10.46: Planet of the Dead

In which everything is just too smug and small.

Broadcast: April 2009

Watched: October 2021

“Hello, I’m the Doctor. Happy Easter.”

Again, not big enough. Also, so smug it hurts. 

Part of it is the lack of a real Hollywood star: it should clearly be Kate Beckinsale or Angelina Jolie or something, but instead it’s some girl off Eastenders who isn’t actually that good. 

But that’s not the only problem when it comes to scale. A planet has been eaten, and Earth might be next. Yet we never see either. I love the conceit of monsters that are essentially just locusts (especially in a story where some of the guest stars are friendly fly people called Tritovores) - but the problem is there’s no villain to articulate the threat. At the end we get a sequence of everyone congratulating each other to triumphal music of the sort you get at the end of a movie... but the story that precedes it is so small it jars.

That’s probably the bigger problem, but the thing I personally find more off-putting is the smugness. Christina is too posh to be sympathetic (while also, paradoxically, very obviously not being actually posh) and not nearly as charming as either character or writer imagines. At the end when the Doctor rejects her as a companion, he does it for “Doctor Sad” reasons, not “Christina Morally Abhorrent” ones. 

Then there’s the very late RTD thing where everyone in UNIT is now incredibly excited about seeing the Doctor. Lee Evans’ Malcolm is meant to be lovable but is actually just irritating. Then there’s a real moment of Chibnall level drama when he refuses to close the wormhole because he loves the Doctor so much, and the captain who isn’t Bambera aims a gun at him, and then the bus comes back and renders the whole exchange irrelevant without making it actually interesting because we don’t care about these people. 

The problem, I think, is [writer Gareth] Roberts is writing Tom & Lalla [season 17 is his favourite era]. But even that era’s fans have generally noticed that it recasts the Doctor and his companion as intergalactic space dicks, and that doesn’t fit with the RTD years’ sensibility. So in an attempt to paper over the cracks, you get the sequence in which the Doctor asks everyone to tell him about their lovely normal lives, which is so bad that someone needs shooting. 

And then as a final twist, the Doctor tries to get a couple of unemployed kids press-ganged into the army. This, along with The Dominators, makes a compelling argument that right-wing Doctor Who is a bad idea. 

“He will knock four times” is the laziest possible way of generating an end-of-an-era feeling, not least because there is no reason for anyone within the drama to interpret it as “this Doctor is going to die”. Yet he immediately does. Perhaps he reads Doctor WhoMagazine.

I get the vibe that the production team thought **INTERNATIONAL SHOOT** would be enough to make this feel like an event. But if you’re watching it, as opposed to making it, it doesn’t come close. Even without getting into the moral questions about filming in Dubai.

The best bit is the Water of Mars trailer at the end. 

Other things:

• Why do we celebrate art thieves and heists? Only kind of criminals we’re expected to find lovable. 

• The monsters look like Trilobites. Trilobites are cool.

• The bus looks jarringly old because Routemasters were withdrawn from service in 2005. The map the police have is definitely not London. Lol that it’s “International Gallery” (yeah, right) rather than British Museum.

• Oh look it’s Adam James from Vigil. [A BBC drama I was watching at the time.]

• The fate of Athelstan’s gold cup is hilarious.

• Also hilarious: the fact there is an actual real Hollywood star in this, but no one has noticed because he’s the young black kid with six lines who isn’t actually famous yet.