Wet Wet Wet

I'm writing this on a very soggy Monday morning in Victoria indeed... and I'm definitely not going outside until it's dry.

The Waters of Mars wasn't perfect, but I do think it was damn good, and definitely worth the six month wait. Some people had been agitating for an airdate of Hallowe'en, on the grounds that this was obviously "the scary one, but in the end November 15th was fine, because it wasn't really about the chills, was it? They were just window dressing to the main plot, the one about the Laws of Time.

No disrespect to the Flood, who were a superbly horrifying monster. Can I be among the first to suggest that they should make a return appearance, sometime in the next few years? However, I agree completely with my wife, who turned to me about halfway through and pronounced, "this isn't nearly as scary as Blink". Part of the problem was that we'd seen most of the big shudder moments already, in the trailers, leaving as far as I can remember only Maggie's transformation scene to unexpectedly chill our blood. The main issue though was that, with so much time and dialogue being devoted to the Doctor's inability to alter fixed history, there wasn't too much room left for terror and suspense.

Full marks to RTD for finally clearing up a question that has been hanging over the show since 1964, when the First Doctor insisted to Barbara "you can't rewrite history! Not one line!" For a long time it seemed as though history there just meant "the subject as studied in Earth schools in the late 20th century", and that deposing dictators and toppling empires was entirely kosher as long as it took place on alien worlds or in the future. At last though we have confirmation that some events are fixed, some aren't, and Hartnell just had a predisposition for taunting his bleeding-heart liberal companions by taking them to unpleasant moments in history that have to stand.

Things I liked about this episode: the production values and acting were top-notch, and Graeme Harper did his usual solid directing job, realizing the importance of turning the lights off for the scary bits. (Witness how comparatively lame Steffi's transformation is compared to the others, because no justification can be found for doing it in the half-light.) Mars looked better than Dubai, sorry, the Planet of the Dead, at presumably a fraction of the cost. "Bowie Base" was a good joke, and there were some classic soundbites, such as the impeccably delivered "the Doctor, Doctor, fun" and "are you the Doctor or the Janitor?"

Things I didn't like. Well, the crew. There seems to be an unwritten rule that the "crew" in any given episode set in the future will always be about the same number of people (half a dozen or so), with an appropriate diversity of genders and ethnicities. The problem being that, in an hour long episode with other things on its plate, there was only room to develop about 50% of them. Adelaide was fantastic of course, Ed defined himself economically by butting heads with his captain, Roman likes robots, Yuri has a gay brother and even Andy has his carrots. Unfortunately that left Steffi, Tarak and Mia with no discernible features apart from their nationalities. Particularly outrageous was where the Doctor made a song and dance about Mia being "only 27", moments after being introduced to Yuri (also 27), and Roman, the baby of the crew at 25. We can draw one of two conclusions from this: either the Doctor in this incarnation only really cares about attractive young girls (not entirely implausible at this stage), or that, in the absence of an actual character, they felt like they had to try and give Mia some remarkable feature, to wit being too young and pretty to die.

I was also miffed by the amount of time spent on shots of people running. Seriously, what was with all those corridors? Yes, they made Bowie look awesome in longshot, but you'd think it'd be blimmin' inconvenient over many years of running a base in actual practice. There was no room in the cargo for the dead weight of bikes, but miles of corridor material was deemed essential? I found myself wondering if the corridors were there as some kind of ironic statement, that "running down corridors is what futuristic Doctor Who is all about", in which case shame on you, Russell T Davies!

As I've said though, it turned out that the Flood and Bowie Base One were just a sideshow to the main issue, of what happens when the Tenth Doctor is confronted with a piece of timeline that he really can't change. We had a taster for this in The Fires of Pompeii: then, he refused to do anything, but Donna pleaded with him to make just a tiny difference, to save just a few. This time, again, he refuses to intercede, and again, Adelaide pleads with him for the lives of her crew. You'd think if he got away with it once, he could get away with it a second time... but apparently not.

I have to say, I loved the Doctor's constant struggle with his conscience at the beginning of the episode. He knows he should leave, knows that when things start taking a turn for the apocalyptic he might not be able to stop himself from rolling up his sleeves and wading in. The funny thing is, I think he's right to stay, and I think he's right to help, though it's a crying shame for Ed and Steffi and Ramon that it takes him so long to come to that conclusion. The Doctor doesn't look like a coward and he isn't a coward. How morally repugnant would it have been for him to keep walking away at the end, while he's listening to his helpless friends dying, one by one? That's the Time Lord way, but the entire series is founded on the principle that non-intervention is not the Doctor's way. I think the tragedy of the end of this episode is that what the Doctor does is completely, unarguably right. What use are laws, of time or otherwise, if all they do is cause innocents to suffer?

And although the timelines do change, Susie Fontana Brooke still goes to the stars. Is there an implication that this only still happens because Adelaide takes her own life? Perhaps. But I have to say, I was a bit shocked by the ingratitude of the survivors back on Earth. Yes, the Doctor should have taken them somewhere far away from the Solar System and 2059, instead of saying "in your face, Laws of Time". But it seems a bit unlikely that the universal reaction to a reprieve from certain death would be shock and outrage. Adelaide may be suffering from "a captain must go down with her ship" syndrome, but she begged the Doctor to help save her crew. She's known him for all of an hour and already she knows better than him about the immutability of the timelines... something which he explained to her in the first place? Granted, she could see the megalomania burning in his eyes in the last minutes on Bowie, she can tell he's going off the rails, but coming to the conclusion that she has to end her own life... well, I think that's RTD telling us, somewhat hamfistedly, that what the Doctor has done is Bad and Wrong, instead of it being any kind of logical thing for the character to do.

I liked that even a Dalek, with its presumable overriding urge to exterminate small defenseless humans, wasn't messing with the timeline of this one. I have to wonder - if the Doctor's screwing around with immutable Earth history somehow impacts on the Time War and brings Gallifrey back, and early indications are that this is a possibility - could the Daleks have been steering clear of Adelaide Brooke's timeline as a matter of priority? Though, as Davros's plan was to snuff out the entire universe, or something equally silly, I'm not sure that's entirely likely.

But yes, in the end, The Waters of Mars is good, because it addresses the issues that have been rankling with viewers for a while now. Isn't this increasingly messianic and Christ-like Doctor getting a bit too big for his boots? Isn't it a bit irritating that he can just point the sonic screwdriver at any problem nowadays and it fixes it? I would be pleased to believe that the increasing aura of omnipotence around the Doctor is not a matter of writers being too lazy to construct proper denouements, but a "Davies Masterplan" - an arc conceived from the start to illustrate the tragic theme of "pride comes before a fall".

"I went too far!" cries the Doctor, and yes he did. But he went too far for a lot of the right reasons, as well as a few of the wrong ones. "Just for once, everybody lives!" he crowed at the end of The Doctor Dances, and we cheered him on. But it's the fact that he's now trying to save too many people, too much of the time, that's going to be the end of him. And that is heartbreaking.