Doctor Who: The Waters of Mars

The rather late preview which then became a review which then sat on my PC for a month (sorry but I was so not bothered I could hardly be bothered)

Airdate: Sunday 15 November 2009

Fantastic. Wow. What an hour of television. Edge of the seat stuff.

Ok, the fanboys have gone now so lets be honest - it was a waste of an hour. Although I do appear to be in the minority as the above were genuine responses. Seriously, people liked this one.


Think Ripley from Alien as envisaged by Merchant Ivory... Well not quite. The promise was that Adelaide would be the Doctors most intelligent and strong minded companion yet. Simply barking orders for 3 quaters of an hour does not make intelligent and strong minded, it is merely one dimensional. Yes she gained a character briefly but what was the point of developing it beyond this when you can simply avoid character writing with sci-fi tosh like "the woman with starlight in her soul" It is exactly the sort of line the production team think is epic and emotional but merely turns out to be empty babbling. Show us a character, not try and tell us in one line.
Incidently much of the problem with the show at present can be viewed in one scene. The flashback to Adelaide and the Dalek made little sense. In order to accept the Dalek refusal to kill her you have to ignore the fact that the Daleks were intending to destroy reality (this would suggest a complete disregard for the web of time) As a scene it works fine but undermines any suspension of disbelief previously granted in Journey's End. It is not so much a question of continuity but being led by a concern to manipulate an audience in the short term present, as a consequence the plot unfolding on screen is believed to be the most important aspect of the programme. To focus on plot is an obvious fanboy error, what counts is the story (story = what a writer seeks to communicate about the world to the collective consciousness of civilisation) Yet recent examples of Doctor Who are being driven by plot rather than story or drama. Now Journey's End was dreadful but both it and this scene show a production team more involved with the cheap effect of a single moment than any over riding sense of quality. Writing 101: Law 34 Long term dramatic congruency should not be sacrificed to bolster immeadiate, trivial and minor plot points.


Behold the one dimensional cannon fodder as mindless death replaces any notion of drama and tension... It was billed as the scariest episode ever since the last scariest episode ever. Yet it managed to be as scary as one of the Saw franchise, so not very scary at all. Death and mayhem are not scary, just voyeuristic sadism.



If it is ugly and not human looking it must be evil... A mantra we have been taught time and time and time again, episode by episode.



Having realised alien entities which possess people always seem to have glowing eyes the production team come up with a chilling alternative, a hose pipe up some blokes sleeve...


Interestingly Confidential showed the production team trying to tone down the episode. Here we have a problem. Authorship by committee will always lead to the bland and uninspired. Case in point, Hollywood. Part of the problem with the Tennant era is the decision to avoid doing anything different or potentially challenging to an audience. Rather than a drama serial it becomes a programme chasing an audience. As such compromises will always be made.
The production team are so determined to keep their audience that anything potentially dramatic will be exorcised. The closing scenes did get my heart racing. For a brief moment I actually believed we were about to see something never done in Doctor Who history. The idea of a Doctor exploiting his near omnipotence, heedless of consequence, was astounding. RTD is probably the only writer in TV talented enough to pull this off. Then came the obligatory back peddle. The Doctor recants "I've gone too far"
They got scared. Partly they did not want to upset or challenge their audience and, I believe, the other part comes down to David Tennant. Here we have an actor who, though exceptionally talented, has been allowed to let his off screen celebrity and personality take over the actual making of the show. To show the Doctor being controversial would compromise the image of David which now dominates the show. Rather than create a character descending into a moral vacuum through good intentions we are quickly turned away so we can feel sorry for the nice, handsome man who was about to die. About to die because an old lady buying chops decided he had to.


Water always wins... Poor humans, even the elements are against them. Thankfully here we have a Doctor so morally apathetic and eager to please he’ll probably kick nature’s ass to protect a bunch of crypto-fascists...
Doctor Who is not a science fiction show or science fiction. That genre relies on fear of the future and soft right wing fantasy to sustain itself. Doctor Who was always different. The show may have been scary to some (I always remember being excited as a child but that is probably just me) but it never tried to engender fear. If anything it played the opposite way. The show played upon the Fruedian notion of the uncanny to explore common humanity. For instance spaceship battles are not Doctor Who but giant cats riding on horseback down the streets of suburbia is. It is an important distinction to make simply because the Tennant era seeks to create fear and not use the uncanny as a means of displaying the best and worst of human consciousness. Moffat spends so much of his time seeking approval from the Holmes/Hinchcliffe worshippers (I'm a Hulke man myself) he is quite happy to promote anything as an object of fear. Hey kids, you know books? By the time I've finished with you, you'll never read again. Love me!
In this episode we are told to fear the elements. Nature becomes an enemy, which is not such a responsible message considering what we have done to it and will now live through as a consequence.
For a writer to create fear for the sake of creating fear is a betrayal of the responsibilities the position holds.


It would not be the Tennant era without tacking on a silly foreshadowing that barely comes to fruition and lacks any ultimate relevance...





Makako en Konvenig
December 2009