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 very day that writers Russell T and Phil Ford (who’d written almost all the best episodes of spin-off show ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ and ‘Torchwood’ between them) sat down to discuss this story in July 2008 the probe ‘Phoenix’ discovered evidence that there had, at some stage, been water on our sister planet, the biggest sign pointing towards the creation of life at some time in Mars’ history. It was in the air, the way space travel had been in the 1960s and scientists were falling over themselves to congratulate each other – so of course Dr Who was going to do a story about it. The difference with the Apollo space programmes that led to the moon landing in 1969, though, was that instead of being our birth-right our trip into space and an achievement mankind should be proud of, heading into space this time was more a way of escaping the problems at home. Most talks of space focussed on whether man came 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 Dr Who 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). So of course rather than the intrepid explorers heading into space, in Dr Who something was bound to go wrong.
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 Who (and a
long way away from what people expected from Ford’s reputation of writing
child-friendly fare). It’s pitched to us as if it’s going to be a very
traditional kind of story, full of plucky pioneers doing their best as they
establish the first base on Mars against the odds and growing their own food,
the best of us in one handy base-sized guise, but then (spoilers) it all goes
wrong spectacularly and even the Doctor can’t save the people who, in other Dr Who
stories, would have been deserving of being saved through their ‘good karma’.
Even more than that it’s a story about how the Dr tries to save everyone anyway
because he sees that as his calling and he’s convinced that he knows better
than the universe, only to find out that there are bigger things at lay than he
can comprehend. For ‘Waters Of Mars’ is a tale of corruption, of how even the
best of intentions can come unstuck due to arrogance with mankind paying the
price for daring to think that they could simply bring their problems with them
to another planet and start again, plus The Doctor’s arrogance that being ‘the
last of the timelords’ means the rules don’t apply to him (though it didn’t
start off that way, Russell picked up on how many fans were concerned with his
smugness and wanted to pull off a ‘reverse Colin Baker’ and have a character
who gradually became less likeable as bad things happened to him). So we get a
sombre story where everyone loses and even the people who survive at the end of
all this shouldn’t have done and treat The Doctor’s meddling with a fixed point
in time as a power no one person should ever have.
The plot comes from a
clever idea that’s been left unanswered since Dr Who’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 in stone? This story is a fixed point in our near future, from roughly
another half century’s time from first broadcast in 2059 and appears in all the
future history books 9and a website that looks like a nicely retro BBC news
website, complete with the font and colours from 2009) as a set event, another
step in mankind’s wobbly journey into space. I’d always wanted to see what a
future ‘fixed point in time’ might look like, Dr Who’s equivalent of Star
Trek’s ‘prime directive’ of not getting involved. After all, in a series where
so many people seem to have time travel then the past should be re-shaped by
people and changing all the time (and often is in Steven Moffat stories). By
and large Dr Who has treated this as if the Doctor and friends were film-makers
studying nature, observing but unable to interfere, though from the first there
was always something of a discrepancy between how the historical and futuristic
stories were treated: anything in the past was treated as a fixed point that
had actually ‘happened’ and everything in the future was fair game. But of
course that’s not true for The Doctor for whom all time and space is equal and
everything is set in stone by the end of the universe (either ‘Frontios’ ‘Utopia’
or ‘Wild Blue Yonder’, his three
furthest trips into the future). So The Doctor has to observe these brave
people walking to their deaths (because it inspired the people who come after
them) even though they do everything ‘right’ – they’re kind, funny, brave,
daring, spend two years travelling to a planet they know they might never leave
and do the right thing just because it’s ‘there’. This crew at Bowie Base One
really are the best of us. But they’re meddling with things they don’t
understand and are no match for the nature of another planet. Equally The
Doctor tries to do the right thing by them, spends forty-five minutes telling
everyone he has to leave, even walks away for ten long painful minutes hearing
the sound of their death in his ears and the flash of their demise in a screen
that plays in his space helmet, until he snaps and avenges their death. Why
should good people have to die? Why should he uphold the laws of the universe
when his own people died standing by them in the time wars? But tragedy is a
side effect of exploration and a side effect of travels through time to places
that have to be in order for what comes next to matter. Sometimes, no matter
how much you want to stop bad things happening, you’re powerless. So The Doctor
feels here.
