Who?

[Ginger Yellow]

Who?

Really? I thought it was one of the worst episodes I've ever seen. "We're OK, it's airtight. But water is patient!" What the fuck? And let me get this straight. These things need water to breathe, but they also make their own water out of nowhere. And create a fission reactor in their hosts? What the fuck? And don't get me started on all the portentous crap about the dalek understanding her time of death was fixed. Or turning Gadget into a rocket sled. The only good thing about the episode was the hubris at the end, but it wasn't enough to make up for an entire episode of hand-waving and self-absorption.

[Purves Grundy]

Who?

I agree with all of that, GY. I was trying to suspend my disbelief just so as not to be too relentlessly negative. But yeah, all those things seemed crummy to me at the time, too.

And unlike a Moffat script, this story seems to have failed on its own "scare the shit out of the kids" terms. Getting the Grundy offspring to brush their teeth last night was no more difficult than normal.

[Lucy Waterman]

Who?

His brief, seemingly, is to hurry along the pace instead of establishing mood, which is what the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, for all its dated bleepings and shrillings, managed to do by the bucketload in years past.

Wind to 1.40 and shout "Hooray!"

I quite liked the Waters Of Mars. For the most part, I didn't have that much of a problem with the plot holes, except that I couldn't see how the escapees could explain their return to people on Earth. How do you sell that?

LIKED
Everything about the design and lighting
The deeply transgressive last fifteen minutes
The pacing, which I think was RTD's best

DISLIKED
The Doctor's memory being made out of webpages
The limp beginning, which didn't do enough to set up our sense of wonder at the colony

[Ginger Yellow]

Who?

The limp beginning, which didn't do enough to set up our sense of wonder at the colony

Yeah, it was bizarre. We're talking about a show in which humans are present at the heat death of the universe, and we're supposed to be impressed by a small base on Mars?

[David Agnew]

Who?

ian.64 wrote:

I thought it was tremendous fun (mind you, I was in the middle of a Grolsch four-pack, so my critical faculties - such as they are - might have been compromised a tad), but I do agree about the 'running about' sequences, there's always this need to inject some Olympic-style gadding about so as to inject some cosmetic 'pace' into the proceedings.

I don't think it's even that, it's more about padding it out. Not so much of a problem when they did it on the old four-parters, but when you're telling a story that's less than an hour, it's a bit lazy (and is one of the main points in my theory of The Doctor's Daughter being a damning review, as opposed to just merely a shit episode)

I was a bit confused by the backstory given to Lindsay Duncan's character and thought it a touch contrived in its attempts to knit in connections to earlier storylines.

And not any old storylines, but old RTD-written storylines. I think the Christmas specials will break the all-comers record and be more continuity-referencing than Coronation street.

I don't sit there with a graph explaining which event in Who history links up with another

Call yourself a fan?

Ginger Yellow wrote:

Really? I thought it was one of the worst episodes I've ever seen. "We're OK, it's airtight. But water is patient!" What the fuck? And let me get this straight. These things need water to breathe, but they also make their own water out of nowhere. And create a fission reactor in their hosts? What the fuck?

Not to mention that the countdown to the nuclear explosion was on four before any of them were in the TARDIS. Now I know the TARDIS can withstand anything, but it takes more than four seconds to get everyone inside a TARDIS. Looking earnest and saying "look, just trust me" takes three.

[David Agnew]

Who?

Oh yeah, and what was the vision of the Ood making him think that death was near? If they wanted imagery, surely they could have used the Watcher from the Baker/Davison regeneration? It would have fitted with the Mars/Bowie base theme, too.

[Ginger Yellow]

Who?

I kind of assumed (after the fact) that he'd got the TARDIS to teleport them inside somehow. He's done that before, I think.

[ian.64]

Who?

Call yourself a fan?

Er, nope, I'm not actually. I like Dr. Who, but I'm not a bone-fide fanatic as some are, and ditto Star Trek - I love it to bits, but steer clear of the twerpy nerdism that makes some people humourlessly slavish to its history and longetivity, like the joyless tits who slagged off the new ST movie because the Enterprise's nascelles didn't look sleek enough, or some such idiotic detail.

[Levin]

Who?

The thing that got me more than all the faults already mentioned was the way that the grandaughter seemed to be ordained to be the first faster than light pilot. It smacked of fairy tale determinism, you will do this not because of who you are but because of who you share genetic material. Surely Doctor Who should be about more than making the cleaning girl aware of here inheritance as a princess?

Not only that but surely the pilot of a spaceship has little to do with the actual act of sending someone into space? A monkey can pilot a spaceship its the people on the ground who build the thing and provide funding that are the real visionaries. I've read The Right Stuff recently can you tell?

[David Agnew]

Who?

Sorry, that wasn't a serious question, Ian.

[Levin]

Who?

