11.18
Managed to acquire the new Doctor Who Special “Waters of Mars” thankfully. My thoughts are below but are spoilerific if you’ve not seen it, so in short I loved it though it probably didn’t need to be a full hour.
SPOILERS!
It looked gorgeous in HD I must say, especially on my new tv. The welsh quarry really looked like mars and the CGI flybys of the base were very nicely detailed.
The Doctor’s internal struggle between his instincts as a time lord and his own personal instincts are played well, so much so that you feel that conflict yourself. You want him to be the hero but you know after 5 years of his adventures (or 45 if you’re the old guard) how bad it would be.
Or would it? This little bump in time healed pretty quick thanks to Adelaide. Compare to Rose saving Pete in series 1, wouldn’t the Doctor expect Reapers to appear or did he reason that Adelaide’s survival will be just as inspiring for history as her death. Arguably, if Pete had survived then Rose would have had a very different impression of him.
Of course that’s all just conjecture. The real disaster is not that he changed history, but the arrogance with which he decided he could. No one was going to stop him except, in the end, Adelaide herself.
Back to the story itself. The Flood were a great enemy (better than their namesake from Halo.) Although I was expecting a bigger link to the Ice Warriors, just compare their mouths! Nice to have a shout out anyway. Presumably, the disaster of Bowie Base One helps get T-Mat up and running, with many governments thinking space travel is far too expensive and risky. Meanwhile a massive explosion could well have woken up some sleeping Ice Warriors and point them towards Earth as being an invasion target.
This is rambling, so I shall stop. Enjoyed it a lot and look forward to Christmas!
I also liked the portrayal of Doctor’s inner struggle and his long hesitation whether to stay of leave immediately which was the main comic relief of the episode. For a moment, I really thought doctor could take such a big risk by saving Adelaide and and get away with it.
All in all, not a bad episode, but full of errors in my view. I refuse to believe the future wouldn’t have turned out any differently just because she died on earth rather than Mars, what incentive would the daughter have to ‘look for her mother in space’ if she was found dead in her own flat. Gadget annoyed me as it seemed like another pointless ‘how’s the doctor going to get the tardis back this time, oh wait, of course – the robot’. I will choose to overlook the fact there is no way there could be an explosion like that on Mars, let alone that we heard it on a planet with no atmosphere.
I would have preferred it to have ended with the doctor leaving them to die on Mars, and it is that which ‘sends him off the edge’
Ramble over.
The wife pointed out the atmosphere thing and I had to point out that actually Mars does have an atmosphere, it’s just thin and mostly CO2. Whether you could get a decent explosion out of it i don’t know but still.
And i thought the idea was that the story told by the other two survivors (setting off the self destruct to save the world) inspired a legacy. In the original timeline the legacy was inspired by the journey and the mystery of the explosion. I admit it’s ropey but like a lot of RTD’s scripts i enjoy it too much to really be bothered by the holes