The Impossible Planet/Satan's Pit: ranking - 271

 The Impossible Planet/Satan's Pit

(Series 2, Dr 10 with Rose, 3-10/6/2006, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Matt Jones, director: James Strong)  

Rank: 271

Please allow me to introduce myself

I'm a being of wealth and taste 

Last seen down a black hole 

In a story that's such a waste

I've been here for many a long year 

Since before time even existed 

Stole the faith of many a man,

Even Oods that persisted

 Pleased to meet you now help me out this pit

It's your turn to break the urn 

And be covered in alien writing like a twit'

 'Whose the baddy in this again?' 'Satan' 'What, Santa?' 'No, that would be silly. Which is why they save it for a 2014 DW Xmas special. I said Satan'. 'What, the devil?' 'Well...technically the alien manifestation of the devil who existed before time and space began and whose shadowy presence throughout history has inspired great swathes of the universe to write stories about how much they fear him and evil dictators to base themselves on his evil ways. So basically, yes.' 'You mean the same guy The Master called on to make him invincible in 1971 story The Daemons?' 'Well...not necessarily. I mean they don't look anything alike'. 'Oh, you mean there's two devils in DW running around causing trouble? Well that might explain a few things. Possibly the existence of Adric. Anyway, where's he living, this Devil? Hell?' 'Well...Technically its the bottom of a big pit buried on an uninhabited planet (with the unlikely scifi name ‘Krop Tor’) deep in space. But basically...yes'. 'Well, isn't that the end of the series then? Once humanity rediscovers him then it's all over. I mean, you can't have a scarier more evil  creature than The Devil can you?' 'Well...Actually by Dr Who standards he doesn't actually do a lot. Mostly he just huffs and puffs a lot looking angry while the Dr talks and talks at him whole wearing an orange spacesuit. Oh, actually he does do something wicked and evil to Humans. he covers them in squiggles'. 'Oh, you mean like tattoos? I guess that is pretty scary. If, you know, you're the mother of a ten year old boy. I take it they're permanent not transfers?' 'Honestly I didn't think to ask'. 'Anyway, so what does he get up to next then, this all-powerful devil that's older than time itself? I mean, he's going to pop up in loads of stories if he's older than time and you can never fully destroy him, right?' 'Actually he's never seen again past this 2-parter. And it's not even a series finale, its just randomly plonked in the middle of a run of other episodes'. 'Well, that's just daft. I need to watch a more substantial episode. What was the name of that 15min one for comic relief recorded in 3D on the set of Eastenders again?'

 
There’s a moment in every long-running franchise when the confidence runs a little too high and the ideas run a little too low so they throw in the big idea they think they can get away with to create some extra artificial drama even though it’s patently a daft and ridiculous thing to do that pushes the stakes too far into implausibility. In drama it’s called ‘jumping the shark’ when the main characters go on holiday and end up in mortal peril, in soap operas it’s an unexpected crashing plane or a sudden mineshaft opening up in the town square, in comedy it’s the main character’s mother-in-law coming to stay and in children’s series it’s a birthday party. Scifi, by its very nature, pushes the boat out so far every episode that there isn’t really an equivalent but if there is then it would be when the Devil gets involved and turns out to be ‘real’, with all actual science gone out the window, when a production team decide they’ve had enough with skirting around the issue of magic in the real world and figures from the Bible and think ‘stuff it, let’s just go for the big one and get it over with’. Usually it happens when a series and the people making it are tired and exhausted and need to up the stakes from last season but can’t think of anything else to do. Dr Who, though, is a series that’s always been wibbly wobbly and timey wimey and so they end up doing the devil not when the franchise is dying, not even as a series finale, but as a mid-season two-parter at the peak of the series’ fame and adoration. Some say the broadcast date, either side of the day 06/06/06 (the number of The Beast according to the Bible) was a deliberate marketing ploy because the production team learnt about all the other Lucifer-friendly programmes on that week and wanted a slice of the devil’s fruit cake for themselves; others say it was a complete lucky coincidence and proof that this era of the series was born under a lucky star. The result is a story that, unlike every other time a scifi franchise tried something similar, is being made by a production team at the peak of their powers who are beginning to believe they can perform miracles and make anything work. Even this.

