The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit

Chapter the 280th, which features David Tennant and a demon (not as a demon).

Plot: 

The Doctor and Rose arrive on a Sanctuary base, a futuristic mining operation on Krop Tor, a planet that is somehow in orbit around a black hole. There is a powerful gravitational force in the centre of the planet that the crew are hoping to exploit. The team is eight people, plus legions of Ood, who act as servants. An earthquake causes the section where the TARDIS landed to collapse, and the Doctor and Rose are separated from the ship. An evil force takes over archaeologist Toby Zed, and then all the Ood. Meanwhile the Doctor and science officer Ida Scott travel down into the shaft that has been mined in the planet, and find evidence of an ancient civilisation. The possessed Ood go on the attack, killing many of the base crew. Rose and two other crew members make it to an escape shuttle, along with Toby Zed who appears to be back to normal but is secretly still possessed, and take off. The force that inhabits Toby was previously in the giant beast that the Doctor finds chained at the bottom of the pit. This beast looks like the very Devil and may be the original exemplar upon whom all the other similar entities in the universe were based (or it may not, the script has it both ways, really). The ancient civilisation placed it in the ultimate trap. If it is freed, the gravity force will switch off, and the planet and the Beast will be sucked into the black hole. By projecting itself into Toby, the Beast presents the Doctor with a dilemma. If he switches off the gravity force, the shuttle - including Rose - will disappear into the black hole. If he does not, the Beast will reach Earth. He switches it off, having faith in Rose to work something out. Rose realises Toby is still under the 'fluence and ejects him from the shuttle. The Doctor finds the TARDIS underground, dematerialises and tows the shuttle to safety. He picks up Rose and drops off Ida. He couldn't save the Ood, who all went down with the planet.

Context:

Watched from the BBC iplayer via an Amazon Fire Stick on the big living room TV. I didn't want to eject the current Blu-ray disc and watch the DVD as I was midway through one of the extras on the Snakedance disc of the Season 20 Blu-ray boxset at the time. I was accompanied by all three children (boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11) who are still humouring their Dad by watching old episodes with him on weekends so he can capture their reactions for the blog. Reactions might have been a bit tricky, though, as every one of them started the episode watching another smaller screen (iphones for the eldest and youngest, a Switch for the middle child). I admonished them for this, but that didn't have any effect; interestingly, though, once the story got underway, they all dispensed with their other devices and concentrated on the larger screen in the corner. The Impossible Planet is obviously doing something right. Only the younger two joined me a couple of days later for the second part The Satan Pit, but that might have more to do with the eldest being busy with coursework and revision for A-levels at the moment, rather than any reflection on this story.

Milestone watch: This completes another season of Doctor Who for the blog, the first David Tennant series and the fourth new series run completed (after Matt Smith's series 6 and Jodie Whittaker's series 11 and 13). It is 15th done out of a current, at the time of writing, total of 39 ( the classic seasons 3, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25 also having been completed).

First Time Round:

The original airing of this story (on the 3rd and 10th June 2006) marks an interesting personal point in my appreciation of Doctor Who: it was the very last time that I in some stupid way fumbled the recording of a story onto a home VHS tape. Since my family got their first VHS recorder late in 1985, I had badly recorded many a classic story after that, either on first broadcast in the 1980s or as repeats during the 'wilderness years' when the programme wasn't being made, and up to the first two years of the returned programme. Late on in the 2006 run, I bought a PVR that would record TV to a hard drive (though I still to this day think of it as 'taping' TV - old habits die as hard as that hard drive). That was in time to record Fear Her. Love and Monsters was captured onto tape the week before without any faults. But I missed off the very end of The Impossible Planet, and The Satan Pit was bedevilled (pun intended) by interference - in the South East, there would be many times that analogue TV signals would degrade in certain types of weather. Anyway, it didn't matter so much that the recordings were blemished as I was watching them live anyway (accompanied by the Better Half), plus there were bountiful repeats on BBC3, and the DVDs would be out very soon afterwards. It still irks me, though, even to this day - this is what being a fan is like!

Reaction:

This is the origin story for the Doctor's orange spacesuit. He is given a Sanctuary base suit to wear when descending beneath the surface of Krop Tor with Ida, and is still wearing it when he reaches the TARDIS towards the end of the story. It seems like he keeps it as David Tennant's Doctor then wears the suit or something very similar in 42 and The Waters of Mars. Since Tennant handed over the role, first time round, it has become a rite of passage for everyone thereafter cast in the star role to get their own moment in the suit during their tenure: Matt Smith wears it in Hide, Peter Capaldi in Kill the Moon, and Jodie Whittaker in the most recently broadcast story (at time of writing), The Power of the Doctor. A nice recurring in-joke, perhaps; or, perhaps, there was a subconscious desire to keep remaking this two-part Ood story as they didn't quite get it right first time. This story is a prototype; it's the first - but would not be the last - time since its return that the series did a futuristic action story where a small group of humans in an isolated outpost are at risk from an alien menace, and are picked off one by one. Aspects had been tried in different stories leading up to the The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, but they'd not been all brought together in that precise formula. And it's definitely a formula for both Doctor Who and for the wider genre world (e.g. John Carpenter's The Thing). In this first try, though, the formula isn't quite mixed to perfection.

