Planet Of The Dead: Ranking - 253

 Planet Of The Dead

(Easter Special, Dr 10, 11/4/2009, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writers: Gareth Roberts and Russell T Davies, director: James Strong)  

Rank: 253

''It looks like the 200 bus failed to turn up again, wonder what planet it's ended up on this time? I would get the time-travel bus but chances are three will turn up at once again and then detour me to blooming Skaro. Oh here it is - a single universe-explorer-master please...'

Nowadays Dr Who can be off the air for a year or more and nobody thinks twice about it, but the announcement that for 2009 we were only getting four specials spread throughout the year up to Christmas rather than the usual thirteen part series was met with horror by us fans who remembered the eighteen month hiatus in the mid-80s that led to a full cancellation by the late 80s. Would the time off air kill our favourite show just when it was at the peak of its popularity? Would the quality drop? Would people stop caring? Would the BBC find some excuse that ‘scifi isn’t popular’ by dint of the wibbly wobbly timey wimey logic that there was less of it around to watch? Thankfully not, but ‘Planet Of The Dead’ is clearly something of a wobble. It’s the one time in the original Russell T years when it feels as if everything is on auto-pilot: that the writing, the acting, the production and even the CGI are ticking over by mirroring something we’d had before and doing it just well enough to get away with it. Had this been a ‘normal’ episode it might have gotten away with it more but somehow ‘The Planet Of The Dead’s biggest crime is that it never feels quite, well, ‘special’ enough to be a special. Never mind (as was much ballyhooed online) a special 200^th story (depending how you break up both ‘The Key To Time’ and ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ never mind semi-official stories like ‘Shada’ ‘Dimensions In Time’ ‘Timecrash’ etc): that’s why the bus is the ‘number 200’ in case you were wondering, although they don’t really make as much out of this aspect as they could. Even for a ‘normal’ episode though it would have been disappointing. After all, the gap between episodes meant that anticipation for this story was sky-high and what do we get? A bus that breaks down and ends up stranded while the rowdy passengers get attacked by insects. That’s not a Dr Who story, that’s something that was happening to me all the time on my daily journeys into Skelmersdale at the time this story went out on air. Where was the magic?

Well, you see, that’s where this otherwise serviceable story breaks down. Because the BBC only worked out budgets in terms of series not pricier ‘specials’ the only way that money could be raised for the final four episodes of the Russell T era was through **BBC worldwide, effectively selling the specials to all the countries that were interested enough in Dr Who to show it overseas. In order to do that they had to market this story slightly differently by drawing on the big budget names: That’s why David Tennant’s name appears bigger than usual, why Russell T gets a co-credit for little more than idea suggestions and proof-reading on Gareth Roberts’ script, why so much of this story is based around the ‘special guest’ and IT girl of the moment Michelle Ryan (fresh off a stint on Eastenders) who even gets her name as big as Tennant’s in the cast list, special ‘comedian’ guest Lee Evans (then at the peak of his international fame) and why the big selling point is Dr Who’s first ever ‘proper’ location filming outside Europe (if a few establishing seconds of ‘Daleks In Manhattan’, shot during a ‘Dr Who Confidential’ stopover, don’t count). Oh and after a year of trying it out on other dramas (including Torchwood) this is the first time the BBC decide to go all-out with their new toy, High Definition, asking the production team for more spills, thrills and sort-of Mandrils than ever before (well, a talking wasp anyway). None of these big selling points quite come off, all for different reasons.

For starters David Tennant isn’t quite himself, just when a story makes him the de facto ‘star’ and gives him the majority of lines for the first time outside ‘Midnight’.  Even though ‘The Next Doctor’ was four months ago for ‘us’ for David it had been seven months for him, during which time he’d been busy playing Hamlet. By his own admission he found to his horror he’d ‘forgotten’ how to play The Doctor and spent his time off in rehearsals watching old videos and trying to get both the higher-pitched voice and run ‘right’. He pulls it off for the most part, but it also feels for the first time as if he’s ‘playing a part’ rather than making The Doctor an extension of himself had he been granted near-immortality and multiple powers, as his nine-year-old self had long dreamed of.  As for Russell, despite his name being the big selling point and the ‘wormhole’ the bus flies through being his idea, he arguably had less to do with this script than any other during his run (due to his commitments to the previous and following specials and his husband’s ailing health) and it shows. The characters, especially, don’t come to life in a few fully rounded phrases the way they usually do. They’re caricatures: the bossy posh totty, the slightly spooky mystic, the trainee garage mechanic who comes good and…who else was there? I’ve literally just stopped watching this episode this second and I can’t remember. The chase scenes all run twice as long (well, it is a special) and there are no small slow bits of emotion that are the ‘real’ selling point of the story, the way that there are in most of the scripts he handled (and are usually the parts that live long in the memory long after the noisy climax has faded).  

Usually Gareth Roberts is a reliable pair of hands, someone for whom at the time (before certain controversies) was genuinely in the running for the next showrunner’s seat – so much so it’s hard to think that this commission wasn’t some form of consolation prize (there was no guarantee, after all, that Steven Moffat would keep the same writers on). However Russell’s pitch to Gareth was basically ‘give us something like in your ‘New Adventures’ novels; it is indeed the perfect cross between ‘The Highest Science’ (one of the range’s best: an ordinary it of public transport is stranded on an exotic planet) and ‘Zamper’ (alien insects: the stingray, especially, is straight out of that book). All the good bits of this story come from the ‘Science’ book, tweaked, although in the earlier version the bus is a train, the companion is Bernice Summerfield (that Cartmel companion, whose basically an upgraded Christina) and the baddies are the Chenolians, a far more interesting group of mutant and presumably teenage alien tortoises with X-ray vision who were sadly too expensive to reproduce on screen  (though they were there for a first draft). After all, it’s very Dr Who to take something ordinary and place it somewhere extraordinary and the best lines in the script by far are about how something extraordinary is going on just out of reach of the mundanity of life (such as The Doctor trying to get the stranded passengers to hold on to the ordinary little things they were planning to do when they got home). There were a few abandoned drafts along the way that sound interesting too (if expensive): a ‘Frontier In Space’ style cosmic war, time-freezing centaurs in a time hotel (abandoned because of similarities to ‘Waters Of Mars’), when the slot got moved to Easter another hotel variant with an ‘Alien’ style plot about extra-terrestrials hatching ‘eggs’ inside customers’ tummies, a story that revolved around a ‘dogfight in space’ (‘borrowed’ for part of ‘The End Of Time’), even a long awaited Star Trek crossover (before the production team found out that the last series of ‘Enterprise’ had been cancelled and there was no longer a Star Trek production team and/or sets to liaise with). In the end it was decided to drop the expense and stick with the bus, Russell asking for a storyline closer to the books that had made him hire Gareth in the first place. 

The thing is though, a novel is a very different beast to a TV story. Roberts is a really good writer at getting inside a character’s inner mind, exploring their thoughts and workings and then having all those contradictory motivations rub up against each other. That’s much harder to pull off in terms of pure dialogue (and especially when the Tritovores – loosely based on Roberts’ far more multi-dimensional race the ‘Chenolians’ – are another in the small handful of races that don’t speak; The Doctor, weirdly, can translate even when separated from the Tardis translation circuits, which becomes a paper thin plot point even if it does result in lots of funny David Tennant vocal clicks). So the characters that live large in the (generally excellent) books just sit there on TV. Had he been more present Russell would no doubt have had the talent to make them work anyway, but with mounting deadlines and difficulties it’s no wonder that the general feeling seemed to be ‘well it worked in the book, so I’m sure it will be fine’, without understanding that to get the most of these characters and this story you need to have read both source materials to get any sense of danger or deeper layers than just a ‘runaround, chased by a wasp’.