They almost, so very nearly do - indeed for many of their fanbase, especially at the time, who had never seen anything like it before they did – but when it comes down to it ‘The Impossible Planet/Satan’s Pit’ is one of the most shoddily wonkily made of all Dr Who stories. It’s a story whose real science goes out the window from the Doctor and Rose’s arrival (black holes really don’t work like that), takes a wrong turn when the big bad decides that his best way of showing off his immortal powers is to cover people in graffiti they can’t remember getting and make them talk in funny tongues (that’s not scary, it’s a Friday night in Ormskirk!), features the biggest bunch of ill-equipped losers to ever hold down a serious job in the single most boring ‘base under siege’ type story of them all, a finale that relies on the companion doing precisely what she prevented everyone else from doing for three-quarters of the story and relies on its drama a whole bunch of things that are ‘about’ to happen at any given moment that never actually do. The production team, which promised they would never, ever do anything as crass or as low budget as the ‘classic’ 20^th century series, have part of the adventure stuck in a ventilation shaft and film half of it down a quarry (Wenvoe Quarry, Glamorgan) pretending unconvincingly to be an alien planet. This story, which is supposed to be an epic battle between the forces of good and evil is reduced to its barest least-interesting bones (I mean it’s a fight between ‘Ood’ and ‘Devil’ which is as bald a metaphor for ‘good’ and ‘evil as you can get) and the climax is David Tennant – an actor who relies so much on his voice and his face and body movements – stuck inside an orange spacesuit that obscures everything facing off against Lucifer nonchalantly leaning against a wall. Forget ‘Satan’s Pit’ this might as well be ‘Stan’s Pit’ and held at a barbeque at the bottom of a garden for all of the drama it actually holds. At least in the 1970s when they put ridiculous-looking monsters down a pit they managed to be entertaining and funny with it, but sitting through this story with characters pontificating at each other is a slog. The big no-no, though, is how do you ever create a monster that will top the Devil? The answer is you can’t: either you give up and go small in future (the 3^rd Doctor met a bunch of alien insects in his season finales after ‘The daemons’ in 1971, not quite the same thing in terms of power, however memorable) or they make the devil less powerful as they do here. So what was the point of having him at all? Even at a time when the production team thought they could walk on water and do no wrong while simultaneously being in something of a rush (there really wasn’t much room in between the BBC bosses ‘we’ve decided the ratings of series one are good enough for a second series’ and ‘we’d like it to air over Easter, please’) surely somebody somewhere should have stopped this and had a look in the cupboard for something else?

‘Planet’ commits more deadly sins in one go than any other Dr Who story I can think of. Let’s start with the Christianity aspect. This is 2006. Religion is the last great taboo on television. Even though believer numbers are dwindling the BBC, mandated by dint of getting TV license money to make something for everyone and offend as few people as possible, are even less likely to cause controversy in the days when governments are talking about taking away their funding than they were when Dr Who last tried something similar with ‘The Daemons’ in 1971. Barry Letts knew this. That’s why he goes out of his way to make clear that the nasty ol’ vicar is The Master in disguise, why the Devil is disturbed by an actual physical archaeological dig that dates back to before Jesus’ birth day and why so much of that story is set up as being about paganism (despite being set in a Christian church), although even there they have a kindly ‘white witch’ who does more to solve issues than the Doctor. Nobody mentions God or the Devil by name and everyone goes out of their way not to offend (although they still got in trouble anyway for the use of the word ‘crypt’ and blowing up the Church, in a model shot, at the end). ‘The Impossible Planet’ is too over-wieldy a beast to do anything so subtle. Rather than skirt around the issues it sticks its cloven-size thousands in the middle of every pot it can stir. The Doctor mentions multiple religions and comments on how far-fetched they are with their daft names, lumping multiple Earth ones in the list with the made-up ones (Pash Pash, San Klah, Akriphets, Quoldonity and the Church of the Tin Vagabond, all of which sound like much more interesting details to explore than our Devil from our Bible). There are multiple mentions of ‘mankind’s sin’ and ‘final judgements’ and even a character joking ‘let there be light’ straight from the Bible. We only now learn, incredibly late in the day, that a whole bunch of alien cultures in Dr Who have their own devil mythos and it’s the same beast in every one – the horned one, Beelzebub,  Lucifer, that chap with the horns. There’s no beating around the bush: this is the Devil and he’s basically a figment of everyone’s imagination. I mean not exactly – he is there and he is the root of all evil etc etc. But he’s also announced by a Doctor to be a meme, an avatar, a composite of all the bad dark thoughts that people have. Which effectively consigns every religion that has the Devil in it to be a fake and two thousands years of human history to the dustbin. Russell T will backpedal like mad, write an episode that almost goes as far as saying that religion and faith can be a good thing  in season three (‘Gridlock’). I mean personally the only religion for me and any true Whovian is to a Jainist (a branch of the Buddhism so beloved in the Pertwee years, but with the added belief that life exists on other planets) but even I’m offended.

