Story 201 - Planet of the Dead

In which a young cat burglar - Lady Christina de Souza - steals the priceless Cup of Athelstan from the International Gallery in London after it has closed for the night. Discovering that her getaway driver has been arrested, she runs out onto the street and jumps aboard a No.200 bus, which is headed south of the river. She finds herself sitting next to the Doctor, who is using a device to track rhondium particles. As the vehicle passes through a tunnel under the Thames, pursued by police cars, the machine goes haywire. The police at the other end of the tunnel report that the bus has not passed through. It has vanished. On the bus, the Doctor and his fellow passengers are thrown around. When the turbulence passes, they discover that they are now stranded in the middle of a vast desert, in broad daylight. They have passed through a wormhole, which has wrecked the upper deck. Present are the driver, a woman named Angela, an older couple - Lou and Carmen - and a pair of young men, named Barclay and Nathan, as well as Christina. The Doctor has to inform them that they are now on an alien planet. The driver attempts to walk back through the wormhole - and the police back at the tunnel see his burned-up body emerge. The Doctor explains that it was the metal frame of the bus which protected them, and only it will get them all back home again. Back in London, UNIT take charge of operations. In command is Captain Erisa Magambo (whom Rose Tyler and Donna Noble had once met in an alternative timeline), and she is accompanied by the organisation's latest Scientific Adviser, Malcolm Taylor, who is a huge fan of the Doctor's. They are able to establish telephone contact with the bus thanks to the Doctor boosting a mobile phone. Malcolm tells the Doctor that the wormhole is getting bigger.

The self-assured Christina takes charge. Barclay and Nathan are tasked with digging out the bus' wheels, whilst the Doctor and Christina elect to go and explore. Carmen has mild ESP powers - she wins £10 on the lottery every single week. She senses death approaching them. The Doctor and Christina come across the wreck of a gigantic spaceship, and are then captured by a Tritovore - a bipedal insectoid creature with the head of a fly. It takes them into the ship where they meet another of its kind. The creatures accuse them of causing their ship to crash. They discover that this is the planet of San Helios, and up until one year ago it was covered in vegetation and great cities. The Tritovores had come to trade here. The Doctor wonders what could have wiped out all life here so quickly - reducing everything to sand. They discover that the spaceship flew into a swarm of massive flying manta-ray creatures, which are omnivorous. It was the swarm which destroyed all life here. The creatures have metal shells and, when they fly rapidly en masse around the planet, they generate the wormholes - which take them to new worlds to consume. Earth will be the next target. The Doctor realises that he can adapt the spaceship's power source to get the bus moving. Christina elects to use her burglary apparatus to descend into a deep pit to retrieve it. She wakes a dormant manta-ray and it attacks her. The Doctor pulls her to safety, but the creature kills the two Tritovores.

The Doctor and Christina race back to the bus, where Angela breaks the bad news that they have run out of petrol. The Doctor has brought four magnetic clamps from the Tritovore ship, and he these placed on each of the wheels. He needs a special metal to make the new engine work and so compels Christina to hand over the goblet which she had stolen from the museum, as gold will do the trick. As the alien swarm bears down on them, the bus floats up into the air and heads for the wormhole. On Earth, Captain Magambo orders Malcolm to close the portal, to stop the swarm coming through. The scientist refuses to obey her. The bus passes back through the wormhole and reappears in the road tunnel. It soars into the night sky over London. A small number of rays manage to come through after it, but these are soon dealt with, and Malcolm closes the wormhole. Captain Magambo has brought the TARDIS from the grounds of Buckingham Palace, where the Doctor had earlier parked it, and he states that he will divert the swarm to a safer location. Carmen tells the Doctor that she foresees his end. She tells him "Your song is ending, and it is returning. He will knock four times...". Christina wants to travel with the Doctor, but he rejects her. She is placed under arrest, but the Doctor then uses his sonic screwdriver to free her handcuffs and she jumps into the bus - flying off on new adventures of her own.

Planet of the Dead was written by Russell T Davies and Gareth Roberts, and was first broadcast on 11th April 2009. It was the second of the special episodes which would lead up to the departure of David Tennant as the Doctor at the end of the year. The end of the Tenth Doctor is foreshadowed by Carmen's ominous prediction in the last few minutes. The broadcast date was Easter Saturday - an occasion marked in the script by having the Doctor eating an Easter egg on the bus when Christina first gets on.
This was the first episode of Doctor Who to be filmed in High Definition, which had previously been used for Torchwood's first two seasons. As such, this was the first story to get a Blu-Ray release.
The 2009 Specials employ guest artists as one-off companions. In this case, it is Michelle Ryan as Lady Christina de Souza. She had come to prominence in Eastenders and briefly played the Bionic Woman in a short-lived remake, as well as appearing as a recurring villain in the Merlin BBC TV series. Lady Christina's backstory is that her rich father lost his fortune in the collapse of the Icelandic banking system, which was topical at the time. She steals for fun as much as for profit, and it is this aspect of her character which leads the Doctor to turn down her request to join him in the TARDIS.
The bus is given the route number 200 - an acknowledgement that this was regarded as the 200th Doctor Who story since 1963. As you will have noticed from this post's title, not everyone agrees with this numbering. (See my piece on Utopia to find out why).

