The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
Story 174, Episodes 718-719, Series 2 Episodes 8-9
Doctor: The Tenth Doctor
Companions: Rose Tyler
A planet orbiting a black hole, drilling toward an unbelievable power source emanating from its center. Welcome to Hell.
The Review
This might be in my mind a Top 5 Doctor Who story of all time, and potentially Tennant’s finest hour. Right from the start, the story is engaging, the Doctor and Rose land in a dingy base filled with doors (all given numbers that make it sound very official). They immediately encounter a ramshackle crew and learn that they are orbiting a black hole. An earthquake strikes, and the TARDIS is sent careening into an impossibly deep chasm. Immediately you are hooked, what is going on here? There is scrawled writing, but writing so old the TARDIS can’t translate it. The humans have a supposed willing slave race offering themselves up willingly, the fantastically designed and brilliantly named Ood. We hear a voice menacing Toby, but it is an Ood that suddenly tells Rose about the Beast. The takeover of the Beast is slow, creeping, building dread. The Ood start speaking funny, Rose chucks her phone when it tells her ‘he is awake’. The base is very much under siege.
The Beast has been focusing on the man tasked with decoding the ancient writing found on the planet, Toby. Suddenly, the writing is all over his body, and his eyes glow red. Maybe the most horrifying scene comes when Scottie sees Toby out on the surface of the planet, a vacuum, without his spacesuit, appearing enraptured with his power. When Toby turns and sees her, he grins with malevolent evil and as he closes his fist breaks her window and Scottie is sucked out into the air. We see her body floating, dead, toward the black hole, gorging itself on the ruins of solar systems. The drilling stops ten miles deep, and the Doctor decides to go down with scientist Ida to see what is going on down there. That’s when the Beast makes its move to possess the Ood (we learn they have a telepathy field of Basic 5, when the Beast gets control it shoots to 30 and then 100). As chaos engulfs the base, the Doctor and Ida found ruins of a civilization…and a giant metal seal in the ground that opens up…
The second half of the story takes place in two separate parts. The surviving crew on the base desperately try to flee the demonically possessed Ood. It’s exhilarating, and we get to see Rose being the Doctor and inspiring everybody to fight back. The most affecting scene is gruff security man Mr. Jefferson sacrificing himself to buy the crew more time to take out the Ood’s telepathic field. Just as interesting however is the Doctor and Ida’s conversation about religion and morality as the Doctor is lowered into the blackness of the pit. They wonder if the Beast here is the inspiration for the stories of a horned god of evil across the universe, and if he is, does that truly make him Satan? The image of the Doctor in the soon to be famous orange spacesuit being lowered and then falling into inky blackness is incredible. It’s also hard to miss the lightning making him and Ida look like skeletons inside their suits. The reality of the Beast truly shakes the Doctor worse than almost anything.
What the Doctor finds is a well-rendered monstrous demon, in massive chains. Rose, Toby, Zach, and Danny have already taken off in a rocket, cutting their losses. The Doctor realizes that the Beast is in a perfect prison, if it is broken the gravity field breaks and throws the planet into the black hole. If the Beast is to be stopped escaping riding in Toby’s head, Rose will have to die too. The Doctor chooses to believe in the only thing he can: his companion, Rose. He breaks the seal and the planet begins to fall in the black hole, causing Toby to go full Beast. Rose breaks the window on the rocket and unbuckles Toby, shooting him out into space. Zach shields the rocket, but they’re still falling. Running away, the Doctor finds the TARDIS, saves Ida, and that’s that. Even at the end, the Doctor genuinely does not know what he saw down there. The Beast claimed to come from before the universe, impossible, right? I think it was truly the devil. The Doctor and Rose go to Hell, and they survive, because they believe in each other. What’s better?
Gabriel Woolf voiced the closest thing to Satan in the classic series, Sutekh. It’s only appropriate that he too voices the Beast. It seems that the devil brings out the hero out of the Doctor the best.
10/10. Base under siege, it got a bit tired at the end of the Troughton era, but I love these stories to bits. They’re to me Doctor Who at it’s most pure, the Doctor and his companion arrive, face a deadly threat with a local crew, and survive by the skin of their teeth. You have to love it.
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