After all, ‘Waters Of
Mars’ is the first Dr Who to be properly hit by the banking crisis of 2008, the
worldwide recession caused by the greed and recklessness of Wall Street. It had
already been agreed that Russell would end his time on the show with five
specials culminating in the 10th Doctor’s final story over the new
year of 2010, but while ‘The Next Doctor’ was clearly going to be the 2008
Christmas special (titled ‘Red Christmas’, where Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christtmas’
was the only record onboard and had become a running joke) and ‘Planet Of the
Dead’ was pencilled in for Easter this one had no official slot. For a while it
was the story for Christmas 2009 before the BBC asked if the Tennant finale
could be kept for a big family audience over the festive period (Yuri isn’t
playing around with a ‘no trespassers’ solar panel in the first draft – he’s
decorating a beacon like a Christmas tree!) For a time this was the Halloween
special which would have suited it nicely, being one of the creepiest of Dr Who
horror stories. But then news came back that while the license fee the BBC
relied on was sacrosanct the company was in trouble: Japan had pulled out of a
deal to show Dr Who stories due to the financial crisis which left the Dr Who
team in a bit of a financial hole and the collapse of the chain Woolworths,
which had an exclusive license to BBC DVDs for a time though not Dr Who ones
that sold too well, hit finances further. For a time this special was cancelled
altogether and it was only the production team pushing to get it made that we
had this story at all. Even then it got its so-called ‘thanksgiving slot’
(actually a week early and a week before the show’s 56th
anniversary) simply because the BBC knew ITV had nothing good on that week and
wanted a ratings boost, nothing more complex than that. As it is this is
actually an ‘anti-thanksgiving special’, given that a family of strangers turn
up and eat the food they’ve created with their own bare hands on a dead world -
and die because they underestimate the local (invisible) population.
‘Waters Of Mars’ wasn’t
originally this dark. Back when it was intended to be a festive story it was
actually a frothy feelgood story before the dark finale about an alien princess
who came to Earth and stayed away from her captors in a normal everyday Hotel
(a lot like ‘Delta and The Bannermen’ – and see ‘The
God Complex’ and ‘Joy To The World’ for
how many Dr Who writers come up with stories about hotels while staying near TV
centre for meetings and how few are ever actually made compared to how many are
suggested). Russell handed his idea to Ford, knowing how good he was at
family-friendly fare, and he enjoyed writing it: there were secret corridors
that led to alien planets and a carnival filled with circus creatures in the
middle that would have stretched the budget to breaking point but sounded good
fun. Executive producer Julie Gardner thought the draft script was great but
Russell was worried: it had strayed a little too far into fantasy and away from
scifi and felt ‘wrong’ to him (ironic really given the pantheon ‘Gods with
magical powers’ he wrote for the Disney years, although to be fair we still
haven’t got to the end of that arc yet. I wonder if we ever will?) It also felt
‘wrong’ heading into the finale with The Doctor on a high, having enjoyed
himself following an Earth granny and visiting aliens.
No, The Doctor needed to
learn his lesson. And the news about Mars landed at just the right time for a
story rooted in the ‘real’ world still but a different world, away from Earth. Russell
may well also have been thinking about the Victorian astronomers (who in turn
inspired the earliest Victorian scifi writers like H G Wells) 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 Dr Who,
making the ordinary extraordinary, even on a different planet). So Phil
went away and tried again, writing the basis of what you have here, a
traditional ‘base under siege’ story that happened to be on Mars, with enough optimism
to be a decent Christmas story though it was a close-run thing with many
casualties. Russell loved the script but found there was one line that really
stayed with him, a throwaway comment by Ford that The Doctor really wanted to
change time but couldn’t. Why couldn’t he? So Russell re-wrote the story to be
a darker look at the Doctor’s psyche where he tried to change events and can’t
(it’s not actually any more re-written than a lot of Russell-era scripts by
outside writers and is still maybe 75% Ford’s work, but the BBC was having
problems getting other countries to buy these specials and thought as Russell
was still quite a big name it would help in the publicity. After all, the
original idea was his too: both of them).
