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esonetwork · 4 years

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Timestamp #207: The Waters of Mars

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Timestamp #207: The Waters of Mars

Doctor Who: The Waters of Mars (Autumn Special, 2009)

Is there any way to slake your thirst in the dust of the Red Planet?

Adelaide Brooke, the commander of Bowie Base One on Mars, tries to call home but loses contact. While her scientific teams have some fun on the planet’s surface, the Doctor arrives in the TARDIS.

He’s soon found and held at gunpoint by a flimsy robot named Gadget as a trespasser.

Once inside, Brooke demands to know his name, rank, and intention. He replies “The Doctor, doctor, fun,” before asking that she lower her gun and trust him. Brooks wonders if he’s a spy from a rival space agency, but the Doctor realizes that this mission is the one fated to end in a mysterious explosion with all hands lost. Unwilling to break the laws of time and subvert a fixed point in history, he apologizes with all of his hearts and tries to leave.

In the hydroponic farm, Andy Stone and Maggie Cain encounter a problem. Stone is infected by a mysterious life form and turns into a zombie-like creature that gushes water and attacks Cain.

As the crew investigates the mystery, the Doctor is forced to help Brooke when she locks up his spacesuit. As the crew walks to the hydroponic dome, the Doctor muses about robots – Gadget is controlled by Junior Technician Roman Groome – and asks Brooke if the mission is worth it. She says yes, with what the Doctor calls “starlight in her soul.”

They discover Cain and call for medical help. She is alive and taken to isolation while Brooke, physician Tarak Ital, and the Doctor look for Stone. Cain has no idea what happened to her, but she’s required to be isolated for twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, Ital finds Stone and is infected. Cain turns soon afterward.

Cain, controlled by the mysterious lifeform, discovers that Earth is mostly water. They should like that world.

Brooke and the Doctor find Stone and Ital. Talking to them fails, so they run for the airlock. Stone shoots a stream of water at the airlock door but none enters the chamber. Instead, both infected crewmen start probing the airlock door with water. They break through and continue the chase through the tunnels, hijacking Gadget along the way to act as a supercharged go-kart. The three of them return to the central base, but the Doctor warns her that water is patient and always wins.

Back in the base, they check in with Cain in the infirmary. The Doctor tries speaking in ancient North Martian, to which Cain reacts positively. He surmises that the ice fields, the source of the colony’s water, is contaminated. El Gold convinces Brooke to evacuate the base and the remaining crew start preparations. The Doctor reminds her that, since they’ve all been drinking from the same supply, they may all be infected already.

Swayed by his argument, Brooke leaves to investigate the ice fields. The Doctor debates leaving again, but joins her. Cain is left alone in the medical dome and immediately starts breaking out. With a scream, she sends a message to her infected comrades.

At the ice fields, the Doctor muses about the Ice Warriors and hypothesizes that they may have frozen the virus as a means of defeating it. Brooke asks why the Doctor is so keen to leave and he explains what a fixed point in time is. Brooke tells him about her inspiration: When she was ten years old, the Earth was stolen and moved across the universe, and she saw the Daleks from her window. She knew that she would follow them to the stars.

The Doctor tells her that, in doing so, she has created history. Brooke’s granddaughter, Susie Fontana Brooke, will be inspired by her story to pilot the first lightspeed craft, paving the way for generations of her descendants to explore the galaxy, with one even falling in love with an alien prince and creating a whole new species.

But the tale is only a consolation.

The moment is broken by a log entry from Stone. A filter was broken earlier in the day, allowing the virus to enter the water supply. Since the water isn’t available yet for the crew, the survivors are able to leave for Earth. While they continue preparations, the Doctor debates whether or not he should leave.

The crew discovers that Stone and Ital have scaled the base, surviving the elements, and are burrowing into the ceiling. It’s now a raise against time, and the Doctor knows that the fixed point has not changed.

He considers leaving. After he’s suited up and standing in the airlock, Brooke locks the system until he explains what happens next. He asks her to imagine Pompeii and how any action she took would only precipitate the event. He tells her about her destiny, how she destroys the base for reasons unknown but her sacrifice saves Earth, but Brooke refuses to die. She asks for help to change the future, but the Doctor refuses. He wonders if the Dalek knew when it saw her so many years ago.

