The Waters Of Mars
('Thanksgiving Special' (honest!), Dr 10, 15/11/2009, showrunner: Rusell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Graeme Harper)
Rank: 38
'Drink the Waters of Mars a Day to help you work, rest and play, now with added alien mind parasite'
There was a lot of talk, circa 2009, about what mankind’s next move as a species might be. After ignoring manned space travel for the better part of half a century, the lure of the stars was growing stronger and there was suddenly a practical discussion about what might need to be done to build a liveable base on Mars. The difference with the apollo space programmes that led to the moon landing in 1969, though, was that instead of the backdrop of celebration and breaking new boundaries man was now moving out of a sense of pessimism and the gnawing sense that something had gone fundamentally wrong with our lives on this planet. Growing awareness of climate change, the rise of terrorism, global divisions, cuts to NASA funding and the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism where millionaires would rather spend money mucking around in space than save people on the planet they were actually on were all leading to a very different feeling whenever people looked to the stars, not to mention the dawning realisation of just how much work it was going to be. After our giant leap for mankind we’d gone backwards and were using other planets as our ‘just in case’ policy for the day when we would inevitably trip over ourselves and fall over, with Mars increasingly spoken about as a one-way mission we might never be able to come back from. Last time around DW largely ignored the moon landings until they were actually happening, then laughed at them by imagining a time when space travel was old hat (‘The Seeds Of Death’) before a cautionary tale where mankind became too smug, treating space travel as something that was everyday even though space was both extraordinary and fraught with peril (‘Ambassadors Of Death’, an eerie choice to be on TV just as Apollo 13 was taking place). Russell T Davies plugs right into the melancholy feeling in the air that a best case scenario was that man would find it very hard to establish a base on another planet at all and a worst case scenario that man would fall apart before he even got there. ‘The Waters Of Mars’ is one of the darkest, saddest stories in all of DW. It’s pitched to us as if it’s going to be a very DW kind of story, full of plucky pioneers doing their best as they establish the first base on Mars against the odds, the best of us in one handy base-sized guise, but then (spoilers) it all goes wrong spectacularly and even the Dr can’t save the people who, in other DW stories, would have been deserving of being saved through their ‘good karma’. Even more than that its a story about how the Dr tries to save everyone anyway because he sees that as his job and he demand that he knows better than the universe, only to find out tat there are bigger things at lay than he can comprehend. For this story, anyway, Neil Armstrong’s giant step kick-started a journey and successes and failures that were always going to end here. I suspect Russell, who loved sneaking pop songs into his scripts, had been listening to just what a surreal, scary song David Bowie’s ‘Life On Mars’ (the reason for the base’s name) is: everyone treats it as a fun pop number nowadays but really it’s a dark and edgy song about how when things go wrong mankind continues to expect to be saved by someone, despite centuries of evidence to the contrary, and how we’ll all still be thinking the same when we die on a future planet. A lot of Russell’s final scripts for the series (from what we’ll hopefully get to call ‘the first time round’ from now on, given his comeback) deal with how we won’t always have a good-heart(s)ed Dr around to ‘save’ us and we have to learn to save ourselves (‘Midnight’ and ‘Turn Left’ especially), while also dealing with how the Dr has become so smug and sure of himself that he thinks he can outwit time and fate itself. The plot comes from a clever idea that’s been left unanswered since DW’s earliest days: how come the Dr refuses to alter history from our past ‘not one line’, but can dabble away quite happily in our future: surely, to a timelord, all times are the same and set ins tone? This story is a fixed point in our near future, from roughly another half century’s time from first broadcast in 2059 (Russell wrote Captain Adelaide Brooks as someone who was plausibly being born right at the time of transmission) and appears in all the future history books as a set event, another step in mankind’s wobbly journey into space. Mankind assumes its alone when it lands on Mars, but maybe there’s a reason we’ve been nervously looking over our shoulder at our nearest neighbour across the centuries and it turns out this world isn’t the dead planet it seemed from the outside. Russell may well have been thinking about the Victorian astronomers who saw the scarred lines running round Mars’ surface and the newspapers who declared them to be canals to shift papers, evidence of intelligence life (accidentally or deliberately mis-translating the word ‘Canneli’ meaning ‘channels’ – they’re actually an optical illusion of the pock-marks from craters and the layout of various rocks. But just supposing for a moment that they weren’t? Very DW, making the ordinary extraordinary, even on a different planet).
