Some of you people newish to Doctor Who may not be aware of all the warning signs, of all the common ways to spot a ropey episode. One stands above all, in old and new Who — if someone calls a story a “romp”, then that means it sucks. “Romp” is another word for “you won’t care, it’s not particularly entertaining, but you can’t deny it’s very silly”.

‘Planet of the Dead’ is a romp. Shame. I was actually tempted to renew my brief one word review policy and write, simply, “meh”. Clearly, though, I’ve resisted. I will however, summarise the story in five words; bus, thief, stranded, desert, monsters.

I look at this story and I wonder why on earth anyone would bother to write it. Are there really people out there who have always wanted to write a story about a bunch of people being stuck in the middle of a desert and doing nothing interesting whatsoever? Davies has written two stories in the last year involving the Doctor saving a bunch of humans trapped in doomed circumstances, and I didn’t much care for the genre the first time he did it. My favourite Davies stories have involved one crazy set-up being switched around, reversed, unexpectedly twisted on its head into a completely different one. But sometimes, a big bus in the desert is just a big bus in the desert, and all they’re going to do is escape. The closest anyone comes to making an involving decision in this story is when Catherine is forced to part with her loot, and frankly, even that seems forced.

I’m being harsh, but only because this has been wearing me down for a while In the first season of Davies’ reign, even the bad episodes felt like the writers were desperate to get their ideas on the page, to write their best Who story ever. By season four, it felt like everyone was disappointingly over that phase, and sitting through a bland Christmas special¹ and now a bland Easter special have only served to confirm it.

But let me be clear. ‘Planet of the Dead’ isn’t badly made. There’s many very nice things about it. It looks gorgeous; the shift into high definition hasn’t harmed Who at all, and the Dubai filming was also a nice touch.² A London bus in the middle of the desert looks pretty impressive. Michelle Ryan is cute as a button, even if she gets some pretty average dialogue to work with.³ The random irritating civilians don’t piss me off nearly as much as I thought they would, even if one of them only seems to be psychic so that she can give the Doctor some rubbish foreshadowing at the end.⁴ The Tritovores are excellent aliens, and the funniest characters to boot, so it’s disappointing when they suddenly get wiped out about half-way through. David Tennant is still a marvellous Doctor, and almost gets you through the ropier parts of the episode with sheer charm. And there’s UNIT, of course.

I like UNIT a lot. I particularly liked them in ‘The Sontaran Stratagem’, so I was a little disappointed to find that we had the as yet undeveloped Captain Magambo instead of Colonel Mace, who I had rather hoped would become Tennant’s quasi-Brigadier. This minor disappointment was soon put to bed, however, as I watched UNIT wobble along between being over-the-top Doctor-worshippers one moment (which I don’t like), and being ruthlessly willing to sacrifice the Doctor the next. The two don’t mesh well; presumably the reason that they like the Doctor so much is because he keeps saving the Earth — it certainly can’t be the amount of casualties they tend to take when he’s around. So why risk him if you can possibly help it? Or, if you did want to risk him, but your supremely irritating comedy scientist refused to, why not insist on him following out the Earth-saving plan immediately after the Doctor is safe, rather than running outside to check yourself? Perhaps this scene was messed up in the editing suite, or perhaps it was just written like this, but as soon as the bus comes through the wormhole, what little tension there was just floats away.

Doctor Who‘s first Easter special doesn’t reach that sweet spot of cross-generational entertainment⁵ that makes this show so special. In fact, it doesn’t even feel like it was aiming for it. Watching ‘Planet of the Dead’ is more like watching a good Saturday morning cartoon than watching Doctor Who. And that’s a bit disappointing.

1. Which I have not reviewed, yet. In my defence, I don’t really like writing about bland. ↩
2. Though, really, couldn’t you do a desert with CGI? ↩
3. There’s a bit about being “extreme” that has to be heard to be believed. Surely everyone realises that you can’t use that word any more unless you’re being ironic? ↩
4. I say “rubbish”, but at least after giving the standard guff concerning things coming out of the dark, she also said “he will knock four times”. Which suggests a particular character to me, at least. Da da da dum. ↩
5. It’s my new term. You could also call it ‘pixaresque’. ↩

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Monday, April 13th, 2009. It concerns such pressing issues as Doctor Who, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.