Russell particularly liked
the thought of going to the near-future, something he’d never done before (a
majority of his era stories are set in the present day and the ones set in the
future are way way waaaay in the future). He wanted the children of the day
watching, knowing that this was well within their lifetimes and might be their
future (Adelaide Brooks, the commander, was born the very year this story was
transmitted and thus is a babe in arms at the time. She could be your kid
sister if you were a child watching this, because who knows what the future has
in store for people!) So we have a plucky team of the best of us, out there in
the great beyond, growing their own vegetables and playing practical jokes on
each other to break the monotony of years in space, people who seem ‘just like
us’. There’s a particularly clever opening that has all the hallmarks of the
Russell era, in that you can instantly see who people are in a few lines of
dialogue and can easily match thm to your class or workmates: Yuri has spent
his spare time creating a ‘no trespassers’ sign at the cost of a spare solar
panel, even though there can’t possibly be any trespassers on Mars. We see the
crew’s reaction: Adelaide, the boss, is fuming and disapproving but also knows
well enough that her staff need to let off steam. Mia giggles nervously, loving
the joke but afraid of getting into trouble. Tarak responds with a wry shake of
the head: typical Yuri! Roman is too busy with his robot Gadget and has missed
it. Adelaide, meanwhile, is watching a ‘transmission’ from her family full of
news from home and impatiently muttering for them to get on with it as the base
is hit by another solar flare, our first indication we’re out in space and so
like a mobile phone breaking up (Adelaide is very much a female General Cutler
from ‘The Tenth Planet’, barking
orders at his men then cooing over his little boy ion video calls back home).
And then The Doctor, a trespasser, rocks up anyway. It’s a very clever bit of
writing: three minutes in and you know these people better than most whole
Moffat or Chibnall era stories, an extended believable ‘family’ who don’t
always get on but who all mean well. Now The Doctor and in a few minutes The
Flood arrive and you’re already anticipating what the varying reactions will be
to both.
And when they die it
matters. It feels like an affront, so that you sympathise with where The
Doctor’s hearts are even when your head knows he’s gone too far. From the first
there’s a sense of doom and gloom that hangs over the base. The Doctor knows
five minutes in that everyone here is going to die, he just doesn’t know quite
how. 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. 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. Even though from a 2009 perspective they’re
thriving: they have bio-domes (actually The National Botanical Gardens Of Wales
in Carmarthenshire) full of crops and even birds to ‘keep the insect population
down’ (in a last minute addition to the
dialogue when it was discovered that the lights from the camera crews woke them
up – something that hadn’t been considered on a night shoot!) But Adelaide
talks openly about all the pollution, economic horrors and struggle back home.
It’s going to take a long old time for Mars to be properly terraformed enough
for people to live here properly and even the bit of food they can grow is
killing them.
Russell gives children
everywhere the evidence that eating vegetables can be deadly (did this
storysingle-handedly cause the obesity crisis in a generation? Discuss…),
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 Dr Who, despite being one of the lowest budget (it’s basically great
ghoulish makeup and the poor actors dripping with a hose that’s hidden in their
cheeks: it took forever and a lot of sleepless nights to get the effect right,
which Russell said caused him more problems than any other during his entire
time as showrunner).The irony: in 2009 water is being greeted as a sign that
colonising Mars might be easier than we thought, as the planet was capable of
it at some point. 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.
However in Dr Who water is the deadly monster that kills. The Flood is a
brilliant simple but powerful and believable creation that (mostly) doesn’t
speak and so again like close cousin ‘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). For
there’s no arguing or negotiating with nature: it does its own sweet thing
oblivious to the control Humans want. Now in theory The Flood should be a
terrible monster: they’re basically bacteria that got a bit lucky, once
banished by The Ice Warriors (very much conspicuous by their absence in this
story) to a glacier and buried until The Humans need a water source. It could
have gone so wrong – they’re the very definition of monsters who are a bit wet
and don’t do much except stand there – but so good are the makeup, the
performances and the sense of threat that they’re terrifying. The effect is really
creepy too when shot in the dark with the ‘cracked face’ makeup as if water is
being drained out of the base members (and a shout out to the actors who go
from being warm and friendly to cold and creepy remarkably well, especially
Sharon Duncan-Brewster’s Maggie). It’s the Dr Who 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.
And even The Doctor can’t stop it, because water is inside us all and even a
drop of contamination, back on Earth, could spell disaster. Most of the story
is then about the tug-of-war between the base looking on the bright side
(usually a good thing in Dr Who stories which means they’ll live) and The
Doctor who knows they can’t ever risk going home and that the base, the symbol
of humanity’s pluck and courage, has to be destroyed.
