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.

📝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 have a lot to say about this episode but I don't know how to be coherent so all I'll put is that I think this should have been 10's regeneration story and this may just be the best doctor who special of all time. David Tennant you will always be famous.

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.

The Christmas adverts have come out in force. After reading Charlie Brooker's excellent piece on the latest awful crop of "seasonal" advertising I've found myself with the theme from the Morrisons advert stuck in my head. I'm blaming you Charlie.

One advert that at least 9 Million people watched last night was on the BBC. Doctor Who had a sixty minute pitch for its apocalyptic Christmas episodes. It was intriguing, somewhat baffling and pretty terrifying. I'm not going to attempt to filter my following comments for spoilers, so go away if you haven't watched and don't want to know what happened. That was your only warning.

Why do I describe the episode as an advert? It certainly wasn't light bright and fluffy. But I wouldn't mind betting that the key word in the preparatory tone meeting for this episode was "Foreboding". We were foreboded in spades. From the early moments when the Doctor says "I shouldn't be here" we were left with a sense that something is coming. In the early moments of the episode we're shown obituaries for all the guest characters to flag up early that things won't end well. Several times throughout the action the Doctor's face is clouded with doubt, as if he's wrestling with his conscience. He wants to save these folk, but knows that he mustn't.

The actual threat faced by the Martian settlers isn't explained. At the end of the episode we have no more idea what it was that the broken water filter let through. All we know is that it turned crew members into zombies and that it was highly infectious. The story wasn't about this particular struggle; it was about the Doctor. He's clearly been travelling alone for some time now with no one to check the god complex that's been bubbling along under the surface since his last regeneration. We saw aspects of it back in The Christmas Invasion when he was clear about his "No second chances" rule. In the same story he brought down Harriet Jones' government with six words: "Don't you think she looks tired?", even though he'd previously described her premiership as a golden age that lasted three terms. In New Earth he declared that there was no higher authority than himself. There are many other examples throughout the tenth Doctor's era.

We need only look to later Christmas specials for more portents of the Doctor's superiority complex. In his first meeting with Donna Noble she begs him to find someone to travel with him because he needs someone to stop him from time to time. On the starship Titanic, Mr Copper sees the Doctor's expression at Rickston Slade's survival and notes that if he could choose who lived and died that would make him a monster. This is a line he crosses in Waters of Mars, and it's terrifying. The nightmare stuff with the water zombies is trivial compared with the prospect of an all powerful Doctor and a pitch perfect delivery by Tennant made the hints at what's to come seem most distressing. The Doctor has crossed a line and there's no going back.

There was an echo of a similar decision made last series when the Doctor discusses his time in Pompeii, when Donna begged him to save someone, anyone to make their time there have some meaning. We're left with the impression that saving Caecilius' family was the right decision, but how that coloured the Doctor's snap decision to save the three remaining crew members of Bowie Base 1 makes me wonder in retrospect. Were we reminded of that episode to show the contrast between saving "some little people" compared to saving Adelaide Brook? Or was it to remind us that the rot set in much earlier?

We're left with no doubt that there will be consequences for the Doctor's actions on Mars, and that these will inevitably lead to the death of the tenth Doctor. Although I'm also left wondering about some of his previous actions too. What about his changing of history to curtail Hariet Jones' government? What about triggering the Cyber invasion of The Next Doctor by sending cybermen and daleks tumbling through the void in Doomsday? His dismissal of the appearance of teh Cyber King in Victorian London with a simple "Funny That", seemed loaded at the time. Have we been witnessing a Doctor out of control for years, making a swiss cheese of time with catastrophic consequences? He said in this episode that his theory of fixed points in time with the rest being flux was "only a theory". What if every change has had repercussions? What if Time has only just been able to absorb the Doctor's actions for so long and now the straw has broken the camel's back? The Christmas double episode bears the weight of some very high expectations indeed.

Casual viewers got a bit of a run around with some water monsters and beautiful martian vistas. Fans were rewarded with a deeper story that challenges the heart of Doctor Who itself: What if the worst monster the Doctor ever came across is himself?