Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead

Easter Saturday, 2009. By the machinations of a small hand-held device unlikely to be picked up by Apple any time soon, the Doctor is sucked into a wormhole and ends up in a Bond movie, complete with Bond girl (Michelle Ryan) and Q (Lee Evans). Is there any way out?

With the Christmas specials bound to be Who Mood A - dark, overblown, with fantastic cliffhanger at the end of episode two ruined by dreadful quasi-religious resolution in episode three - this Easter special was Who Mood B: big, dumb fun, sweet as a chocolate egg and not nearly as sickly.

It could have gone horribly wrong. Amidst the schmaltz of the "forget about the fact you're on an alien planet with three suns, what really matters in this life is chops and gravy" scene - not a very Doctoresque sentiment, I might add - I feared that this was going to be yet another "ordinary folk pull together" type morality tale, but the episode pretty much abandoned the bus passengers after that. Instead, what we got was a lot of flirtation between the Doctor and that Michelle Ryan character - what was her name again? Tickle McWim? Yup, it wasn't only the desert that was hot.

This was Doctor Who: The Sexy Special (PG rating, contains mild peril and a lot of embarrassing innuendos.) Poor Michelle Ryan: not the most convincing actress at the best of times, as Tickle McWim she had to deliver a lot of lines which may as well have been suffixed with the words JUST LIKE SEX. "I like things extreme" - JUST LIKE SEX. "We could be good together" - IN THE SACK. Unfortunately this bled into every other line that she said. "There's sand in the engine" - AND IN MY PANTS. When she wasn't being sexy, she was being sexy and posh: "That's how the aristocracy survives, by being ready for everything" (AND BY SHAGGING LOADS), she says, before diving down some kind of giant vent thing to rescue a crystal (shades of The Crystal Maze, anyone?) Everything, except for the Icelandic banks collapsing, apparently. Poor Daddy.

But who cares? It was good to see the Doctor getting flirty and dirty. The harder it gets the more he loves it, apparently - me too, baby. His tongue got an excellent workout, both licking the sand and snogging Michelle at the end, with not a DNA transfer excuse in sight. Of course, he kissed and ran - you can't have shagging in the Tardis, as DT often says. Perhaps Ms McWim will turn up on Torchwood? I'd like to see her face off with Captain Jack - BETWEEN THE SHEETS.

This wasn't the only love affair in Planet of the Dead. The other, and, I hope, the more lasting of the two, was between the Doctor and Lee Evans's Malcolm, a UNIT boffin and sort of genetic splice of Q and Rob Brydon. Watching Evans in action it was hard to believe he hadn't been a series regular since day one. Doctor Who needs a comedy scientist, stands to reason, if only to say lines like, "Doctor, what if I reverse the proton polarity of the anhydrous electromagnet and increase to a force of fifteen Bernards? Oops, my glasses have fallen off." [Disclaimer: may not actually have been what he said]. By the time they were back-and-forthing on the phone, I felt as if they had known each other for years. When they finally came face to face, and Evans delivered his excellent and heartfelt series of "I love you"s, I thought he was going to go in for the snog too. Disappointingly, he didn't, but if Malcolm loves the Doctor, I love Malcolm, and beg Mr Moffat to please bring him back soon.

There were other fabulous details, too numerous to mention. The shit-eating alien flies, who don't have ears but who do have perfect ear-shaped communications devices lying around their spaceship. The fact that a skeleton falling out of a wormhole is "Emergency Code One" which rather makes you wonder what happened at the meeting where they dreamed up the emergency codes, and whether Emergency Code Two is "Tower Bridge unmoors itself and starts dancing the Macarena". The fact that the only thing that can make a London bus run on time is an ancient gold cup "worth 18 million pounds". Have I made myself clear yet? I absolutely loved it from beginning to end.

Next time: "Water always wins": the Doctor is unexpectedly killed by a urine infection.