A lot of Russell’s final scripts
for the series from the ‘first time round’ 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 10th Doctor, who used to be charming and
charismatic, has slowly become so smug and sure of himself. Note how he bosses
Adelaide Brooks around like she’s Rose, even though she knows the Mars terrain
so much better than him and he’s a stranger that’s already told us at home how
in awe of her she is. However even though she’s blonde Adelaide isn’t throwing
herself at The Doctor or becomes in awe of him: she’s seen enough of the
universe already not to be impressed and while she does save him, in one last
heartless gesture (a clever idea having the Flood be in water the base has
already drunk so he isn’t affected. Good job he don't arrive in time for tea
really!) Ford’s original script ended with Mia and Yuki going on to have a baby
who would head into space and who wouldn’t have survived if The Doctor hadn’t
rescued the two of them, but it felt wrong to Russell, too easy. So instead the
showrunner re-wrote it, having the rescue mission end up causing more harm than
good. The Doctor saves her, Yuri and Mia and gloats about expecting their
thanks but they’re more terrified of him than The Flood and refuse to let him
have a victory he doesn’t deserve. The Doctor thought for a glorious five
minutes there he could do anything and was bigger than the laws of time itself,
but the brilliance of Dr Who is that our lead is no superhero, just someone who
means well and occasionally gets it wrong. He’s badly punished for his
arrogance here in a story where he ‘loses’ more thoroughly than any story that
doesn’t include a regeneration, albeit neatly setting things up for a finale
when exactly that occurs (it’s very like ‘Planet
Of The Spiders’ in fact, the final karmic Pertwee story that punishes The
Doctor for his recklessness and curiosity that so often puts the people around
him in danger. That story’s writer and executive producer Barry Letts, who did
so much to shaped what we think of ‘as’ Dr Who, died five weeks before
transmission and ‘Waters Of Mars’ carries a sweet caption to him).
But is this really about
The Doctor? Across the fourth season, especially, he’s become the mouth-piece
for his creator, sharing all his same traits: personable, friendly, a
chatterbox bordering on being a know it all. Not since Malcolm Hulke and Robert
Holmes had a writer been quite so involved with making ‘their’ Doctor a direct
(if exaggerated) version of them and no other Dr Who writer outside Terrance
Dicks’ 3rd Doctor (whom he never wrote for directly) has become quite so linked
to a particular regeneration as he is to the 10th. We’ve seen it in other
stories like ‘Midnight’ where
The Doctor’s need to be the most important person in the room has worked
against him and it’s a theme that keeps cropping up at this end stage of Russell’s
time as showrunner. 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).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
his beloved show 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 Dr Who history-books, to get in there first (and to make a
plausible aesthetic link between their two often very different styles (there’s
one point, where Adelaide is discussing the water supplies, you’re convinced
she’s going to say ‘Don’t even drink, drink and you’re dead, just like in ‘Blink’! Mind you, it goes both ways: Moffat’s
‘The Pilot’, about a sentient puddle of
water, returns the compliment by stealing heavily from this story). It’s also
worth noting that there are far more links to Moffat’s stories in the RTD2
years than anything from his own era). 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 Russell wouldn’t
have known that: the only clue Moffat was giving anyone was River Song turning
up a few episodes early in ‘Silence In The
Library/Forest Of The Dead’ and even Moffat wasn’t sure if she was ever
actually coming back (till her popularity meant he couldn’t really avoid it).