Had this all been worth it for good drama or even good Dr Who I would still have been happy. Except it isn’t. Science is not this story’s friend even before The Devil shows up. The whole premise of this story is that we’re on a planet orbiting round a black hole with just enough power to make sure the ship isn’t sucked in. Rose is good enough to point out that this black hole doesn’t work like any of the other stories about black holes she’s ever seen and it doesn’t, because erm there’s a devil down the bottom of it. Why does he manage to subvert the powers of science that exist everywhere else in the universe? Well it’s the Devil, innit. You know you’re in trouble when a Disney live action fantasy (1979’s ‘The Black Hole’) has better science than a science-fiction  shows that prides it on being halfway plausible. They do call this the ‘impossible’ planet for a reason I guess, but it would be nice if the Doctor didn’t have to keep going ‘but that’s impossible’ every few minutes. Because the Devil also exists ‘before time’, something the Doctor knows to be impossible – and he should know, I mean it doesn’t ever happen again a cross 328 stories and counting. When we left them timelords had the power at least equal to the Beast (and arguably more so); you’d think they’d at least know about him, but no – it looks as if Gallifrey doesn’t even have the same folk memories of the Devil that his long list of other planets do (and he spent his childhood scared of the Fendahl!) While it makes perfect aesthetic sense the Devil would live down a black hole, somewhere that sucks all the light out of the world, in plot terms it’s a non-starter: this two-parter was commissioned directly by Russell T after criticism that we didn’t get to see one alien planet in series one (a couple of alien space stations and no end of aliens, but no alien planets) so it was meant to be the big alien planet. And what we see in the first half could just as well have been set on a spaceship while the second is down a pit, in the dark, after an interminable scene of being lowered down to the bottom. That’s not a place for a drama, that’s a place for potholing! And there’s absolutely no possible scientific reason the Doctor wouldn’t be toast if they’d even got near enough to hang a rope down. I’m all for telling a good story in Dr Who and running with imagination if it ends up being more interesting than the science, but none of it is. This adventure is a bottomless hole of things that make absolutely no sense, for no good reason.

Talking of no reason, let’s talk about that ending. The original idea was to have the Doctor face a threat he thought was impossible and therefore didn’t know how to fight and so doesn’t solve it the same way as usual, with science. But that’s the fatal  flaw with this story: how do you end a story like that? This adventure hedges its bets throughout about how this world works and how much the power the threat has and because it never quite ties its sails to the mast we don’t really know what threat the Doctor is fighting either. So it’s mostly solved by instinct and luck, which is as irritating in its own way as if the Doctor had waves a sonic screwdriver and pressed a button. The Tardis is gone, jettisoned in cargo bay six (of course it’s six) so the Doctor and Rose can never get home. The best scene by far is the two of them sitting together struggling to come to terms with the fact they’re trapped, Rose teasing the Doctor he’ll have to settle down and get a mortgage and hinting at moving in together (given that, till now, they’ve basically been living together in his vehicle, albeit one bigger on the inside with lots of room), the one moment in this story that feels ‘real’. There’s no way the Tardis will ever come back again. And then it appears later at the Doctor’s feet just as he’s at the end of his rope (dramatically speaking), delivering an impassioned plea about never giving up and taking the easy way out (killing himself and everyone else to stop the Devil by destroying the urns that, somehow have the Devil’s true essence inside them) to a creature at the bottom of a pit who couldn’t look more bored. The Doctor’s hope is answered by Rose realising that the infected expedition member Toby is the Devil and not what’s in the urns and does what she’s been ordering the people around her not to do for almost an entire episode: opening up a window and letting him be sucked back into space. Let’s go through that again: this episode could and should have ended an hour earlier if the others had simply ignored this new stranger, younger and more inexperienced than anyone else. She actually kills a person, the ultimate no-no for a companion – she doesn’t know for certain it’s the Devil speaking and usually would be the person having faith the Doctor could still save the Human whose been possessed. Given that the nearest object is a whacking black hole you would have thought that the infected Toby would merely end up down the black hole and next to the Devil again anyway. Rose doesn’t even end up sacrificed herself, somehow managing to stay inside a spaceship with a smashed windscreen – until the Doctor turns up to save everyone in his magically re-appearing Tardis. It’s incredibly lazy writing, one of the worst ‘sudden solution Davies et machina’ endings even in an era notorious for them. It’s as if the Devil took over writing partway through, taking a vaguely promising first half and writing the worst possible second half out of it.