The great thing about Who is that humans will always go to the stars, not because of one person driving them there but because thats what humans do, they go out and explore. It doesn't matter who is at the Mars base it just matters that they are there. The glorification of Adelaide just seems to be another part of the celebritication of Doctor Who. She may be fictional but she was treated in the same was as all the historical figures we've seen in the past few years.

To be charitable it's a childs way of looking at history, to join the dots between the 'important people' to be less charitable it's a Victorian way of looking at the past, one that ignores nearly a century of historiography. Now true maybe I shouldn't expect fiction to look at the past from a particular standpoint but if the writers are going to chuck Victoria, Shakespeare and Christie onto our screens then I'd hope that they would do more than present them as celebrities from the past.

[David Agnew]

Who?

It's laziness more than anything. Hartnell met a few prominent historical figures, but that was in a day when Doctor Who was specifically aimed at kids, and the historicals were used to educate. But, after Hartnell meets Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, the next historical figure we see the Doctor meet is George Stephenson 20 (of our) years later.

Sure, there were references to meetings, and we even saw Tom Baker go to visit Da Vinci in City of Death, but we never even had a cameo.

The great Who writers and producers (Hinchcliffe, Holmes, Hulke, Dicks, Sloman, Letts, Adams) always veered away from big names. RTD's era has almost depended on it, and hasn't really cared how well the characters concerned have been portrayed (see William Shakespeare as Liam Gallagher).

[Purves Grundy]

Who?

Yeah, there's a definite sense that with the success of Charles Dickens in The Unquiet Dead (and in fact the first season in general) the production team had a sense of "blimey, this is easier than we thought" and have been getting increasingly slack (and to use the word of the day, hubristic) ever since.

[Merlin the happy pig]

Who?

Phoebe wrote:

Not to mention that it kind of kills the whole point of "Father's Day" and Rose not being able to bring her dad back.

Wasn't it the fact that Rose went back twice, crossing her own timeline the second time that brought the Reapers?

[Ray de Galles]

Who?

I've forgotten, who told The Doctor that death would knock four times for him and when did they tell him?

[Purves Grundy]

Who?

Easily forgotten. It was the Whoopi Goldberg character in the shit one with the bus.

[David Agnew]

Who?

Merlin the happy pig wrote:

Phoebe wrote:

Not to mention that it kind of kills the whole point of "Father's Day" and Rose not being able to bring her dad back.

Wasn't it the fact that Rose went back twice, crossing her own timeline the second time that brought the Reapers?

No, it was because "someone is alive who is supposed to be dead".

Rose didn't cross her own timeline (she could see herself but they never made contact, unlike, say, the Brigadier in Mawdryn Undead)

[Wyatt Earp]

Who?

No, but in rescuing her Dad she impacted on her own history, creating an unsustainable paradox. This was different, this Fixed Points In History argument.

[Crusoe]

Who?

Some RTD bingo to take your mind off it

[Wyatt Earp]

Who?

Ha ha ha.

[Mumpo]

Who?

Late to the thread, as usual.

So, what to think about that one? Generally impressed. A qualified success. Heart in the right place. Thankfully, it was nothing like Planet of the Dead. The best moments were when the Doctor was walking away from the base, and it really did seem as if all the colonists would be picked off in his wake. By that time, I actually found that the events had become quite harrowing, as emphasised by the scientist's decision to play video footage of her daughters last communication at the moment of her death. I think a few expectations were thwarted by the way the plot unfolded, too - most people seemed to be expecting the shock factor to be ramped up to the max in a Martian zombie horror tale, but as the larger moral picture unfolded, the monstrous adversaries were left in the background. Yes, it's a pity that a little more thought hadn't gone into their aqueous nature - it was a real case of going for a monster that could deliver on the effects, without reasoning their existence through. Overall, though, the tone was the thing, and the grim air of foreboding was just about perfect.

And as for Murray Gold... perhaps, as Ian said, not hos worst effort. It's just a shame that whatever he does come up with has to be trowelled on so thickly.

[Mumpo]

Who?

My The End Of Time predo: the Doctor will regenerate alone, or in the company of only a minor character - because there's no way that either Russell T. Davies or Steven Moffat will want a Russell T. Davies companion alongside Matt Smith when he wakes up.

[Disco Child Ballads]

Who?

Or he could regenerate in the company of Sarah Jane Smith, which would be a way of getting round that.

I predict that every single companion and other major character from the revived series will appear in the Xmas specials and it will be a bit shit.

[Mumpo]

Who?

I've heard a couple of spoilers, and there is an extraordinary plot twist that I didn't think even Russell T. Davies would have the cheek to pull off.

[Max Payne]

Who?

Mumpo wrote:

I've heard a couple of spoilers, and there is an extraordinary plot twist that I didn't think even Russell T. Davies would have the cheek to pull off.

Billie Piper having a shower and the whole thing turns out to have been a dream?