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. For all the stories from the second half of series four were
written against the backdrop of Russell’s partner Adam 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 full time. It must have felt as if
fate was laughing at him: there he is, having brought back his favourite show
back from the dead and after four years of hard work Dr Who is now at the point
where the BBC treat it as a flagship programme that will do no wrong, where he
can win any award and write anything he likes (a dream job for any writer). Just
look at the moment when The Doctor is crushed by meeting Mia especially. ‘You’re
so young’ he sighs, his eyes saying ‘it isn’t fair’. Russell has been flattered
by everyone from all sides for years now, from fandom to critics, and even to
someone as rooted as he tried to be that has to have an effect on you at some
point, where you start to believe at least some of your own publicity. But of
course as brilliant as Dr Who is, as important and profound as the points it
raises are and as much influence as it has, it’s still only a TV programme. It
can’t reverse cancer or heal people that are sick (see ‘New Earth’ for the last script Russell
finished before the diagnosis, when The Doctor does just that). For all the
things he can do with a fictional character in a fictional universe there’s one
thing he can’t change: fate in real life. And so Russell gets ‘his’ Doctor 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!’ A
lot of his final scripts from ‘Midnight’
onwards have Russell angrily shouting at the world for doing this to him right
now when he’s happy (it’s not for nothing that the 10th Doctor is
the one who screams ‘I don’t want to go”’ because his writer really really
really didn’t, but equally would never have forgiven himself if he’d wasted
those last few precious years with his soulmate by always being at work).
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 who’s 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 sudden
unannounced crisis away from having your world turned upside-down. This story
is all about how the Doctor continues to stay in his ‘job’ saving people long
past the point when he knows it’s 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 Doctor and saving people is what he does. He refuses
to let people die, which can be read in two ways: why Russell absolutely has to
quit now and care for his loved one and also because he can’t cheat the laws of
time. He’s had his time, it was fun, but now he has to go or the timelines will
be forever changed and he’ll forever be guilty. So we get that wonderfully
charged ending when The Doctor has to see and hear the sight of death all
around, desperately trying to stick to his convictions, but he just can’t stop
himself. So he comes back for one last rescue. And it all goes horribly wrong. Sometimes
there are things even The Doctor can’t solve. And it’s so courageous a thing to
do, at a time when The Doctor was everybody’s hero, tripped up on his own
arrogance and ego right at the time of his greatest triumph. Though not
intended as such, this is the end of an arc Russell has been writing since ‘Boom Town’, about repercussions of
behaviours and how, unlike the classic series, even The Doctor has to pay his
bar tab sometimes in the modern series, facing up to all the things he gets
wrong.
Note how this base is the
‘first’, the pioneers who took a dying planet and breathed new life into it, in
just the way Russell did to Dr Who. Note how the alien arrives just when it
looks as if everything is settled, waiting when they let their guard down
rather than attacking on first arrival. Note too that the first pioneers are
doomed and have to make way for those who come afterwards because that is the
nature of exploration: it comes with risk and people who know they might never
come out of it alive. This event is a ‘fixed point’ in time 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, so they can spread their wings and have their say, 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 the 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). In his heart he knows it’s the right thing to do. But like The
Doctor he can’t bear to leave. 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 one thing The Doctor can’t
control – saving someone who can’t be saved, who shouldn’t be saved (and writers, after all, more than anybody
are used to having control over what happens; we’re all control freaks at heart,
with power over worlds we create). The Doctor thinks he’s being his most human
and caring. Even the people who trusted him see him as a monster. He even
starts quoting from The Master in ‘The Time Monster’ that ‘the laws of time are
mine and you will obey me!’ All that absolute power has gone to his head an
corrupted him, absolutely, even though we know what the abse doesn’t, that his
intentions were always good.
Russell’s best scripts
all come from this late run when he digs deep inside himself and faces up to a
shadow side most writers would simply ignore. 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, but
sometimes being good isn’t enough. Russell is clearly from the Barry Letts
Buddhist school of Dr Who ands the writer/director/producer would surely have
adored this story, which is almost a Buddhist parable about ‘living in the
moment’ not the future and what goes wrong when your ego grows out of control. Even
more eerie, it’s a tale about the dangers of exploration with lots of
throwbacks to polar exploration (which is where ‘The Tenth Planet’, set at the South
Pole, got the idea too), where plucky Humans (usually Brits) are no match for
the power and whims of nature. Funnily enough 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 (Who
writer Mark Gatiss played the exact same role in the remake, weirdly). Adelaide
is clearly Captain Scott, stoic and a gentleman (well, a lady) to the end, with
strict protocols and a stickler for rules who still understands her crew’s need
to goof off occasionally and the importance of a happy ship. Lindsay Duncan
plays Adelaide in exactly that way (her next big job is playing Matt Smith’s
mum in his last pre-Who job ‘Christopher and His Kind’ funnily enough, where
the 11th Doctor is oddly miscast as playwright Christopher Isherwood
In a so-so movie), while the noble sacrifice of Roman (yes, even the comic relief
dies in this story!) recalls Captain Oates sacrificing himself in the knowledge
he’ll slow down the party. After all, what could be more ‘cut off from
civilisation’ than being at the end of the world? Except in Dr Who terms, where
it’s the end of an empty world. There are no sofas to hide behind here, just
mankind, his and her wits and the elements.