The one character we do get to know is one that – largely  we wish we hadn’t. It’s maybe not a coincidence that Dr Who got cancelled the first time round just when 1980s script editor Andrew Cartmel had a similar idea about a posh cat-burglar in the unmade season twenty-seven (when Raine would have been a big fat disappointment after the streetwiseness and likability of Ace judging by the Big Finish ‘lost stories’, full new scripts based on ideas being banded about the production office at the time of cancellation). I don’t know why two writers thought it was a good idea: in their heads Roberts and Russell were thinking ‘Romana II’, someone haughty but capable who knew as much as The Doctor but that character worked because we had time to see her grow, to unlearn all the reasons she thought she was superior and to see her do the right thing after learning from The Doctor (not that Romana would ever admit it!) Lady Christina De Souza only gets an hour and our first impressions are not good: far from thinking ‘you go girl’ when she starts the episode nicking a priceless heirloom from a Museum you think ‘blimey, that’s going to put the admission fee up to account for all the extra security’ and far from being impressed you’re more shocked at how thick all the guards have to be not to have at least one of them with an eye trained on the ceiling (so the ‘Mission Impossible’ film franchise ends whatever year this episode is set then, otherwise there’s no way anyone would fall for that). A sort of cross between the two versions of ‘The Avengers’ (ITV and Marvel Comics) she is reportedly modelled by Russell on ‘Black Canary’, from the Flash comics (which figures as to why she’s a bit…one dimensional) but is also clearly Emma Peel (a character created entirely as ‘em appeal’ i.e. man appeal, and nothing more – till Diana Rigg got hold of her). Fun as the museum opening is, it basically means Christina is robbing the local district (presumably somewhere in London) of their cultural heritage (she’s the British Museum with a getaway bus). They never quite know what to do ith her: at times she’s a battle-hardened unphased criminal who’s seen everything; at others she’s spooked by having dead things in her hair. Are we meant to admire her, hate her or feel sorry for her? The writers don’t know so we don’t either. What makes things worse is that Christina hands over her hapless assistant Dmitry over to police to save herself: the ultimate Dr Who no-no. Okay you think, she’s another Turlough: The Doctor is meant to be too blinded to her vices by her virtues and then we discover some retrospective thing that will make us like her anyway. Or possibly another Adam: a companion who we’re shown is deeply unsuitable to a life of morality with The Doctor, exploring the universe for all the wrong reasons. Except we get mixed messages instead, as if the writers liked her too much to make her ‘all bad’. We’re clearly meant to admire Christina’s capability and the way she takes charge (even more than The Doctor), not to mention her sly humour, while her courage is never in doubt. At the same time, though, she’s arrogant and rude and admits at the end that even though her family have fallen on hard times and needed the money, mostly she stole things ‘for kicks’. She just swings too far into the ‘bad’ column: snooty is okay, lawbreaking is okay, but a lawbreaker who’s smug about what she does? No thankyou. No wonder The Doctor doesn’t quite know what to do with her, standing back both when the police try to capture her back in the present day and when she makes her escape, letting fate take its course. That’s one hell of a risk with a one-story companion who gets the majority of the lines The Doctor doesn’t get. Far better, surely, would have been to make her a sympathetic ‘Robin Hood’ type, stealing from some billionaire who  has more trinkets than sense and is about to demolish the local orphanage and turn it into a bus park or something. Some actresses could still have got something out of the character, made her larger than life and a bit cheeky chappy, but with all the love in the world Michelle Ryan was hired to be a ‘big name’ not because she was right for the part and is clearly there because she can talk posh and look glamorous without falling over. It’s all a bit of a lost opportunity, to say the least. Goodness knows what she'd have done if she'd become a full companion - nicked something off the Bowie base and called The Master a right geezer, or something like that probably. Interestingly for the first draft Christina couldn’t have been more different: she was a clutsy but sweet larger than life shop assistant named Rebecca who kept everyone hopeful (and turned down a trip in the Tardis to make sure everyone got home safely); not unlike Nicola Coughlan’s character in ‘Joy To The World’ in fact, a Russell script from 15 years later.  Frankly, that would have worked better.     

As for ‘comedian’ (the term is used loosely) Lee Evans, he’s worse. A trial go at ‘Osgood’ (who was never quite so relentlessly irritating) with elements of ‘Whizzkid’ (from ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ but even more relentlessly nerdish) his ‘Malcolm’ is one of those very few Dr Who characters you want to punch whenever he is on screen. Once again he falls between two stools: more than The Doctor you have to believe this hapless scientist is fully capable of bringing the bus back home, but how we can take seriously someone who seems to have problems changing a plug? Lee plays him as a caricature of a Dr Who fan eager to meet his hero (and he turned up to filming with a generic fandom caricature pair of false sticky-out teeth – a panicked production team phoned Russell up at home; he is said to have laughed for five full minutes then said ‘no!’ in no uncertain terms). His habit of labelling everything to his own ‘system’ is not the sort of thing UNIT would have tolerated (in case you’re wondering the ‘Bernard’ reference is yet another homage to ‘Quatermass’). Even the 3^rd Doctor (the regeneration most likely to agree with fawning and praise) would have found it OTT while you wonder how bad the UNIT staffing levels must be that someone this utterly clueless got such a big position. Even the late Pertwee ‘UNIT’ were never quite as relentlessly ‘Dad’s Army’ amateurish as this. We’re at the unfortunate point in time where the idea of having an ‘international’ (albeit Welsh) name and a ‘comedy’ moment to break up the action are being deliberately introduced to a story in order to help ‘sell things to the masses’. At it’s best, like 90-odd per cent of this book, Dr Who stories feel organic and even the worst ones seem to grow up quite naturally out of the plot elements. But not this one: it feels forced.

The biggest mistake, though, is the one thing everyone was banking on to make the audience go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’, one clearly here to show off the new High Def format: the trip to the deserts of Dubai. The plan was to have an ‘endless horizon’ that would show off the HD to its greatest extent. It was a bad idea for all sorts of reasons: the one everyone mentions is because it still looks (despite the expense) as if they simply filmed it down the road in the usual quarry, with nothing in the background but sand anyway. Then there’s the cost involved (for the transport money of sending so many actors overseas they could have paid for another medium budget episode). Not to mention the risk, something that came unstuck when the bus that had been exported from London at vast expense (not even a ‘current’ bus but a red routemaster officially ‘retired’ in 2005, used because the production team wanted one that as recognisably red)  was damaged in transport at the Dubai dockyards when an 18 foot crane accidentally rammed into the side of the palette where it was being stored unprotected. Whoops! That did at least make for arguably the best episode of ‘Confidential’ that went out in tandem with the episode though as the production office have kittens and discuss the costings of flying out another bus and how they can possibly tell their showrunner, by then off home (and caring for his hubby). Russell’s chuckle amidst all the chaos and his single line rewrite that the ‘cosmic storm’ has damaged the bus shows that not every production mountain is as big as it seems.

There were problems even getting to the ‘set’ though: a taxi, carrying David Tennant and Michelle Ryan, was stopped by police for speeding (leading to the two actors turning up bewildered and late) while another containing production members got lost in the sand and was heading the wrong way, to Oman, before eventually realising their mistake and turning up late. Once everyone had finally turned up a bigger problem was the wind: everyone’s hair whipped round their faces continuously (apart from David Tennant’s, who’s hair gel was strong enough to keep it in place, but did attract lots of sand grains – just what you don’t want in your first episode going out in high definition!) and the constant storms drowned out most of the dialogue, which had to be added in post-production. Even back in Britain the scenes of the wormhole were shot in the midst of the biggest snowstorm the country had seen in years and the foggy breath mist was so obvious on camera that Russell had to include a line about ‘adverse weather conditions’ (yep, just like old times and ‘The Claws Of Axos’!) Even in post-production things didn’t go smoothly: originally the bus had an ‘Easter Egg’ for ‘Neon Naismith 3G’ (Naismith being the de facto baddy of ‘The End Of Time’ before The Master comes along), only in between filming and screening there really was a Vodafone service titled ‘Neon 3G’ that would have got the BBC into trouble for advertising, so all the banners around the bus had to be removed. This was, it’s fair to say, a troubled production, but it’s one of those where the troubles didn’t bring people together to make a better production (a la ‘Shada’ or ‘’The Daleks’) but rather drove people mad. There are tales of poor director James Strong on his first day, with only a minute of useable footage in the can, already so behind schedule he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Then of course there’s the bigger question of whether a forward-looking equality-loving series like Dr Who should ever be anywhere near the United Arab Emirates with their poor human rights reputation and giving them taxpayers’ money. The decision to go to Dubai at all is, it’s safe to say, not one of Who’s better ideas.

