The Waters of Mars by: Russell T. Davies & Phil Ford and directed by: Graeme Harper

 

“The Waters of Mars” stars David Tennant as the Doctor and Lindsay Duncan as Adelade Brooke with Peter O’Brien as Ed Gold, Aleksander Mikic as Yuri Kerenski, Gemma Chan as Mia Bennet, Sharon Duncan Brewstetr as Maggie Cain, Chook Sibtain as Tarak Ital, and Alan Ruscoe as Andy Stone.  It was written by: Russell T. Davies & Phil Ford and directed by: Graeme Harper with Gary Russell as Script Editor, Nikki Wilson as Producer, and Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner as Executive Producers.  It was originally broadcast on Sunday 15 November 2009 on BBC One.

 

Content Warning: This review will contain a discussion of suicide as it pertains to the episode and characters in Doctor Who “The Waters of Mars”.  Reader discretion is advised.

 

“The Waters of Mars” is an episode that wasn’t initially on the schedule for the 2009 specials to say goodbye to Russell T. Davies, Julie Gardner, and David Tennant.  While the plan was to write a series of specials to be broadcast through the year, the exact number of episodes that would be part of the special series, initially believing to be four: “The Next Doctor” which was in production, an Easter special which would become “Planet of the Dead”, and two further specials that would become The End of Time.  Another would be added to the schedule to air between “Planet of the Dead” and The End of Time, bringing the episode count up from five to six, split across five stories.  Davies was determined to get Phil Ford into the main show before he left the series after his work on The Sarah Jane Adventures, initially suggesting “The Midwinter’s Tale” set in a hotel on Mars which evolved into “Christmas on Mars” or “Red Christmas” before finally focusing in on “The Waters of Mars” for a November airing, before the holiday season could properly begin.  As with “Planet of the Dead”, Russell T. Davies worked closely with Ford on developing the script in co-written format, but unlike the former the general idea was actually Ford’s and not Davies’.  Davies contributed particularly the character that would become Adelaide Brooke, designing her as a role for Helen Mirren or Dame Judi Dench, and the ending of the episode with Ood Sigma appearing as lead-in to The End of Time.  Both agreed on creating a multinational cast though Davies was also responsible for adding a robot and the explicit nature of the fixed point in time surrounding Bowie Base One.

 

Due to a budgeting issue, “The Waters of Mars” also had less funds to facilitate the switch to high definition in “Planet of the Dead”, limiting some of the effects director Graeme Harper could use, something that works to the episode’s advantage.  Harper has always been one of the best Doctor Who directors, and television directors in general and this has some of his best work.  While it was always scripted as a base under siege story, being limited with how many sequences could be outside of the base and the monsters themselves being limited to human actors with minimal effects is a limitation that just adds to the horror.  The manifestation of the Flood as the script denotes the creatures that take over the members of Bowie Base One are truly terrifying simply because of the sheer amount of water yet how dry the faces become adds this uncanny valley that feels wrong in the absolute best way.  The idea of the water being patient, waiting until the final possible moments to break into the base once the characters seal themselves in add to the tension, the audience knows how history will remember this base and how it must end, something the episode does deliver on while subverting expectations in the best way possible.  This entire episode is one where the patience and resolve in a crisis ends up being the downfall, the characters make all the right decisions but it’s still not enough.  “The Waters of Mars” is one of the few episodes of the revival of Doctor Who that is entirely from the Doctor’s perspective.  Even though the rest of the specials with one-off companions, those companions stayed the focus, but here it’s all on the Doctor, arriving on the base and almost immediately learning exactly what is about to happen to these people, something that he is powerless to stop.  Ford and Davies directly parallel “The Fires of Pompeii” with the Doctor knowing that morally he should be saving these people, yet because of history he can’t, and this leads to the point where he snaps, doing it anyway in an incredibly harsh decision to be a Time Lord Victorious (though the fact that this becomes a thing for a multimedia event treating it like a prophecy when it isn’t is weird in retrospect).

 

David Tennant gives one of his absolute best performances in this episode, his facial acting in particular through the first half of the episode showing this great sorrow and resistance to actually leave because why would he?  Initially the idea is that even if he cannot save these people, he has to know what happened.  As soon as he arrives the first member of the crew is infected, the second is infected and found unconscious before being quarantined, and the bodies start to pile up as the water begins to mobilize.  Tennant spends the last ten to fifteen minutes of the episode having a third act breakdown, screaming and making the decision to play God and interfere, one of the few times where the deification of the Doctor in the revival is explicitly shown to be wrong.  Tennant’s anger and sorrow is amazing and placing him against noted character actor Lindsay Duncan just exemplifies this.  The Doctor resists until he is forced to share with Adelaide her fate and what it means for the universe, giving this episode the lens of asking what it means to be a part of history and how does one define the big lives when compared to the small ones.  This is the woman the Doctor not twenty minutes earlier was running and enjoying the company of throughout.  Duncan in return gives one of the best performances in Doctor Who’s history, a performance that remains near to the top position.  This was the first thing I had seen Duncan in and based on this performance alone tells me the caliber of actress she is.  It was already on the way, but her final silent moments are perfect and some of the darkest Doctor Who has done.  To prove the Doctor wrong, Adelaide Brooke enters her home and immediately commits suicide so history can remain on track, one final death to inspire the future.  It ends the episode with this horrific feeling and realization that the Doctor has genuinely gone too far and needs to regenerate.  In fact, if the Tenth Doctor’s era had ended here and The End of Time didn’t exist we would have one of the best regeneration stories in the series’ history.

 

Overall, “The Waters of Mars” is oddly an episode people sometimes overlook due to being the episode right before the massive two-part finale.  It’s an episode in the midst of specials that go for spectacle and fanservice over substance, but it also proves that even in its final moments Russell T. Davies’ era of Doctor Who knows how to pull out all the stops for one last perfect ride before things can end.  It deserves to be discussed as one of the Tenth Doctor’s best moments despite the character being at his lowest, something that would have been the perfect end to the character and the era instead of what happened in the final two specials.  “The Waters of Mars” is perfect.  10/10.