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. IBut 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). Phil Ford deserves full
credit too and a lot of the character touches we associate with Russell may
well be his judging by his emotional-wringer episodes of Sarah Jane and
Torchwood. I suspect Russell let his co-writer
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) before
Russell takes over for the last quarter. 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 to the other extreme. It’s certainly not the heartwarming ending
fans would have been expecting at all in his era of the show (or what Phil Ford’s
name in the credits or the teased bits about princesses would have suggested).
However ‘Waters Of Mars’ is all the better for it, a story that’s unique in Who
terms in being scary both in the monster staring right at us (the moment Maggie’s
voice changes mid-sentence, as she stares at a picture of the Earth and all its
water, might well be the single scariest moment of the modern series) and the
psychological horror that nature just doesn’t care about mankind. Now this 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, judging by the birdsong - before it was moved
to being a ‘Thanksgiving Special’ in America (which is just wrong given that it
features killer vegetables). They really should have made it Who’s first ‘Halloween’
special though: it has that feel about it, when nasty sinister lurking things
we try to pretend aren’t there come out to play. The makeup job, the dripping
water, the scene of it breaking into the base rivet by rivet, the sheer unstoppable
relentlessness of water all make The Flood one of the best Dr Who threats and
one I’m amazed hasn’t had a re-match yet (only in the comic strips anyway – see
below).
Is ‘Waters Of Mars’
perfect? Well, it’s maybe a tad too sophisticated to be a true horror story
like the hammer horror ones of the 1970s. It is perhaps a bit dark for
children: they have to be careful about not actually saying Adelaide commits suicide
due to BBC guidelines and she uses an audibly futuristic gun to do it (one The
Doctor couldn’t possibly have heard from outside the way he does); the more
child-friendly animation ‘Dreamland’
was broadcast very soon afterwards but actually a lot of children preferred
this, for all its dark edges. There’s only the one plot, which ebbs and flows
until it hits a powerful climax which does make it all a bit intense. The scene
of a young Adelaide and a Dalek sparing her life, told in flashback (as part of
‘The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’)
doesn’t quite work (what does a Dalek care about a fixed point in humanity’s
time? They’re not timelords with a rulebook and would be more likely to kill
her if she helped inspire mankind to stretch out to the stars). Given how
curious The Doctor seems to be about what happened at this base it’s curious he’s
never been for a peek, nor that he turns up expecting to find a base over-run
with trouble given it seems unlikely mankind will ever build a second one on
Mars after this. 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 it
feels out of place (even while giving him a plausible finale when The Doctor
uses Gadget to control the Tardis and land it in the base). Gadget, based on Pixar’s
greatest film Wall-E, is too ricketty to survive on Mars (in real life takes
had to be halted as its arms kept falling off and the robot kept running over
them and breaking them!) and too much of a liability given its bulk and
inability to be repaired given that there are no set jobs for it to do and –
apparently – one crew member who knows how to control it. The Doctor’s oddly
grumpy about it too, as if resentful on an unfeeling robot’s behalf (is he
remembering ‘Robot’ or ‘Robots
Of Death’?) despite having never shown an aversion to silly robots before –
indeed, a man who owned a robot shaped like a dog for three seasons can’t
really complain about one being dressed up (however much he protests about that
being ‘different’). Meanwhile 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 it’s 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) and perhaps had this base
only just become habitable after months of hard work rather than a second cosy
home already. There’s nother truly awful blubbing Murray Gold choir tacked onto
the end, on what has otherwise been a story that’s been impressively open and
scoreless, allowing the viewer to think what they want to think. The story is
set up maybe a little quickly and takes too long to end (the final edit was at
sixty-five minutes for ages until a lot of the start got trimmed. Personally they
should have taken out a bit more of the end). It relies a lot on the people at
home understanding the idea of karma and the laws of time and why The Doctor
can’t save everyone. I know a lot of fans who were left confused by the ending
and it isn’t quite as neat as Russell makes it out to be (for the mystery of
Adelaide dying at home rather on Mars and the possible disgrace of her suicide
might well change how her children and grandchildren see the future as
explorers. Not least because she didn’t call round to them to say goodbye
first).
