The idea of a “leap year” for Doctor Who was both exciting and a little worrisome. Exciting because only getting four episodes spread out through the year meant that each story was going to be big and epic. Worrisome because that’s giving each individual episode a lot to live up to. And, to be honest, the first few specials didn’t quite live up to those expectations. The Next Doctor opened with a blatant fake-out and proceeded to a tediously inevitable resolution, along the way giving us the ludicrous spectacle of a giant steam-punk “cyberking,” a concept that made the burping trash bin of Rose look brilliant. Planet of the Dead was a fairly successful “romp” episode and gave us a promising and exciting companion, but it also gave us a curiously anti-climatic and passive enemy and the most thrilling moment was heavy-handed foreshadowing for future episodes.
So, that was where we left off. So it’s perhaps not surprising that this episode opens with the Doctor visiting Mars on a whim. He’s not there chasing monsters or seeking wrongs to right. He’s simply enjoying himself. As we’ll see later, he’s strongly resisting the threat of his impending death and just doing things that he, ironically enough, never really had the time for. Naturally the forces of narrative causality strike, and the Doctor finds himself arrested and imprisoned on a science base. But not any base, the first human off-world base. One that the Doctor knows is doomed to experience a catastrophic disaster, but a necessary one, as the memory of the lives lost would compel further human exploration into space. Which brings us to the central conflict in the story. Oh, not the water-spewing zombies that take over the base personnel one by one. Those are just a convenient monster-of-the-week, a necessity for an old-fashioned Who “base under siege” story.
We’ve seen the Doctor fight against the seeming inevitability of fate before. It’s one of the stronger connecting themes running through the fourth series and is the central question posed in The Fires of Pompeii. Because of his unique position as a person outside of time, his actions when he becomes involved with history have consequences, and while his goal is to keep time running as it should there are also moments when he cannot interfere. There are also moments when his presence and his actions actually cause the fate he’s hoping to present. And that is his central worry here. He knows the fate of all these clever, brave people that he is instantly smitten with, particularly Captain Adelaide Brooke, played wonderfully by Lindsay Duncan. She’s one of those rare characters that can match the Doctor for intensity and determination and is more than capable of standing up to him and challenging him. The Doctor is caught between the responsibility he feels to maintain the integrity of time and his desire to help, and constrained by his fear that his attempts to help may be what ultimately dooms these people. It’s an impossible, unimaginable position, and David Tennant plays it beautifully.
And then the Doctor does something very bad…
It’s easy to forget that the Doctor is, fundamentally, inhuman. His values are not human values, his morals are not human morals. We’re shown this in little ways over the course of both the classic and the new series of the show, but it’s very rarely foregrounded in a significant way. This is one of those moments, as the Doctor realizes that it is actually within his power to change history, to save these people, to force time itself to bend to his will.
It’s a startling moment. We finally see the Doctor as a terrifying figure, a force of pure power. We see why other races feared the Time Lords. A being who can rewrite time to his own ends is essentially a god, one to whom every one in all of time and space should live in fear of. We see in this moment exactly the kind of callous arrogance that the Time Lords were dedicated to preventing amongst their own kind, the root of the madness that drives a character like the Master. The Doctor does save three people, and in doing so his motives change from doing it because it is the right thing to do, but doing it because he can. The casual way in which he brags to Adelaide that saving “the little people” is something he enjoys doing is quite possibly the scariest thing that’s ever come out of the character’s mouth in forty-six years.
And that’s not even the darkest moment in the episode. No, that comes moments later, with a death so stupidly tragic only because it is without a doubt directly the result of the Doctor putting his ego and selfishness, and, most importantly, his own fear of death, ahead of doing the right thing. It’s the Doctor getting his comeuppance for the increasingly cavalier attitude he has taken towards the lives of others and the state of the universe in this incarnation. With this episode, we see not only a clear and direct prologue to the coming finale, but also a culmination of the last four years worth of stories and character development. It’s intelligent, tight writing that is still an utter rarity in television. And it’s on a children’s sci-fi show.
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As has, I’m sure, been pointed out by many others in relation to the episode: there is a reason that, in the legends of the Daleks, he’s called “The Oncoming Storm”
It’s good to see them finally exploring the implications of their plots at a deep level. It would have been nice if they’d explored the effect on Jack of being buried for nearly 2000 years, for instance.
I’m trying to think of other stories that really explored the fearsomeness of the Doctor. Wasn’t the Doctor a legendary demon of sorts among Leela’s people?
While I watched this episode I remember Doctor-Dona saying that because she was a human with the knowledge of a Time Lord she could come up with solutions to problems The Doctor never could.
The prime mistake to doctor made (discounting his hubris) was taking the members of the expedition back to their lives on earth. He could have saved them but moved them several generations forwards or backwards in time. Or to another world. They would have been lost and able to inspire the world but also able to live out the rest of their lives.
I thought it was a the special felt padded out, and didn’t really come alive until the Doctor decided to change his mind. He did feel like he’d become the villain at the end of it. I hope to god some folks did some fine Valeyard fanfic as a result! Lindsay Duncan was splendid in the role of Adelaide Brooks. Much better than Michelle Ryan in POTD.
Excellent review as usual, and boy do I love that ‘spoilers’ pic.
I find “the little people” line to be quite scary, too, but for me the most unsettling part of the Doctor’s behavior at the end is when he gets annoyed and demands to know, “Isn’t anyone going to thank me?” Not only is the Doctor not comprehending that he has terrified the people he has just saved, he’s also forgetting a fundamental aspect of his character. As Jackson Lake and Martha Jones establish in The Next Doctor and Last of the Time Lords, respectively, the Doctor never gets thanked for saving the day. He doesn’t do the right thing in order to be praised. It’s such a casual moment–the camera’s making quick cuts, there’s no music, Tennant says the line quickly–and yet, that is a Doctor that I can believe was “a friend at first” with the Master. A Doctor who could be a follower of the Master. As you say, Dorian, a great prologue to The End of Time.
It is nice to see that all the messianic business with the Doctor is finally building to something- Tennant’s Doc has had these moments in brief before, but obviously this seems to be a case where he’s going to confront the issue.
I only have a couple of minor complaints with this. It would have been nice to get some sense of the monsters as a race- i.e., do they want anything besides just killing everyone and hiding in their bodies- but that may just be a matter of preference. Also, I saw the German girl’s death coming pretty much from the instant she showed up on screen. There’s always a hot chick among the casualties, so you just have to look for the one who would make the best screamer.
My main reaction to Waters of Mars: man, why can’t we have Lindsey Duncan as the next Doctor? She and Adelaide really stole the show for me. And, though it is rankest heresy, it also just brought home how damn tired I am of David Tennant.