Here’s Why Planet of the Dead is Your Most Underrated 2009 Special

Andrew Reynolds is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

This is it.

The end of the Russell T. Davies era and goodbye to David Tennant and the Tenth Doctor. No really, this is the end. When compared to other subsequent specials, this is the last time we get to share any moment of levity without the omnipresent threat of what’s to come hanging over the festivities. And it’s your most overlooked of the 2009 specials, with 43.75% of the vote.

Planet of the Dead unfairly gets overlooked simply because it lacks the tragedy of, say, The Waters of Mars or the importance of The End of Time – no, what makes this episode stand out is that it’s the last time the Doctor gets to have a good day.

Sure, he has to abandon a potential companion and there’s also the small matter of Carmen’s prophecy that ‘he will knock four times’ which ultimately leads him down a path towards his demise but, for the large part, he gets to revel in the fun of just being the Doctor.

And it’s something at that point that we’ve lost from the show.

Now, under Moffat’s reign, the show leans heavily (and some might say disproportionality) towards serialisation – and specifically, the kind of Doctor centric serialisation that naturally doesn’t lend itself towards taking your foot off the gas once in a while to relieve the tension.

However, that’s not exclusive to this episode. Previous series have placed similarly light episodes nearer the start of a story arc; for example New Earth, which provided a gentle, fun re-introduction to the Doctor. But even those stories had, beneath the surface, something to say – albeit a theme buried under a very goofy surface.

The specials were ideally placed to tell these kind of stand-alone stories. They had the chance to explore a particular aspect of the Doctor’s personality just before we introduce the next incarnation – the show almost has to reset every time; making them ideal for at least one high spirited adventure.

You could argue that the Christmas Specials operate in such a fashion but they’ve almost always served as an epilogue to the previous series – and they usually, and perhaps crucially for this special, come heavy laden with a Doctor grieving for a departed companion.

There’s a brief moment in Planet of the Dead where this pain does rear its head again but it’s not dwelt upon: I’m not sure what stage ‘driving a flying bus with a master thief while space Manta Ray’s threaten London’ comes in the grieving process but even that’s not enough to shake the idea that, at this point, a companion isn’t for him.

No, what Planet of the Dead offers us instead is an extended look at the Doctor in his element: He smiles, he cracks jokes, he gets to do a funny alien voice, and he also gets to take charge of a situation that never really threatens to boil over into a crisis (there’s a wider planetary threat here but it’s largely in the background) in his own idiosyncratic, very Doctorly way.

In other words, the Doctor wins.

However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a darkness underneath the surface – I mean, just look at the title.

Perhaps the most telling moment of just how much this episode wants to avoid slipping into darker waters is when the Tritovores share the plight of the titular planet with Lady Christina, gamely played by future Bionic Woman Michelle Ryan, who instead of boding over the horror of literally treading on the remains of a once thriving civilisation, she complains she has dead people in her hair.

It’s not quite as jokey as that sounds – she’s understandably upset at the idea of washing lifeforms from her locks but – and this is perhaps the reason why the episode fails to land its most prominent blow – the Doctor gets his vitality from his companions and, as moral ambiguous thieves with a line in charming flirtatiousness go, Lady Christina lacks an emotional core necessary to really impress us.

And that’s ultimately what makes her unique, or unique up to this moment; we are supposed to be impressed by her – even the Doctor is occasionally impressed yet even as she willingly hurls herself down a shaft to retrieve a crystal, it never really works.

It’s one thing to make a companion relatable but it’s another to make one that truly impresses and, despite one such moment where the Doctor compares her ‘liberation’ of Aethelstan’s cup to his theft of the TARDIS, writers Gareth Roberts and Russell T. Davies never elevate her above her rather grand character description.

Conversely, even the moments where the Doctor draws strength from the kind of everyday people occupying the bus feel flat because, at this moment, he isn’t lacking in reassurances – he has a whole other previous incarnation where he took solace from ordinary people and the kind of mundane lives he couldn’t have; it’s perhaps the one crack in this episode’s considerable armour – the growing sense that the old ideas perhaps aren’t working anymore.

Maybe it’s a small mercy: How often can the Doctor launch into another speech about the ‘indomitable’ human race? No, if anything it lends to the feeling that this is a lap of honour; a sort of greatest hits package which showcases the strengths of the show (seriously, they took a double decker bus to Dubai! Madness! Wonderful, British madness!) while ushering in the end of something at just the right time.

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