"Planet of the Dead" is the first of four special episodes of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who broadcast between mid-2009 and early 2010. It was simultaneously broadcast on BBC One and BBC HD on 11 April 2009 (Holy Saturday). The specials served as lead actor David Tennant's final stories as the Tenth Doctor. He is joined in the episode by actress Michelle Ryan, who plays Lady Christina de Souza, a one-off companion to the Doctor. The episode was written by Russell T Davies and Gareth Roberts, the first co-writing credit since the show's revival in 2005. "Planet of the Dead" serves as the 200th story of Doctor Who.
The episode depicts Christina fleeing the police from a museum robbery by boarding a bus that accidentally travels from London to the desert planet of San Helios, trapping her, the Doctor, and several passengers on board the damaged vehicle. After the bus driver dies trying to return to Earth, the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, headed by Captain Erisa Magambo (Noma Dumezweni) and scientific advisor Malcolm Taylor (Lee Evans), attempt to return the bus while preventing a race of metallic stingray aliens from posing a threat to Earth. At the end of the episode, one of the passengers delivers a warning to the Doctor that "he will knock four times", foreshadowing the remaining three specials.
"Planet of the Dead" was the first Doctor Who episode to be filmed in high definition, after a positive reaction to the visual quality of spin-off series Torchwood and the financial viability of HDTV convinced the production team to switch formats. To ensure that the desert scenes looked as realistic as possible, the production team filmed in Dubai for three days, sending several props, including a 1980 double-decker Bristol VR bus, to the United Arab Emirates for filming. After a shipping container unintentionally damaged the bus in Dubai, Davies rewrote the script to explain the damage in the narrative.
The audience gave the episode an Appreciation Index of 88—considered "excellent."
Contents
Plot
The gentlewoman burglar Lady Christina de Souza steals a gold chalice once belonging to King Æthelstan from a London museum and hops on a double-decker bus. The Tenth Doctor joins her and the other passengers, just before the bus passes through a wormhole and ends up on the sands of the planet San Helios. The Doctor studies the wormhole and determines that the bus protected them from its effects like a Faraday cage, but he is unable to stop the driver from stepping back through the wormhole. When the driver's burnt skeleton appears on Earth, UNIT forces are alerted, led by Captain Erisa Magambo and aided by scientific adviser Malcolm Taylor.
While the others attempt to repair the bus, the Doctor and Christina scout ahead and spot what appears to be a sandstorm on the horizon. They encounter two alien flies called Tritovores, who take them to their wrecked spaceship. They explain they were going to pick up supplies at San Helios, which had recently housed billions of people but now is totally desert. The Doctor has them scan the approaching sandstorm and finds that it is actually a swarm of alien stingrays that are destroying the ecosystem. He suspects the swarm is generating the wormhole to travel to their next planet to feed upon, and they must hurry and close the wormhole before the aliens can reach Earth. Christina uses her burglary skills to retrieve a power crystal and its mounting from the Tritovore ship, but accidentally wakes an alien stingray, which consumes the Tritovores.
With the swarm nearly on them, the Doctor uses the crystal's mounting, an anti-gravity device, to enable the bus to fly. To control it, he persuades Christina to give him the gold chalice, which he smashes, using it to interface the bus's controls with the mountings. They fly back through the wormhole just as Malcolm closes it, but not before three stingrays sneak through, which UNIT quickly kill with Stinger missiles. Christina asks the Doctor to take her with him, but he refuses right before she is arrested. Carmen, a bus passenger who has low-level psychic abilities, warns the Doctor that his "song" is ending and "he will knock four times". As he departs, the Doctor allows Christina to escape from the police and fly off on the bus before they can stop her.
Production
Writing and casting
Russell T Davies co-wrote the episode with Gareth Roberts, the first credited writing partnership for the show since its 2005 revival. "Planet of the Dead" was a departure from Roberts' usual stories—Roberts had previously only written pseudo-historical stories—and instead consisted of wild science fiction elements from his literary career and teenage imagination. The episode had no clear concept—such as Shakespeare and witches in "The Shakespeare Code" or Agatha Christie and a murder mystery in "The Unicorn and the Wasp"—and instead was a deliberate "clash [of concepts] with many disparate elements". Roberts explained he was cautious to ensure that each element had to "feel precise and defined ... like we meant that", citing the serial Arc of Infinity as an example where such control was not enforced. The episode includes a common feature of Davies' writing in that there is no clear antagonist: the Tritovore are eventually sympathetic to the protagonists and the stingrays are only following their biological imperative.
Unlike the Christmas specials, the theme of Easter was not emphasised in the story; the episode only contained a "fleeting mention" of the holiday instead of "robot bunnies carrying baskets full of deadly egg bombs". The episode's tone word—"joyous"—was influenced by Davies' realisation that "every story since 'The Fires of Pompeii' [had] a bittersweet quality" and his subsequent desire to avoid the recurring theme. The starting point for the story was Roberts' first novel The Highest Science. Davies liked the image of a train on a desert planet and rewrote the train as a bus. Davies nevertheless emphasised it was not an "adaptation as such" because tangential elements were constantly being conceived and added.
Michelle Ryan's casting as Lady Christina de Souza was confirmed by the BBC on 23 January 2009 and attracted media attention owing to Ryan's recent relatively high-profile roles in EastEnders, Jekyll, Bionic Woman and Merlin. Ryan stated that she is "a huge fan of Doctor Who and [was] very excited to be joining David Tennant and the Doctor Who team." Davies commented that "Michelle is one of the most sought after young actors in the country" and that they were "delighted to announce that she [would] be joining the team." Ryan described her casting as a "real honour", noting that she "love[s] the character".