Yet ‘Waters’ still works
and packs a really powerful punch, one of the unsung greats of the comeback era
that got a bit lost compared to the ghastly and great stories either side of
it. This is a story that could easily have gone wrong and would have fallen
apart badly had the wrong people been cast and hammed up what could have been
very silly monsters or missed the wry humour of Humans always missing the bigger
picture (such as the scene where Andy is the first Human converted, at the back
of shot, in glorious mime, while Maggie rambles on about home stuff). But one
of the reasons ‘Waters Of Mars’ is so powerful is that every single part is perfectly
suited to the actor playing them, who all manage to make people we only know
for an hour (and sometimes only a few minutes) feel three-dimensional flesh and
blood. They all get families, or talk about not having families and mention
other stuff beside their job (something other writers never quite get right).
This one of the best overall casts in the series, an ensemble piece where every
part is judged to perfection. Lindsay Duncan (who had never watched Dr Who but
had always wanted to work with David Tennant, a last minute replacement after
Helen Mirren ummed and ahhed) 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 – 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 Dr Who
script (she’ll end up another of Dr Who’s unknowns who became breakout stars,
becoming a hit with another BBC scifi show ‘Humans’ in 2015, alongside Colin
Morgan from ‘Midnight’). Most of
the others are Russell regulars from his other series like ‘Queer As Folk’ or
Cucumber’, which might explain why he wrote for them as well as he did.
As for the base itself,
the show also features some of Dr Who’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 their third
Russell-written series ‘Children Of Earth’ and so didn’t need to be kept on
standby for filming anymore. It looks as big and spacious and believable as any
set in Dr Who and matches up well with the ‘pentagram’ shaped modelwork too (rarer
than you’d think). There’s one of the best uses of a quarry in the entire
series, too, with the shot of the Tardis arriving on red stone that really does
look an awful lot like the red planet (Taffs Well Quarry, Morganstown). Russell
sent Tennant a message on the morning of filming ‘Hooray! Your last quarry!’
Then sheepishly sent an apology message a few days later that he’d just written
one into the finale ‘The End Of Time’! Then
there’s Russell’s favourite location, Victoria Place in Newport, the street
where Adelaide lives and back in Dr Who again for it’s last of umpteen
appearances as different things, complete with snow (a hangover from the
Christmas setting that nobody wanted to change).
This is a story with lots of space and scale compared to every other Dr Who
‘base under siege’ stories, yet remains claustrophobic throughout too, directed
with intelligence by Graeme Harper in his last Dr Who before retirement (the series’
longest serving director, he’s been around since ‘Warrior’s Gate’ in 1981).
For the most part ‘Waters
Of Mars’ is a masterpiece, as brave as 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 darker and groundbreaking 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). As great as the overall tale is, this is a story made up lots of
little nuggets of greatness, from the slow Flood takeovers to the casual
dialogue (‘State your name, rank and intention’ ‘I’m The Doctor, Doctor, Fun’
and the joke that Richard Branson’s company are still talking about going to
Mars but haven’t quite made it yet even half a century on from transmission) to
the tough bits (The Doctor pleads to be allowed to go and answer simply ‘Adelaide
Brooks’ when asked how, to which she does it with the words ‘damn you!’,
knowing she dies while he gets to walk free) to the astonishing long shot as
The Doctor tries to keep out of trouble but just can’t stop himself, the sound
and sights of death ringing in his eyes and seen through his tears. Shadowy,
sinister, scary, almost brutally real and utterly unlike anything else Dr Who
had ever tried in its long history, this is one hell of a way to (nearly) bow
out, as perfect a piece of telly as any you’d see in the 2010s. The tragedy is
that 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, but of course it’s the
situation he was in that was inspiring them. And that the economic climate kept
shrinking them just as his ideas were getting more ambitious: it was touch and
go whether this special would be made at all and the cast, crew and showrunner
all went through hell making it. Unlike some other Dr Who stories where that happened
backstage, it never shows onscreen: indeed it’s the confidence in ‘Waters’,
that the audience can actually cope with something as relentlessly dark as
this, which impresses most. ‘Waters’ is still the only Dr Who story Russell won
a HUGO award for (he was usually beaten by Moffat!) and deservedly so, even if
this story hasn’t lasted as long in the public consciousness as some others. Phil
Ford deserved a longer and more illustrious career on the main show too. Though
in many ways it’s an ending, ‘Waters Of Mars’ feels like a new beginning, a
whole new darker way of doing the show. For ‘Waters Of Mars’ is sparkling with
ideas everywhere you look.
