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|Maybe she's the master. After all, she "looks like a time-lord".|

Hah! Ironically Voyage of the Damned is probably the one special I could watch over and over without a problem. Go figure xD

Also, the number of recycled idead in the episode was rather lazy. The doctor's song ending, the doctor doing his whole time lord spiel for the umpteenth time. References to past goings on in the Whoniverse.

You know, it's not actually a crime to come up with original dialogue occasionally, guys D:

i didn't really like it
the script was dreadful, especially the woman.

a miss for the specials :c

How ironic, then, that in an episode that makes such a case for the importance of the mundane in the grand scheme of things that none of the supporting cast get a look in outside of those with arguably the most 'abnormal' lifestyles.

How does that square, exactly, with your assessment of it?

Well, that's that cleared up then. Doesn't make the episode any more tempting a proposal to sit through again, unfortunately.

Oh, and I'm always at Sarc-Con one. Been there since the start of Welsh Who and damned if I'm changing now. I'm afraid it seems to be a rather unavoidable side-effect of those with impotence issues and huge chips on their shoulder.

Last night I had something of a minor epiphany relating to this episode, mind. I honestly think the problem with it lies more in the fact the show still stubbornly insists on tethering itself to Earth through the most increasingly tenuous of links. What, really, was the doctor doing pottering round central London when he knows full-well he's got a Noble-shaped timebomb just waiting to go off at the faintest whiff of a mysterious time-walking stranger showing up and performing all sorts of world-savery? It's like Russel picks and chooses which continuity to get behind depending on how he feels when he gets up in the morning.

Also, you have to feel for the fly-people. Sentenced to death the moment it's revealed they're stranded every bit as much as the earthlings-because we can't have insectile aliens in jumpsuits running amok on Earth now can we? And yet we can have a sodding great Routemaster flying about the place and apparently we're supposed to believe it'll be business as usual for the world in general the next day.

The whole Earth-plot was nothing but tedious filler that only served to detract from any sense of peril prevalent on that supposedly distant alien world. Sometimes this kind of juxtaposition works, but it's been done to death in Welsh Who what with the doctor's magic phone-and here I think it only cost the writers valuable space which could have gone into making a genuinely engaging narrative.

Just for clarity's sake I wasn't actually fielding those insinuations at *you*, persay. I was applying them to myself and my tendency to let the fanboy within spit forth copious amounts of bile at any Who outing that sufficiently fails to engage my attention. At the end of the day, the episode didn't offer much more than a Stargate-by-numbers type affair and that's why I feel inclined to nitpick so atrociously. Precious few episodes are anywhere near perfect, but most tend to chalk up more hits than misses in the long-run. Planet of the Dead simply didn't, from my point of view.

And I'm using 'Earth-Plot' as a loose monicker to address those patches of the episode dedicated to the UNIT circus rolling into town. While I'll readily agree with you that the two parts of the story did dovetail rather nicely there was *nothing* in the earthbound segments that couldn't have been jettisoned and still left a perfectly servicible adventure yarn. All we had to know was that UNIT were covering the ground back home, and that could have been handled with a single phonecall. By cutting back and forth between the locales all you're left with is a sense that the Doctor and co. have just wandered down a particularly bothersome sliproad off the M25. It's hard to feel any discernable sense of threat when the doctor's got a portable astrophysics lab at his beck and call. That *is* why we go to such great pains to lose the TARDIS in nearly every other episode, after all.

The continuity stuff I only mentioned because the writers did *insist* on wheeling out those tired old quasi-religious portents again. Had they cut that interminible 'psychic' nonsense from the script I likely wouldn't have brought it up.

A new point of contention to mull over, though, comes from those worm-hole jumping critters they introduced. I'm fine with the fact they can rip holes in the fabric of space-time itself simply by going really fast...but what then, happens to the hole on the other end? Why don't they all just pour back into it once they've circled the planet once. Or does it just collapse again as it apparently did for the chief of police and his men at the beginning of the episode so they could get through the tunnel. Even for Who logic this seemed to be stretching credulity to breaking point.

Again, these would no doubt all be moot points had the episode amounted to something a little more than the proverbial hill of beans-but the abiding impression Planet of the Dead left me with was that it was story-lite, sense-lite drivel.

*Sits down with a bag of popcorn to observe the debate/discussion*

I also liked it, and don't see what these people are complaining about. Maybe if you look back at the dialogue and stuff it isn't so great, but not so bad that, while watching it, you think "This is awful". I enjoyed it.