Trivia / Doctor Who S30 E15 "Planet of the Dead"

---

• Development Gag: Lady Christina is very similar to Raine Creevy, who would have replaced Ace as companion had there been a twenty-seventh season of the original show (and who was eventually realised by Big Finish).
• No Stunt Double: Michelle Ryan did many of her stunts herself.
• Promoted Fangirl: Michelle Ryan was a fan of the show.
• Throw It In!: The double-decker bus' roof was smashed up by shoddy crane operation when it was being shipped to Dubai from Cardiff. Rather than waste crucial filming time to fix it, the script was altered to have the bus suffer damage as it passed through the portal to San Helios, serving as a warning how dangerous it was to pass through the gateway. Unfortunately, they didn't bother changing the driver's complete confidence that he can get back through it without any problems, which makes him seem either idiotic or delusional.
• Troubled Production: The special was made when the new production team was being trained by the old one. Due to location shooting in Dubai and David Tennant only having a small gap in his schedule in which to film, the team only had six days to shoot, with an unusually tight turnaround between filming and broadcast. Unfortunately the double-decker bus prop on which the story relied got heavily damaged while transporting to Dubai. Russell T Davies decided to Throw It In! and added lines in the script addressing the damage to the bus (which results in a plot hole, as the driver's confidence that he can go back through the portal unscathed wasn't changed despite the massive damage it now was written as causing to the bus), but couldn't do a lot about the sandstorm that prevented shooting for several precious days!
• What Could Have Been:
  • The story was originally to have featured the Chelonians, villains of The Highest Science and recurring bad guys in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe, but the Dubai filming location meant they couldn't put an actor in turtle-man prosthetics without real risk of heatstroke. The Chelonians would eventually get a shout-out in "The Pandorica Opens", but still haven't appeared onscreen.
  • Russell T. Davies originally didn't like the idea of a Classy Cat-Burglar randomly getting on a bus and was considering swapping the character that became Christina for an ordinary housewife named Eileen. Failure to find any appealing actresses to cast as the latter ended that version of the story, and Davies had Christina was made to get on the bus out of desperation after her getaway car was seized by the police.
• You Sound Familiar: In the Hungarian dub, Lou's voice (Csaba Jakab) was also the Roberts!Master's voice.

---