| Chapter The 200th, the Mighty 200th chapter. |
Plot:
Lady Christina, an aristocratic cat burglar (exactly like you get in real life) steals priceless relic the Cup of Athlestan from a museum and is chased by police. She escapes by getting on the same London bus as the Doctor who's got a homemade machine that is tracking a nearby wormhole. The bus passes through this and ends up on the barren sandy planet San Helios. The planet was fine a year ago, but a swarm of stingray-like flying alien beasties devoured everything. This swarm then circles the planet at increasing speed generating and expanding the wormhole, so they can fly through to repeat the process on the next planet: Earth. UNIT arrive and establish a link through the wormhole with the Doctor, who talks to their current scientific adviser Malcolm to work out how to close the wormhole once the bus is back through. The bus runs out of petrol, meaning everyone will be stranded. The Doctor and Christina explore nearby and find a crashed spaceship with two Tritovores (creatures like giant flies that stand on two legs) that just happens to have exactly the right equipment to attach to the bus and make it fly. The Tritovores both get killed by a lone stingray-like creature trapped in their ship that made it crash in the first place. The bus flies back through the wormhole, along with a couple of the creatures that UNIT then do battle with. The Doctor won't take Christina travelling in space and time with him, as he's tired of losing people, but he helps her escape the police in the flying bus. One of the passengers, an old wise black woman with second sight (exactly like you get in real life) makes an ominous prediction that the Doctor's going to die soon because someone will "knock four times".
Context:
A small cheat: I swapped this story and the previously blogged The Sun Makers around, so that this would be the 200th story post. I couldn't resist it: the episode was touted when it came out by Doctor Who Magazine as the 200th televised story, with an accompanying poll launched to get the readership's views of those 200 tales, and a big poster depicting each one with a thumbnail. Picking up on this (if memory serves it was that way round, the magazine's interviewer Benjamin Cook telling showrunner and cowriter of Planet of the Dead Russell T Davies of the milestone), the production team put in an allusion in the programme, with the bus being the number 200. The only problem is that it might not be the the 200th story at all. Some of the divisions are somewhat arbitrary. To get to the total, The Trial of a Time Lord, fourteen weeks of programming constructed as four linked tales with a framing device, was counted as one story; Shada was not included, as it was never completed or shown, and Utopia was included with The Sound of Drums and The Last of the Time Lords as part of one three-part story. Different people have different views on these judgement calls, including Davies himself who said at the time he personally saw Trial as four stories, and would separate Utopia from the following two episodes (making Midnight the 200th story for him).
For the blog, I am going to do Utopia together with the other two episodes when I come to it. I've already covered Trial as four separate blog posts, and somehow managed to also blog Shada and spin-off K9 and Company too. As such, Planet of Dead is number 205 on my list, and my 200th story is Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. Anyway, however it's numbered - and I'll return to this nerdy theme a bit in the Deeper Thoughts section below - the story was watched with all three of my children (boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9) on Blu-ray from the David Tennant Complete Specials box-set on a Sunday afternoon (the standard day now that they indulge their old man in watching old television). The Better Half wandered in and watched for long stretches too. She wondered why Michelle Ryan's career didn't take off quite as it looked like it might around the time of this story's broadcast. Middle child wondered what the swarming creatures were called; I didn't know (and subsequent online research found nothing either), so he dubbed them Sky Rays as they looked like stingrays but flew. I didn't tell him this was also the name of a Walls ice lolly that had a Doctor Who connection in the 1960s.
First Time Round:
I remember watching this live or very slightly time-shifted on its debut BBC1 broadcast during the Easter weekend of 2009. The Better Half and I still only had one child back then, though another was on his way. It seems like yesterday; it seems like a lifetime ago. The weekend was quite good for British TV sci-fi fans. As well as the return of everyone's favourite Time Lord, there was a comeback for another series that had been previously been made by the BBC as a multi-camera show in Television Centre, but was now being made in a more modern way and in HD for the first time: Red Dwarf - Back to Earth premiered on the UK channel Dave episodically across the weekend. I remember at the time thinking that this new Red Dwarf was slightly more enjoyable than the Doctor Who special.
