The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit

Since "Doctor Who" came back to TV, the makers have so far been going down a checklist of things that either the original series or the spinoffs in the wilderness years did and bringing them to full-screen and fully-updated life. This story covers some of the few remaining "big" items to check off, like "visit hostile alien planet," and "meet Devil," and now having seen these done and done so well, I feel like we are at last back to "normal," or at least what normal was before the cancellation crises of the mid-80s started, or what normal should be today in 2006. Strange that such a gripping, suspenseful, and terrifying story should bring about in me a feeling of relaxation, like the series is finally well and truly "home." What a pleasant feeling to have. :)

In classic series terms, this is very much "Planet of Evil" crossed with "Pyramids of Mars" and a bit of "The Ark in Space." From "Evil," we have a bottomless black pit that the Doctor falls into, a scientific expedition on a hostile planet that's slowly going under, and some physics that's rough around the edges. From "Mars," we have the god-like being that could destroy the universe, the prison that it's kept in, the prison helping the Doctor to prevent the jailbreak , and even the voice of Gabriel Woolf. And from "Ark in Space," there's some good old running-away-from-monsters-in-ducting and diversion of power from a rocket ship with its own power system. Oh, and there's the old "we've lost the TARDIS" trick. I make these points not to criticize the series for reusing its own greatest hits collection, but to remind everyone that we saw these things in "Doctor Who" in 1975, and that's where it's all coming from, and not from other movies and media that became hits in the meantime. And it's more than just straight reuse. It's all given a fresh 2006 update with plenty of great character work, as the story stops itself on numerous occasions to let the Doctor, Rose, or our guest starts pause to think about the implications of what it is they're discovering, or about how much trouble they're now in, or how old the person who's just died was as she floats off into a black hole. I also very much like that, for once, the space explorers in a tough environment are not a bunch of cynics complaining about their lot or what bonus their evil paymasters didn't give them or how they shouldn't trust these strangers who just turned up. They're still at least somewhat cheerful, for although they may lose people, they're all doing something they believe in and feel like they're getting somewhere, and for that, the Doctor gives their captain a hug, in what's probably my favorite character moment that the Tenth Doctor has had yet. And now for that thing they discover...

Now, normally, I bristle whenever in "Doctor Who" we get a giant god-like monster from beyond the universe or time or what-have-you. These things are too often done as excuses for the villain to do apparently magic things or to introduce a silly backstory with all sorts of proper names attached to it. I was therefore a bit surprised to find myself really enjoying how the Beast material turned out, and I think the reason why is that although we've got the Beast, there's only a very sketchy backstory given for it (literally), and we only see a small fraction of its power. The rest is very wisely left to our imaginations as to whether or not this thing really is the true original Devil, or how bad it would be for the universe if it ever got out. It's big (really big) and bad and it can read your mind, and it might be older than the oldest hill, and it sounds like Gabriel Woolf, and that's all we need to know for it to be terrifying. On the Woolf casting front... I, like many others, was a bit giddy with anticipation that it could turn out to be Sutekh himself, but in the end I'm glad it turned out not to be. Had it been him somehow, it would have devalued both this and the earlier story, and in any case, the Beast that we do get to see is so visually impressive that I don't mind that it wasn't that guy with the mask with the green lightbulbs in it. And I do also much appreciate the implication that this Beast probably inspired those on all of the other planets that we've already seen horned beasts on, particularly Dжmos as the Dжmons were supposedly behind humankind's obsession with devlish imagery.

Of course, another big thing the 2006 series can bring to these 1975 "Doctor Who" traditions is the much-improved visual images, and this story certainly didn't disappoint on that score. "Doctor Who" has never looked as good as it did here, and in parts this show looks almost as good as "The Lord of the Rings" movies. There's the black hole itself, the star systems it's eating, that freakin' awesome Beast, the exteriors of the base, Scooti floating in underwater-for-space, but most of all, the cavern system leading to the seal, which looks utterly and completely convincing to me. I had no idea until I'd seen the "Confidential" episode how they shot that, and that it proved to have been done in a traditional "Doctor Who" quarry is the most ironic thing I've heard all year. Everyone at the Mill and on the effects team in general should give themselves some hugs like the Doctor does in this story, because you've really surpassed yourselves this time.

