Mark Watches ‘Doctor Who’: Planet of the Dead

In the first Easter special of Doctor Who, the Doctor hops on a bus with a thief (unknowingly, that is) and gets sent through a wormhole to a planet of sand. Oh, and DEADLY STINGRAYS. It’s better than it sounds. Promise. If you’re still intrigued, then it’s time for Mark to watch Doctor Who.

Whoa, STOP THE DOCTOR WHO BUS. The show is now filmed in HD? EVERYTHING LOOKS SO CRISP AND NEW. I feel like I can see every pore in David Tennant’s face. (I’m not complaining, for what it’s worth.) Not only that, but if I had been thrust into this show with this special first, I probably would have thought this was a movie. I don’t know if these same production values transfer over to series five (DON’T TELL ME), but this episode was so pretty. Where on earth did they film this??? It looked completely genuine. (That you can tell me. I am avoiding Wikipedia to protect myself from spoilers.)

This particular special is a whole lot of fun, and pretty darn creepy at that. There are a few narrative sleight of hands (including the fact that Russell T Davies wrote this one as well? WHY ARE YOU CLINGING ON TO THIS SHOW? Oh, right, because it’s the best thing ever I would do exactly the same.) and some fantastic acting from Tennant. I mean, I’m not surprised at this point, but it really is a joy to watch him play the Doctor.

There’s no real companion in this special, but Michelle Ryan, from EastEnders, does a fine job playing professional thief/adventure Lady Christina de Souza. After trying to escape from a job robbing a London museum, she hops onto a 200 bus and meets the Doctor, who is trying to find a wormhole with the silliest device we’ve seen him use yet. (“It’s spinning!”) What this episode does well with its ensemble cast is deal with an absurdist situation: what if you were dropped onto a planet of sand with no foreseeable way out? I appreciated that this special didn’t veer straight for “Midnight” territory. That episode already did the “trapped in space” trope incredibly well. For the most part, these people get along fairly well, actually! No one resorts to ridiculous levels of hostility. No one calls Carmen a weirdo or a freak for being able to “see” things. No one really turns on each other. And only the bus driver dies, and that’s only entirely out of his own arrogance and fear.

In that sense, “The Planet of the Dead” was refreshing; Davies and Gareth Roberts, who penned this special, avoided pitfalls that we’ve come to expect from this trope in science fiction. Additionally, it allowed them to explore many other things in the story that never would have seen the light of day had everyone fought for half an hour.

Still, as familiar as it was, this episode certainly was creepy as hell. From the endless dunes and hills of sand, to that weird clicking voice that played while some mysterious creature watched our stranded passengers on a screen, to the HORRIFYING effects of the bus driver trying to run through the wormhole. Seriously, that might be the most violent thing on the entire run of the show. Yikes.

It was obvious that Christina and the Doctor would be paired off, but, again, because we weren’t dealing with passenger exiles or ruthless anger from those on the bus, it made sense that the two of them would split off to scout the planet while Nathan and Barclay tried to fix the bus. I can’t deny that the two of them had a great sense of chemistry. I can’t. They did work well together and I’m sure they would have made a great team. I think that Christina’s physical prowess and ingenuity was a fantastic complement to the way the Doctor already works, as if they were two pieces of a super genius puzzle waiting to be put together.

We’re left to believe that whatever is watching the Doctor is responsible for the wormhole. Well…ok, maybe I should amend that. I believed that we’d discover what creature was watching the Doctor and Christina. The dialect that the creatures used seemed so familiar to me, yet I couldn’t place it. So I thought that we’d see a villain from nu-Who return, having created the wormhole to specifically trap the Doctor in order to DESTROY HIM.

So imagine my surprise when the Tritovores turn out to be entirely neutral. Helpful, even! They weren’t past villains and they weren’t even villains at all. So….where did San Helios go? We learn from the Tritovores that there used to be a teeming city of a hundred billion inhabitants. A hundred billion. And somehow, it was all reduced to sand.

It is silly. And ridiculous. And over-the-top. And nonsensical. And I do not care at all. Those metallic stingray aliens? SERIOUSLY, THEY ARE SO TERRIFYINGLY AWESOME. So, if I understand this right, the planet wasn’t a desert until the stingrays ATE EVERYTING AND TURNED IT TO SAND? Which would explain why the sand tasted “wrong” to the Doctor. THERE WERE REMAINS OF PEOPLE AND CITIES IN IT. Oh man, it’s like that time it snowed, only it wasn’t snow, IT WAS ASHES AND SHIT. Sometimes, this show is so wild that I can’t help but love it to bits.

Anyway, as Shit Continues To Get So Real, I found myself smiling at the wonderfully understated explanation for these aliens. Sometimes, Doctor Who can easily fall into overexplaining things. And when they do that, they also risk creating Epic Plot Holes or Stories That Make No Sense. In general, though, this show does what it does right here: It gives us barely enough to accept the story and then presses on. I love the idea that these creatures have a biological imperative to feed and that their speed creates wormholes to new environments so they can continue feeding. THAT IS IT. THAT’S ALL WE KNOW. Oh god, it’s such a good idea! And Davies doesn’t take it so far that I feel the need to question the details. CAN YOU HEAR MY APPLAUSE.

The Doctor and Christina work together (and well, I might add again) to help figure out how on earth they are going to get a bus partially stuck in the sand through a wormhole. Once they figured out that they could use the crystal to power up the bus, I actually thought that Christina might take the crystal for herself and try to leave the Doctor behind. In hindsight, I guess that doesn’t really make any sense. It’s really obvious now that Christina looked up to the Doctor and, given her little speech to him at the end, she wanted the adventure he could give her.

The end of this episode is great. It’s nice that, aside from the Tritovores, who I just started liking a whole lot, this episode doesn’t involve a thousand million people dying. The Doctor gets everyone back to London, he gives a glowing recommendation to Nathan and Barclay, and then…he flat out denies Christina the chance to be his companion. I didn’t expect that she’d last beyond this particular special, but I was shocked by how direct and cold he seemed. But it was all for an important point: He couldn’t risk taking on another companion, not after what had happened in “Journey’s End.”

But the entire episode is SO UNBELIEVABLY UPSTAGED by the parting words of Carmen:

“You be careful, because your song is ending, sir. It is returning, it is returning through the dark. And then Doctor…oh, but then…he will knock four times.”

WAIT. WAIT. OH MY FL;KASJDF;LASDJF;ALKSDJLJDFA;SLKDFJFAS;LDKDFJKSL

FOUR TIMES. YOU ARE KIDDING ME. Is THE MASTER coming back? Oh my god, but it can’t be John Simm again, can it? He’s dead? BUT WHAT ELSE WOULD KNOCK FOUR TIMES IN A ROW?

This show, guys. THIS SHOW.

THOUGHTS

• Up until this point, I hadn’t commented on him, so I must now. I LOVE MALCOM FOREVER. I was worried that he’d just be an unimportant side character, and a stereotypical one at that. But he was SO HAPPY!!! It was infectious and it made me realize that I love the Doctor, too. MALCOM AND HIS FINGERLESS GLOVES FOREVER.
• It was nice to see a strong woman of color leading UNIT.
• “Yes, I’ll just step inside this police box and arrest myself.”
• OH GOD I LOVE THIS SPECIAL.