KT has a soft spot for red London busses, but prefers that they not take her to barren desert planets.
DOCTOR WHO: 2009 special, “Planet of the Dead”
Its not every day that your average London bus driver picks up a cat burgler and an alien adventurer. But then, it’s not every day that this average London bus driver goes into a tunnel and comes out in the middle of a sandy desert.
Like the Christmas romp, this one is nice and fluffy (even more, fluffy, really). It gets silly at times, but it never gets dark or depressing.
The Doctor and company are dealing with what is essentially a desert-island plot: Where are we, how did we get here, and how do we get home? Oh, and are we going to have to defend ourselves from canabalistic natives while we’re here?
I love the shot early on of a screen showing the bus and its passengers from afar, with a non-human hand resting next to the screen. An audience trained in sci-fi genre conventions knows that that will be our enemy of the week — and that’s exactly what doesn’t happen. The Doctor and Christina meet a couple of aliens, and while there is some initial suspicion, they turn out to be stuck in pretty much the same mess. Despite being bug-eyed aliens, they’re allies, and they give our heroes some vital pieces of information and equipment.
The villains of the piece turn out to be a force of nature in the same way that a plague of locusts is. No malice, no plan other than basic survival — they just happen to be the natural predators of pretty much everything. I thought the swarm was better handled than the one in season four’s library two-parter, but I did get a little hung up on the mechanics of the swarm. I couldn’t help wondering how quickly they would be able to take down every life-bearing planet out there (if they did in this planet in about a year) — and how they always manage to tear the wormhole such that it leads to another life-bearing planet — and how many such planets are there in the Whoniverse — and what would happen to them if they transported themselves to a planet with no atmosphere, or to open space, or inside a star. Total extinction, wouldn’t you think?
As for the humans, I was surprised by the guest cast: I expected to think that Michelle Ryan was dreadful and Lee Evans was hilarious, but was wrong on both counts. Not that I’ve seen a lot of either actor — but Ryan was better here than in Bionic Woman, and while I loved Evans as Leo Bloom in The Producers a few years back, I thought his Malcolm was thoroughly annoying. (And yes, that’s also Michelle Ryan as Nimueh in Merlin, but I saw this before I started watching Merlin.)
I liked that Christina was eager to take charge and that she seemed to know how to go about it, although I could have done without the constant comments about what a good team she and the Doctor made. (Show, don’t tell, please!) I wouldn’t say that I liked her, what with the sense of entitlement and the large scale kleptomania, but she was useful, she was witty, and she was cool and collected. A good one-shot character.
Malcolm, on the other hand, I just thought was over the top. Maybe all the eight-year-olds loved him. Although, I did enjoy the way he and the rest of UNIT (an organization that has worked closely with the Doctor in the past but not so much lately) reacted like fangirls in the presence of Robert Pattinson when the Doctor showed up.
The ending felt overwrought, though. For a man who usually prefers to slip away quietly, the Doctor’s been getting an awful lot of accolades recently! I did like the exchange where Captain Magumbo asked if he would stick around to help with the paperwork and he kind of laughed at her. Magumbo appeared in last year’s “Turn Left” and I really liked that they brought her back. Nice to have a smart, no-nonsense female leader.
Christina, however… How exactly does she think she’s going to escape in a bright red flying bus? My husband joked that the RAF will probably have an escort on that thing pretty damn quick. I suppose the Doctor didn’t want to turn her into the police, having already admitted to her that he stole the TARDIS all those years ago. So instead they had him send her off, but then help her get away — I suppose to find further adventure and create more chaos and steal more priceless historical artifacts. Argh.
