It seems that Russell T Davies is at it again. Tonight’s Doctor Who special, “Planet of the Dead”, was immense fun, had a great companion, and was in many ways classic Doctor Who (the Doctor’s stuck in a red double-decker bus in the middle of the desert, and the Big Bad is only minutes away - unless the Doctor can sort things somehow). But many, many things appear to have been stuck in the plot because they sounded sort of cool, without much, if any, thought to the ramifications.
First of all, what sort of half-arsed security system do they have for the gold cup that Lady Christina steals? Count the security flaws:
There are four static guards, who can see neither any other guard (so won’t know if the guard gets knocked out) nor the cup they’re supposed to be guarding (so don’t realise it’s stolen). There aren’t any guards patrolling to add some random element; the guards are in a routine, predictable situation. The laser barrier starts above a guard’s knee-height and is therefore trivial to slide under, or for that matter jump over if you’re good enough (the high jump world record is just over 8 feet); it’s not a complex barrier stopping anyone getting in from either side, it’s just a fence. There are no motion detectors or infra-red heat detectors or anything like that. There are no cameras. The cup is stolen using the exact same method as Indiana Jones uses to steal the Golden Idol from a pre-industrial dungeon in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Our heroine steals the cup by abseiling in, in exactly the same way that Tom Cruise did in the first Mission Impossible film, except that she doesn’t have to worry about body temperature or anything. In truth, though, any passing vandal could have had a similarly devastating effect on the value of the cup by merely wandering in with a crossbow and shooting the damn thing (gold, remember, is remarkably soft for a metal), as there isn’t even a glass case around the damn thing, even though it’s supposedly on public view in the middle of a busy museum. What’s to stop some random member of the public grabbing it and doing a runner? Apparently nothing, unless they had a perfectly serviceable glass case and velvet rope during the day time, but took them away just after closing time so they could wheel out the world’s most easily-penetrable laser field system.
The aliens, though, are even worse.
They’re supposed to be 100 miles away, and are so fast that they’ll “be here in 20 minutes” (i.e. fly at 300mph), but when we actually see them they’re moving at 30-50mph tops. Oh, and they’re moving with a swimming motion (like the stingrays they’re based upon), as if they didn’t have to worry about pesky gravity, despite us being informed that, to armour themselves against the damage they’ll take by passing through the wormhole, they’ve infused their exoskeleton with metal. The wormhole is some sort of emergent property of there being billions of these things, going faster and faster around the planet until they go back in time and rescue Lois make some magic door happen, but why aren’t they creating wormholes all over the place? What’s so special about the place they’ve created this one?
They turned up less than a year ago and started eating everything they could find until an advanced civilisation of 100 billion people was completely wiped out, yet they’re vulnerable to bullets. How come the native civilisation didn’t realise that a whole bunch of flying creatures had suddenly appeared and was e.g. eating their skyscrapers?
For that matter, how come the ant-headed guys didn’t think, when they turned up in orbit around the planet, “Hang on, this planet’s supposed to be green, but instead it’s orange”? And how likely is it, given that they had an entire planet to choose from, that they’d have crashed just two sand dunes over from the bus? Even assuming that there’s something special about the capital city of this planet, which is why the wormhole apparently turned up there, how come the flight path, and subsequent crash path, took them right to the centre of the city? (Even if you assume that they somehow managed to go straight down from orbit, which you can’t do without burning up, I’m guessing they put the space ports for this sort of thing somewhere other than in the middle of the most important city on the planet, which, on a planet of 100 billion people, must be pretty big.)
The thing is, there are a number of ways you could have explained at least some of these, if you cared about basic science, but as we’ve seen before, Russell T Davies hates science. You could talk about their flight patterns generating waveforms, and at the point where they all harmonise, there the wormhole appears. (There could of course be multiple possible wormholes, but maybe they’re too far away for us to get there, and this one happens to be the most advanced.) Given that there’s talk of life cycles of what is clearly a hive species, you could easily have a large number of very, very fast fliers creating the conditions for the wormhole, and the actual dangerous creatures being the queens of the species, who move slower but are armoured against the crossing. You’ll still have the problem of explaining how these creatures can find enough food to feed billions of themselves (or, conversely, if they can feed off anything, including metal, why they aren’t burrowing into the tasty, tasty metal core of the planet), but at least you’ll have shown some sort of effort.
Incidentally, one area where I’m inclined to give Russell T Davies a pass is the whole Faraday cage thing. When the protagonists discuss why it is that they could come through the wormhole intact while the bus driver got skeletonised, both Lady Christina and the unemployed kid postulate that it’s because the metal chassis of the bus forms a Faraday cage. The Doctor them promptly dismisses that idea, saying that the science of wormholes doesn’t work like that, but they’ll be safe in a bus anyway. I originally thought “This is RTD in another of his ‘fuck you, science’ moments”, but if you watch Doctor Who Confidential for this episode, it turns out that the bus was supposed to be intact.
The only way to get a double-decker bus from the UK to Dubai, where the episode was shot, was by ship; and, being significantly bigger than a standard container, that meant the bus had to be on the deck of the ship. This isn’t something that happens often, so you can understand, if not forgive, a crane operator smashing the hell out of the upper deck of the bus with a container by mistake. Cue a last-minute script rewrite.
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