That wouldn’t matter if the characters were up to standard, but they’re not. You only need to contrast this episode with ‘Midnight’ (less than a year old at this point) to see what’s gone wrong. I can guarantee that I have sat on a bus next to each of those characters: the dominant dad pretending to be smart, the nervy son pretending to be thick rather than get in a fight, the dotty arrogant professor, the assistant who knows more than he ever will. Each one of those characters had inbuilt relationships (mostly power struggles) that seemed to have existed long before the cameras started running. None of the people on this bus seem quite ‘real’ and I’m not sure if I’ve ever sat next to any of them. What’s more they don’t behave the way people normally would en masse in a crisis: there should be screaming, confusion, a bit of paranoia (just like ‘Midnight’). Instead everyone sits around wondering what to do and agreeing to keep calm to keep the ‘sweat levels’ on the bus down (surely the last thing anyone wants to worry about when stranded on an alien planet). In ‘Midnight’ even The Doctor had trouble fighting against the sheer panic of a group of people who feel they’ve been cut off from home and safety forever; here they’re all polite enough to accept even Lady Christina calming them down without a murmur.   

Things don’t get any better when we go outside. The Tritovores don’t really get to do much and are one of the most ‘wasted’ of Dr Who monsters, there to look ‘pretty’ rather than move the plot forward (had this been the ‘classic’ series they’d be there to sell the first cliffhanger then run out of uses, like The Krotons or Monoids before them). Clearly there to ‘sell’ the HD, they do look impressive but even there they just look like the Vespiforms from ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’ with leggy bits from ‘The Hath’ from ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’, only lacking that first race’s sting and, umm, waspiness. They’re actually nice despite their appearance – something that’s always welcome in a Dr Who story – but we don’t get to know them well enough for this ‘twist’ to really matter. Instead it’s the oncoming swarm that’s the real jeopardy in this episode and these flying parasites have even less screentime or motivation: they’ve  opened up a wormhole, just because (shouldn’t there be lots of cases like this on Earth then? Shouldn’t there be lots of busses and cars and planes and things on this desert planet? Is that what happened with the Bermuda triangle? After all, even by the convention of Dr Who storytelling coincidences needed to drive a plot on it’s one hell of a coincidence the first time they’ve done this a timelord just happens to be onboard the 200 route bus). They could at least have made them killer Spring chickens or something: though set over Easter in…some unspecified year there’s absolutely nothing here to make this an ‘Easter Special’. Not even an alien egg.

It’s more than that though: other episodes have dropped the ball in far more spectacular ways than this episode. The real problem with ‘Planet Of The Dead’ is that nothing really comes together, not one part. There’s a wormhole that shouldn’t be there – not the most original idea the series has ever had and the ‘rhondium particles’ part is never fully explained. There’s a catburglar who’s sort of bad but sort of good – not the greatest idea ever. There’s a ‘visionary’ who can see things going wrong – who isn’t useful to the plot in anyway whatsoever (the one time she’s ‘useful’ is when warning Dr 10 of what’s coming in the series finale).  It’s nice to see UNIT again, but wouldn’t Torchwood be of slightly more help than a hapless scientific advisor? The aliens don’t really do anything. The solution when it comes, is depressingly ordinary: UNIT fire a rocket at it (just imagine the arguments the 3^rd Doctor would be having with the Brigadier for pulling a stunt like that!) The real big problem with all of this though: there’s absolutely no sense of danger here at all. You always have faith the Doctor will get everyone home, because he always does, while a few insects and a bus are hardly the sort of thing to keep the Doctor up at night. There’s no such thing as an ‘ordinary’ episode of Dr Who, of course, but this is a special: the stakes are meant to be higher, not smaller.  The overall feel is an episode where everyone’s minds were on other things (it was about now the handover to Matt Smith and Steven Moffat was confirmed) and this special just got lost in the shuffle. Fans have long wondered what a series 5 under Russell might have looked like in some timey wimey spacey wacey parallel universe, but for every indication that Davies was hitting new strides in confidence and taking more risks (‘Waters Of Mars’) there’ll be another story like this one that suggests we would have had a year of playing it safe (a bit like series two then, but with less excuse for a ‘victory lap’).

Whisper it quietly, but don't you think it looks a bit tired? Still packed full with strong ideas and great lines, but going through the motions a bit? We'd had worse episodes since the Who revival certainly, but they tended to fall apart because they were trying something bold, new different - and wrong. 'Planet' feels like lots of other episodes cobbled together, a series playing it safe. Why, at the peak of such success? Was it the need not to scare the sponsors of the new budget? The distraction for actor and showrunner?  Writer paralysis of trying to come up with a new idea that hadn’t been tried before? The worry about everyone looking at a ‘special’ without being able to rely on Christmas Day indulgence? It’ as if, a bit like The Doctor, Christina  and UNIT in this story, everyone is looking to someone else to save it: Russell is distracted, Gareth is in untried waters (on TV at least), the director is facing a sandstorm of his own and even David Tennant has lost his usual bounce and is clearly missing Catherine Tate as much as his character misses Donna. The writing is as close to numbers as two of the series' most inventive and talented writers can get, all the worst parts from Gareth’s books recycled rather than the best. Even the music and direction fall a bit flat, like a memory of better episodes rather than being one.

All this is a shame because the bits of this special that work really stand out. The starting point for all of this was the big red London bus on an alien planet. Russell said that, even long after the audience have forgotten everything else about the story, he wanted the children of the day to remember that image and they have, more or less. It is, after all, such an incredibly strong ‘Dr Whoy’ image: forget your bus routes, forget your timetable, forget your set Humans rules and  things going on the same way day after day: there’s another whole universe going on out there blinking just out of reach, if only you knew and looked up from your mundane world. In retrospect that accident was one of the best things that could have happened to this episode and maybe should have been there in the first place: of course the bus would have been wrecked in transit. This isn’t a safe journey down to the shops, this is a trip through space and space is big and dangerous and scary and full of things beyond your wildest dreams (I must admit my first thought on seeing it was ‘wow, how’s that for realism, they actually wrecked a bus!’ before reading ‘Confidential’  revealed all the things that had gone wrong). This episode isn’t, sadly, for the most part, but for a moment there you feel as if anything is possible again and for that moment at least the journey is worth it. Roberts, too, might not have included as many cracking one-liners into this episode as his others (and he feels oddly lost in the futuristic setting, that was his bread-and-butter in the novel range, even more than the comedy historicals) but there are some really good lines sprinkled throughout. Especially between The 10^th Doctor and Christina smart-alecking each other in a 4^th Doctor-Romana way, two people long used to getting in the ‘last word’ (though the best one, sadly,  got cut, Christina looking up at the stars and talking about all the impossible worlds she imagined were out there somewhere, thus giving more depth to her story and revealing why she isn’t as overawed as all the others; then the Doctor comments he used to look up[ at the stars imagining ‘that part might be Wolverhampton!’)  The pair change places too in a  clever way: Christina is the cynical one who despairs at first while The Doctor is used to being in tough situations and talks her round (‘I live in hope’ says The Doctor rushing off to fix things. As for the rest there’s nothing a re-write from a less distracted script editor couldn’t have fixed: make Christina a bit softer, make Malcolm a bit sharper, the threat a bit stronger and make the passengers into ‘real’ people and this could yet have been one of the stronger Whos, one where everyone goes on a ‘journey’ of discovering new reserves of courage and hope (just not the one they were expecting to take when they woke up that morning). Like many an Easter present, though, it all ends up feeling a bit hollow, its treats buried away under too many layers of sugar. We give it maybe half a Malcolm for effort (which isn’t very much of a Bernard at all).