As with all Dr Who stories the devil’s in the detail. Had they made me care about this world and the people in it I’ll forgive any plothole going and heck probably won’t even notice half of them even when other guidebooks point them out. But I really don’t. I mean I really really don’t. So much of this story is people standing around talking and they’re not even interesting people to talk to. Even Rose is not herself, suddenly not fussed about being stranded and never seeing mum or Earth again and taking time out from the end of the world to talk to flirt with Danny about his backside. The people on this planet are all walking caricatures, all of them. Back in the 1970s script editor Terrance Dicks had the quirk of writing ‘character summaries’ every time one appeared in a script he wrote or heavily re-wrote, giving out things a casting director would need: ages, mannerisms, the ‘type’ of people they were like if it was like someone famous and at the end would write ‘good slid part’ or ‘fair part’ so the casting director would know in advance whether it was worth getting out his gold casting directory with all the important telephone names or slum it looking for unknowns desperate for any job going. They were never ever read on screen. In this story when the Devil wakes up and starts insulting people he reads out a list exactly like one of Dicks’ memos, a one line summary of these people and their flaws (‘Toby…Virgin’). And then it hits you: that’s all these people are, one note summaries. They don’t engage in real conversation, they don’t react like people who’ve known each other for years, they don’t act with any real feelings or any sense of danger. There’s no sense, like all the best drama, that they had lives before the camera started rolling and that the few survivors will go home to write about this later. They’re just there to get picked off one by one to increase artificial tension that isn’t there from the plot. Honestly by the end I was cheering the Devil on and wishing he’d get on with it, which is not what you want from a Dr Who story. This results in some of the most lifeless ‘death’ scenes in all of Dr Who – which is a shame because in pure visuals it’s really effective and borrows heavily from ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ how to do ‘deaths in space’ (they don’t quite put the actors on a trampoline and film them in slow motion, the way they did with poor Katarina, but it looks very like the telesnaps that survive and the observations by people who watched it on first viewing, when it was the big shock moment of the show’s third season).

