imminent fate? Or is he simply
the Doctor’s inner turmoil made manifest?
The Waters of
Mars
draws to a close to the sound of the TARDIS’ cloister bell as the angry,
hurt and (I would hope) suitably ashamed Doctor kicks at the console. Much
like the third Doctor’s death in Planet of the Spiders, Ten’s
conceit on Mars has apparently started him down an inexorable path towards
his own demise. The Immortality Gate is waiting…
“I’ve gone too far. Is this it? My death? Is it time?”
And so to sum
up, I love the audacious course that the writers have set us on,
and to say
that I’m preposterously excited about the upcoming finalé would
be understating matters considerably. Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel
that the straw that broke the camel’s back here was something of a short
one. It should have taken more.
That said of
course, it’s
impossible to judge decisively having only seen one piece of the puzzle and so, for
now at least, the jury’s out.
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