POSITIVES + The opening scene makes you think you’re in for a very different kind of story. It’s a measure of how much goodwill there was for Dr Who in Wales that the national Museum in Cardiff allowed so much opening filming there, even when the scene made their security men look like the biggest bunch of losers since Adric. The ‘British’ location filming is strong all round, actually: the tunnel with the wormhole is really the Queen’s Gate Tunnel on the A4232 in Butetown and the Tritovore spaceship is really the Alpha steelworks in Newport. Rather than the expense of filming in London the brief scene in London’s Oxford Street is really St Mary’s in Cardiff, redressed. Oh and you remember DI MacMillan, the police officer who pops up at the beginning and end of the episode? He has no less than three links to Who: one of David Tennant’s best friends after the pair appeared as brothers in the play ‘Vassa – Scenes From Family Life’ in 1999 together, he’s the son of Polly James (who guest-starred in ‘The Awakening’) and also happens to be close  to the Pertwee family and Jon was his godfather!

NEGATIVES -  Michelle Ryan was a big name at the time after some high profile roles in Eastenders, The Bionic Woman and the ever under-rated Merlin (she plays a witch in at least one of these series, possibly all three). After being in everything at once her career crashed and burned after being in Who, much like the London bus, when she used the international appeal of the series to leave Britain to make a name for herself in Hollywood and burnt most of her bridges. It's not that she's bad (her dialogue and character are a bigger problem than her acting) but she plays Christina (who could have been such a multifaceted character) with very broad strokes and practically winks at the camera when she's up to something, which is out of place when everyone else is aiming for the feel of a rugged kitchen sink drama. At least she did most of the stunts herself though, the one time she seems perfectly at home amazingly: you don’t get to do that on ‘Eastenders’!

BEST QUOTE: Lady Christina: ‘You look Human’ Doctor: ‘You look timelord’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Russell T asked Gareth Roberts to base this story on his ‘New Adventures’ story ‘The Highest Science’ (1993), his most popular book amongst Whovians during the ‘wilderness’ years. It’s certainly his most ‘Dr Whoy’, with the 7^th Doctor and Benny exploring time portals and at the mercy of a race. The Chelonians, who feel like the big insect alien overlords every Who production team has tried over the years at least once (though in the books they can actually do things the TV versions could only dream of!) The book was one of Russell’s favourites and you can see why: it’s colourful, imaginative and in places very silly indeed, though unlike a good half of the ‘New Adventures’ it also feels rooted in the ‘real’ world, with characters you meet in everyday life rather than weird aliens with unpronounceable names and complicated back-stories. This element naturally enough got transposed to ‘Planet Of The Dead’ in the form of everyday people trapped in a bus on an alien planet, which is exactly what happens in the novel even if those people are actually very different. For a draft or two The Chelonians were the baddies too before it was decided to simplify them (not least because anyone wearing a physical costume in the Dubai heat would surely have died of dehydration!) and turn them into the far weedier Tritovores, who were much easier to write in using CGI and didn’t have long lines of dialogue for extras to react to. Alas that’s a shame: they could have made them work, as a brief cameo as one of the many aliens present at the cliffhanger at the end of ‘The Pandorica Opens’ shows. Though I can see why they had to dumb the story down it’s the complexity of the Chelonian scheme and their playfulness as monsters that makes the book ‘work’ as well as it does. While it isn’t Roberts’ masterpiece in my opinion, the way so many fans reckon (that’s Hartnell missing adventure ‘The Plotters’) it is a really good book and in many ways the most enjoyable ‘New Adventures’ page by page; other books have better ideas, better chapters and better lines of dialogue but this is a page-turner to get lost in, every it, Dr Who at its most ‘colourful’ as Russell enthused to the media around this story. 

Considering its relative unpopularity there are a surprising amount of sequels to ‘Planet Of The Dead’, all of them starring Michelle Ryan as Lady Christina De Souza. How come you might ask given that they parted company at the end of that story? Well, she’s a traveller and they do seem to have an uncanny knack of bumping into each other in the Doctor’s ‘gap year’ avoiding his fate with the Ood and ‘The End Of Time’, this one set after the shock of ‘Waters Of Mars’ where Christina finds a much sourer, bitter timelord even less given to second chances. ‘Last Chance’ (2018) was part of the Big Finish box set ‘The Tenth Doctor Chronicles Volume Four’, a set that sadly doesn’t feature David Tennant – hard as Jacob Dudman tries he never quite get Dr 10’s voice quite right. Set on the African plains it features the Doctor trying to do good with his last few years, using his feelings as the last of his kind to inspire him to save animals from across the universe from extinction. There’s a fun opening scene of him riding on the back of a rhino and a fun detour in Iceland but really this is quite a dark and brooding story, very different in feel to the whimsy of ‘Planet’, with a baddy alien bounty hunter known as The Deagle chasing after them. Lady Christina is just as irritating though and the plot never really progresses beyond saving animals. A box set too far maybe?

The return was popular enough for Big Finish to give Lady Christina her own series, which has run for two series to date between 2018 and 2020, with Michelle Ryan having adventures of her own without any pesky timelords trying to push her down the straight and narrow. She does, however, have UNIT chasing her and her red London bus instead and for the first time since ‘Mission To The Unknown’ you’re clearly meant to root for the baddy rather than the rather bland soldiers on her path. Along the way lady Christina solves a cat-burglary in the French Riviera, steals a painting, a heist at Edinburgh Castle during a UNIT military tattoo (!), clashing with the Slitheen over a robbery, searching for a Great Aunt in the Australian outback and, erm, betting on the horses. The best story is the second  (in volume one), ‘Skin Deep’ in which Christina befriends Donna’s mum Sylvia when she suddenly comes into money but gets snubbed by all the posh people in town!

Lady Christina also turns up in the Big Finish anthology ‘Protector Of Time’(2022), with the loose theme of people whose lives have been ‘changed’ by the Doctor (isn’t that everybody?) where she bumps into The Doctor’s Daughter Jenny at an exclusive party she’s about to rob. They don’t get on! There’s a confusion about a diamond, which ends up being Jenny’s new spaceship  in a story that’s one part drama and one part farce.  

Lady Christina turns up in the Big Finish anthology “Two’s Company” (2023), part of the company’s 60^th anniversary celebrations that sees the 6^th Doctor injured during the time war and brought to a hospital planet suffering from the effects of a ‘degeneration weapon’ that’s sent him a bit doolally with memories of other incarnations. He’s visited by a lot of old faces from the past, including the unlikely match-up of Lady Christina and Jackie Tyler – and promptly has a relapse. Can’t say I blame him.  

‘Smiley’s Mirror Exhibit’ by Janelle McCurdy is a short story from the anthology ‘Prequels’ book ‘The Adventures Before’ (2024). The fun of ‘The next Doctor’ has worn off now and The Doctor is feeling lonely, wondering what his friends from ‘Journey’s End’ are up to now. he decides to cheer himself up by stopping off at the fair and the exhibition in the title takes his fancy. It’s not what he expected: it’s a big smiling face, like the sort 1990s ravers used to wear on badges, in a hall of mirrors that distort it’s reflection and make it’s innocent gaze seem evil. The next door exhibit, named ‘Strange’ is closed for repairs and surrounded by security guards. The Doctor bumps into a thirteen-year-old girl called Nova looking for her friend who has mysteriously disappeared in scenes very like ‘The Nightmare Fair’ (only then it was a sister looking for her brother at Blackpool fairground) Her comment when he reveals he’s a timelord alien: ‘You do talk too much for a normal person!’ It turns out that the smiley face is a real entity than can trap people and absorb their souls (the way the Abzorbaloff does bodies) but changes character with each new person it traps. The Doctor defeats it by…taking it’s photo and then holding it up to the mirrors as it destroys itself trying to absorb what it already has. A rather weird and rather basic story. Oh and if you’re wondering why it’s a prequel to ‘Planet Of the Dead’ there’s a cameo from lady Christina De Souza at the end as she tries to steal the trophy on display in the fairground, the Cup of Athelstan.    

