Complete masterpiece, the best the show has ever been. Incredible progression of the Doctor. THIS IS IT FOLKS!!

We now come to the tail end of the Tenth Doctor’s life with his penultimate episode The Waters of Mars. Of course, you all know why this story’s famous; the Doctor is pushed to his breaking point where in the face of letting a base full of the first humans on Mars die in order to preserve the timelines, the Doctor takes the laws of time into his own hands. But is it right to change history on such a scale? How far could the Doctor go with such power?

Really the main strength of this story lies in its second half, the first half is an effective base under siege horror story with the Mars base crew under attack by a living organism that hides in the water and possesses all who touch a single drop of it. The Flood is a great and chilling monster that’s mostly left unexplained which adds to the horror element, not to mention some freaky transformation scenes. But the second half is where things really start to pick up with the Doctor being faced with the moral dilemma of letting the first humans on Mars die in order to inspire the captain’s granddaughter to take the people of Earth out into the stars. It’s not often that Doctor Who tackles a fixed point in time that takes place in the future, but it does allow for more creativity and some powerful drama, the scenes between the Doctor and Captain Adelaide Brook are so excellent, from the scene at the glacier where the Doctor hints at what the future holds for Brooke’s family to the scene where he comes clean about how he can’t save her or her crew. Coupled together with Murray Gold’s beautiful score makes it one of my favourite scenes in the show.

This then leads into the Doctor being pushed over the edge as he decides that as the last of the Time Lords, that makes him in control of the laws of time. So, he goes out of his way to rescue all the survivors including Adelaide who realises to her horror that not only does her survival have the potential to change history for the worse, but the Doctor has decided he has the power to choose who he feels is worth saving whether he should or shouldn’t. The ending and how Adelaide snaps the Doctor out of his brief god complex is a powerful gut punch resolution. The only downside to this is that it comes so near the end of the Tenth Doctor’s life and the fact that it’s so poorly followed up on in The End of Time, which makes me wonder if the ending may have been more down to Phil Ford’s writing. The idea of the Doctor losing control and becoming “the Time Lord Victorious” could’ve been the beginning of an entire set of stories and a unique new direction to take the Doctor (and I don’t mean that unfocused, over complicated mess we got in 2020), or at the very least it should’ve been the focus of his regeneration story instead of whatever the hell Russell was smoking when he wrote The End of Time.

I have always held this one up as one of the best and upon rewatching it, I somehow think I was STILL UNDERESTIMATING IT! Really quite enamored with the set design and art direction here. It feels so classically sci-fi. Like right out of a battered paperback. The villains design is simple yet truly terrifying in its execution. Kind of like the 456 in Torchwood, their attack is so simple but the cinematography and the score never let the budget restraints show too much.

It's been awhile since Tennant had a decent scene partner and his work with Lindsey Duncan is SO GOOD!!!! I can't describe how devastating Tennant's turn is. Everything in the sequence of him walking away pays off in such a beautiful subversion of our established hero's trademark. It's terrifying. It's fantastic. I want to kiss it to death.

This gets more intense as time goes on. The fact that Captain Adelaide is only supposed to be five years older than me, and now that robots are advancing far past Gadget Gadget 25 years before this episode is set, the whole viewing experience is quite surreal.

The Waters of Mars is a very good story. It makes clever use of foreshadowing to tell an interesting story with strong characters. The ending is very nice.