Brooke releases him with a whispered “Damn you” and rushes away as the water enters the base. The Doctor listens as the crew tries to fight it… as Steffi Ehrlich plays a message from her daughters as she succumbs to the virus… as the shuttle is prepped for departure but fails as Cain breaks through… as Roman falls from one drop on his face… as Ed destroys the shuttle to prevent an incursion on Earth…

It’s the tragedy of a Time Lord. Of knowing everything and being powerless to change it.

But the Time Lords no longer exist. Their rules are gone forever. Nothing remains to restrain the Doctor. He can make his own rules.

So he decides to change it.

Knowing that the end of his song will be heralded by four knocks, he returns to save the crew, proclaiming that the laws of time are his and that they will obey him.

The environmental controls are destroyed. The spacesuits are damaged. The infected are breaking the ice. But the Doctor has a funny robot.

Using Gadget, the Doctor tries to bring the TARDIS to the crew as Brooke starts the self-destruct countdown. Gadget enters the TARDIS and sets the controls, piloting the time capsule to the base as the nuclear device explodes.

The TARDIS materializes on a snow-covered street. Brooke, Bennett, and Kerenski, and Gadget have survived, but the robot shuts down as it loses its control signal. Bennett can’t handle the stress and runs off. Kerenski follows while Brooke confronts the Doctor with the consequences of his actions. The future the Doctor told her about will be broken, but she tells him that no one should have that much power.

The Time Lord Victorious is wrong.

Brooke enters her house, but as the Doctor walks away, she commits suicide with her laser pistol. Bennett and Kerenski will still tell the tale of how she bravely saved Earth. The future is saved.

The Doctor realizes that he’s gone too far, witnessing a vision of Ood Sigma as he wonders if his time has come.

The Cloister Bell sounds. His time is near. But with a defiant “No”, the Doctor sets the TARDIS in motion once again in an effort to outrun his destiny.

What we see here are the depths of the Doctor when unrestrained by neither the conservatism of the Time Lords nor the humanity of the companions. We’ve seen the darkness of the Doctor before – the Tenth Doctor’s rage manifested in The Runaway Bride, the Sixth Doctor let it slip through in post-regeneration psychosis, and the Fourth Doctor displayed how easily he’d wield absolute power in the absence of companions – and we know just how important it is that the Doctor be tempered.

The maxim is true: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

That is one of the Doctor’s weaknesses. Another is love and compassion, which is played in concert with the temptation of power, resulting in this excellent character study of someone who wants to do so much.

It certainly earned that 2010 Hugo Award. The story was competing against its own, of course, but I’d side with this one.

Taking a look at the franchise’s history, this is the second time that the TARDIS has heralded the Doctor’s regeneration through the Cloister Bell. It did this in Logopolis, but in that instance, the Fourth Doctor was willing to wait for the inevitability whereas the Tenth Doctor pretty much fears the coming milestone.

The nod to K9 was amusing, owing to the Doctor’s long-standing love for his canine companion.

We also have quite the focal point in the mythology here. By live action standards in 2009, the next story is Tennant’s finale, The End of Time. Come 2013, The Day of the Doctor would get wedged in between the two, and if we expand to the animated specials (which we do on the Timestamps Project), Dreamland is also on the table.

This story’s placement gets even more complicated this year with the Time Lord Victorious multimedia event, which (naturally) incorporates this story into its narrative.

Finally, there’s an important companion note related to this story and actress Lindsay Duncan. As of this story, she became both the oldest actress and oldest individual to travel in the TARDIS. She’ll forfeit the latter title to Bernard Cribbins in The End of Time.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Sarah Jane Adventures: The Gift

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

#Doctor Who #Tenth Doctor #Timestamps Project

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softplacepod · 4 years

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Episode 2: Volcano Day

Show notes & transcript below the cut.

SHOW NOTES:

“The Fires of Pompeii,” Doctor Who. S4E2 (2008) - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1173173/

“Absolute Candor,” Picard. S1E4 (2020) - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9420280/

Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) - https://www.ea.com/games/dragon-age/dragon-age-inquisition

TRANSCRIPT:

EP 2:

Hello, bees. It's me, Sara, sending you light and love, and also a bunch of things I've been super into lately that I think might be your jam. Welcome to A Soft Place to Land.

[music]

Item the first: theories of time travel

Or, the futile, the fixable, and the flexible.