Previous ‘The Next Doctor’ next ‘The Waters Of Mars’

The Two Doctors: Ranking - 254

  The Two Doctors

(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri and Dr 2 with Jamie, 16/2/1985-2/3/1985,  producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Peter Moffat)  

Rank: 254

''Food glorious food, tender Terranians and custard! Wait, why is that baked potato alien shooting at me?!'

This story isn't bad by any means, but it wastes a lot of the things that could have made it really special. Bob Holmes is back writing for Dr Who again at last after six years away...a story that's quite unlike his usual style. We get the return of the 2nd Doctor!...Who after spending episode 1 totally nailing the part he's only played twice in 16 years then has to spend most of the story out of character as a 'part Androgum'. He's back with Jamie...who turns savage partway through and barely says a word. Bob Holmes writes for his most famous creations The Sontarons for only the second time...under heavy protest at having to have a monster at all, so they might as well not be here too (also, how come the Androgums don't at least try to have a nibble if they like Human flesh so much? I mean, Humans don't look tasty but the Sontarons resemble baked potatoes on legs). There's a great and nuanced cast headed by John Stratton and Jacqueline Pearce (a Blake's 7 baddy stronger than any humanoid we see in Who, except perhaps Roger Delgado's Master) ...Who are given a script that all but encourages over-acting and throws subtlety out the window. We get a lot of location filming in Spain...But for all the difference it makes to the script it could have been filmed in Croydon (the original plan, to film in New Orleans, made a lot more sense, but the budget got cut and the script re-worked at the last minute). Like many a Bob Holmes story, this one is based around one of the bees in his bonnet, but his conversion to vegetarianism doesn't lend itself to a DW story as well as his pet peeves bureaucrats and tax inspectors. The idea of what would happen if Humans were seen as nothing special and just another group in the food chain by an alien species gives the Androgums a whole new clever reason for coming to Earth, but it also makes for a really gruesome little story where everyone wants to kill everyone else, most of the time in sets resembling giant kitchens with slabs of meat hanging from hooks. Even the Doctor gets in on the act, killing Shockeye with cyanide - it's hard to imagine another story where he would even think of doing that, even if it is in self defence while badly injured. I can just about imagine a 'normal' 6th Dr story in this setting, as its not that far removed from the 'video nasty' theme of 'Vengeance on Varos' which worked really well and gave Colin Baker a chance to get on his high horse a lot, the moral outrage his doctor does so well. But the 2nd Dr is completely wrong for this sort of story - a cuddlier, funnier yet underneath it all a subtler and often a more manipulative Dr - is just the wrong setting for him to come alive. This Dr quickly becomes a passenger caught up in circumstances and that's something he never was in the 1960s (or indeed till Peter Davison came along). This is one of the grimmest stories DW ever did, with the two Tardis crews eating or being eaten or being converted or badly injured, yet unlike the other grim DW stories (mostly the Eric Saward war epics) there's a lot of humour here too, with a lot of funny lines and philosophising between the action scenes that's pretty much unique to this series. Though there are lots of good moments and some great ones, I'm not convinced it works - this is the sort of story that will tell you off for eating meat, then linger on every gruesome detail of the cast about to be skinned alive and eaten, then throws in a joke to make you laugh. Definitely not one to watch over dinner in other words; you need strong stomach and a wicked sense of humour to get the most out of this one, for all the many things it gets right.

Positives + The best bits by far are the all-too brief interactions between the two Doctors and two companions. Colin Baker and Patrick Troughton were old friends (Colin was once room-mates with Pat's son David) and their affection and easy chemistry lights up the screen, though their banter is spicy and icy even for a multi-Dr story. It's impressive how completely Pat Troughton revives his character and the start in black and white could easily be taken for a 1960s episode give or take the odd wrinkle. Jamie and Peri make a great double-act too and its interesting to see how despite being two very different characters from entirely different centuries they both end up resembling each other: loyal, brave, but slightly clueless. The downside is hat it takes so much of the plot before they meet and then how quickly afterwards the 2nd Dr gets converted into an Androgum, complete with orange eyebrows.

Negatives -This is such an oddly plotted story for anyone, but particularly by one of the most prolific DW writers and one-time script editor, a story that gives you horrible while you're still laughing from the previous scene and conversely something funny while you're still reeling in horror. Combining the two is what DW stand out from its peers, but its never been done quite as black and white as this before. Take Oscar, the pretentious insect collector - an obvious bit of comic relief with his penchant for quoting Shakespeare at inopportune moments and ideas above his station. He's the sort of character who always survives to the end then tells the authority figure what really happened while they don't believe a word of it. Here even he dies, a quite gruesome and gratuitous death, while still in character and coming up with pretentious quotes. The point being made is that, for all his high culture, to Shockeye he's just another piece of meat, but how are we meant to respond to that scene? Laugh or cry?

The Lazarus Experiment: Ranking - 255

    The Lazarus Experiment

(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 5/5/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Stephen Greenhorn, director: Richard Clark)  

Rank: 255

''You can't go out the house looking like that. With that CGI face. Not until you're older...'

Dr Who is a programme that has risen from the dead so many times across it’s sixty years Every time it’s critics have tried to bury it enough people have rallied around it to make it survive in some form, even when it’s not been on television. It’s a comforting thought now, what with the ratings in perpetual collapse and rumours of a Mickey Mouse deal with Disney only lasting until 2025, that this is a programme they’ve been trying to kill since it’s first story and yet it still lives on reborn, just with a new CGI-reconfigurated face. Over sixty years you’re going to have a few running themes going through a series and one theme that crops up a lot in its 20^th century run is the idea of immortality and the natural cut-off point for Human life at roughly four score and ten compared to the Doctor’s ability to regenerate and change. For timelords long life is a form of power and control, with a regenerational cycle of thirteen lives that they don’t ever seem to do much with, apart from the Doctor, who actively turns down the chance of immortality in stories like ‘The Five Doctors’ and ‘Enlightenment’ because he knows, to quote from ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ that it isn’t the years that matter but what you do with them that counts. It’s one of the last regular features of the ‘old’ series to turn up in the new series, redressed and remade for a modern audience and rather fitting for a series that had itself risen from the dead to be more popular than it had been in decades.IT’s also one of those episodes that seems to pretty split down the middle depending how old you were when it went out. If you’re young then it’s the first time you ever came across a thrilling concept, in which one man’s arrogance to extend his life-form leaves him as a husk of his former self, a monster that’s devolved rather than evolved and turned him into everything he once hated. If you’re the sort of fan who was old enough to have seen this series before then it was a pale mismash of past stories that did it better and deeper, like ‘The Brain Of Morbius’ and anything involving Eternals or the Celestial Toymaker. Everyone agreed that the CGI monster was a bit rubbish though and the story soon got replaced in fans’ affections by bigger brighter stories.

