I meant to add something about poor sound stuff (not clear on technical term) to my list. Mostly incidental music doesn't bother me much so I don't have the problems with Murray Gold that many people have. But in several NuWho stories I've found either the dialogue is gabbled and unclear or it is drowned out by sound effects/music. It happened several times in Water of Mars: I had to rewind and relisten to Tennant's "banging four times" thing, I didn't catch the 2iC's dying speech, nor Tennant's speech on seeing the Ood.

One thing that was an unusual flaw in this story was the light-weightness of the characters, with the exception of the Captain. Time was tight but RTD usually puts more into fleshing out bit parts and has shown he can do a good job of it in limited words but here we had a character whose defining feature seemed to be being 27.

And it was still great.