Most fiction that uses time travel as a device has to face the inevitable question: can a person or group acting in the past make change that affects the “present” of the story, or the future? Reminder that when talking about time travel tenses can get weird, so fair warning. There are, uh, let’s say a million ways to work out how exactly past meddling can change a story’s present or future, but for me they all eventually boil down to three ideas: futile, fixable, flexible.

Futile stories are ones where you can travel back and make all the changes you wish: step on that butterfly, kill your great-grandfather, release or don’t release the monkeys. It’s going to be the same anyway. You’ll find that you are the reason the plague gets released, or you luckily killed the wrong person, or you managed to slow the train just enough that the person running to catch it did, in fact, catch it. You’re responsible for the present you came from, and it would have happened regardless.

Then there are fixable stories, where you can in fact make a difference in the present you left. Butterfly effect may be in full force, so your sneezing in the past wipes out all life on the planet. Your every action, your very presence, sends out ripple effects that, once you return to your present, will have spiraled out into results you could never have predicted. You go back in time to watch Vesuvius erupt, and you return to a world in which super-intelligent squid rule from their orbital space stations. You change the world, not because you necessarily want to, not in the ways you wanted to, by even peeking at the past.

And then, my personal favorite, the flexible. This is the idea that you can in fact change things in the past, in the short term. You can make change that feels huge and monumental, and you can return to your time - and yet, it’s the same as it was when you left. The names are a little different, the dates a little off, but the setting is what it was before, or maybe slightly worse. Time is like a rubber band, and you can stretch and pull and twist and fiddle with it, but it will snap back over and over again, to roughly the same shape it was before.

And the reason I’m talking about this is that I tend to root for fiction in which time and history matter, in which our actions and our protagonists’ actions have merit and agency and can change things.

Item the second: “The Fires of Pompeii”

Or, fixed points in time

There is, I suppose, another option. In the 2008 Doctor Who episode “The Fires of Pompeii,” the Doctor - I’m assuming here you have a passing familiarity with the conceit of Doctor Who, but if not, think time-traveling alien and a human companion - the Doctor explains that there are things in time that can change. Lots of them! But, too, there are fixed points in time, things that must happen, that will happen, regardless. The destruction of Pompeii, it becomes clear over the course of the episode, is one of those fixed points, and eventually the Doctor’s companion, Donna Noble, one of my favorite fictional characters of all time, comes to accept that. There is nothing she can do, nothing they can do together, to stop the eruption; in fact, they cause it, and must cause it, and always had caused it.

But.

But Donna, understanding and accepting that, eventually, insists and pleads and orders and begs the Doctor: save someone. Save one person. Save anyone, someone, just one person from this fate. The event has to happen, is happening around them, and they can’t stop it, but they can save one person. And so he does, and they do. They save a family, and then they leave.

It could seem callous, and sometimes it does: this family is saved but all the others are left to die. But these days, I’m starting to see it more as a gesture of defiance. Events around us are huge and crushing, and more often than not there’s not a thing I or you or hundreds of us could do about it. We can’t force huge corporations to stop global warming, we can’t force the prison-industrial complex to change their raison d’etre to restorative justice, we can’t force our lawmakers to respect and support marginalized people and their rights.

But.

But we can try. This may not be a fixed point. This may be something we can still change. And if it is a fixed point, a thing that is happening and will happen and will always have happened, we can save one person. We can save one family. We can make our anger known and we can lift people one at a time into an escape route. We can’t do the big thing, but we can do the small thing.

If history’s going to be the shape it’s going to be, I choose to believe that we can and should work to fill the shape in with our small actions. Protests that get shut down, petitions that get thrown in the trash, votes that get ignored: they’re still there. They still happened. One person, here on volcano day. And then another. And then another.

Item the third: Picard

Or, the weight of choices you regret

There’s a scene in the fourth episode of Picard, the series, or a sequence of scenes, set in a place that’s become something of a Romulan refugee camp slash reservation. The titular Picard is responsible for its founding, and has not been back for some years, and returns to find it has drastically changed in his absence. He speaks with a woman who’d been something of a friend, seeks an explanation for why, suddenly to him but gradually to the people there, the place is now hostile and struggling, full of anger and need. She points out, quite rightly, that he founded this place and then left, never once checking in or following up. “Because you could not save everyone, you chose to save no one,” she says, in an absolutely devastating line delivered with no recrimination, no anger.

Picard, in that moment, looks shaken, and while he doesn’t react well to it - starting a bar fight, yelling, then some other stuff happens and then Seven of Nine shows up, which is great - it’s still a moment that, in the context we’re looking at right now, means so much to me.