There were rumours at the time of its broadcast that the story had script problems necessitating extensive rewrites by author Matt Jones and / or Russell T Davies. I don't know how true they were, but the finished product does have some significant pacing issues. For example, the sequences early on where the Doctor and Rose are welcomed by the crew are much too quick and easy, no suspicion seems to have been aroused at all by their mysterious presence; but, the explanation of the planet being in orbit round a black hole is much more long-winded and overly spelled out by comparison. It also takes too long for the Doctor to grasp the 'trolley problem' he's faced with at the end - prevent the villain's escape but sacrifice Rose (and himself). The audience is well ahead of him and precious minutes of screen time are wasted as he catches up. Generally, the creepy moments and the action moments are fine, but all the bits in between drag on too long. Those moments of creepiness are one of the things the story is best remembered for and are mostly effective. I'm not sold on the voice of Gabriel Woolf warning against the act of turning round - it veers towards being humorous, though this type of horror does walk that fine line. But the other scenes with Will Thorp playing the possessed Toby Zed - his skin suddenly tattooed with ancient symbols and his eyes blood-red, his standing outside the base and yet still being able to breathe, his slowly beckoning toward another character - all make the hairs on the back of one's neck stand up.

The two squaddies that work for security chief Jefferson - each played by a supporting artist without any dialogue - don't get names. This is fine for the end credits, but Ida makes a point of introducing everyone in the crew to the Doctor and Rose, but she doesn't include them. This is a major problem that suggests that somewhere in the writing process a full grasp on the world of the story has been lost - there are eight humans alone on a base, and they are still recovering from the loss of their captain; there's no way any one of those eight would not be seen as important enough to be included in introductions. It's annoying as it would be very easy to fix. It also makes it fairly easy, if it wasn't already, to guess that neither squaddie will be making it to the end alive. There are moments that fail to convince with individual characters too; Ida is the scientist on the base, and has been waiting throughout a long and dangerous mission to find out the secrets in the pit, but then for some reason just stands back and let's the Doctor (someone she's known for about five minutes) venture into the unknown instead of her - why? The story also gives in to a periodic temptation for Doctor Who over the years to create a giant monster for the Doctor to confront (as the Doctor confronts the massive beast in the pit here). But from Kroll in the Power of Kroll to the Sun God in The Rings of Akhaten, the problem is the same: the Doctor is obviously just yelling at a green screen; the final face-off can never be tangible because protagonist and antagonist can never be realistically felt to be together in the shot. Problems are compounded in all these examples because none of the creatures can speak, so the Doctor at the climax is reduced to talking to himself.

As if all of these points weren't enough, there is a stifling atmosphere of smugness about the lead characters at this period of the show's life. This is epitomised in the opening gag where they both laugh at the very idea of getting back in the TARDIS in case there might be trouble ahead. Their laughter is very fake, and it's a little bit cringe. This makes me care a little less about the moments where the plot relies on their strong but unspoken love for one another. The guest cast perform better than the regulars here, sometimes despite the script. Claire Rushbrook playing Ida, Shaun Parkes as acting captain Zachary, and Danny Webb as Jefferson, are all doing sterling work throughout. Best of all, and probably most likely to be overlooked, is Silas Carson as the voice of the Ood, a role he's played ever since. Some brief musings on religion and the nature of evil are passingly interesting, I suppose. You can't beat the creation of a great, new recurring Doctor Who creature, though. The Ood are the best thing about these episodes, and it was obvious that they would appear again (and again) in future. Every detail of design and conception is perfect, including Carson's voice work. All the scenes with them, plus the action scenes and creepy moments mentioned earlier, manage to save the story, and make it more than the sum of its parts, despite all those many flaws.  

Connectivity:

Two David Tennant stories in a row that feature his Doctor visiting a base and interacting with characters of both a scientific and military bent.

Deeper Thoughts:

Tunes of past and future: a review of Doctor Who @60 A Musical Celebration, BBC Sounds. Watching a relatively early story after Doctor Who's return to TV like this Ood two-parter, the die-hard fans had not had time yet to take composer Murray Gold for granted. The music for The Impossible Planet condensed into a 3-minute suite of the same name on his first ever Doctor Who soundtrack CD is very powerful, with a mournful viola line giving way to more lush and stirring strings at the end. That release was a compilation of music from the first two series of the relaunched show, and anyone buying it when it first came out - like me, for instance - would probably not have expected Gold to still be composing music for the eight series after those two, as well as many specials in between. Music he made towards the end of that first tenure is amongst his best stuff too. This was demonstrated at the anniversary concert in Hoddinut Hall in Cardiff on 28th September 2023, when the track chosen to be the final number (bar the obligatory encore of the Doctor Who theme music) was The Shepherd's Boy, the magnificent climactic cue from the late Peter Capaldi episode Heaven Sent. This concert - featuring the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the BBC Singers conducted by Alastair King - was billed as a celebration of 60 years of Doctor Who, but mostly covered Gold's work, which has been used for many a concert and prom before, so was well prepared for another live outing. Many favourites of those events were played again here (I am the Doctor, All the Strange Strange Creatures, This is Gallifrey, Doomsday, The Long Song, Vale Decum, and more).