POSITIVES + 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 Doctor 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 Doctor
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 who’s always reliably brilliant even in 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 Doctor’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?!?
BEST QUOTE: ‘Water
is patient, Adelaide. Water just waits. Wears down the clifftops. The
mountains. The whole of the world. Water always wins’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: So,
no Ice Warriors then, despite the story being set on Mars: ya boo! So hurrah
for ‘The Wolves Of Winter’ (2017), a 12th Doctor comic strip - one
of the last to feature the Capaldi Doctor in fact, published in the gap between
‘The Doctor Falls’
and ‘Twice Upon A Time’
and a story that’s already been mentioned under both ‘The Curse Of Fenric’
and ‘The Eaters Of Light’.
The script takes in 9th century Vikings, a crashed spaceship and The
Ice Warrior community massacred by…The Flood. Good job The Doctor and Bill are
there to put things right…eventually! (Though it’s a surprise the 12th
Doctor doesn’t give his younger self a hint to leave well alone somewhere given
that chronologically this is a prequel to‘Waters
Of Mars’). See the prequels/section under ‘Empress Of Mars’
for more.
I read the online short story, I read the novel, I
read the comics, I watched the webcasts, I got a couple of the Big Finish
downloads as Christmas presents (thanks Thomas!)– admittedly I didn’t get to
the interactive event ‘Time Fracture’ but even so you would have thought by the
end of that lot I’d have a better idea of what the ‘Timelord Victorious’ series
(2020-present) was meant to be. In total there were sixty-six separate items in
the ‘Victorious' series, ranging from short half page items to full-on epic
stories. Some of them are quite good, despite being given short shrift from a
confused community who saw it as a bit of a cheat to be honest, a way to make
money off the Who name during what seemed like an impossibly long gap between
Chibnall and RTD2 eras. The central premise: the 10th Doctor goes a
bit mad post-‘Waters’ and ends up creating a parallel world where he thinks
he’s unstoppable and can do whatever the hell he wants (hint: he can’t). You
could, if you wanted to, read/watch/listen to the stories in order and get an
overall picture of The Doctor’s gradual descent into a sort of Master Mark II. Or
you could take each story as a standalone event. It was quite the challenge: kudos
to James Goss, overall executive producer, who somehow managed to liaise
between multiple companies such as Dr Who magazine, Big Finish, Penguin Books,
Titan Comics, Eaglemoss models, the online Dr Who comic creator and the BBC
itself, not to mention the producers of the interactive event and the Dr Who
‘escape room’. In purely negotiating terms it’s by far the most ambitious thing
the series ever did. In practice it’s all a bit bitty, with different authors
never quite sure whether they’re writing for basically The Doctor as we know
him or a Valeyard-style darker timelord, the result being a bit of a jumble. It
doesn’t help, either, that we basically get the same plot as ‘Waters’ with The
Doctor shocked to find he doesn’t have the powers he thinks he does, but
without the benefit of the shock value of the episode where he discovers it for
the first time (and it’s hard to think that the shocked Doctor at the end of
this story would ever dare try anything like it again). Most of the stories
feature the 10th Doctor but the 8th and 9th
cameo quite a lot (the ripples of The Doctor’s actions going back to the time
war) and one story – the best one – even features the 4th (Big
Finish audio ‘Genetics Of The Daleks’ in which The Doctor intervenes to save an
‘Ark In Space’-like
starship from destruction). They’re still making the flipping things now though
most fans I know stopped being interested in it a long time ago – maybe one day
we’ll get a final end? Till then it all seems a bit pointless, despite some
good stories along the way. Oh and a shout out to Brian the Ood, the most
memorable ‘new’ character, who turned up in the comic creator story and is a
very good Ood indeed.
Previous ‘Planet
Of The Dead’ next ‘Dreamland’/’The End Of Time’
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