Co-writer Gareth Roberts had originally hoped to use his creations the Chelonians in this story. They had been devised for one of his New Adventures novels - The Highest Science. They are later name-checked as one of the alien races converging on Stonehenge in The Pandorica Opens. Roberts' novel also features a group of humans transported to an alien planet in a bus which has been brought through a spatial anomaly. The Chelonians are a warlike race of turtle-like creatures, small and squat, with big shells on their backs. It was realised after the decision was made to film this story in a real desert location that such a costume would prove too hot and bulky for the actors to perform in. The Tritovores were devised instead - Russell T Davies having a liking for creatures which were basically humanoid in form but with a recognisably Earthly animal's head. The large masks meant that they were quite cool to wear.
The story of the bus being transported to Dubai and having an unfortunate accident soon after arrival is well known, but for completeness sake I will summarise. Realising that a sandpit or beach in South Wales just wouldn't work for the story, the decision was made to film oversees - and Dubai was selected. A red London double-decker had to be bought and sent over there. It couldn't be driven, as it would have had to pass over some politically unstable borders, and was too big to be flown out. It therefore had to go by sea. It made it all the way to Dubai safely, only for a crane operator to drop a container on it at the docks. There was an initial panic, until pictures came through of the damage. RTD realised that it wasn't as bad as feared and he amended the script to take the damage into account.
They only had a few days to film, and the first of these was totally ruined by a prolonged sandstorm.

The actors who got to go abroad for filming included Tennant and Ryan, as well as the bus driver and some of the passengers. The hapless driver is played by Keith Parry. Angela is Victoria Alcock. Nathan is David Ames, who went on to become a regular on Casualty. Barclay is played by Daniel Kaluuya, one of many of the cast of the Channel 4 series Skins who have gone on to greater things. He starred in the 2017 cult hit Get Out, and appeared in Marvel Studios' massively successful Black Panther.
Lou and Carmen don't ever leave the bus, so it was a trip to Wales rather than Dubai for Reginald Tsiboe and Eastenders' Ellen Thomas.
Also stuck back in Blighty were guest artist Lee Evans, who played Malcolm, and Noma Dumezweni, reprising the role of Captain Magambo after first appearing in Turn Left in Series 4.
The policeman who is relentlessly pursuing Christina, DI McMillan, is played by Adam James, who was an old friend of David Tennant's.
The two Tritovores - Sorvin and Praygat - are played by regular monster performers Paul Kasey and Ruari Mears. Only Kasey was required on location in Dubai.

Overall, it is an middling story. The ingredients should have given us something a little more epic. Evans' slapstick is a little irritating, and Christina comes across as not terribly sympathetic as a character. Between the DWM Mighty 200 poll in 2009, and the 50th Anniversary one in early 2014, it dropped from 99th to 191st place (out of 241).
Things you might like to know:

• There was some criticism of the choice of Dubai for filming, due to its poor reputation for human rights - especially its treatment of gay people.
• Back in 2006, Ellen Thomas had played one of the Clockwork Droids in The Girl in the Fireplace.
• The Doctor complains about humans on buses always blaming him - a reference to the traumatic events of Midnight.
• The Doctor had previously built a device for detecting rhondium particles in The Time Warrior.
• He recommends Nathan and Barclay to Magambo as potential UNIT recruits - as he had earlier helped Martha Jones join the organisation. This seems at odds with his obvious dislike for their militaristic ways.
• Malcolm has read all of the UNIT files on the Doctor. His favourite is the one about the Giant Robot (a reference to 1974 / 5's Robot, written by Terrance Dicks).
• Malcolm likes to give names to units of measurement - including his own. A number of Malcolms (100) are said to add up to a Bernard - as in Quatermass. Remembrance of the Daleks had intimated that Bernard Quatermass exists as a real person in the Doctor Who universe, and the Doctor has never referred to Quatermass as a TV series, in the way he has with Star Trek for instance.
• Having played Hamlet at the RSC for the previous 6 months, David Tennant was worried that he could get the Doctor's voice right. The same thing had happened to Billie Piper when she returned in Series 4 after a long break from playing Rose.
• The bus has a poster for a mobile phone network called "Neon" on its side. This company will prove to belong to the millionaire Joshua Naismith, who will feature in The End of Time Parts 1 & 2.
• Adam James had Jon Pertwee as his godfather.