I wasn't there in person, alas, but BBC Sounds had the full concert available from the 12th October 2023, and BBC Radio broadcast it on Sunday the 15th of that month. Unlike the previous proms and concerts, this was smaller and focussed more on the music, without creature performers walking amongst the audience or appearances from stars of the show. There were though still interviews between performances, with presenter Jo Whiley talking to various people who worked behind the scenes on Doctor Who in different eras. Murray Gold was one of those, and got the biggest laugh of the night from the assembled audience by answering Whiley's question about whose idea it was initially to have musical motifs for characters with "Er... Wagner's?!" It wasn't quite all about Murray's music and mirth, though. The classic series years were represented by a medley performed by the Radiophonic Workshop's Peter Howell and Mark Ayres with orchestral accompaniment, It covered similar - if not perhaps exactly the same - ground as did the pair's performance at the concert for the 50th anniversary, including amongst others Space Adventures (the 1960s Cyberman theme), snatches of The Sea Devils score, and music from City of Death, Howell's The Five Doctors, and Ayre's magnificent final cue from The Curse of Fenric; it's always a rare pleasure to hear that one performed by an orchestra. Music that came after Gold's first tenure was represented by a suite of Segun Akinola's cues for the thirteenth Doctor Jodie Whittaker's era. This was the first time that any of this music had a concert performance, and it sounded great. I hope we don't have to wait another ten years to hear either of these non-Gold selections live again.

Three showrunners with Jo Whiley

Howell, Ayres and Akinola were all interviewed on stage during proceedings, and it was nice to hear from all of them. Akinola was accompanied by Jodie era showrunner Chris Chibnall. All three showrunners of the 21st century were on stage at different points. Steven Moffat expounded on the differences between his two Doctors: Matt Smith's Doctor could do any terrible action and would still be forgiven, Peter Capaldi's Doctor could be given any number of jokes to say and he'd still seem fearsome. It was once and future showrunner Russell T Davies that was the most interesting, though, as he holds secrets of what's to come. Whiley tried to tease these out of him, a game she admitted she's been playing for many years without success, but he and Gold had come with a few previews for us nonetheless. For the first time were heard three pieces of music that will be featured in stories in 2023 and 2024: new companion Ruby Sunday's theme "The Life of Sunday", Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor's theme "Fifteen", and the 2023 reworking of the main Doctor Who theme. The first and last of these seemed to be harking back. The new main theme seems to pull together elements of every theme tune arrangement used in the last 60 years, appropriate for an anniversary year. The Life of Sunday echoes some themes, particularly from early on in Davies and Gold's time on Doctor Who. It's a waltz, like Gold's theme for Cassandra used in the second 2005 episode, The End of the World; assuming the orchestration is going to be the same, it features a prominent piano melody early on, exactly like Rose's theme from the start of the relaunched show, and there are definite similarities with Martha's theme too. It ties Ruby musically to that companion lineage.

The Ncuti Gatwa "Fifteen" theme meanwhile seems to be looking to the future. It is subtly different to my ears than anything Gold has written for Who before, certainly as the main character's motif, using the whole orchestra percussively to provide a relentless driving rhythm. Broadcaster and Doctor Who fan Matthew Sweet tweeted about it being similar to something Michael Nyman might have composed, and I can hear that. Respondents to Sweet's tweet also highlighted what I'd thought about the melody that plays over that rhythm, that it is reminiscent of the theme to an exciting 1960s ITC film show like Ron Grainer's theme for The Prisoner. It's an instant favourite and leads to some exciting speculation: Ncuti's Doctor feels like he's going to be a force of nature. Davies teased a little in his onstage interview; he may have been joking, but talked confidently about an idea for an episode for a fourth, i.e. 2027 series, saying that the third was already planned out (the first is in the can, and the second according to Davies quoted elsewhere is more than half scripted). Other interviews recently have seen him talk about his and the BBC's grand ambitions for Doctor Who, and the increase in budget it's getting. I'm reminded of the theory I've expounded upon before (see the Deeper Thoughts of The Mysterious Planet and Spyfall posts for more details) that the new series followed a superficially similar progression to the classic series but at an accelerated rate. If Jodie Whittaker's era was the equivalent of Sylvester McCoy's (new direction breaking from the past before embracing some old monsters from the second year, involving more socially conscious writing from a mostly new set of writers, less popular than it had been), then are we approaching the point where the cycle starts again? A period where the show's been off air, followed by a Russell T Davies re-launch with more budget available to it than previously? Certainly sounds familiar. Not long to wait now.

In Summary:

When it's G-Ood it's devilishly g-Ood.