Planet of the Dead

He will knock four times.

Planet of the Dead was not that well received when first broadcast, mostly due to fans being a bit put out in getting what is a bit of a romp after a four month hiatus and looking into a further six month wait until The Waters of Mars. RTD later went back and explained that given the dark nature of The Waters of Mars and the end of the Tenth Doctor in The End of Time, he wanted to keep this story fairly light. Watched in isolation and removed from the wait, it is better than original fan reaction, though not without it's flaws.

Plot Summary

A thief, Lady Christina de Souza, breaks into a museum and steals a thousand year old gold cup. The alarms go off as she nears the exit of the building and the police arrive, cutting off her planned escape. She then gets on a bus to hide. Just before the bus leaves, the Doctor gets on, tracking an anomaly in space. The bus drives along and Christina is spotted by the detective who leads a pursuit of the bus. He also has the police set a blockade at the other end of the tunnel the bus has just driven in. As it nears the exit, the bus suddenly vanishes, disappearing through a wormhole.

The bus emerges on the other side, beaten up but intact, and lodges itself in the middle of a desert. The Doctor points out the wormhole they just passed through and before he can stop him, the driver tries to go back. He emerges on the other side, all his flesh having been boiled off. Stunned, the police call in UNIT to take over. On the planet, Lady Christina organizes the other passengers and sets the Doctor to getting them back home.

The Doctor figures the bus protected them like a Faraday cage and that if they can get it moving, they can go back. The passengers are set at various tasks, digging out the wheels, laying them on flats and cleaning the sand out of the engine. As the Doctor and Christina look around, they notice a sand storm approaching, but that contains glints of metal. One of the passengers, a woman named Carmen, has a level of psychic perception that is amplified by the planet, she senses death approaching from the cloud.

The Doctor makes contact with UNIT via a modified cell phone, talking first with the UNIT commander, Captain Magambo, and then with the team scientist, Dr. Malcolm Taylor. The Doctor sets Malcolm on measuring the wormhole and then figuring a way to close it. The Doctor and Lady Christina return to the top of the dune to chart the storm when they are approached by a fly-like alien called a Tritovore. It takes them back to its ship to see the captain.

The captain believes the Doctor and the passengers on the bus are responsible for the attack on his ship, which crashed while attempting to set up a trade between planets. The Doctor convinces the captain that they are not responsible and fellow crash victims. He then helps restore power enough to launch a probe to study the storm. The Doctor learns that the planet they are on was inhabited by 100 billion people and showed no sign of distress only a year ago. Now, the Tritovore ship is crashed in the middle of what was once the capital city. As the probe reaches the storm, they learn that it is not a sand storm, but billions of metallic stingray-like creatures. He reasons they stripped the planet clean and are now flying in formation around the planet, creating a wormhole to fly to the next planet for them to feed.

The Doctor receives a call from the bus passengers informing him that the bus is out of gas, leaving it without power. He decides to extract the main power source of the Tritovore ship to help them. Lady Christina sets up her repelling rig and descends into the shaft before the Doctor can stop her. He then guides her through until she reaches the bottom. She manages to extract the crystal and it's mounting plate but discovers one of the stingray creatures in the shaft, dormant due to the cold, but waking due to her body heat. Once the extraction is done, the Doctor pulls her out and she resets the security field, trapping the creature in the shaft. However, several other creatures were in the hull when it crashed and they are also waking up. The Doctor urges the Tritovore captain to abandon the ship but he refuses. One of the creatures emerges from the hull and eats him. The other Tritovore shoots repeatedly at the creature but it has no effect and he is also eaten. The Doctor and Lady Christina flee the ship, only a short way ahead of the swarm.

Upon reaching the bus, the Doctor tosses the power crystal and attaches the anti-gravity clamps to the bus wheels. He attaches the interface to the bus wheel but find that they won't integrate. Realizing he needs gold to make the interface work, he asks Christina for the cup she stole, having seen it and figuring her for a thief during her descent into the power shaft. She reluctantly agrees and he smashes it apart to make the interface. The Doctor also calls Malcolm to have him be ready to close the wormhole just after they emerge. Captain Magambo overhears this and threatens to shoot Malcolm if he does not close it immediately.

With the interface complete, the Doctor engages the anti-gravity and then flies the bus back through the wormhole. Malcolm refuses to close the wormhole until hearing of the Doctor's pass through. One through, he tries to close it but his machine malfunctions. The Doctor calls him and walks him through the process and the wormhole closes with only three stingrays having gotten through. Those three are killed by the UNIT soldiers waiting on the other side.

Upon landing, the passengers are escorted away, though Lady Christina breaks off to join the Doctor. She asks to come with him, having had the TARDIS delivered to him by UNIT, but he refuses, feeling that it's too dangerous for anyone to travel with him at the moment. Lady Christina is then arrested by the detective who had been waiting around with UNIT during the crisis.

