Happy Mother's Day! I just got home from visiting with my mom, so that's nice. I am also dead tired, so this is going to be a brief one.

Let's talk about the Time Lord Victorious.

The Waters of Mars

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

If yesterday's story was a romp, today's story was.. whatever the opposite of a romp is. There was a little bit of levity in the opening scene, but once the water starts flowing it's pretty much all grim. The Doctor visits Mars, only to discover that he has arrived at Bowie Base One on the very day that said base goes up in a nuclear fireball taking all personnel with it. It is the event that ultimately propels the human race into the stars, because the daughter of the base commander goes on to pilot the first human lightspeed ship -- inspired by her mother's sacrifice. The Doctor keeps telling himself he needs to leave, that this is a fixed point in time, and yet he remains to witness the events unfold. Sometihng buried in the Martian underground glacier pack is unleashed, a life form that is transmitted by even a single drop of water. Things go from bad to worse to just plain brutally awful, and there is no way to change it.

Except that in the last act, unmoored by the absence of any travelling comapnions to keep him reigned in, the Doctor declares himself the Time Lord Victorious, not just the last surviving Time Lord but the winner. No longer constrained by Time Lord rules, he takes it upon himself to rescue Adelaide and two other crewmembers and take them back to Earth. At which point Adelaide hits him full force with just how wrong his decision was, before she politely goes into another room and shoots herself in the head to maintain history. It is a brutal and heartbreaking sequence, as the Doctor fully realizes the magnitude of his error.

So yeah, not  a happy fun-time episode by any stretch, but a fantastic acting turn by David Tennant as he crashes on towards the end of his tenure. This story was everything that smart science fiction / horror can be, with a creepy and relentless foe and hopless odds. It is cut from the same cloth as John Carpenter's The Thing, just with slightly less body horror. Where yesterday's story was all about fun and derring-do, today was all about the madness and loneliness that continues to haunt the Doctor in the wake of the Great Time War. 

Tomorrow: It's the bouncy-bouncy Tigger Master. I'm not a fan.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Tenth
Companion(s): Adelaide Brooke
Episode(s): The Waters of Mars
Steps Walked: 8,490 today, 2,977,134 total
Distance Walked: 4.32 miles today, 1,553.22 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 100 today, 3,714 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 929 total
Is the Doctor So, So Sorry?: Oh yes he is... and then he ignores it and goes too far
Weight: 252.76 lbs (five day moving average), net change -54.54 lbs