It certainly looks as though The 10th Doctor (David Tennant) is going to go out in style. This week's one-off episode - The Waters Of Mars - did a fantastic job of sowing the seeds of his own doom while still working as a creepy, self-contained story.The Doctor arrives on Mars in 2059 and meets up with the first human colonists on the Red Planet, on the day he knows the multi-national group are all fated to die - a fixed point in time that inspired future generations to continue to strive for the stars.
The whole "base under siege" scenario is an old favourite with Doctor Who script writers (and is a good excuse for lots of scenes of people running about), but in all honesty the plot about the alien creatures traveling through water was almost irrelevant to the real story about The Doctor deciding that, as the last of The Time Lords, he could rewrite history and, basically, do what he liked with the passage of time to try and save people.
Seeing our beloved Doctor "lose it" - virtually driven mad with power, for want of a better description - was far more frightening than the dripping zombies, humans infected by the viral lifeform that became known as The Flood.
While the white-eyed, crack-faced infected were quite disturbing, there was no escaping the fact that when they squirted water from out of their sleeves (or mouths), it just looked silly. Which is why it was fortunate that they only used this shtick a couple of times - like the equally daft flame tracks behind the souped-up Gadget robot when it went racing off Road Runner-style.
I also remain unconvinced that the legendary, pioneering Captain Adelaide Brooke (Lindsay Duncan) being found dead in the front room of her home on Earth, with her brains blown out when she was supposed to be on Mars, would be as inspirational as her heroic sacrifice (albeit under mysterious circumstances) in the 'original' timeline.
However, that aside, there was no escaping the episode's frenetic pacing and claustrophobic atmosphere and some wonderful pieces of scripting, such as Adelaide's account of her backstory (involving the dalek's "stealing of Earth"), the fan-friendly namecheck for the ice warriors (well, they were on Mars, it would have been crass to ignore them) or The Doctor's emotional recollection of Adelaide's influence on her granddaughter and her role in the future of mankind.
The story may not have come close to the fear factor suggested by the prepublicity (it all helped to drum up viewers, though, so you can't begrudge Russell T Davies for hyping his own show), due to The Flood's incidental nature in the story... unlike, say, The Weeping Angels in Blink, where the story couldn't have worked without them.
However, as I've already said, that wasn't what The Waters Of Mars was all about - it was about the massive cracks appearing in the character of The Doctor and that's where this episode excelled.
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