When Russell T Davies revived Doctor Who in 2005 after the series had been dormant for fifteen years he said: ”It deserves the status of being like Robin Hood or Merlin or James Bond – those rare British cultural figures who just run and run.” The original series, which ran for twenty six years from 1963 was low budget. The Time Lord known only as the Doctor was outwitting metal humanoid Cybermen who could have been wrapped in tin foil and the evil pyramid shaped machines called the Daleks who could have been exterminating humans with elements from bar heaters. But the story and the characters were rich and the theme, by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, broke new ground in electronic music. The new Doctor Who has the luxurious appearance of a feature film. The monsters are diabolically detailed, the action happens on dense computer enhanced worlds and the special effects are sensational. The regenerations of the Doctor played by Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant have acquired a wide extended family: the parents, siblings and friends of his companions, parliamentary figures, the British Royal Family and the intergalactic equivalents of MI5 and the United Nations in the Torchwood Institute and UNIT. But “If you strip the show down to its essentials, it’s one man, and one woman,” said Russell T Davies.
The Doctor is more than a great humanitarian, he’s a great speciesarian, with a deep regard for all forms of life anywhere in the universe. He uses ingenuity to outwit his enemies and escape danger and tries to cause no mortal harm. But in the final of the last series, Davros, the creator of the Daleks, showed the Doctor a version of himself he found unbearable. He’s a saviour but his presence wreaks havoc and people and creatures die and suffering and destruction follow in his wake too. He is unarmed but the humans who become his companions are frequently armed and as the human race takes tentative steps into space it acquires weapons from alien civilisations and its leaders are prepared to use devastating force. And all of his companions are lost to him after a while. They’re generally ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations. “The bigger picture is why the Doctor’s travelling alone – because he’s heartbroken, because he loses too much in the end (each time),” said Russell T Davies. “This is an arc over these last few specials, gradually, especially in Waters of Mars, which comes up in November, we discover that he travels with a human because he needs a human. He’s too powerful , and without that (human with him), he can become a dangerous man. Donna pointed that out to him in her very first story, The Runaway Bride.”
The series is on hiatus until 2010 and David Tennant’s regeneration is edging towards his demise in a series of television specials. The 2009 Easter special is a romantic comedy with references to jewel heist movies. Lady Christina de Souza breaks into the International Museum in London and in an aerial grab, suspended from a wire, takes an ancient golden goblet and leaves a waving gilt Chinese good luck cat in its place. She tries to escape from a the scene of the crime in a red double decker bus. The Doctor boards the bus, eating an Easter egg. The bus is sucked through a wormhole onto a planet that has been reduced to sand by a swarm of orbital termites that extrude metal carapaces and the mass of the swarm and velocity of its movements rips new holes in the fabric of space and time so that they can find new planets to denude. The Doctor and Lady Christina encounter a couple of giant fly creatures, the tritovores, who trade in waste and use anti-gravity components of their crashed ship’s engine to fly the red bus back through the wormhole, to London. The Doctor has been communicating with an exuberantly nerdy UNIT scientist to measure and monitor the wormhole. He defies the UNIT leader to closes it once the red bus and its passengers return.“She is sexy and glamorous,” said Michelle Ryan who played Christina, “but she’s also a tomboy and very independent. She’s always chasing the next adventure, the next high. And because the Doctor is charismatic and fearless too, I think they’re an excellent match.” She asks the Doctor why he’s smiling when he realises that the oncoming swarm is deadly, decimating entire planets and creating wormholes to find new food sources. “The worse it gets the more I like it,” he says. “Me too,” she replies. The Doctor asks Lady Christina why she’s stealing ancient artifacts from heavily guarded museums. “Daddy lost everything. Invested his fortune in Icelandic banks,” she replies. No, that’s not it, he surmises. If you want money you rob a bank. He comprehends that she’s seeking sensation and the thrill of danger. But it’s their conversation that’s sexy. They trade wisecracks and insults and dares and it’s dazzling and seductive. She’s his equal. As spontaneously reckless as him and as snappy at improvising a way out of a impossible situation. “It’s a good old fashioned flirt,” said the director, James Strong. “It’s two very young, sexy people who are thrust together and there’s chemistry. They might not actually get on that well to start with but there’s definitely something. There’s a connection between them. Often in an adventure the Doctor will take control and everyone will do what he says. She’s very much in control – the two of them are in a sparring way, battling against each other to get through this adventure.” It seems logical that Lady Christina will go on to travel with the Doctor but he says no. He’s still bruised by the loss of all of his previous companions. The Doctor allows the detective who had been pursuing pursuing her at the museum to apprehend her, but then he’s left looking as hapless as Inspector Clouseau as the Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver to unlock her handcuffs and she escapes in the red bus, flying over London.
There are no villains in Planet of the Dead just creatures whose natural life patterns and diets are destructive to us. If the creatures were at a much smaller scale the Easter special could be an interplanetary episode of David Attenborough’s Life In the Undergrowth. When the Doctor alights from the bus on the planet of San Helios he kneels down and runs the sand between his fingers, tasting the grains. The chemical composition disturbs him. He’ll discover that the swarm creatures have reduced an entire planet’s civilisation, all of nature and all the cities, the whole population and all animal life to sand. The Doctor tells the UNIT commander that the bio-metal creatures of the swarm don’t consciously intend to attack and destroy earth, it’s just their life cycle, earth is just a source of nutrients for it. He says that he’ll try and divert the swarm to uninhabited planets.
The creatures of the swarm are savagely beautiful aerodynamic biomachines, resembling a spy plane, and robots something like them are being developed by the American Defense Advanced Research Program. In Wired Magazine today Bruce Sterling posts a press release from a company that’s creating “an autonomous robotic platform that’s able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional refueling. It has a biomass engine system that will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes ‘human bodies’, the public can be assured the the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings, and wood-chips – small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage.”
The Doctor and Lady Christina become fond of the fly creatures, although we generally find flies repugnant. “Our anthropomorphic common taxonomy of animals has been based largely on utility,” Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman wrote in Concrete Jungle. “Thinking about animals has been broadly divided into categories such as destructive / pests, useful / domestic, or useless / wild … For both practical as well as conceptual reasons, pests – what biologists call r-selected species, such as the cockroach, rat and pigeon – are that dangerous class of animals, who are rarely appreciated with the sentimental eye we reserve for pets. Seen as emblems of decay and contamination, as potentially chaotic elements, these animals are symptomatic of our inability to control all the variables in nature. It is difficult to deny the power of their adaptability. These persistent organisms, to our great anxiety, remind us of our part in the biological contract: they remind us that we, like all animals, are part of a complex web of relations that is not always in our favour.”
