Discover Top Posts Tagged with #water zombies

Why I like the Waters of Mars

Meaning the titular water monsters, not the episode as a whole. I mean, I like that too, it's just not what I'm here to talk about today. To start off with, I just plain like Mars. It's our closest planetary neighbor and the most earthlike world we've found, albeit significantly smaller. Recently voted the solar system's most colonizable locale, Mars lacks one lone essential: water. Well, and breathable air. But the question of whether Mars now has or at some point in the past once had water is one of the primary questions facing modern Areologists. It is for water that the Curiosity rover was dispatched and has been diligently searching for almost a year now. Because where there is water, there is the possibility of Life. (Mod's note: ...as we know it, Jim. I have opinions on this.) That first set of Mars colonists, led by Captain Adelaide Brooke, finds water on the Red Planet in the form of a glacier. (We know that Martian ice caps are composed of dry ice - frozen carbon dioxide; the extent to which they may also include water ice is one of those things we're still working on). And as they find water, so they find Life - microscopic and viral, but intelligent. It can talk for itself, it can plan, and it can wait. As the Doctor puts it: "Water always wins. Water is patient." This is what separates the WoMs from your typical zombies. Because...they're basically zombies. Certainly the closest thing we ever see in Doctor Who, with the closest contenders being the Hæmovores of "The Curse of Fenric." The plot - or, at least, the part of the plot that involves the monsters - quickly becomes Base Under Siege style Survival Horror. Their transformations as well are very zombie like, following the basic pattern of infection, apparent death, and revival. And change in eye structure just for good measure. It is similarly never treated as a curable disease - the infected (possessed) team members are considered dead to all intents and purposes. So yeah. Zombies. AWESOME. Now, they're not the very greatest zombies of all time, being both fast and rational, but they're still the first proper zombies in Doctor Who, so I'm not complaining. (The modern zombie - that is, the "Romero zombie" - is in fact younger than Doctor Who... which is kind of an odd thought.) One of the particularly un-zombie-like traits of the WoMs is the delayed transformation. Water is patient after all - it puts off converting one of the infected colonists, the better to use her as a sleeper agent. She turns only after infiltrating the otherwise sealed base and gathering significant information on the Earth. In addition to being incredibly effective as a general strategy, this manages to combine two of the scariest things out there in terms of psychological autonomy (that is, zombies and sleeper agents). Not only could it get anyone, it could already have gotten anyone. You're dead already and you have no way of telling. To round out the triangle of inexorable unstoppable horror, although it is technically introduced as a viral agent in the water, the enemy is overwhelming presented as the water itself. And when you get right down to it, water is terrifying! It's primal, elemental, untamable - it gets in everywhere. We need it to live - we are in fact made of water. And if the water itself opposes us, becomes not only intelligent but malevolent as well - what can be accomplished against such a foe? Let's just say there's a reason this story is premised on an eventual Total Party Kill. All things together, the WoMs are really fantastic monsters. The episode isn't about them, of course, but they're a really wonderful backdrop against which to set the central drama of the episode. They combine rational and irrational monster types almost flawlessly. And they've made a whole generation absolutely terrified of Martian exploration. Wait...