by Paul Mount
David Tennant’s first tenure as the Doctor raced breathlessly to its finish line in a series of ‘special’ episodes aired intermittently during 2009. They were a bit of a mixed bunch, to be honest – Easter’s Planet of the Dead was a heady, if vacuous, romp and the actual two-part finale, The End of Time, airing over the Festive period, suggested that showrunner Russell T Davies was starting to run out of creative steam. But the winter special ‘The Waters of Mars’ was a doozy, a classic not only of the ‘new’ series but also of Doctor Who in general. Phil Ford, who co-wrote the script with Davies, has now turned the story into a thrilling, high-octane sci-fi adventure as one of the latest of the BBC’s reinvigorated Target Books imprint. It’s unlikely that these new books will have the same impact on readers today as the original run did on heritage fans back in the 1970s, but it’s heartening to see the spirit of the range kept alive in what now appears to be an annual selection of adaptations of episodes from the canon of the 21st-century series.
Anxious to escape the ending of his ‘song’, as predicted in previous episodes, the Tenth Doctor is on the run. He lands on Mars in the year 2059 and finds the hostile red planet home to a research facility called Bowie Base One, run by the no-nonsense Commander Adelaide Brooke and her likeable team. But the Doctor knows the future all too well, and he realises that the base and its crew are soon doomed to die in a catastrophic nuclear explosion that wipes out their base; their legend passes into history, and their deaths are ‘a fixed point in time’, important moments in history that cannot be undone. When the crew starts to become infected by The Flood, a long-dormant subterranean sentient Martian water virus that turns its ‘victims’ into water-gushing zombies, the Doctor realises that there’s nothing he can do to save the Base and its occupants – until he decides that, as the Last of the Time Lords, perhaps he is the only one who can exert a terrible and dangerous mastery over the laws of Time itself.
The Waters of Mars is a proper, adult science fiction story (or at least as close to adult as Doctor Who can ever really be allowed to get), with only the cute robot Gadget acting as a fillip for a younger audience. Ford has grasped the prose mettle and turned the script into an urgent, dramatic and often quite unsettling little novel, emphasising the remorseless nature of the Flood and its determination to make its way to Earth – a world abundant in water and ripe for occupation by the Flood – and he brings the supporting characters, especially Brooke, to life vividly by subtle use of flashbacks. One chapter, recounting the exploits of a young Adelaide caught in the middle of the Dalek invasion that concluded Season Four the year before, is particularly thrilling and inventive. Ford captures perfectly the genuine sense of threat engendered so well on TV by the Doctor, who, towards the end of the story, considers himself the ‘Time Lord Victorious’, who believes he has a right to change the flow of time because he can. Writing with economy and subtlety, Ford manages to turn a spectacular TV episode into a hugely readable novel in its own right, reminding the reader of the horror visualised on screen whilst remembering that he’s telling the story in a different format that often requires different skills. The Waters of Mars is a breathlessly exciting book with plenty of surprises, even for those who are already extremely familiar with its TV incarnation. Another bullseye for the new Target range.