Is it worth reviving and seeing again though? Well, the central idea is a good one that asks questions of its audience and it’s at its barest here, so you don’t get distracted by any extra sub-plots like The Black and White Guardians or The Sisterhood of Karn keeping a candle alight in a cupboard. Would you like to live forever if you had to be genetically modified to spend part of your time as a scary monster? And does a timelord, who can live foreverish barring accidents and timewars, have the right to sit in judgement over someone who wants to live longer? (does the fact that the Doctor wears himself out each time doing good make him more deserving of long life, precisely because he takes risks that kill him every so often?) Where does the line between mankind striving for scientific perfection and being God, playing with laws of nature he doesn’t understand, lie? Should we sympathise when lazarus is hoisted on his own Cathedral-shaped petard, applaud him for trying to push the barriers or science or condemn him for putting people in harm’s way due to his own personal quest for a longer life? They say that youth is wasted on the young and that you only really know what to do with all that excess energy when you’re too old, tired and beaten up by life to have it anymore. If, as we keep on saying, that Dr Who started as a debate between generations then this is the ultimate extension of that and a plot so obvious it’s amazing they didn’t do it in the 1960s: a man who has the arrogance of changing from one generation to another, of actually being reborn with the gained wisdom of one age and the body of another. It’s the arrogance too of a generation who insist on living even while their youngsters are crowded out (alas the script doesn’t explore the ramifications of this experiment but they’re huge if it had worked: the Earth is already overcrowded, what would happen if the elderly never died and competed with the young for the same resources. Would the elder generation ever retire? Would the young be on minimum wage for decades? How would living amongst one ‘people’ when you were born with the angst another affect you? And I thought I was a curmudgeonly millennial!) The story skips those questions sadly but it does ask if is it a blessing that one of our greatest scientific minds has got his youthful zest back? Or is it a curse that he’s only doing it for selfish reasons and is hardly the sort of person who deserves long life, a monster long before he steps into his machine and precisely the sort of person who would never learn from his mistakes no matter how many trips back into youth he had? For, like many of the best Who stories, ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ is also about what life is really for, to grow and learn from and adapt: there’s no point being granted extra life if you’re just going to waste it all over again. It's the sort of big, sweeping existential topic this series has always excelled at, by taking it out of the realms of philosophical pondering and putting a real (well, CGI in this case) face to it and it’s never been done in Who in quite this bare-bones way before. Read the script and this is quite a moving story (if ever a modern Who needed a Target novelisation it’s this one, not flipping Eaters of Light or Robot of Sherwood). We needed another story about evolution and progress, like ‘Ghost Light’ but one that was actually comprehensible this time; alas ‘Lazarus’ goes the other way and it far too bare-bones to be interesting. 

There are too…problems with how this ended up on screen. It’s nicely poetic that most people missed the theme about getting younger without learning from your mistakes because they were too busy laughing at the hideous CGI effects monster which dominates this story, which replaces the rubber suits of old that people used to laugh at decades before. It’s truly awful, a candidate for the worst special effect of the 21^st century as of time of writing (I mean, the Devil in ‘The Impossible Planet’s not great either and David Walliams in ‘The God Complex’ is clearly not real and The Reapers in ‘Father’s Day’ and Krillitane in ‘The School Reunion’ are both generic monsters that are the weakest link of their respective stories, but none are quite as jarring as this). It’s as laughable in its own way as the Ergon or Myrka in the dim and distant past – worse, perhaps, because it doesn’t even look like a man in a suit whose trying but a fake being made by a computer code that couldn’t care less. Russell asked the Mill effects department to come up with something ‘cumbersome yet lithe’, one of his more confusing directions, and I guess he got one: this is a lumbering ungainly bulky type of monster with sudden bursts of unconvincing speed that just seem wrong to the eyes (nobody with those sort of legs and large bottom should be moving quickly). So far the new series has been using its effects sparingly, learning from the first story in production ‘Aliens Of London’ that less was more with the monsters only in a few scenes so you were too distracted to spot all the mistakes, that only had a few features to build and that CGI looked more convincing when monsters were standing still and not walking. Then along comes ‘Lazarus’ which spends a good half hour with a CGI scorpion running round some unconvincing sets and looking like it’s going to a fancy dress ball with a human mask. It’s a mask that doesn’t look remotely like Mark Gatiss, one of the members of the production team for whom there’d be oodles of photographs to use (and Mark’s the kind of actor wh’d come in on all his off days just to help the project along; after all he spent three hours in the makeup chair every day to play Lazarus’ older form, he could probably have spared an hour for some scale model photos). All that hard work on the script and it goes out the window the minute Professor Lazarus becomes a bug that clearly isn’t there, just like the old days. Oh Dr Who, you never learn do you?  

‘Lazarus’ wouldn’t be the first Who script to be scuppered by a bad effect though and it’s not the only thing that goes wrong in this story, which feels as if it’s going to be better than it is and sets up a lot of cheques it just can’t cash, the philosophy giving way to the Doctor running around madly pointing his sonic screwdriver at things. Usually when stories do that I blame the writer for either writing in a hurry or trying to do the bare essentials in order to get paid but I have a lot of sympathies with writer Stephen Greenhorn. More of a dramatist by trade, he’d worked with Julie Gardner on a series named ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ in which Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’ arose from the dead to be told in a more ‘modern’ way, from a slightly different perspective (Rochester’s wife, the one hidden in the attic). Julie, having only been hired to make one series of modern Who, had set it up as future work before hastily coming back to work on series two and Greenhorn paid her lots of compliments about how good the revival was and what a big of the original show he was (Julie, who’d taken some convincing from Russell T Davies that a generation of people had secretly grown up as Whovians, was shocked to find just how many people she’d worked with seemed to love it). Greenhorn was a natural to be asked to write for the series and was as big a fan as any who worked on the show, bursting with ideas. However one downside with the way Who was being made in the 2000s compared to 19something was the way Russell came up with all the ideas himself, farming them out to the nearest available writer. Greenhorn is a writer whose good at realism, Russell-like in his ability to make characters feel real and flawed yet likeable only Russell had taken most of those story slots for himself: he asked Greenhorn to write something like a comic, big and bold and bright involving a mad scientist and super-powers (‘Dr Octopus’ was one of the names mentioned). Some fans, who grew up on Who comics, would have jumped and run with that but Greenhorn was confused. He did however come up with the basic story with a few added sub-plots to make it more interesting, with Lazarus’ experiment causing The Thames barrier to flood and lower the age of Londoners even while one man was extending his and whether that was ever a fair compromise: Russell sheepishly admitted that he’d already written the Thames flood barrier into a  then-unbroadcast script hat became ‘The Runaway Bride’. Next Greenhorn tried to go down the route of ‘The Fly’ with a humble insect (whatever was most CGI-friendly) that had got into the Lazarus machine with its creator; Russell sheepishly told him that a lot of that year’s ‘Torchwood’ had played around with gigantic insects already. The writer was then sent away and asked to include two new elements Russell had been working on: Martha’s family and a coda with a mysterious Harold Saxon who was going to turn up in the series finale. Greenhorn went ahead with his script, latching onto the Biblical themes of rising from the dead and setting up the big denouement in St Paul’s Cathedral, recognising it as a spirit of human perseverance (somehow escaping any direct hits from bombs in World War 2) and  remembering it from ‘The Invasion’ where an army of Cybermen matched past it. St Paul’s were contacted and only too happy to work with the production team (after all, a fair percentage of their visitors are curious Dr Who fans re-creating the Cyber-invasion) and Greenhorn wrote an intricately woven plot about Christopher Wren’s design being influenced by the Doctor, who knew he might need it one day to see off such a life-form as a giant scorpion. Only at the absolute eleventh minute someone from St Paul’s finally read the script and was horrified to read that the finale involved a monster falling from the balcony, fearing that some of the public might try to re-create it for real. So they axed it, with barely days to re-write the script while the production team hastily rang around other Cathedrals in London (Southwark was, apparently, right at the bottom of the lost otherwise they’d have been totally screwed).