Russell gives children everywhere the evidence that eating vegetables can cause you harm, thanks to an invisible alien that hides in the water when these settlers try to grow their own food before taking over humans, who are after all made up of quite a lot of water themselves, in a ‘possession’ that’s surely the scariest in all DW, despite being one of the lowest budget (it’s basically great ghoulish makeup and the poor actors dripping under a hose). The irony: in our ‘real’ world the big debate is about whether a base on another planet will ever be sustainable because of the bulk of resources we’d have to take with us that aren’t native to the planets, especially water here Russell imagines an invisible monster that’s ‘switched on’ by the water the humans bring with them, a DW equivalent of the dying sailor poem ‘water water everywhere (and not a drop to drink’ as what we need to survive and risk dying through scarcity surrounds us and kills us instead. It might be significant that this is one of the first scripts written now that Russell has made the painful decision to hand over control of DW to his friend Steven Moffat, a writer who’d been applauded for his particularly scary scripts over the past few years. Russell, like most of us, assumed that Moffat would probably deliver more of the same once he took over for good and may have had half an eye on writing a properly scary story of his own for the DW history-books, to get in there first (and to make a plausible aesthetic link between their two often very different styles). As things turn out Moffat will go in a much dreamier, more fairytale direction a world away from the harsh realities of this script which makes it redundant on that score, but he wouldn’t have known that: the only clue Moffat was giving anyone was River Song turning up a few episodes early in ‘Forest O The Dead’. I suspect this story also reflects Russell’s sadness at fate getting in the way just as he was at the peak of his powers so that he couldn’t give the show he loved his full attention anymore. All the stories in this year of ‘specials’ were written against the backdrop of Russell’s partner getting seriously sick, while Davies wrestles with the difficult decision of whether to stay with his dream job or stay home to look after him. A lot of his final scripts from ‘Midnight’ onwards have Russell angrily shouting at fate for doing this to him just when he’s at the peak of his powers and finally enjoying himself after waiting for this job since childhood without pressure of cancellation from inside the BBC or worry about keeping the viewing figures up, then guilt at daring to think he’s arrogant to think that he’s above the sort of awful things he puts his own characters through.
Note how the monster in this story takes over just when the base is settled and everyone’s comfortable, thinking their hard work is all done and dusted and how it strikes without warning: anyone whose ever dealt with sickness for themselves or family know the primal guttural misery of realising that as much as you like to think you’re in control of your life and have it together you’re only one crisis away from having your world turned upside-down. Not since Malcolm Hulke and Robert Holmes had a writer been quite so involved with making ‘their’ Dr a direct (if exaggerated) version of them and no other DW writer outside Terrance Dicks’ 3rd Dr (whom he never wrote for directly) has become quite so linked to a particular regeneration as he is to the 10th. And so Russell gets ‘his’ Dr to say everything he wants to say to the fates in this portion of his life: basically ‘how dare you do this to me just at my moment of greatest triumph!’ This story is all about how the Dr continues to stay in his ‘job’ making people long past the point when he knows its wrong, that everything is telling him to get out now, that this is a fixed point in time he has to obey, but he can’t stop himself because he’s the Dr and saving people is what he does. Similarly this is the Russell T whose clung on for an extra year of half-work and five specials instead of the usual 13 episodes, even after he knows in his heart of hearts he has to leave because some things are ore important than television, even television as great as DW. Note how this event is a ‘fixed point’ because Adelaide Brooks’ death needs to happen to inspire the people who come after her and really do lead mankind out into space to become the ‘indomitable plague’ the 4th Dr mentions in ‘The Ark In Space’. Equally Russell has to give up the job he loves sometime in order to make way for the people behind him, even when he doesn’t want to, perhaps thinking of those who were little during the time of transmission who would grow up to be the fans and writers of the future steering rhe ship the way Russell was a kid during the days of the 3rd and 4th Drs (he was almost exactly six months old the day the first episode went out in November 