Writing and casting at the
Queen's Gate Tunnel on 28 January 2009. Russell T Davies co-wrote the episode with
Gareth Roberts, the first credited writing partnership for the show since its 2005 revival. The episode includes a common feature of Davies' writing in that there is no clear antagonist: the Tritovore are eventually sympathetic to the protagonists and the stingrays are only following their biological imperative. The starting point for the story was Roberts' first novel
The Highest Science. Davies liked the image of a train on a desert planet and rewrote the train as a bus. Davies nevertheless emphasised it was not an "adaptation as such" because tangential elements were constantly being conceived and added. and attracted media attention owing to Ryan's recent relatively high-profile roles in
EastEnders,
Jekyll,
Bionic Woman and
Merlin. Ryan stated that she is "a huge fan of
Doctor Who and [was] very excited to be joining David Tennant and the
Doctor Who team." Ryan was rumoured to be in line for a role as full-time companion to the incoming
Eleventh Doctor (
Matt Smith) and her casting in "Planet of the Dead", combined with her previous working history with incoming Executive Producer
Steven Moffat – the two working together on
Jekyll, fuelled speculation that she might return to
Doctor Who accompanying the Eleventh Doctor in
Series 5. Ryan was interviewed by
BBC News about her role as Lady Christina. Ryan praised her colleagues and the "family atmosphere" on set and described
Doctor Who as "really something special to do". and on
The Justin Lee Collins Show on
ITV2 to promote "Planet of the Dead". After a showing of a
trailer for the episode on
The Justin Lee Collins Show, Ryan described the "fantastic" time she had filming in
Cardiff and in
Dubai. The episode was influenced by several works: Davies described "Planet of the Dead" as "a great big adventure, a little bit
Indiana Jones, a little bit
Flight of the Phoenix, a little bit
Pitch Black."; the relationship between the Doctor and Christina was influenced by 1960s films such as
Charade and
Topkapi, which included
Cary Grant and
Audrey Hepburn "being witty and sophisticated together, and then running for their lives"; Carmen's warning evoked memories of the
Ood's warning to the Doctor and Donna in the fourth series episode "
Planet of the Ood". Two weeks later, the production team was on a
recce for the special and the final draft of the script was completed. The production team examined overseas locations to film the episode because they wanted the scenery to feel "real" and thought that they would be unable to film on a Welsh beach in winter. After examining countries such as Morocco and Tunisia, the production team decided to film in Dubai because the area was more amicable to the filming industry and viable filming locations were nearer to urban areas than other locations. Production began on 19 January in Wales. The special was the first
Doctor Who episode to be filmed in
high-definition television resolution. The move to HD had previously been resisted for two major reasons: when the show was revived in 2005, high-definition television had not been adopted by an adequate portion of the audience to be financially viable; and special effects were considerably more expensive to create in high-definition than in standard-definition. "Planet of the Dead" was used as a switch to HD because of the show's reduced schedule in 2009 and because the filming crew had become experienced with the equipment while they were filming
Torchwood. Filming began at the
National Museum Cardiff, which doubled for the history museum depicted in the episode's first scene. To portray the tunnel the bus travelled into, the
Queen's Gate Tunnel of the
A4232 road in
Butetown was closed for four nights to accommodate filming. The last major piece of filming in Wales took place in the closed Mir (formerly Alphasteel)
steelworks in
Newport, which doubled almost unaltered for the Tritovore spaceship. Scenes set in London's Oxford Street were filmed at St Mary Street, Cardiff. Filming took place at the peak of the
February 2009 Great Britain snowfall, where the sub-zero temperatures slowed filming and had a visible effect on the cast. To accommodate for the adverse conditions, Davies included a line in the script that specified that the Tritovore spaceship cooled as external temperatures increase. took place in mid-February 2009. Two weeks previously, one of the two 1980
Bristol VR double-decker buses bought for filming had been substantially damaged when a crane accidentally dropped a container in Dubai City Port. After an emergency discussion by the production team, they agreed that the damage was unintentionally artistic and decided to include the damaged bus in the episode; James Strong recalled the reaction of the production team to the damage to the bus in an issue of
Doctor Who Magazine: ''s editor
Tom Spilsbury acknowledged the controversy in the magazine's 407th issue, which ran a reader survey of all 200 stories. ==Broadcast and reception==