Director James Strong did a number on us as well, milking almost every shot for all the tension he could get out of it. For example, in one scene, the stage directions probably read "Toby looks in horror at his hands, which are suddenly covered in the alien lettering." But is that the final shot we get? Not quite.... first Toby looks at the backs of his hands, which are clear and fine, and so for an instant he and we watching think, "oh, they're fine," but then he turns them over, and there's the lettering all over them. Strong fills the entire story with little changeups like this, so we can never quite anticipate just when the scary bit is going to appear. I also would like to mention the four different reactions shots from only slightly different angles that we get in quick succession as the Doctor has one of his Tenth Doctor trademark moments of "Yes! No! Wait! Yes!" as he thinks very rapidly aloud to himself down in the pit.

Speaking of that Tenth Doctor, David Tennant really found some new sides of him to show us this time. We haven't seen "melancholy" from this Doctor much before now, but here when he's confronted with some really terrifying things for the Doctor, he gets all sullen. The two that stand out to me are when he's sitting with Rose over dinner contemplating having to settle down somewhere and have a mortgage on a house now that he may have lost the TARDIS for good, and especially that moment when he is hanging in the pit deciding on whether he should fall to the bottom or not and also trying to answer Ida's question about what he believes in. It's in that moment that we hear for the first time in a while his belief that he hasn't learned everything yet, and that's what keeps him going and going, and it's that which gets him to let go and fall to the bottom. (and what an image that shot is of him falling into blackness) And once there at the bottom, we learn of his other belief... his belief in her....

And speaking of Rose, she at last is back to the top form and quality screen time she hasn't had really since "The Parting of the Ways." "The Satan Pit," where she takes charge of the Ood crisis back in the base, is her strongest episode of the season by far. Whereas that take-charge-like-the-Doctor-does attitude got her into trouble in the previous story, here it's what saves herself and some of the others and helps to finally destroy (?) the Beast. Cut off from the Doctor, she doesn't go apopleptic but instead thinks what he would tell people, tells them the same, and because it makes so much sense, they do it even though they've all got ranks and a command structure and she's the mysterious stranger who doesn't even know what an Ood is. I mentioned things I bristle at earlier, and another one of those is when a hero has some pithy final line for the villain just before killing him, but somehow I actually really loved Rose telling the Beast to go to hell just before she literally sends him there with her bolt shot at the window at the end. I don't know why I liked it this time. I think it's just because it was Rose saying it and doing it... this lost little shop girl so far away from home comes through and kills the Devil himself. That's pretty cool.

Speaking of pretty cool, Murray Gold's music veered back into that category with this story. He gave us some truly beautiful music to go with the imagery this time, particularly the movements that accompany the reveal of the cave and the bit where Toby is standing out in the vacuum and then kills Scooti. That was very "Firefly"-like, and that's always a good thing. More like this please, Murray.

There's lots of other things I want to praise about this story too, but this is already going on a very long time, so I'm going to just have to list things and tell you at the top here that these were are all fantastic: the entire guest cast and the way their parts were written, the character name of Captain Zachary Cross Flane which is just the coolest name ever, the Ood, the inventive plot of the Beast trying to escape the jail in mind and not in body, the rocket, the ventilation ducts which for once don't do any venting, the spacesuits, the random spooky voices, putting the next week trail after the credits again... and so on and so on.

And last and least, I will take my shots at the ropey physics. I call them the least because they're all things that could have been fixed, and none of these things being wrong really impede the story in any way. It's just frustrating for someone of my background to see these things continuing to crop up from time to time. I do wish they'd let someone with a science background at least glance over the scripts before they shoot them so burs like this can be sanded down though.

There clearly seems to be gravity on the surface of this planetoid, so why is Scooti's dead body not just lying on the ground outside where Toby cracked the wall? Why is she suddenly floating above the base and off towards the black hole? (It looked really, really cool, I'll grant you, but why?)

Why is the gravity near and within the pit at normal levels when, being near the center of the planetoid, it should be balanced out to near zero-g? And since it should be near zero-g, that could've been used as the reason why the Doctor didn't crash when he got the bottom of the pit.

Why do they keep saying it's impossible to orbit a black hole when it is no such thing? (All this needed was to say that they're beyond the event horizon of the black hole while they're orbitting... now that would be impossible.)

Sci-fi tends to scrimp around the sounds-in-space issue for dramatic effect when ships are shooting at each other, but as recently as "The Parting of the Ways" we saw "Doctor Who" not allowing Dalek-to-person sound transmission through the vacuum. So how can Ida and the Doctor hear the rocket take off when it's doing so in vacuum?

That's all that come to mind right now, but I suspect there might have been one or two others.

Overall though, a tremendous story and a welcome return for "Doctor Who" to a truly alien planet and situation. 9.5 out of 10. (I'm docking 0.5 for the ropey physics.