A lot of people who missed the opening credits just assumed it was a Mark Gatiss script. It had that feel about it: a larger than life character in a straightforward rehash of Dr Who’s  biggest source material ‘Quatermass’ (specifically the third film ‘The Quatermass Experiment’ – note the similar title and a similar finale in Westminster Abbey; Gatiss had just starred in a live re-make of the long wiped but influential original alongside a pre-Who David Tennant. The parts in this story not nicked from that series come from ‘Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde’ ‘The Fly’ Russell’s own ‘The End Of The World’ where Cassandra ‘the last human’ extends her lifespan to literal breaking point and ‘Star Trek: Next Generation’ episode ‘Genesis’ in which a literal bug gets into the teleporter machine; unusual to have ‘our’ show ripping off ‘their’ show for a change). Oh and the fact that Gatiss is in it, with the juicy part of Professor Lazarus himself. Actually Gatiss was too busy with other projects and never did have an episode in series three (it’s the only series up to the Chris Chibnall years of new Who that he didn’t write at least one script for, although ‘Victory Of The Daleks’ was written for series four and not made until series five) but it was a lifelong wish to actually be in a story in a series he’d loved since childhood. The production team had long been looking to make use of the writer-actor, a big name after ‘The League Of Gentleman’ and various horror one-offs, but wanted to give him a proper part rather than a cameo: Lazarus seemed made for him on paper, the sort of arrogant conceited despicable Humans he’d made his name playing - most of Gatiss’ best known parts are grotesques, eccentrics who have been distorted from nicely batty to perverse and wicked. But he’s not quite right for the part: Lazarus needs to be a wisened old man with more money at his fingertips than sense and arrogance to keep his gain for himself still powerful and charismatic even  on his deathbed, an Elon Musk or Steve Jobs in old age, not the feeble yet gloating 73 year old, the best the prosthetics can manage (as unconvincing as it always seems to be when Who tries to age actors, in any era) and he needs to turn back into a boy genius, not Gatiss’ middle-age (he was forty during filming: not old exactly but the experiment would have more impact if he’s gained 50,60,70 years of life not a mere 30. Lazaruis is exactly the sort of man who’d keep twiddling knobs until he was a teenager again. I mean, talk about a mid-life crisis!) He’s got where he’s got out of false promises and charm, getting money out of people he’s promised to help but secretly despises, like the Delgado Master: everything should be glowering under the surface. Instead Gatiss plays him as an early version of Mycroft Holmes from the series he co-wrote with Steven Moffat about his brother ‘Sherlock’ (though in Mycroft’s eyes it’s clearly a series about him): an arrogant pompous brainy man who doesn’t do anything with his brains except look down on other people. Lazarus as a character is too ordinary for Gatiss’ over-the-top rendition though: he’s not a psycho scientist like Dr Solon in ‘Morbius’ or one under duress like Professor Kettlewell in ‘Robot’ or Professor Watkins in ‘The Invasion’ and he’s not a corrupted misguided idealist like the lot in ‘The Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’. There’s not even any sign that he’s a scientific genius: it takes the Doctor pressing the right buttons to avoid an ‘obvious’ catastrophe and no mention of his past successes. He’s just arrogant as if that’s enough of a character trait to have caused everything else. A lot of this story relies on Lazarus being wicked beyond measure, using his experiment to cause harm, but most of the deaths he causes seems to be by accident. There’s a deliciously evil moment where Lazarus refuses to kiss his benefactor Lady Thaw, turning her down because she’s old to him now and he’s young and thinks he can do better, but it’s a the only truly cruel thing he does and the rest is mere preening: Gatiss plays the part as truly thoroughly evil, picking up the clue from the script that he’s a predatory monster (we’re still a few years away from the Jimmy Savile scandal becoming public knowledge but that’s what it feels like: the man with the charming smile known for eccentricity who sees everyone as a potential victim). But he goes overboard a little, adding bits that simply aren’t there on the page, perhaps because of all those interminable rewrites and, what with the character being so central to the plot, it rather falls apart because of this. Professor Lazarus would work better had he been either painted as a real monster, with a load of victims protesting outside at how he treated them, or left as a professor who was trying to do the right thing by mankind and got it wrong. Making him a bit vain and pompous is too in the middle.

All that might explain why ‘Lazarus’ feels as if it has a whacking big hole in the middle of it where the plot should have gone and why so much of it feels like vamping, filling in time between the big set pieces. As it turned out on screen it’s really oddly paced, with an opening section with Professor Lazarus himself that feels rushed, with little back story and the whacking coincidence that he just happens to have hired Martha’s sister for the pr in the exact same 24 hour period (on Earth at least) that Martha was left stranded on the moon and met the Doctor – and yet never told her (is Martha's family unlucky or what? Her 'cousin', also played by Freema Agyeman, was killed on-screen just a few episodes ago too). Just to rub it in Martha’s mum even leaves her a cryptic message right at the same time the Tardis brings Martha home. We don’t know really knows why Lazarus is trying to live longer or what his motives are: the first five are nicely ambiguous about whether this is a mere vanity project (as it proves to be) or whether Lazarus is genuinely trying to help out his fellow man (a lie he tells his financial backers). Even Lazarus seems confused as to what he really wants: he’s guarded enough to not give any of his science away but vain enough to call a giant press conference in a pricey part of London in front of all the press; equally he seems arrogantly sure his experiment will work yet hasn’t done the usual baddy-in-Who thing and tested it out on a protesting underling first (he’s going to look mighty stupid if he’s called all those newspaper people there and it doesn’t work, but I guess that’s in keeping with his arrogance too). There’s a moment, halfway through the story, where the plot seems to end: the Doctor’s talked to Lazarus and shown him the error of his ways and Lazarus vows revenge, only for him to leg it to the Cathedral next door and wait for the Doctor and Martha to find him all over again, a sign of something major going missing from the story. They should have used some of that extra time to better set u the opening – or indeed the ending, which is one of the crassest copouts of all Dr Whos: the Doctor plays Beethoven really loudly on Southwark Cathedral’s organ really loudly and makes the monster fall to his death. Of all the ways to go in Dr Who death by Beethoven must be one of the stupidest (I mean, it’s not even Clementi, the composer who can kill at ten paces with a single trill).Well, Russell T did ask Greenhorn for a comic strip story I suppose. The story, at least on screen after bits were taken out, desperately needs some sub-plots too: it seems to be a rule of thumb that my least favourite Who stories can be summed up in a single sentence and ‘scientist wants to live longer but his experiment turns him into a scorpion’ is one of the most basic and silliest summaries.

One theme that’s sort of half there and was probably lost when the rewrites happened is the theme of religion and worth. ‘Lazarus’ is such an apt name for a Professor if not quite coming back from the dead then at least going back in time (so much so you’d think it would be all the media watching on would comment on) and is taken wholesale from the Bible. Jesus revives a goodly faithful man four days after he died, to the point where he interacts with Jesus’ followers and lives another long and happy life as a convert. It’s never quite stated (nothing in the Bible is ever quite stated) but the hint is that he was chosen as Jesus’ ‘miracle’ and proof of being the son of God because Lazarus was a good man: the Earth benefitted from him walking on it. The thing is though: had Lazarus’ experiment worked and not turned him into a scorpion it would have been open season for all of Humans to use. Longer life sounds like a gift but it wouldn’t solve any of our problems. It would be, well, playing God/Jesus to only give it to a few ‘deserving’ types and whose to say who the deserving people would be? The only fair thing to do is to give it to everyone – and that includes the people who deserve it. Lazarus symbolically devolves rather than evolves, because man isn’t meant to go any higher than this. The fact the story ends in a Cathedral, with Lazarus defeated with the sounds of sacral music, is a sort of judgement on high that mankind isn’t ready for such a decision. Instead it gets a bit lost in the final edit: it’s simply music that kills the monster. Not his arrogance, not his unsuitability, just a timelord improvising quickly. And that’s a shame: ‘Lazarus’ might look half-hearted and silly but it would have helped the story a lot if it had been given a suitable ending that actually answered some of the bigger questions at the heart of it.

