Doctor Who Easter Special "Planet of the Dead"
A fun but disposable romp.
Good things:
* Michelle Ryan! I actually enjoyed her performance as Lora Craft. Nice to see a companion taking the lead, being competent at things while not ignoring or rejecting the obvious resource of the Doctor, etc.
* Lee Evans managed to to annoy me, incredibly. His comic relief actually worked as such.
* In general, the dialogue was snappy and amusing between the Doctor and Lara Lady Christina.
* I like UNIT being all dark and mean. That's good.
* "He will knock four times" makes for good arc words. Whatever they turn out to mean, anyway. It's also good to be able to use the audience's knowledge of Ten's imminent regeneration to make foreshadowing more potent - we're all interested to discover how he dies, after all.
Indifferent things:
* The rest of the bus cast were pretty much nonentities, except of course for psychic lady, whom I'll get to. (Hint: graaagh)
* Monsters were alright I guess. I liked the fly-things mouths and language, although they were pretty cookie cutter otherwise. Flying devourer things looked alright from what we got to see of them, but they weren't really all that menacing (and also seemed to be "just seconds away from the wormhole" for about ten minutes, somehow - I know Just In Time is a trope and all that, but you could disguise it better). Plus "spin round and round the planet really fast to generate any kind of needed magical effect" surely died with the pre-Crisis Superman...
* Heh, UNIT's weapons actually worked! I guess it's nice to have that happen once in a while. But erm, it rather defanged the already-not-especially great monsters. Did they even kill anyone other than the fly-people? Ah well.
Bad things:
* It didn't really aim to be anything other than the romp it was, and where it did it fell rather flat, largely because:
* We've seen a lot of these story concepts before. Emo doctor is emo about companions dying around him. Yes, it's all very tragic and woobifying, but where does it go? We know he's going to get more companions eventually, that's how the show works.
* And as for his little speech about how marvelous mundane lives are, that's also getting kind of tired.
* Psychic Magical Negress is Psychically Magical. Because every disposable action story can be elevated by someone making spooky-sounding but vague remarks about death. Also it irritates me how frequently we end up cramming in a random psychic into stories like this - there's one in every form of transport in the galaxy, it seems. I guess we also needed to cram in some foreshadowing at the end. Bleh.
* The jerky tonal shift so emo doctor could be emo was, well, jerky.
* It was just all a bit meaningless and disposable. Nothing happened to the Doctor, the world, or anything we cared about; only the "knock four times" business gave any sense of an arc, and as already stated, the Doctor seems to be in an emo holding pattern.
As specials go, then: I enjoyed it more while watching than the Runaway Bride or Voyage of the Damned, and about equally with The Next Doctor. In some ways those three at least aimed to be of more consequence, even if they were less slick as actiony romps.
Still nothing matches The Christmas Invasion though, which remains by far my favorite of the specials.
Good things:
* Michelle Ryan! I actually enjoyed her performance as Lora Craft. Nice to see a companion taking the lead, being competent at things while not ignoring or rejecting the obvious resource of the Doctor, etc.
* Lee Evans managed to to annoy me, incredibly. His comic relief actually worked as such.
* In general, the dialogue was snappy and amusing between the Doctor and Lara Lady Christina.
* I like UNIT being all dark and mean. That's good.
* "He will knock four times" makes for good arc words. Whatever they turn out to mean, anyway. It's also good to be able to use the audience's knowledge of Ten's imminent regeneration to make foreshadowing more potent - we're all interested to discover how he dies, after all.
Indifferent things:
* The rest of the bus cast were pretty much nonentities, except of course for psychic lady, whom I'll get to. (Hint: graaagh)
* Monsters were alright I guess. I liked the fly-things mouths and language, although they were pretty cookie cutter otherwise. Flying devourer things looked alright from what we got to see of them, but they weren't really all that menacing (and also seemed to be "just seconds away from the wormhole" for about ten minutes, somehow - I know Just In Time is a trope and all that, but you could disguise it better). Plus "spin round and round the planet really fast to generate any kind of needed magical effect" surely died with the pre-Crisis Superman...
* Heh, UNIT's weapons actually worked! I guess it's nice to have that happen once in a while. But erm, it rather defanged the already-not-especially great monsters. Did they even kill anyone other than the fly-people? Ah well.
Bad things:
* It didn't really aim to be anything other than the romp it was, and where it did it fell rather flat, largely because:
* We've seen a lot of these story concepts before. Emo doctor is emo about companions dying around him. Yes, it's all very tragic and woobifying, but where does it go? We know he's going to get more companions eventually, that's how the show works.
* And as for his little speech about how marvelous mundane lives are, that's also getting kind of tired.
* Psychic Magical Negress is Psychically Magical. Because every disposable action story can be elevated by someone making spooky-sounding but vague remarks about death. Also it irritates me how frequently we end up cramming in a random psychic into stories like this - there's one in every form of transport in the galaxy, it seems. I guess we also needed to cram in some foreshadowing at the end. Bleh.
* The jerky tonal shift so emo doctor could be emo was, well, jerky.
* It was just all a bit meaningless and disposable. Nothing happened to the Doctor, the world, or anything we cared about; only the "knock four times" business gave any sense of an arc, and as already stated, the Doctor seems to be in an emo holding pattern.
As specials go, then: I enjoyed it more while watching than the Runaway Bride or Voyage of the Damned, and about equally with The Next Doctor. In some ways those three at least aimed to be of more consequence, even if they were less slick as actiony romps.
Still nothing matches The Christmas Invasion though, which remains by far my favorite of the specials.