Specials

Episode title: Planet of the Dead
Featuring: Tenth Doctor
Companions: Lady Christina de Souza
First shown: 11th April 2009
Guide: The episode starts with the thrill-seeking young burglar, Lady Christina de Souza, stealing a gold chalice from a London museum and escaping police officers by jumping onto the 200 bus. The Doctor, who is tracking down a wormhole, joins her, shortly before the bus travels through the said wormhole. The bus lands on the desert planet of San Helios with the wormhole still active behind them. The bus driver attempts to cross back to Earth on foot, but is vapourised and the Doctor concludes that the bus protected the passengers like a Faraday Cage. When the skeleton of the bus driver emerges on the other side of the wormhole on Earth, the police (who were waiting for Lady Christina) call UNIT for assistance.

The Doctor and Christina in front of the damaged bus.

The Doctor and Christina begin to scout out the planet while Nathan and Barclay (passengers on the bus along with Angela, Lou and Carmen) try to repair the bus ready to go back through the wormhole and home. The Doctor and Christina spot an oncoming storm approaching when they come across a couple of Tritovores, who take them back to their crashed spaceship. The Tritovores explain that they were doing a goods collection with San Helios when they crashed into the desert. They explain that the planet recently had a hundred billion inhabitants with a thriving ecosystem.

One of the Tritovores.

The Tritovores send out a probe to investigate the oncoming swarm and the cause of the lack of ecosystem and find a swarm of metallic stingray-like aliens. The Doctor knows that these aliens routinely create wormholes to travel between planets and destroying their ecospheres is their biological imperative.

The swarm of stingray-like aliens.

The Doctor and UNIT suspect that Earth is the next target for the stingrays. UNIT try to close the wormhole but their scientist, Malcolm Taylor, refuses to sacrifice the Doctor. Christina retrieves a crystal which powers the Tritovores spaceship using her burglary skills but awakens one of the stingrays in the process. It is revealed that some of the stingrays were sucked into the spaceships engines when it came to the planet and were the cause of it crashing. The stingrays kill the two Tritovores while the Doctor and Christina escape back to the bus. The Doctor uses the crystal and the gold chalice that Christina stole at the beginning of the episode to make the bus fly and directs it back through the wormhole and back to Earth. Malcolm then closes the wormhole but not before three of the stingrays are able to get through.

UNIT Captain Magambo and scientist Malcolm Taylor.

UNIT shoot down the stingray creatures and everyone is debriefed. Christina begs the Doctor to let her travel with him but he declines, saying he has no wish to lose another companion. Christina is arrested by the police but the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to release her as a final act of kindness, allowing her to escape. The pair fly away, Christina in the bus and the Doctor in his TARDIS.

But before he leaves, Carmen gives him a message that will shape the rest of what the Tenth Doctor does.

“You be careful, because your song is ending, sir. It is returning, it is returning through the dark. And then Doctor... oh, but then...he will knock four times.”

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