“The Waters of Mars” is the 2009 special in which the Tenth Doctor arrives at Bowie Base One, humanity’s first colony on Mars, on the day history records it being destroyed with all hands. A water-borne intelligence called the Flood begins taking over the crew, and the Doctor must decide whether to walk away from a fixed point in time or break it.
The review calls it the best of the specials, praising the Flood as a genuinely frightening monster, Lindsay Duncan as Adelaide Brooke and David Tennant’s turn as the “Time Lord Victorious”, while noting a few effects and logic niggles. It rates the episode 5 out of 5.
This is the one. After a year of specials that mostly filled the 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, but lose himself. Five minutes in there were already two people dead, and I remember thinking it looked like one of the scariest episodes of the new series, with some of the scariest villains. It’s a horror story with a genuinely frightening monster, and then it becomes something much worse than a horror story. 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 before anything else happens he’s picked up by Gadget, the base’s little wheeled maintenance robot, and trundled about by a machine with a voice like a toy. It gets a joke out of him about having known a much better robot dog, which is as close to K-9 as the show is going to say out loud, and it’s the last time anybody in this story has any fun. Then he 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, and today is the day it’s 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’s one of the fixed points, the events that can’t be altered without unravelling everything downstream. The Doctor knows the names, and he recites them to a crew of living people standing in front of him. It’s the same rule he explained to Donna in the doomed streets of The Fires of Pompeii, but back then he had somebody beside him arguing, someone who forced him to save at least one family. Here, nobody argues, and that absence drives the whole episode. The nearest he gets to comfort is telling them nobody will ever forget them, which is true, and also the most useless thing you could say to someone you’ve just told is going to die today.
Lindsay Duncan is superb as Adelaide: hard, decent, exhausted and utterly unsentimental. She has a childhood memory that explains her, because during the theft of the Earth in The Stolen Earth she watched a Dalek look straight at her through a window and choose not to kill her. She’s spent her whole life treating that as an obligation. It’s a lovely, unexpected use of that story, and it makes her much more than a doomed name on a plaque. By the time she and the Doctor are squaring up, you believe she’s the only person on Mars who could stand up to him.
The Flood
The monster is one of the best the show has produced. Something ancient has been 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 crack across the face, their eyes go white and water pours endlessly from their mouths, not spraying, just flowing, constantly and silently. They move slowly because they don’t need to hurry, 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 people surrounded by the one substance they can’t live without and can’t avoid, in a place where a single leak is fatal, and the episode wrings real dread out of drips, condensation and the sound of running taps. The crew go one at a time, and each loss counts, 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 gets a heroic last stand. They just get wet, and then they aren’t themselves any more. It’s the scariest the show has been in years.
I do have a few niggles, and they only bother me because the rest is so good. The water shooting out of the infected crew’s hands looks really fake, less like an alien virus and more like a hose up somebody’s sleeve. When the converted crew climb out onto the Martian surface, it’s fine that they can breathe water, but on a planet that cold, surely it would freeze? And when Gadget goes zooming across the landscape to fetch the TARDIS at the end, I couldn’t help wondering what happened to all the hills the Doctor had to climb over to reach the base in the first place. None of it spoils the episode for me. It’s just the sort of thing I shout at the telly.
The Time Lord Victorious
For a long stretch, the Doctor tries to leave. 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 die behind him. David Tennant plays it as physical pain, a man forcing himself down a corridor, flinching at every scream and telling himself the rules exist for a reason. What breaks him is the shuttle. Adelaide gets three of her people aboard, one of them is already infected, and it goes up while everyone watches, and that’s the moment the deaths stop being a fact he’s read about and become something happening in front of him. He gets as far as the door, stops, turns around and goes back, and it plays not as heroism but as something snapping.
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, the Time Lords are gone, and so the laws belong to him now. He tears through the base, saves Adelaide, Yuri and Mia, and lands the TARDIS in a snowy street on Earth, throwing the doors open like a conjuror. Then he says it out loud: not the last of the Time Lords but the winner, the Time Lord Victorious. It’s exhilarating for about ten seconds and then deeply horrifying, because we’ve watched it coming, from Davros telling him at the end of Journey’s End that he turns people into weapons, to four specials of him refusing anyone who might tell him to stop. The worst part is that he isn’t wrong about the facts, because there really is nobody left to stop him except himself.
Adelaide’s answer
Then Adelaide, the only person in the episode with a steady moral compass, looks at him and is appalled. She doesn’t thank him. She tells him no one should have that much power, and then she walks into her house and shoots herself, restoring the fixed point with her own hand so that her granddaughter still looks up at the stars. It’s a shocking, brutal piece of writing, and it lands like a slap, with the arrogance draining out of him in real time. Then Ood Sigma appears at the end of the street, the Ood who told him in Planet of the Ood that his song was ending, and the Cloister Bell tolls. With the four knocks from Planet of the Dead still hanging over him, the Doctor runs for the TARDIS like a frightened man.
Rating: 5/5. Frightening, morally serious and genuinely shocking, with a monster I loved and a central performance that turns the hero into the villain without ever losing the thread. It doesn’t move the bigger story on much beyond the Ood and those four knocks, and the water effects wobble, but I don’t care. Easily the best of the specials, and one of the finest hours the revived series has produced.