1963). However the 10th Dr, his doppelganger, is too arrogant to see clearly, blinded by his desperation that things will work out if he just keeps going – in the end his characters are smarter than he is and Adelaide Brooks (spoilers) takes her own life to set time straight anyway, putting things back on their natural course again. The Dr is as crushed as we ever see him at the end of this story, realising that he’s gone ‘too far’ and the scary monster in this story isn’t the monster so much as ignoring time itself when events happen in a writer’s life (and writers, after all, more than anybody are used to having control over what happens; we’re all control freaks at heart). A lot of Russell’s best scripts are about everyone learning lessons dressed up as a different kind of action story, but none perhaps quite as brilliant as this, a deeply brave story that takes one hell of a lot of risks in an effort to be Russell’s penultimate will and testament, about a lesson he himself learned the hard way about making stable plans in a changing universe. By and large in Russell’s scripts he ‘saves’ the people who are good and kills off the people who are bad (he’s from the Barry Letts Buddhist school of DW – how fitting, then, that this is the first story screened after Barry’s sad death as he’d have really approved of this story which is closest of all to his own script for 3rd Dr farewell ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ and even more eerie that back when he was an actor Barry’s biggest role was as Apsley Cherry-Garrard in the film ‘Scott Of The Antarctic’, a ‘doomed heroes’ tale from real life that feels as if it served as a model for this one inspiring future explorers with tales of bravery and sacrifice; he gets a tribute over the credits) - as opposed to his successor who more often than not tries to have it so that ‘everybody lives’ and the baddies get to learn lessons from their mistakes and live another day.
Just as well too, really, given that Russell’s greatest strength as a writer is his ability to make even his smallest, most minor character seem like a real flesh and blood person we can relate to – had he killed a majority of them off along the way we’d never have been able to sleep at night. But here he has a jolly good go with a full ten minutes of the Dr looking sad and wordlessly walking away while all hell breaks loose behind him, everyone willing him to turn round even while he knows he has to go (this might be Russell’s one bit of ego, as fans wondered out loud if the show could even last without him and all hell broke loose on social media). A lot of this story stems from the fact that he’s alone: without Donna there to stop him he always goes a bit too far post-Rose and even when he tries to do what she would do (save people, like in ‘Fires Of Pompeii) he gets it ‘wrong’ by going too far that way too. It’s certainly not the heartwarming ending fans would have been expecting at all in his era of the show and all the better for it (though it would have been even more of a downer had it been on at Christmas as originally intended – that’s why the carrots are being grown for Christmas and why the only bird taken from earth is a robin - before it ended up being moved to nearer Halloween; officially it was billed as a ‘Thanksgiving Special’ in America, which is just wrong given that it features killer vegetables). It relies a lot on the people at home understanding the idea of karma and the laws of time and the actors for making these people seem real enough for us to care for them. However the risk pays off handsomely. Lindsay Duncan is note-perfect as Captain Brooks, tough enough to make all the hard decisions but vulnerable enough to make her moments of doubt and panic seem like a part of her character rather than a contradiction. The smaller characters don’t get much to do but still do what they can very well – this is an ensemble piece where everyone is the perfect fit but none more so than break-out star Gemma Chan as Mia, the innocent and vulnerable one you can all but guarantee would survive in any other DW script. I suspect Russell let co-writer Phil Ford come up with a lot of the ‘everyday base scenes’ which last just long enough for us to get a feel of both what a hard life this would be if mankind went into space (Ford’s other co-credit, for ‘Into The Dalek’, features a lot of excellent scene-building like this) Russell more or less ‘adapting’ a first draft that was more like a 4th Dr story, with captured princesses on the run from monsters seeking refuge in the base where everyone ends up doomed, and adding the ending to make it more about the Dr’s personal journey. And then there’s ‘The Flood’, a brilliant creation that until near the end doesn’t speak and so again like ‘Midnight’ robs the 10th Dr of his greatest ability, being able to outwit and out-argue people (even Dr 10 can’t do banter with a disembodied invisible virus hiding in the water).