If we believe that our choices matter, and we believe that there are forces and powers larger than us that control more of the world than we could ever hope to, it’s so immediately and irrevocably easy to slip into despair. My recycling won’t stop global warming, won’t even make a dent, why try? The carceral system is a money-making juggernaut and a hundred protesters won’t make any difference, so why go and risk arrest?

And I get it. And I feel that way, so much of the time these days. But.

But, because we can’t save everyone, we have to try and save someone. Because we can’t stop the volcano, we have to pull out the three people we can reach right now.

Otherwise, and I say this with total self-accusation, we are part of the problem. We are part of the problem anyway, but if we can help one person and we don’t, pointing to the larger systemic issue we feel powerless against, we fail not only that one person, but also ourselves, and the truth at the heart of where I’m aiming: that you and here and now and this moment, this small choice, do in fact make a difference.

Item the final: Dragon Age: Inquisition

Or, the echoes of choice up and down the timeline

There is a moment - there are dozens of moments - in this video game, with which I have become ever more obsessed lately, where you are given meaningful choices. You’re talking to, say, the Iron Bull, a huge horned mercenary, and his company is in danger, and you have choices. You can tell him to abandon his men and preserve an important alliance for the organization you represent. Or you can tell him to save his men and scuttle the alliance.

The game makes it clear: there are upsides and downsides to either choice. It differentiates this kind of choice, the irrevocable kind, by making the dialogue wheel a different color, and by summarizing the immediate effect of your choice as you hover over each option.

But I submit, and here’s where we’ll close, that it’s just as important when you choose smaller things. Choosing a kinder justice when faced with a prisoner. Choosing to laugh with your friends around a card game. Choosing to welcome someone to join you, despite their style or race or abilities or past. These choices shape the game, shape your relationships and the options you have, and the ending crawl, where you see how your people have fared, well. It’s all your choices writ large.

And there are, always and always, ripple effects you couldn’t have predicted. Your continued emphasis on careful planning nudges a character’s vigilante justice group toward effectiveness. Your open heart shows a reformed murderer the power they might have to help others in the same position. Your support for a character fighting an addiction shows them a way forward free from something that hurt them. On and on, the smallest choices building into a snowball.

There’s no ideal condition, really: the game knows you can’t save everyone and everything, knows that loss, too, is important and true. But you can, in this game and the best games and fiction and also your life, decide to treat each choice like it really matters.

The temptation can be to freeze, when faced with the reality that your choices matter. There are too many ways to screw this up, there’s one right answer and if I choose wrong I’m toast and I’ve lost.

Well, no. There’s not really right or wrong answers in most cases. There are different aspects you can choose to emphasize, there are myriad paths you can walk, there are branches that end at the same place. But the more rooted you are in the belief that you can choose, that your choices make a difference, that you can make a choice and continue to make choices about how to deal with that choice, well. Hopefully we learn to see not danger but opportunity, not a failure point but an inflection point. A chance to course correct, to right a wrong, to steady a ship, to open a hand.

You can choose an open heart, a restorative justice, a support role, a championing of what matters most to you. And you can watch, slow but sure, the repeated choices you make (always mercy, always hope, always justice, always laughter, always truth) begin to echo up and down the timeline. You can’t change the decisions you already made, but you can try to change the ones you’ll make tomorrow. You can’t change the effects you’ve already created, but you can try to mitigate and shape them into something better. You can’t control anyone but yourself (in real life), but you can encourage them, and create a space for them, and show them other ways to choose.

And if we see only wrong choices, only harmful outcomes, maybe we do our best to pick the least bad, and to keep choosing the least bad, shaping the ripples as best we can. Maybe we can work our way back up the chain to a crossroads, and try another fork this time. Every dialogue choice has an effect, even if it’s only for a moment. We can, most of the time, repair the damage we’ve done, or soften it, or simply acknowledge and apologize and do our very best to do better with our next choice.

[music]

Theme music for A Soft Place to Land is “Repose,” by Chase Miller, off his album Burnout. Chase’s music can be found at chasemiller.bandcamp.com. Show notes and episode transcripts are at softplacepod.tumblr.com. You can find me on Twitter @cyranoh_ and you can listen to me jabber on as the foil to my very good friend Anna on our parenting podcast, The Parent Rap, at parentrap.net.

I love you very much. Take care of yourselves. See you soon.

[music]

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