This is the one. After a year of specials that mostly filled time pleasantly, “The Waters of Mars” arrives and does something the show has been circling for four years: it lets the Doctor lose. Not lose a fight — lose himself. It is a horror story with a genuinely frightening monster, and then it becomes something much worse than a horror story, and its last fifteen minutes are among the most disturbing this programme has ever broadcast.
Bowie Base One
Mars, 21 November 2059. The Doctor steps out of the TARDIS in a spacesuit, delighted, and then reads a plaque and stops dead — because he knows exactly where he is and, more importantly, when.
This is Bowie Base One, humanity’s first colony on another world. Today is the day it is destroyed in a nuclear explosion with all hands. Captain Adelaide Brooke and her crew die here, and the manner of their deaths becomes the story that sends Adelaide’s granddaughter to the stars and launches the whole human expansion outward. It is one of the fixed points — the events that cannot be altered without unravelling everything downstream.
The Doctor knows the names. He recites them, one by one, to a crew of living people standing in front of him, and the show does not let him off the hook for a second. This is the same rule he explained to Donna in the doomed streets of The Fires of Pompeii — and back then he had somebody standing beside him arguing, someone who forced him to at least save a single family. Here, nobody argues. That absence is the entire engine of the episode.
Lindsay Duncan is superb as Adelaide: hard, decent, exhausted, utterly unsentimental. She has a childhood memory that explains her — during the theft of the Earth she watched a Dalek look straight at her through a window and choose not to kill her, and she has spent her whole life understanding that as an obligation. It’s a lovely, unexpected use of The Stolen Earth, and it makes her more than a doomed name on a plaque.
The Flood
The monster is one of the best the show has produced. Something ancient is frozen in the Martian ice cap, and the base’s water filtration system has just brought it inside.
The Flood is a viral intelligence that lives in water, and infection takes a single drop. The infected split and crack across the face, their eyes go white, and water pours endlessly from their mouths and hands — not spraying, just flowing, constantly, silently. They move slowly. They don’t need to hurry. They are patient and they are absolutely relentless, and the design is so effective that the first proper look at one is genuinely alarming.
What makes it work as horror is the logic. This is a base full of humans surrounded by the one substance they cannot live without and cannot avoid, in an environment where a single leak is fatal. The show wrings real dread out of drips, condensation, and the sound of running taps. The crew go one at a time, and each loss is made to count — a woman sealed in a room with a leak she can hear starting, a man watching the skin of his own hand begin to crack. Nobody here gets a heroic death or a last stand. They just get wet, and then they aren’t themselves any more.
The Man Who Walked Away
And for a long stretch, the Doctor tries to leave.
That’s the most uncomfortable thing in the episode. He knows what’s coming, he knows he mustn’t interfere, and so he starts walking back to the TARDIS while people he’s just met are dying behind him. Tennant plays it as physical pain — a man forcing himself down a corridor, flinching at every scream, telling himself the rules exist for a reason.
He gets as far as the door. And then he stops, and turns around, and goes back — and it plays not as heroism but as something snapping.
The Time Lord Victorious
What follows is the most frightening thing Tennant has ever played.
The Doctor decides that the laws of time were made by the Time Lords, and the Time Lords are gone, and therefore the laws belong to him now. He tears through the base saving people he has just finished explaining must die. He drags Adelaide, Yuri and Mia off Mars, lands the TARDIS in a snowy suburban street on Earth, and throws the doors open like a conjuror.
And then he says it out loud. Not the last of the Time Lords — the winner. The Time Lord Victorious. He announces that he has broken a fixed point because he could, that he decides what’s fixed now, that there is nobody left in the universe with the standing to tell him no.
It is exhilarating for about ten seconds and then it is deeply, genuinely horrifying, because we’ve watched this coming. Davros told him he turns ordinary people into weapons at the end of Journey’s End and he had no answer. He’s been alone ever since, refusing companions, with no one to argue him down. This is what four specials of nobody saying “stop it” produces.
And the genuinely unsettling part is that he isn’t wrong about the facts. There really is nobody left to stop him. The Time Lords are ash, the rule he’s breaking has no enforcement behind it any more, and he has worked that out — which is precisely the problem. The only thing that was ever holding him to it was himself.
Adelaide
And then Adelaide Brooke, who has spent the episode being the only person in it with a steady moral compass, looks at him and is appalled.
She doesn’t thank him. She tells him that no one should have that much power, that he has gone somewhere no one should go, and that saving her has broken something more important than her life. And then she walks into her house and shoots herself, restoring the fixed point with her own hand, making sure her granddaughter still looks up.
It is a shocking, brutal piece of writing, and it lands like a slap. The Doctor stands in the snow having been comprehensively judged by a better person, and the arrogance drains out of him in real time.
Then the Ood appear at the end of the street — Ood Sigma, who told him on a snowy hillside in Planet of the Ood that his song was ending, standing silently in a suburban road. The Cloister Bell tolls. The Doctor says no, and runs for the TARDIS like a frightened man.
What The Waters of Mars Leaves Us With
The best thing the show has done in years, and the most upsetting. Here’s what it plants:
- A monster of pure dread. Water that thinks, in a place where water is life. Slow, patient, and unstoppable — a superb piece of horror design.
- Fixed points, weaponised. The rule the show established in Pompeii returns as a trap, and this time there’s no companion to make him save one family.
- After four specials of travelling alone, refusing anyone who asks — and this is the result. The show has been building this deliberately.
- The Time Lord Victorious. The Doctor as tyrant, briefly, sincerely, and terrifyingly. Tennant has never been better.
- Adelaide’s answer. She takes her own life to fix what he broke. The most damning verdict anyone has passed on him, and he can’t argue with it.
Rating: 5/5 — Frightening, morally serious and genuinely shocking, with a central performance that turns the hero into the villain without ever losing the thread. Easily the best of the specials and one of the finest hours the revived series has produced.
He saved three people who were meant to die, called himself the winner, and one of them went inside and made sure he was wrong. The Ood are waiting in the street. Three people have told him his song is ending. I don’t think he’s got long.