OBSERVATIONS: Doctor Who: “The Waters of Mars” (Season 31, Episode 3)

Republibot 2.0 has already reviewed this episode (Read it here: http://www.republibot.com/content/reviews-doctor-who-waters-mars ), and I have little to add to that, so I’m not going to bother with a synopsis or a formal review. I did just now manage to watch it on Youtube (Link below the jump), however, and as we’ve got no other real content today, I thought I’d offer my own observations.

I’m in a weird place at the moment regarding Doctor Who, or, more properly, I should say I’m in a weird place regarding the Russell T. Davies iteration of Doctor Who. On the one hand, I’m forever indebted to the man for bringing back one of my all-time favorite shows, and re-inventing it in a way that is appropriate for the times, adding new, darker elements to the mythos, both in ways that are entirely consistent with the nature of the series. On the other hand, that was five years ago, and there’s the whole “What have you done for me lately” thing cropping up. While I adored the show in its first resurrected season, I’ve felt a steady decline in quality the longer its dragged on, not in the direction or the acting - which consistently gets better and better - but in the stories themselves.

Case in point: Christopher Eccleston, in his one season, quickly managed to become my favorite doctor, usurping Tom Baker, my perennial favorite. He was a good actor, and his hopeful-yet-spastically-angry version of the character resonated with me. He was walking wounded, which gave him a layer of resonance that the previous happy hobo doctors didn’t have. (Though the seventh Doctor did have some darker elements.) David Tennant quickly surpassed Eccleston as my favorite, with his self-deprecating manner (Most of the time) and his obvious - and occasionally crippling - manic depression. But as great as Tennant is - and he really is the best one ever to wear the role - we have to face the fact that none of Davie’s big season finales ever made a lick of sense, his standalone plots themselves were frequently rather nonsensical as well, and that the best, instant-classic episodes of the revived show were all written by Stephen Moffat.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m indebted to the guy, and I’m not dissing him because he’s less talented than some of the other folks who write for the show. I’m dissing him because his batting average has been declining, and also because he’s seemed - to me - to be increasingly distracted by his other Whoniverse shows. Torchwood demands a lot of his time, as does the Sarah Jane Adventures, and I just get the feeling that he’s spread himself too thin. As we learned from the last season of Babylon 5, even a great writer/showrunner can overextend himself by writing two series and three movies all at the same time, and *all* the things he’s working on suffer. And Russell T. Davies was *never* a great writer. A good writer, an interesting writer, a flashy writer, a loving writer, occasionally an above-average one, but not a great one. I’m sorry, that’s just how he stacks up for me.

OBSERVATIONS

Right off the bat, this episode suffers from the “Davies Christmas Special Syndrome” in which we’re introduced to a bunch of people who’ll die off ten-little-Indians style