Seeing the passengers off, Carmen gives a warning to the Doctor that his song is ending, that he is returning and that he will knock four times. The Doctor acknowledges the warning and then quietly frees Christina from her handcuffs. She slips out of the police car, steals the bus and flies off into the night as the Doctor disappears in the TARDIS.

Analysis

Planet of the Dead is a mostly fun rompy story but it does have a few flaws. The two most prominent are a couple of the acting portrayals and the occasional hard shifts in tone reflected in the two different styles of the writers: Russell T. Davies and Gareth Roberts. Nonetheless, it is far better than it is generally given credit for.

This is pretty much the last we see of the light side of the Tenth Doctor and he revels in it. He is in full command and very enjoyable. There are glimmers of darkness, such as when he recalls Donna (although not by name) and when he says no to Lady Christina to traveling with him. But even there, he beats back the darkness and indulges in the fun. It's at times silly, but never over-the-top or badly done.

Lady Christina is a fun pseudo-companion. She matches well with the Tenth Doctor, matching him with wit and resource, but also having enough respect for him that she defers to his knowledge when appropriate. Her cockiness would probably have been her undoing had she continued and I think I can see shades of Clara in her, both in the good and the bad. But in this one story, she does well, although I was disappointed in the indulgence of the trope at the beginning where she removed her mask before leaving the museum. No proper thief would ever do something that stupid. She also should have ducked down in the bus, obscuring her face rather than looking directly at the detective. But the plot needed to start in some way.

The folks on the bus are pretty non-descript as they are more rescue objects than actual characters. There is some minor development with a couple and they also provide a touch of comedy here and there but you could have left the bus empty and it wouldn't have changed the story much.

The exception is Carmen and I do not like her. I think the acting was sub-par and the attitude of the character was a distraction whenever it shifted to her. The psychic stuff had no bearing on what happened and if anything it defused the tension rather than accelerating it because it put the Doctor on his guard rather than being totally surprised at the nature of the swarm. The prophecy at the end was far too heavy handed and poorly delivered as well. I would have actually thought it better if as the people walked away, Ood Sigma was left standing (so only the Doctor could see) and stated the line about him knocking four times. It still would have been heavy handed but it would have played in to previous uses of the Ood and their psychic abilities and provided continuity to the use of Ood Sigma in The Waters of Mars and The End of Time.

UNIT was fairly non-descript in this story. Captain Magambo was fine as a stand-in for the Brigadier but I didn't care for the false tension of her threatening Malcolm before the Doctor emerged. It just seemed a bit much and you can see how a character like this was morphed into Kate Stewart in the Eleventh Doctor era. Malcolm was a light bit of humor but also not overly memorable. His main point is to provide the quick Deus Ex Machina fix at the end with the closing of the wormhole. Not bad, but not standout either.

Both aliens were good in this. I like the idea of the somewhat mindless swarm of stingrays that fly from planet to planet like a swarm of locusts. Not evil, just hungry. I also liked the feint with the Tritovores, given our natural disgust towards flies, and having them be victims just as much as the bus folk. I was a little disappointed that they were gotten rid of so quickly as having at least one of them make it back to the bus and interact with the passengers would have provided an interesting little dynamic at the end.

The overall story was pretty good if relatively thin. There is a darker tone that permeates most of the story but with lighter bits here and there. However the end gets a bit too silly for my taste. The sting rays are essentially on top of them and they have time to banter and wave about in the air before going through the wormhole. Likewise there are the soaring aerial shots of London which look very nice, but in that time, much more than three stingrays should have gotten through and been terrorizing UNIT. Christina's escape at the end was also rather farcical as if overly attempting to compensate for the darkness of predicting the Doctor's death. This was rather unnecessary as everyone knew that David Tenant was leaving at the end of the gap year so there wasn't really a need to lighten the tone in such a huge way.

I don't know that much can be said about the effects or direction. The stingrays are dated CGI but it's fairly easy to ignore them as they are not dwelt on for very long. Similarly, I know that parts of this were shot in Dubai but it's rather difficult to tell and I was told that all of it was shot on a sound stage, I would have easily believed it. It has the standard Doctor Who level of engagingness but also cheapness that we expect from British television. The ultimate point is that they don't distract from the overall story which is about as good as you can ask for in any effects heavy story.

Overall, given time and the ability to see this story as it's own thing rather than an island in the midst of a sea of waiting, it is fairly entertaining. Most everyone is either at the top of their game or at least in a position of high entertainment with the prominent exception I noted earlier. If you wanted to treat someone to a decent bit of stand-alone Doctor Who, this would not be a bad choice. It's fun and if you don't expect too much of it, you won't be disappointed.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5