by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Mars movie night in Golden Hill (http://marsmovieguide.com/) consisted of
three episodes of Doctor Who — the 21st
century incarnation, which has considerably better special effects than the
originals and are in color but are also nowhere near as much fun — that had
some sort of Mars theme. It’s obvious that the Doctor Who writers are looking around to other science-fiction
movies for plot inspirations, since the first episode on the program, “The
Waters of Mars” from 2009, is a pretty close ripoff of the original Alien. Adelaide Brooke (Lindsay Duncan) is leading the
first attempt by Earthlings to colonize Mars when the Doctor (David Tennant)
arrives just one day before the history books recall that she and the entire
Earth colony on Mars were killed in a nuclear accident. It turns out that as a
result of Martian water contaminating the hydroponic dome in which the
Earthlings were trying to grow normal human food, the food has become toxic and
anyone who eats it, or drinks the Martian water directly (writers Russell
Davies and Phil Ford came up with this script well before the recent discovery
that there is frozen water under
the surface of Mars, which makes their script seem prescient!), becomes
infected with a Martian disease that causes their body to spurt water
uncontrollably. Eventually Adelaide makes the tough decision to set off the
nuclear self-destruct mechanism and destroy the colony, which means killing
herself and everyone else, in order to protect the population back on Earth
from being infected by the Martian whatsit — which is how I read the ending of Alien (Sigourney Weaver’s character consigned herself to
certain death to keep Earth from being infested with the killer aliens) and why
I was so disappointed when they not only made Alien sequels but resorted to an increasingly outrageous
series of plot conceits to allow her to appear in them. Only the Doctor
arrogantly insists that he’s going to rescue Adelaide and one other crew member
and take them back to Earth, thereby changing the timeline and preventing
Adelaide’s granddaughter from being inspired by her late grandmom’s example to
become an astronaut herself and pilot the first spacecraft capable of
faster-than-light travel. Adelaide frustrates the Doctor by vaporizing herself
with a ray pistol or whatever the weapon she had on Mars, and so the only thing
that changes in the timeline is the last paragraph of her obituary, from
stating that she died on Mars to she died on Earth.
The other two episodes,
“Cold War” from 2013 and “Empress of Mars” from 2017, introduced one of the
sillier menaces ever on Doctor Who
episodes: the Martian Ice Warriors, a sort of Viking-like caste (they’re even
compared in the script to the dramatis personae of the 1958 film The Vikings, the action potboiler Kirk Douglas had to sign on to
in order to get to make Paths of Glory) who have a way of turning up on Earth. “Cold War” is sort of The
Hunt for Red October meets The
Thing, as it’s the 1980’s and a Soviet
submarine is working under the Arctic to drill for oil and the Martian ice
warrior decides to commandeer it and use its nuclear missiles to obliterate all
life on Earth in revenge for one of the sub’s crew members tasing it. “Empress
of Mars” was even sillier — though the actor playing the Doctor, Peter Capaldi,
was quite the best of the three (the others were David Tennant and Matt Smith) represented
here, mainly because he was older than the others and thereby brought the
proper gravitas to the role. Its
conceit is that in 1883 Martians came to earth and kidnapped a garrison of
British soldiers who have become obsessed with the idea of turning the tables
on their captors, conquering Mars and adding it to the British Empire. I was
unimpressed by these shows, especially the last two, and I’m afraid that I
respect but really don’t admire and will never be part of the cult that has
formed around them — and as tacky as the original Doctor Who shows were, they also have an endearing charm that
the later, more elaborately produced and effects-ridden incarnation doesn’t.
