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’