We might as well talk about it now. The episode ends with the Doctor, unable to listen to the crew of Bowie Base One dying over his communications link, deciding to rescue the survivors even though history says they died and their deaths subsequently inspired others to explore the stars. He can do this even though the destruction of Bowie Base One is a "fixed point" that cannot be changed, because he's the last Time Lord and "It's taken me all these years to realise the Laws of Time are mine, and they will obey me!" Captain Adelaide Brooke is (somewhat understandably) horrified by the "Time Lord victorious", and decides to kill herself to put history back on course. (Never mind that there's a difference between sacrificing yourself on Mars and shooting yourself on Earth.)
The problem is that there's no real reason why the Doctor couldn't save them properly, for real, without any of us this "I'm the winner and what I say goes" nonsense. We're told that Bowie Base One exploded on 21 November 2059 and that can't be changed, but we also know it exploded in a massive nuclear explosion that almost certainly vaporized everything in the base. So why can't the Doctor rescue Adelaide, Mia, and Yuri and take them somewhere/when else? As long as history thinks they died (and it's not like there were bodies to collect), what's the matter? Why can't they live somewhere else? (This becomes particularly irksome when the Doctor subsequently wriggles out of his own "fixed point" death in "The Wedding of River Song" in a not-entirely-dissimilar manner.) But no, this story is building up to a vengeful, cruel Doctor at the end (er...except this aspect won't actually be brought up in The End of Time), and so it has to reach this point, logic be damned.
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| The Doctor looks out over Bowie Base One. ("The Waters of Mars") ©BBC |
It's not perfect; I've mentioned the huge problem at the end (and why is the Doctor seeing Ood Sigma of all people?), but there are some minor issues along the way: there are slightly awkward lines like, "Water is patient, Adelaide. Water just waits", but there's also the weirdness of the Dalek in Adelaide's childhood electing not to kill her because she was involved in a fixed point -- even though the Daleks' plan in that story was to eliminate all life in the universe, which one would think would preclude Adelaide's death in 2059 (and incidentally, the webpage describing her death talks about the Dalek invasion of 2008, not 2009, but we can probably call that a typo and move on). There are also some curious accent decisions: the Russian sounds Russian, the Australian sounds Australian...but the Americans sound British. (Thus giving credence to the theory that something happened to the US in the mid-21st century -- although you wouldn't think the accents would change...)
But normally these things wouldn't matter -- they're largely minor niggles, and everything else is done well enough that this should be a classic. But I just have such a hard time with the resolution of the storyline that it brings everything down as a consequence. If you don't have this problem, then "The Waters of Mars" should be one of the standouts of the Tennant era (certainly a lot of people thought enough of it to award it the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form210) -- I just have a really hard time getting past the resolution; it weakens the entire effort.
It's sweet that they dedicated this to the memory of Barry Letts, though.
210 On the other hand, both "The Next Doctor" and "Planet of the Dead" were also on the shortlist for the Hugo that year, so maybe we shouldn't read too much into it.