Reaction:
Was Russell T Davies ever planning to leave after delivering the big finale to his fourth series in charge (The Stolen Earth / Journey's End)? This was a rumour that I heard around that time, and it certainly fit the big celebratory, loose-end tying up nature of that story, with many many characters from his time running the show returning. It would also explain how come only a few stories later when he did write his last story, he essentially pulled the same trick at the end, to diminishing returns. It's not corroborated online anywhere, though, and doesn't fit my reading of The Writer's Tale, a book which collects Davies's email correspondence of the time to Benjamin Cook. If not, if Davies always intended to stick around, there must be another reason why Planet of the Dead feels so rushed. The production was infamously rushed. Shooting started not that long before transmission (presumably this was because of David Tennant's availability - they had to wait for him to finish performing Hamlet with the RSC), and had a few issues on location in Dubai with the London bus shipped over there getting damaged in transit, and sandstorms wiping out many of the limited hours available for filming. The crew also had to contend with the challenge of upgrading to HD for the first time on Doctor Who. None of this, though, is any reason why the writing appears to have been rushed too. Unless, that is, Davies commissioned it late because he was indeed planning to leave before it was needed.
As anyone who's read the aforementioned Writer's Tale book will know, Davies's scripts were always rushed, so busy was he on all aspects of the show. Here, though, he had co-writer Gareth Roberts writing the initial drafts. Somehow, the script has still got into a tiny bit of a mess. It's mainly around characterisation. The point of an episode like this, or at least it would appear to be the point at the beginning, is who out of the rag tag group of people thrown together randomly by fate will survive, and how. The characters, though, don't have much time to develop; most are very down to Earth to the general standard of Doctor Who of this era. The one that gets most of the screen time, though, Lady Christina - the try out companion, auditioning for a role by the Doctor's side exploring the universe - is utterly unbelievable. Christina is a modern young aristocrat who does elaborate heists using Mission Impossible style gear for the thrill of it, and has a backpack with lots of equipment in, so she's prepared for any circumstance. She is a character out of a camp OTT caper movie, and she sits very oddly against the rest of the bus travellers which the script goes out of its way to highlight as 'Chops and gravy, watching TV' ordinary. Yes, there's one other character in the bus that's also somewhat unbelievable (and clichéd, older black woman = secretly mystical seer) but it's not enough to make it seem intended rather than a mish-mash.
When it comes down to it, it's not a tale of survival at all: only one person (the bus driver) dies near the beginning and after that there isn't much jeopardy for any individual, just the ticking clock of the approaching swarm; none of the Dubai cast's combined efforts, or the setbacks they encounter, make any difference to their eventual escape, as instead a way out is provided by a set of magical techno plug-ins the Doctor and Christina find on some alien fly-people's spaceship. It feels wrong that the Doctor just lucks out stumbling across them. The narrative idea of a plucky band of mismatched characters surmounting impossible odds is fatally undermined: they don't surmount the odds at all. The resolution scene where the Doctor suggests that a couple of them might be head-hunted for positions in UNIT therefore doesn't work as they haven't really had to do anything. There's a fig-leaf towards making this convenient ending seem earned by Christina having to give up the Cup of Athlestan to make the bus fly, but seeing as she stole the thing in the first place, that's not much of a sacrifice. The fly people themselves are not characters but plot devices, there only to provide the way out, plus a bit of background exposition, and then get killed off so they can't complicate things any further by returning to the Earth with everyone else.
The scenes on the other side of the wormhole in the UK are better. Lee Evans playing the Doctor Who fanboy scientist is great throughout, and Norma Dumezweni is a welcome return, playing UNIT Captain Magambo, last seen in Turn Left. The two of them have the best scene of the piece towards the end: a stand-off where the Captain wants to close the wormhole immediately to protect the Earth, but the scientist wants to get the Doctor and bus passengers through first. Rarely for Doctor Who, they both have a legitimate point of view, and the scene is presented with economy and urgency. Like everything in Planet of the Dead, though, it comes to nothing. Events overtake them so no decision has to be made, and there are no consequences. Adam James is wasted in a thin role as the bumbling police officer always failing to catch Christina, but he performs what he's given by the script well. The character is denied his arrest at the end, as the Doctor helps Christina escape. This also didn't feel right to me, as Christina hasn't earned a reprieve, and she comes across as a bit smug. The Doctor rejects Christina as a new companion near the end, not because she's an unrepentant adrenalin-junkie criminal, but because he's sad about losing people close to him (Donna being the most recent). Given it was always going to end that way, perhaps it would have better not to waste so much time earlier with all the bits highlighting how good a companion she'd make (a lot of it being very tell not show anyway). The rest of the story is a similarly mixed bag: Murray Gold's score is excellent throughout, but the CGI bus looks terribly fake. An early performance from the now very famous Daniel Kaluuya is great, but some of the other characters / performances are quite forgettable.
