I love Waters of Mars like few other Doctor Who stories. I wouldn't necessarily want every Doctor Who to be like this, in fact, its uniqueness is what makes it be so special.

From our first little taste of the peak "Time Lord Victorious" to the sinister monsters (whose effects and performances by those infected are so well done) there isn't a part of this episode I don't like. Even little things like the simple set-up and payoff of the little gadget robot all worked to make this an effective and captivating piece of science fiction. It's dark, full of ideas, and properly explored from start to finish. Easily one of my favourite David Tennant stories, I would consider it right up there with other spooky outings like Blink and Midnight. For whatever reason, it feels like Waters of Mars doesn't quite get the same level of hype, but I think it should. The virus in this story is so creepy. We briefly get a sense of its perspective when it is "talking" through the captured woman, before it reveals itself, but that's our only real glimpse into their thoughts or perspective. Otherwise we are just left with the creepy reality they instill.

Water is patient... that, and how quickly/suddenly the infection spreads, really sticks with me. And it is all capped off with some of the most interesting character work around the Doctor I've ever seen. The stuff at the end with him and Adelaide is haunting. I really like the full cast here. There's just enough personality and pluck to them you really feel bad once the bodies start piling up, and why it is so hard for the Doctor to let history play out. This could have just been a goofy horror episode to close out Tennant's run. Instead, it left me incredibly emotionally invested.

Maybe not every Doctor Who episode can be this dark or push the character this much, but it absolutely should set the standard in terms of creativity and ambition.

📝10/10 = FAVOURITE!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time! This time: when water drives you crazy!

The Water of Mars is, and will always remain, one of the finest episodes in the 60+ years of Doctor Who. It’s a delightful mix of great production values, a capable cast, a compelling story, a creepy monster, and memorable moments.

The TARDIS takes Ten to Mars and research base Bowie Base One, right before the base and its personnel are terrorised by a terrible water-based alien life form. The Doctor soon realises that he has the power to alter the course of history and avoid the entire crew from being killed by the aliens, which unleashes his Time Lord Victorious complex. The Waters of Mars is a brilliant showcase of how to make a compelling base under siege with deer meaning—that of a Time Lord’s burden and responsibility—and how even the Doctor can go too far.

The episode sets up the setting, the crew, and the monster within the first five minutes. Then it uses the rest of the runtime to flesh everything further out, while effectively building tension and providing plenty of excitement by turning the ongoing situation worse by the minute. The tight direction and frat soundtrack also help in building the atmosphere. There’s enough time to build a satisfying story with beautiful character moments while keeping things going at a good pace.

David Tennant is at his absolute best here—a Doctor weighed down by his believed status as the Last of the Time Lords and the immense burden of responsibility that comes with it and finally snaps him. The way he just stands around in a corner, listening to the crew panicking and watching the catastrophic events of the base go down, unable and unwilling to do anything, is genuinely gut-wrenching. And then he suddenly fights back and defies every rule and principle with full force in a way that is both satisfying and scary, and only Tennant could pull it off.

All guest characters are great, even the ones we barely get to know. Captain Adelaide Brooke is a no-nonsense leader who doesn’t allow the Doctor to control her or attempt to change the course of history. Gadget is one of the more memorable robots in the show, but sadly underused.

The makeup work on the infected is one of the best seen on the show, and the design of Bowie Base One and its different rooms is effective as well. 

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

• It’s funny how I’m technically older than any of the Bowie Base One personnel seen here. The oldest, Captain Brooke, was born in 1999, and most of the others in the 2020s or 2030s.
• I love that the Ice Warriors get a mention and that they bear a fleeting relation to the aliens we meet here.
• The Time Lord Victorious multimedia event builds off the ending of this story, and there’s truly a compelling base for a wider exploration of a “victorious” Time Lord laid here.

I may risk sounding overdramatic, but my most recent viewing The Waters of Mars shook me to my core. The first half hour has little shards of frothy fun poking through the mix but the last half hour absolutely crushed me as the inevitable fate of Adelaide Brooke's outpost team becomes clearer and clearer. It is their hope and their ever diminishing chances of saving themselves, that kills you. I don't know if Doctor Who has ever been darker. I don't know if you'd really want Doctor Who to ever be darker than this. For this piece of television though they get the balance right. It is right that in and amongst the run-arounds at Easter and Christmas that you get this cathartic, tragic, horrible, emotive episode.

The links back to The Fires of Pompeii are quite rightly called out in the episode itself but there is a key difference for the audience. We don't mourn the people of Pompeii with the same potency of the people of Bowie Base One. Not because they are not as human - they are in fact real historical figures who we should be able to empathise better with than entirely fictional characters - but because the people of Pompeii are set in the past, their deaths feel natural, inevitable and okay. The fact that The Doctor is able to save one Pompeiian family is cause of celebration. The fact that The Doctor is only able to save two members of Bowie Base One is a tragedy because Doctor Who usually makes the future a safe place where the right thing will always happen in the end. As one unlikely piece of hope is dangled after another you are left with your heart in your stomach - until the terrible conclusion finally arrives.

The only criticisms you could lay at the door of this story are the intrusive newspaper cutting flashbacks which seem unnecessary to me, especially more than one or two of them. It is a weird and unsatisfying visual to put onscreen that many times. Though, I sympathise for Phil Ford & Russell T Davies who do not have a companion for The Doctor to communicate some much needed "history" to regarding the events of 21 November 2059.

How refreshing though to have a story with no companion. I know they presented Lyndsey Duncan's Adelaide Brooke as a companion ahead of broadcast but what she actually is, is one of the best lead guest characters the show has ever seen. The lack of her being a "companion" is one of the key things that makes this story so gobsmacking. So unsafe. So uncertain. Anything could happen and it does.

Clearly the most shocking thing they did with her character was to have her kill herself at the end. It may have been with a zappy sci-fi gun, but its a suicide in a family TV show. She felt that she should have died on that base. She should have gone down with her crew. So The Doctor "mastering time" to keep her alive is not enough. She did not think the outcome was right, or would lead to a better future for humanity, so she righted it herself. Tea-time brutally for tots indeed. What makes this even more shocking is that the show was set in 2059 and someone of Adelaide's age would have been born in the same year as a 10-year-old watching the show in 2009. Ford and Davies are saying to the target audience: "THIS IS YOUR FUTURE". Never before has the show dared to stray into this territory and perhaps it will never do again. "Gadget gadget" is not going to soften that blow.

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.

Everything about this is wonderful. Mars and the Bowie Base are so wonderfully realised that everything feels just so real, which adds to the dread, claustrophobia, terror and unnerve. The crew, while not all given the same depth universally, are all given some insights to really root for them, with Adelaide Brook being such a fantastic character.

The Flood are terrifying, and such a wonderful concept, and building fear from such a mundane thing.

And it leads into the Time Lord Victorious, which is such an interesting concept, and adds depth to the Doctor.