This is virtually a remake of 1982's widely unloved "Time Flight", only with a bigger budget and a worse Doctor. Too wildly lit, underwritten, paced for an audience with an 8 second attention span, too noisy, too much emphasis on quirk over character and too talky from the massively over-rated David Tennant and that damned sonic screwdriver! - so, pretty much par for the course for a post revival Dr Who. Russel Davies seems love peppering the series with cartoonish fanboy dialogue and seems, by this point in the series to be ruling it as a personal fiefdom much the way John Nathan Turner did in his reign. The new Dr Who as always unoriginal and more marketing oriented than quality driven, and by this episode, that had become tedious.

This Dr Who Easter special from 2009 tantalisingly dangles a potential new companion before the viewer in the shape of feisty cat burglar Michelle Ryan's titled bored rich girl character only for the Doc to turn up his nose and continue to fly solo. Beforehand, they share a moderately exciting adventure when after daringly stealing a closely-guarded golden artifact Mission Impossible-style, they find themselves sat together on a red London bus just about to take a trans-dimensional trip to anther world, naturally, where they encounter another world-threatening species, ditto naturally, before saving said world yet again in the nick of time - naturally to the power 3!Borrowing some ideas from Harry Potter (a flying bus, the Doctor's "parseltongue" type dialogue with the Dead Planet's initial batch of aliens) the story's okay if lacking somewhat in excitement or surprises. There's the odd smattering of humour and a nice frisson between Tennant and Ryanm but Lee Evans as a Doctor-adoring UNIT boffin gets too much screen-time.With no single antagonist to act as a focal point, the story struggles to really create tension and thrills and by the end relies far too much on CaGen SFX as the flying menace targets earth for occupation in their millions.Seasonal specials and Dr Who tend to go hand in hand, but this episode failed to really take for me.

It took me a minute or two to get round to watching this first of the specials that will see David Tennant give up the role of Dr Who to a teenager who won the role in an online raffle. Anyway, I'm not a massive Who fan or anything so I only approach Planet of the Dead as a piece of entertainment and, if it can entertain me then it is god enough for me. As it is though this special just seemed like it was in some sort of holding pattern in almost every regard. In terms of building up to Tennant's exit, it doesn't do anything other than end with a cryptic warning of the future but it is in the rest of the special where the "doing the basics to pass the time" aspect comes over.The plot is a bit like Pitch Black but of course this is a Saturday evening family piece of entertainment so the darker, more thriller stuff is limited to what kids can cope. This is not a massive problem but it is when you temper it with so much noisy and silly stuff that it prevents the adults accepting it as well. This happens here as we have the usual "big, colourful" Doctor doing his stuff but too much silliness, weak comedy and daft action sequences that lack a reason to care or believe – they all pile up and the end result is a special that will work best for children and not the family as a whole. Things get a bit better in the second half as the creatures are introduced but even then the colourful spectacle of it all takes precedence over the rest. This in turn produces those terrible "cringe" moments that Doctor Who has occasionally – moments that remind you that this is not a massive American production but a BBC Wales production aimed at the Saturday evening telly crowd.Indeed on such "moment" is all through the special, and that is the presence of Michelle Ryan. Fresh from her attempts to break America (how she got the opportunities she got mystifies me), Ryan attempts to be light, flirty fun while delivering an action character. The problem is that she never feels natural doing it at all. She attempts to match Tennant's larger-than-life approach but she hasn't got the acting skills nor the charisma to make it work and she ends up coming over either wooden or like she is overacting in a "big smile, lots of teeth" way. Tennant is his usual solid self and matches the "fun" approach of the special even if he doesn't have much else to do here aside from the usual running and shouting stuff. Evans is amusing but a bit too obvious while Dumezweni, Kaluuya, Ames, Thomas and others are all TV-standard.Overall, Planet of the Dead will suffice for those younger viewers of Dr Who as it produces the standard requirements of the show. However for the casual viewer it will unavoidably come over as overly noisy, colourful and all a bit silly. As a "holding" film then I suppose it does the job, but the next few specials will need to step up their game somewhat as this is the sort of special/episode that you can forgive as the exception, not as the norm.

This episode of Doctor Who is watchable and no more. No drama or tension and most of the performances seem forced and pathetic. The aliens were boring and had very little effect, the humanoid aliens were a direct homage to the original version of The Fly, which was made in 1957 but nevertheless proved more interesting than this episode of Doctor Who. Don't fear however, not all is lost. The old woman at the back of the bus psychic ramblings may have been irritating at first, but pay off in the end when she warns the doctor of things to come.Considering how poor this episode was and the Christmas episode was, does not bode well for the specials coming later in the year. New doctor who fans are beginning to lose faith in the series, so Russell T. Davies better have something spectacular planned if he wants Doctor Who to be popular with the younger generation once more. If not, more and more families are switching to ITV for their Saturday night TV line-up....