One person who loved that scene was Stanley Kubrick and he actually phoned the Who production office up in 1966 to ask them how they did it for his forthcoming film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. That’s clearly the inspiration for these episodes (along with ‘The Black Hole’), but in the great Dr Who (i.e. British) tradition of doing it in reverse and more pessimistically, so that instead of a benevolent alien presence pushing mankind on to evolve and better himself we get a dark shadowy creature exploiting our insecurities and trying to make us mess up. You can tell that the production team are trying to go for the same expansive feel, even going to far as to use classical music for the ‘space’ sequences (although given the connotations with Torvill and Dean in this country the use of Ravel’s Bolero just makes you think the Devil is going to start ice skating any moment). You could also throw in another film franchise that ripped Who off heavily (especially ‘The Ark In Space’) ‘Alien’, with Ridley Scott another Whovian who very nearly worked on the show himself (he was due to design the Daleks instead of Raymond Cusick before a deadline for another show saw him reluctantly pull out). This story is ‘Alien’ in reverse (the film that made a star of John ‘War Doctor’ Hurt), with a similar bunch of skulking Humans on the fringes of the known universe in a battered old spaceship (one the script specifies as looking like ‘Nostromo’ in the film) at war with themselves when they discovery a ‘mystery’ and go exploring - only instead of an alien being inside our bodies it’s inside our brains. Very Dr Who. This story is clearly meant to be all about the hugeness of space and mankind’s small part in it and an intriguing yet impossible planet. It should be big and expansive and expensive. Only the money’s run out. With confidence for series two skyhigh and a slight increase in budget so many big wild ideas have been thrown into the 2006 series that by the time we end up here, the last fully recorded episode of Billie’s Piper’s time as a companion (at least the first time round) nobody can properly afford anything. The visions of space are disappointing, the graffiti effects look cheap and the Devil himself, part of a ‘competition’ between the Mill effects team (won by a worker in the dispatch department) because nobody could agree on what he should look like, is as basic it gets, a hundredth of the size he should be (and Davies expected it to be –it was written into the script that the Doctor should come across a ginormous hole in the wall and take a rest, only to discover it was the Devils’ eyeball, something they’d never be able to pull off properly on screen in these circumstances but would at least have been worth trying). They had to scrimp and save to even get that: it was only by saving on the other episodes around it, mostly ‘Fear Her’, that the Devil became a CGI creation and not just a man in a mask. Which might actually have been better. The original plan had been to shoot in Iceland (the country, not the supermarket), a Welsh quarry in February was very much a last minute substitute and never looks like anything other than a quarry. This wouldn’t be the only Dr Who story hit by finances but it’s one of the stories that was relying on those finances to really sell it – and they’re just not here. Throw in the fact that this is also one of the most rushed Dr who stories, in post-production right up to the wire (to the extent that reviewers didn’t get a copy in time before the episode aired, making the second half the least talked about Davies story of all in the press), with David Tennant forced to nail his big long speech against the Devil in one take or face having the show taken off the air for a week, and you can see why so many things went wrong. As with the people on the base the people making this thought they’d have all the time in the world to tweak things and get it right, but the Devil laughs at well-laid plans.  

  
Even with all the time and money in the world this story would always be a confused one though. There are lots of good ideas raised in this story but they all get forgotten: one minute this is a morality tale about the goodness of Humans before Rose solves it by being cruel and giving in to the Devil (at least by her standards and to save lots of other people, but still). You think it’s going to be a shock reveal that the Devil is real and has been causing all the other monsters in the universe – and then they shy away from it. You think it’s going to be a story about space exploration and then we spend half of it down a pit. You think it’s going to be a tale of slavery, where the slaves turn on their masters and save them despite their need fore revenge  then they don’t. None of the ideas in a vaguely promising first half come anywhere near being seen through to the end of a very rubbish second episode. This adventure is so different to any other Dr Who story ever written that you’d be forgiven for thinking that writer Matt Jones had never heard of the show in his life, if only for the fact that this is the one and only Dr Who story, out of 328, where reading is bad for you rather than good (I could add ‘Extremis’ in to that pile, but that turned out to be a parallel world simulation that didn’t work like ours) in a series where knowledge is power. In fact Jones is one of the biggest fans to ever write for the series, responsible for several spin-off novels (all of them far far better than this one!), one of the better ‘Torchwood’ episodes (‘Dead Man Walking’, in which Owen comes to terms with being a ghost) and the ‘Fluid Links’ mini-fillers that used to run in Dr Who magazine (all of which tell a more fully realised story than this one within a paragraph or two). He was also a good friend of Russell’s having script-edited ‘Queer As Folk’. He’s usually a very sympathetic writer, good at character, not bad at plot and he knows the way Dr Who stories work as well as anyone – as well as the showrunner even. He’s the sort of reliable writer you turn to in times of trouble to get you out of them (and exactly the sort of person you want for the last block of shooting). So what went wrong? My guess is that this story came unstuck because of  Russell’s insistence on farming his own ideas out to other writers and then trying to get them to write what he had when he first got the idea. Jones isn’t the right sort of writer for either a sciencey space story or a Gods from beyond time story; he’s the one with a talent for writing about people in the present day. You can tell his heart isn’t really in this and that he’s struggling, but there’s no way he’s going to let anyone down or give up the chance to work on one of his favourite programmes so he makes do as best he can. Other less talented writers have got away with far less over the years. But without the money, without the time for Russell to sneakily re-write the script to his own image and make it sharper, it lives and breathes and on its ideas. And it’s ideas are mostly rubbish.