Ryan was rumoured to be in line for a role as full-time companion to the incoming Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) and her casting in "Planet of the Dead", combined with her previous working history with incoming Executive Producer Steven Moffat – the two working together on Jekyll, fuelled speculation that she might return to Doctor Who accompanying the Eleventh Doctor in Series 5. It had been reported that Ryan auditioned to replace Billie Piper in the companion role when her character, Rose Tyler, left in 2006, but was unsuccessful; Ryan subsequently stated that this was false.
Filming
Pre-production on the four specials started on 20 November 2008—four days before scheduled—because the episode's overseas filming in Dubai required the extra planning time. Two weeks later, the production team was on a recce for the special and the final draft of the script was completed. The production team examined overseas locations to film the episode because they wanted the scenery to feel "real" and thought that they would be unable to film on a Welsh beach in winter. After examining countries such as Morocco and Tunisia, the production team decided to film in Dubai because the area was more amicable to the filming industry and viable filming locations were nearer to urban areas than other locations.
Production began on 19 January in Wales. The special was the first Doctor Who episode to be filmed in high-definition television resolution. The move to HD had previously been resisted for two major reasons: when the show was revived in 2005, high-definition television had not been adopted by an adequate portion of the audience to be financially viable; and special effects were considerably more expensive to create in high-definition than in standard-definition. "Planet of the Dead" was
used as a switch to HD because of the show's reduced schedule in 2009 and because the filming crew had become experienced with the equipment while they were filming Torchwood.
Filming began at the National Museum Cardiff, which doubled for the history museum depicted in the episode's first scene. To portray the tunnel the bus travelled into, the Queen's Gate Tunnel of the A4232 road in Butetown was closed for four nights to accommodate filming. The last major piece of filming in Wales took place in the closed Mir (formerly Alphasteel) steelworks in Newport, which doubled almost unaltered for the Tritovore spaceship. Scenes set in London's Oxford Street were filmed at St Mary Street, Cardiff. Filming took place at the peak of the February 2009 Great Britain snowfall, where the sub-zero temperatures slowed filming and had a visible effect on the cast. To accommodate for the adverse conditions, Davies included a line in the script that specified that the Tritovore spaceship cooled as external temperatures increase.
Filming in Dubai took place in mid-February 2009. Two weeks previously, one of the two 1980 Bristol VR double-decker buses bought for filming had been substantially damaged when a crane accidentally dropped a container in Dubai City Port. After an emergency discussion by the production team, they agreed that the damage was unintentionally artistic and decided to include the damaged bus in the episode; instead of shipping the spare bus from Cardiff—which would have delayed the already hurried filming
200th story
"Planet of the Dead" was advertised as Doctor Who's 200th story. Writer Russell T Davies admitted that the designation was arbitrary and debatable, based upon how fans counted the unfinished serial Shada, the season-long fourteen-part serial The Trial of a Time Lord, and the third series finale consisting of "Utopia", "The Sound of Drums" and "Last of the Time Lords". Davies personally disagreed about counting The Trial of a Time Lord as one serial—arguing that it "felt like four stories" to him—and grouping "Utopia" with its following episodes, but agreed that it was only an opinion which did not override any others. Gareth Roberts inserted a reference to the landmark—specifically, the bus number is 200—and Davies emailed the show's publicity team to advertise the special as such. Doctor Who Magazine's editor Tom Spilsbury acknowledged the controversy in the magazine's 407th issue, which ran a reader survey of all 200 stories.
Broadcast and reception
Overnight figures estimated that the special was watched by 8.41 million people, a 39.6% share of the audience. An additional 184,000 watched the programme on BBC HD, the channel's highest rating at that time. The initial showing had an Appreciation Index of 88: considered excellent. A BBC One repeat, two days later, gained an overnight figure of 1.8 million viewers. The special was therefore the second most watched programme of the day, beaten only by the premiere of the new series of Britain's Got Talent. The final viewing figure
for the initial broadcast was 9.54 million viewers on BBC One and 200,000 viewers on BBC HD, making it the fifth most watched programme of the week and the most watched programme aired on BBC HD at that time. Including repeats in the following week and viewings on the BBC iPlayer, 13.89 million viewers watched the episode in total.
The episode received average critical reviews. Simon Brew of science fiction blog Den of Geek said the episode was "by turns ambitious and predictable" but "still quite entertaining". The first part of the review mentioned an objection from his wife that the bus trapped in the sand "[looked] really fake", despite the episode being actually filmed in Dubai, and then mentioned Brew's appreciation of the concept of people stranded in the desert and concluded that "made a fair fist of it". Brew positively reviewed Michelle Ryan's performance—believing it similar to her role in Bionic Woman than to her role as Zoe Slater in EastEnders—and Lee Evans' performance as Malcolm Taylor, calling him the highlight of the episode because of his dialogue. He closed his review by saying that "'Planet of the Dead' was passable enough": he thought it "never really gelled" for him; but he thought it was overall entertaining and was excited for the remaining three specials as a result of Carmen's prophecy.
Charlie Jane Anders of io9 "mostly loved 'Planet of the Dead'", commenting that it was a standard Russell T Davies script:
POTD was pretty much everything you've come to expect from Russell T. Davies' Who: crazy adventures, slightly cartoony characters, clever dialogue, moments of sheer silly fun, a childlike solemnity, a miraculous save, bombastic music, and one woman who's held up as being the most special person ever.
International broadcast
The special aired in Canada in July on Space, and in the US on BBC America on 26 July 2009. In Australia, the Special aired 31 May 2009, on ABC1. In South Africa, the special aired on 18 October 2010, on BBC Entertainment.
Legacy
In 2018, Ryan began reprising her role as Lady Christina in her own Big Finish Productions spinoff audio drama series.