Connectivity:
Both this story and The Sun Makers see the Doctor ally himself with at least one thief, and both have a theme of aliens that exploit planets until their natural resources are exhausted before moving on to do the same on another planet. The Usurians and humans in the Tom Baker story do it a bit slower than the alien metal stingray things in Planet of The Dead, of course.
Deeper Thoughts:
To the next 100. Normally, in the Deeper Thoughts section of a post in late December, I look at my overall progress in the Sisyphean mission of covering every televised Doctor Who story, old and new (including the ones that have been shown since I started this madness). Reaching the milestone of my 200th story has made me reflect a little earlier in the year. As I mentioned above, I've covered a few extra bits and bobs, so I currently make the total number of stories currently making up the blog's "canon" (up to and including the last broadcast story Revolution of the Daleks) at 301. This means that I only have to blog two more stories and I'll pass a significant psychological barrier, where I only have a double-figure total of stories remaining to do. Of these, there's a healthy mix of all the Doctors left to cover, with the exception of Paul McGann whose entire televisual oeuvre (one TV movie) was the third ever blogged story when I'd just started out in 2015. There's a slight bias towards post-Eccleston new series Doctors and Tom Baker, because they had more broadcast stories (in Baker's case this is because he was in the role so long, for the more recent Doctors it's because the majority of their stories are only one episode long). If I continue blogging at roughly the same rate as I do now, I would get through all these in three more years. I hope that I won't just be mopping up the remaining Baker or Matt Smith (or any specific Doctor's) stories by the end, and that it stays varied.
The obvious thing that will make it take longer than three years, and might well entail that I do end up towards the end blogging only one Doctor's stories (albeit one that may not yet have been cast), is the programme enduring as an ongoing production (thank goodness!). The number of episodes being produced per year is lower than it used to be, and additionally impacted this year by Covid, but has never reached the rate I am able to blog anyway (30+ stories a year would be great, but isn't a realistic dream). I was always going to catch up at some point, and its exciting to have uncertainty about the future of the blog because it is inextricably linked to the future of the show itself. What do we know about the latter? It's public knowledge that there will be a series of 6 episodes this year, and three specials next year. Beyond 2022, though, who knows? Not Chris Chibnall according to his column in the latest Doctor Who Magazine: decisions about the next Doctor will be made above his pay grade apparently, but he heavily hints that they are going to be made at some point soon. The first two specials next year are planned for New Year's Day and then sometime in Spring, and both were part of the 8-episode batch that has currently wrapped its filming. What he also confirms in print is that the final one of the 2022 specials was a relatively recent extra commission, and hasn't been filmed yet. This will be the special where Jodie will bow out that is going to be broadcast as part of the BBC's centenary celebrations. Such a commission has to be taken as a vote of confidence in the show, and must mean that it is going to continue after 2022. It wouldn't be too celebratory, not a good way to mark 100 years of the Beeb, to kill it off or leave its future uncertain.
There is a much more important thing that this lack of information makes unclear: what exactly is the 300th story of Doctor Who going to be? The blog has already set a total higher than 300 for me to work towards, and depending on a lot of different judgement calls (see Context section above for more details) you might feel we've reached the 300th story already too. It's generally going to be unclear and inconsistent whatever one thinks. There's not much doubt that The Stones of Blood, Tom Baker story, third in the Key to Time season, is number 100. At the time they went out, Dragonfire and Planet of the Dead were celebrated by the BBC as the 150th and 200th stories respectively, but there's no possible system that could be applied to fit both those numbers. If we agree that Planet of the Dead is number 200, and make lots of assumptions about potential ambiguities in stories broadcast since (Heaven Sent and Hell Bent are two different stories, the three 'Monk' stories in Peter Capaldi's last year are a linked trilogy but still count as three not one), then the most recently broadcast story is the 296th in Doctor Who's televisual history. If the six episodes to come in 2021 are truly one epic tale, then the 300th story will be Jodie Whittaker's swan song, which is neat. Or it could be partway through the 2021 run, or it could already happened. These sort of questions will always be asked, as will another: will Doctor Who ever celebrate its 400th story? As ever with my favourite show, one could argue about it forever, and it still wouldn't ever be important.
In Summary:
A bit of a mess, but never mind: there'll be another story along in a minute.
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