Doctor Who: The Planet of the Dead

I approached this Doctor Who special with appropriate caution. Russel T Davies has never, ever done a good Doctor Who special. He's done good single episodes, of course, but he usually lets the sense of occasion go to his head and ends up with giant transformers stomping Victorian London.

This time round, though, the special is not just written by Davies, it's also written by Gareth Roberts who wrote The Unicorn & The Wasp and The Shakespeare Code. These weren't good episodes but they were witty and quite well thought out.

Roberts' writing clearly compliments Russels because this special is... quite good.

It opens with a very exciting sequence which blows away the stodge of usual doctor who openings. We're not forced to sit through five minutes of a companion squabbling with their family, we're straight in with the action. The doctor appears and he offers Michelle Ryan (who is very good, as usual) an easter egg - the one nod to the festival this special marks.

Then the plot kicks in, a london bus gets dumped on another planet and things carry on as they normally do in Doctor Who.

What's quite nice about this special is - a lot of time has clearly been devoted to Michell Ryan's character. She's not a tiresome everyman (thankfully) and she brings up a lot of questions that an attentive watcher will be asking - as well as several that they wouldn't have thought of. This is fantastic - it keeps the writing ahead of the audience and means that when the plot holes start opening (as they usually do with Davies' scripts) we don't really mind because they have successfully missed so many on the way.

It is an episode with a fair few problems though. The main one is the traditional Russel T. Davies camp factor. The ending is packed full of cheese - applauding soldiers, a badly written classical score marking the triumphant return, and more than a few corny lines of dialogue.

The creature design is half brilliant, half terrible. Thankfully, the terrible bits don't intrude much.

The main problem, though, is the length. This episode is 60 minutes, rather than the more traditional 45 and boy does the ending drag because of it. Up until the finale, everything moves at a real pace. So much gets done - there's action, jokes, fun bits of characterisation... but then everything slows down to a crawl for no real reason.

So yes. As far as Doctor Who episodes go, it's definitely ahead of stuff like The Impossible Planet - mainly because there are precisely no Deus Ex Machina's... It's not as good as the stellar episodes like Blink, Gridlock etc. etc. but it's as good as episodes like 42, Father's Day etc.