This gentleman could do with some chapstick.

Everyone and his dog (robot or otherwise) is aware that David Tennants days as The Time Lord are numbered; paving the way for the floppy haired Matt Smith to take the keys the T.A.R.D.I.S and carry on the duties as the 11th incarnation of The Doctor next year. The Waters Of Mars is the last in the series of one hour specials before the Christmas and New Years day climax that sees  Tennant exit the show as the iconic Time Traveller. The Waters Of Mars excels in not only telling a interesting Doctor Who story, but drastically changes the way the audience sees the 10th Doctor. Making the wait till his inevitable exit all the more frustrating.

Still without a companion; The Doctor lands on Mars in 2059 and stumbles across a base inhabited by a team from earth lead by Adelaide Brooke (Lindsay Duncan) and accompanied by annoying comedy robot “GADGET”, who looks like a cross between demented computer GLaDOS from Portal and Johnny 5 from Short Circuit; only without the charm, charisma or the ability to do anything of interest or worth. The Doctor learns that the date is the 21st November 2059 and this is the crew of Bowie Base One (insert David Bowie and Life On Mars reference); the first human outpost on the red planet who tragically die on this date in a mysterious explosion. He is aware that this is a fixed point in history similar to the volcanic eruption in Pompeii, and the Time War that wiped out the Time Lords and cannot be interfered with and he quickly decides to leave.

Meanwhile however; across the other side of the base in the Botanical enclosure the smilingly innocent and usually problem free action of washing a simple carrot has disastrous consequences as the water that washed said carrot seems to cause infection in anyone who comes in contact with it. So when a generic carrot loving crew member fancies a bit of his favourite orangey vegetable he falls foul of the infection and is transformed into a soggy zombie, with water exuding constantly from his mouth and making the floor very unsafe to run on. Which turns out to be extremely inconvenient as there is to be much running as the infection spreads throughout the base. Leaving The Doctor with a choice to stay and help or leave and let things pan out how they are always supposed to.

The beautiful thing about The Waters Of Mars that by the end of the episode you realise that the majority of things that actually happened in the last hour was completely throw away. Any matters concerning the literally soaked undead is inconsequential by the time the credits roll. Now, if a seemingly outlandish statement like “most of that thing I just watched for about an hour could’ve been replaced with any number of different scenarios” was applied to anything else you would understandably be annoyed; and would probably want to write a strongly worded letter to the creators of the show. The jist of the letter probably being simply “WTF?”, you would then find yourself in a scenario where you couldn’t find a pen or other wrting materials to write said letter and would almost certainly take out your frustrations on a household pet (e.g budgie or domestic owl) then sulk in front of your computer to “own some n00bs” until your rage subsides.

Or…

You would realise that The Waters Of Mars was an episode about The Doctor, not just an episode with The Doctor in. The monsters in this story essentially work as a distraction to the events leading up to the regeneration into Matt Smith at the end of the year in that sense are completely interchangeable with any of the series rouge gallery. You probably could’ve painted Gary Glitter purple and stuck a number of assorted kitchen utensils to his stupid little beard, and an episode entitled “The Attack Of The Purple Pedo & His Cunning Collection Of Cutlery” still would not have anything really to do with the monster in the show. The wonderful thing that is happening with new Doctor Who is that the creators of the show have given us a Doctor that we feel sorry for. They repeatedly reinforce how lonely The Doctor is and how hard it is when he loses a companion (with Catherine Tate’s exit illustrating this the best). The moments that make this episode so memorable is when all these moments catch up with The Doctor and causes him to go completely coco-loco and drives him to go too far an abuse his powers and responsibilities as a Time Lord. Without spoiling too much we start to see elements like arrogance and disdain creep into The Doctor; certain characteristics that are more identifiable with The Master.

The creative team behind Doctor Who have taken full advantage of the fact that David Tennant has been with the show for three and a bit series and intend to give him a grand send off. Thus making the transition between Tennant and Smith much more of an event then that of Eccleston and Tennant; whose exit to the show came at the last minute and was sort of brushed over at the end of the first series. It’s a very brave decision to take an extremely beloved incarnation of The Doctor such as Tennant’s and take the character down a very dark path; which completely changes him. The Doctor we see by the end of the episode is not the the cheeky Time Lord with the sunny disposition we see on lunch boxes or in that weird top trumps game on the D.S; making his regeneration a necessary event, rather then an excuse for Tennant to be written out of the show. For this Russell T. Davis should be applauded for making such an inspired decision before he hands over his responsibilities to Steven Moffatt as head writer for the new series.

The next episode “The End Of Time” airs on the 25th December. Where according to many miscellaneous characters “he will knock four times”. My predictions is that it won’t be The Master knocking on the T.A.R.D.I.S door, but will be comedy Grandad played by Bernard Cribbins. Watch this space…

Dave Hammond

dave@itsnotatumour.com

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Tags: Bowie, Catherine Tate, Christoper Ecclestion, Comedy Robot, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Evil Carrot, Gary Glitter painted purple, Household animal abuse, Mars, Matt Smith, n00b, Regeneration, Russell T Davis, sexy fun time, Soggy, Steven Moffat, TARDIS, The Waters Of Mars, Time Lord, Undead, Wet, WTF, Zombies

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.