Had Mary Whitehouse still been alive and still been watching the series she’d have had apoplexy at the sight of the possessed humans, all their humanity gone, replaced by a rictus grin like The Joker from Batman, while the possessed humans drip their way across Mars (we’re used to people on bases under siege being big drips in the 2nd Dr era, but never quite like this). As for the base itself, the show also features some of DW’s most convincing location shooting (another real strength of the Davies era) with Carmarthenshire's Botanical Gardens making a highly suitable double for a base filled with plants. I like to think that even now the people who work there are nervously looking over their shoulder for signs of ‘The Flood’ in their colleagues given the realism of this story! Even after events switch to the studio things look more impressive than normal, mostly thanks to the extra space the production team had after Torchwood’s main hub had been destroyed in ‘Children Of Earth’ and so didn’t need to be kept on standby anymore. This is a story with lots of space and scale compared to every other DW ‘base under siege’ stories, even allowing for 1960s filming conditions. If there’s a problem with this story its that for once the jokes don’t fit: you’d hope that mankind would have come up with a better robot than ‘Gadget’ during the next fifty years and even the Dr comments on how stupid it is, while the Dr’s in an uncharacteristically breezy and light-hearted mood when he first lands at the base, almost as if the script is being balanced out for the horrors to come, a man dressed for a party who hasn’t realised its really a wake. It’s a slight shame: had this story been dark all the way through it might have tasted even more brilliantly bitter rather than being an uncomfortable halfway house (just as dark chocolate never tastes right when in the middle of white or milk), has this base only just become habitable after months of hard work rather than a second cosy home already. That’s a very minor point indeed though: for the most part ‘Waters Of Mars’ is a masterpiece, braver even than Russell’s other brilliant ‘farewell’ scripts like ‘Midnight’ and ‘The End Of Time’ (and pipped only by ‘Turn Left’, a last love song to DW from one of its biggest fans), a tale much much braver than it needed to be as its showrunner pushed DW into another giant leap even as he was taking his last small steps with the show (or so we all thought at the time anyway). Shadowy, sinister, scary, almost brutally real and utterly unlike anything else DW had ever tried in its long history, its one hell of a way to (nearly) bow out, as perfect a piece of telly as any you’d see in the 2010s, Russell’s time on the show he loves evaporating right at the point when his brain was being flooded with some of his best ideas.
+ Once again one of his final scripts asks a lot from David Tennant
and he’s utterly superb, digging out a new darker side to his Dr
all the more impressive for coming so soon after the start of an
episode where he’s his light and breezy self (for the last time,
give or take his appearance in the Sarah Jane Adventures filmed after
this story but screened a fortnight before it). Few other actors
(maybe Hartnell or Troughton?) could have carried off the scenes
where the Dr stands in front of the camera trying hard not to cry or
re-act to every last thud going on behind him as the base is
destroyed, Tennant’s face saying everything without saying a word.
I know there’s been a bit of a backlash for this era nowadays and
for some of it, particularly what was going on behind the scenes and
Martha’s character arc, that backlash is warranted. But never David
Tennant’s performance whose brilliant even in his lesser scripts
and utterly superb in his best ones like here that ask him to show
off one of the widest ranges of any actor in any series. Your heart
utterly breaks when the Dr’s does and the charges of smugness and
ego that people often criticise this particular regeneration become
his downfall here, a character flaw that drives the plot. This is a
timelord who starts the story a King and ends it a broken little boy.
What other series ever does that to their leading character heroes?
What other actor playing an action hero could even try to pull that
off?!?
- Whatever happened to The Ice Warriors, our resident DW Martians?
There’s a line that glibly tries to cover this in dialogue, but you
have the sneaking suspicion that even as big a fan as Russell T
(working with a production team full of other fans) simply ‘forgot’
that another alien race had already laid claim to our nearest
neighbour. It seems uncharacteristic that the Ice Warriors would ever
let a species they trust as little as humanity build on their soil
and even less likely that they’d let an invisible entity run amok
without having a big ol’ battle with it out of honour and duty etc.
The script could have made quite a play on this too: after all the
Ice warriors are reptiles so presumably have their own source of
water somewhere, perhaps one ‘programmed’ to kill any interlopers
like those pesky noisy humans that live next door? Or, as we’re in
a crossover into the kinder more community-savvy ‘Peladon’ lot
they could have left a message saying ‘We’re just on holiday at
the moment conquering another star system, make yourself at home but
don’t touch anything OK?’ and a coda where they go ‘typical
humans, they can’t leave anything alone, I knew we shouldn’t have
let them and their opposable thumbs come to visit. I suppose they’ve
de-tuned our telly to some awful earth reality TV station, tuned up
the thermostat and drunk all the alcohol out the fridge too’.
No comments:
Post a Comment