Talking of silly: this is Dr Who, science fiction, where a lot of things aren’t real. We fans aren’t daft, we know enough to give a show artistic license when it’s trying to tell a moral story or entertain us. However sometimes the science in a story can be so whacking wrong that it pulls you out of what a story is trying to say. This is one of those times. Just supposing that the Lazarus machine was real and actually could re-set your DNA, accidentally triggering some benign ‘junk’ DNA that all of us carry around in our bodies even though as Humans we no longer need it. Humans don't turn into primeval monsters if you mess around with their genes, honest - in reality doing what he's doing Professor Lazarus would lose a few IQ points or more likely collapse and die. Even if it did work Lazarus would be a monkey. He’d maybe grow a tail, perhaps lose his opposable thumbs, he’s certainly lose a lot of his brain capacity and would probably have a hankering for bananas. Unless a future story comes along to contradict it no Human, in the real world or Whoniverse both, has ever descended from a Scorpion (unless this is an astrological machine that devolves people into their birth chart and Lazarus is a triple Scorpion and had another professor had come up with the idea London would be surrounded by a flying pair of scales, a centaur or a deadly Virgin. It might explain what The Macra and Fish people are: a bunch of snappy Cancerians and dance-loving Pisceans. No? Alright, please yourselves). I also seriously doubt that you can turn your bodyclock back with ‘soundwaves’ of all things too: it’s almost as if they’ve written the finale in a Cathedral with a whacking great organ and need an excuse to use it. Nobody ever quite explains properly how the machine works either – goodness knows there’s a lot of running around that could have been cut down for a full explanation – as if even the Dr Who team are embarrassed by how wobbly the science is this week. Something tells me that science wasn’t Greenhorn’s best subject at school (perhaps this story is a subconscious response to being made to play God and dissecting inects?)      
There are only two parts not related to this main plot. One is Martha’s family. Compared to, say, Rose, Donna and Rory they don’t get nearly enough screen time – Martha was only a companion for a single year after all - and only turn up in three stories (and then not all of them); this is by far their longest amount of screentime and it’s where Greenhorn shines. Martha’s relationship with them is refreshingly spiky and honest. She’s the ‘responsible’ one in the family, the one trying to make the most of her life with a doctor’s degree and the others are fed up of her turning down social invitations to concentrate in her studies. They’re most surprised to see her with a bloke, though far less surprised when he turns out to be a science geek they think she met on her course. Tish, her sister, is the opposite of Martha: she’s bubbly and sociable and way more emotional, gloating at her big career opportunity that’s made her the ‘chosen one’ in the family that can step out of her sister’s shadow: the big emotionally charged scene in this story isn’t the one where the monster falls to the strain of organ pipes but where Martha has to tell her sister her job’s a fake and the famous professor whose been flirting with her and making her feel special is a predatory monster, in more ways than one. They’re both keen to please their mum Francine, who is one of life’s natural critical: nothing is ever enough and there’s always something to find fault with. Even her daughter training to be a Doctor doesn’t impress her and she’s the sort of mum who secretly thinks she could have done better given a similar break in life (in a parallel universe she’s a natural Dr Who fan!) Actress Adjoa Andoh was hired at Russell T’s insistence, after he admired her work as Sister Jatt, one of the cat nurses in ‘New Earth’ and he wanted to see her face: both are very ‘catty’ parts, but in impressively different ways. Younger brother Leo seems to be more of a spare part, there apparently just for the extra publicity of having radio 1 DJ Reggie Yates in the show, but he’s recognisable too as the peacemaker and glue that’s used to holding this family together recovered, now off doing his own thing and trying to keep out of family rows. This is the sort of family Who does so well in that they feel real, the sort of people you see rolling their eyes at the other three in public when they think no one else is looking, which in itself neatly mirrors the main plot theme of arrogance and assuming you know best. The other part, though, really doesn’t work: Russell T throws in so many references to Harold Saxon it’s not funny. Like many a series arc Russell only cme up with it near the end when writing the finale, then went back to sprinkle’ clues’ across different scripts: It’s a sign, perhaps, of how little is going on inside this script that so many were stuffed here compared to the others. Lazaru, needless to say, supports Saxon with a mysterious promise of money going both ways to the crooked prime minister. Saxon is mentioned by name by three characters: Lady Thaw, Francine and Lazarus himself. Plus Lazarus’ lab is laid out in the same circular way as Saxon’s ring in ‘The Sound Of Drums’ so that quick-eyed viewers can spot it at once (I confess I didn’t spot this till several re-watchings later).All very clever and all, but then Russell ignores these clues for multiple episodes, with the added twist that Francine’s been warned that the Doctor’s trouble and Martha should stay away, that’s meant to feel like a big ending but isn’t (not that shocking: I mean, her two daughters have just been attacked by a giant CGI scorpion).

Overall, then, ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ is a mess that few people rate very highly, a story recycled from too many other ideas that’s never sensibly seen to fruition that throws away the promise the idea had in favour of running around from unrealistic CGI monsters: the very worst of Who all in one handy place to be skipped on your episode re-runs. However this is more one of those unfortunate stories that got torpedoed by circumstances rather than a story that wasn’t worth trying and was never going to work in a month of Palm Sundays. There’s a good story in here somewhere about man’s greed and how some of the people who get furthest in society are the least deserving: had they spent more time turning the Human Lazarus into a monster and less time on the unconvincing CGI monster this story would have been a lot better. Had they included something to distract us from all the running around and let Greenhorn do the character dialogue he’s best at (see his other script ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ for a better example of a character-led story with the plot in the background) then it could, should have worked. Had this story been given to a different qwriter altogether, with Greenhorn asked to come up with his own ideas, we might have got two great stories for the price of one. There are lots of reasons to think that, in some parallel series three somewhere, children still talk in awe about this episode and are haunted by the super convincing  CGI monkey with Lazarus’ face whenever they go to sleep. But of course we can’t go back in time – that’s the whole moral of the story after all – and we have to take this story as it is, one of those new Who stories where everything seemed to go wrong and where nobody comes out of it well. If you were young enough to never see Dr Who turn a humanoid into a monster before your eyes (yes, amazingly new Who hadn’t done this by 2007: monsters were all from outer space oer mad Humans) and had never seen a scifi story ask deep questions about the concept of aging and the idea that one lifetime will never ever be enough to do everything you want to do then this story was enough to blow your tiny little mind, even with fake CGI monsters; for those of us who’d lived too long and were jaded by the concept and then watched it being done this badly most of us simply thought ‘life’s too short for this nonsense’ and went back to sleep.

POSITIVES + Well, almost everyone. Martha is, for me, the great unsung companion of the revival, proving that there was life after Rose Tyler without having to carbon copy her, and Freema sells every line here, even the bad ones, with lots of extra screen time where the plot would normally be so that we get to know both her and how she turned out the way she did from her family. Her chemistry with David Tennant is more than up to Billie Piper's and their scenes together in this story are some of their best.  Never have you wanted a monster to shut up more just so they can get more screen time together. Three scenes really sell this story though: the one where the Tardis materialises in her flat and she’s deeply embarrassed at her crush seeing her underwear drying, never expecting to meet a boy and bring him back home, sort of, when she left for work that day (the Doctor, characteristically, doesn’t notice and couldn’t care less), the middle where she has to sympathetically tell her sister of her bad romance choice even though she knows it weill break her heart and see Martha turned into a scapegoat ‘monster’ (Clearly something that happens a lot with Tish) and the finale where Martha puts her foot down and asks to be a full-time companion, not a trainee student 9she more than proves her worth this story after all, acting as ‘bait’ for the monster and getting people to safety: two of the biggest things on the ‘companion tickbox’ sheet the Doctor seems to carry around in his head. According to ‘Totally Dr Who’s companion academy if nothing else). She also gets the best line in the story: ‘I heard an explosion and knew it would be you, Doctor’.

NEGATIVES – Not only does this feel like a recycled script but the sets and props are recycled to, a give away that this is the ‘cost saving’ episode of the series. That’s a tweaked version of The Doctor’s tuxedo from ‘The Age Of Steel’, Lazarus’ scientific prop is the elevator from ‘The Impossible Planet’ and we’ve been in this location a few times too,  so that even by series three it looked old hat: Lazarus’ experiment is filmed in a combination of Cardiff Museum, The Senedd building used by the Welsh Parliament and St William’s House in Cardiff. To be fair the scenes shot in Southwark Cathedral (the outside) or Wels Cathedral (most of the inside) look gorgeous and make good use of the fact it’s being filmed in a ‘set’ far bigger than Who can usually manage. Those are some particularly impressive pipes. And the church organ’s not bad either. The ‘tower’ is the best set in the episode too: it feels like a natural extension of the cathedral itself rather than a mock-up created in a TV studio.  

BEST QUOTE: ‘Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty. It's not the time that matters, it's the person’.

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