I say mostly because, despite everything else being a complete and utter spaceship wreck, there is one brilliant invention that prevents this story from being a complete disaster and saves it from a, well, multitude of sins: The Ood. Created by Jones, then re-shaped and named by Russell, they’re a brilliant invention and the reason so many fans think of this story fondly. An alien race who can only talk between themselves using a detachable orb they hold in their hands and who look some of the most alieny aliens ever seen in the series, they work brilliantly for the plot (where they become possessed), the wider implications present in all great Dr Who (they're the perfect metaphor for how we treat people who are different to us) and for the merchandise (which sold a treat). They are arguably the most loved ‘new’ monster of the Davies era, returning again and again even when Moffat and Chibnall take over the show. They have a brilliant introduction, where even the Doctor and Rose are so prejudiced against their appearance that they misunderstand their request to ‘eat’ and think they’re alien-fodder, before it turns out that they’re sweet and benevolent and kind, everything that’s pure in the world. Although their later appearances make great play on the fact that they’re slaves, the vastly superior ‘Planet Of The Ood’ giving them a back story that turns them into cotton plantation workers with their own ‘secret’ shared culture that their masters don’t realise is there or that they are even capable of (where spiritual and blues songs and eventually rock and roll came from), a story about their moral uprising against their suppressors. Here, though, they’re helping mankind because they’re kind and live to serve and be useful; Russell talks a lot about how he was sick of getting criticism for lengthy alien names and decided they should be ‘odd’ and simply swapped a letter, but Jones clearly wrote them to be ‘G’ood; without a letter missing. They’re the opposite of the Devil who loves making mischief and causing rifts for the sake of it – they want people to be happy. As much as Rose is concerned, as much as there is an organisation called ‘Friends Of The Ood’ to make sure they’re treated properly, left to their own devices they’re sweet and kind and perfectly happy despite looking like an explosion in a tentacle factory. One of the great things about Dr Who is the way it talks about prejudice and how not every alien is out to murder us all and The Ood are the welcome example for a whole new generation of fans, to go alongside ‘The Sensorites’ (the next story reveals the Ood are close cousins, after comments Russell made in publicity for this one). They look amazing and unlike anything the series had ever done before (bald heads and a face full of squiggly bits), they sound distinctive (like a kindly librarian in space in a world where most people are always shouting) and feel ‘real’ in a way most of the Humans in this story don’t. The moment when the Devil gets to even then, making the ultimate race of pure altruistic beings turn nasty, is a thrilling moment indeed, with a great near-cliffhanger of a whole room full of them with flashing red eyes and angry chants (like many a thing in this story the pacing’s all out: the cliffhanger should either come here a few minutes early or when the Doctor finds the rope’s snapped a few minutes into part two, not with the trapdoor or the Humans - quite literally - staring into space).

The Ood are a brilliant creation and worthy of every accolade they receive and nearly save this story singlehandedly (they’re the reason this story isn’t right at the bottom of my pile). Future stories will flesh them out and turn them into more mystical guru-types, while ‘Planet Of The Ood’ gives them one heck of a lot more to do (this story wouldn’t be that different without the Ood in it – they just needed a monster to menace Rose while the Doctor locked horns with The Devil). However they’re at their best here I think, as a being of pure kindness and servitude and not enough future writers have built on that. You could, if you so wanted, see the Ood as Humanity in the Bible, pure beings led out of the garden of Eden down a black hole (only this planet isn’t very Edenish). The story wouldn’t work nearly as well without them – and yet they weren’t even in the first draft script. The original plan was to show us more Slitheen following ‘Aliens Of London’, with the twist that the Doctor and Rose assume they’re going to be evil but they turn out to be sweet – the Family Slitheen we saw in series one were the bad apples that every civilisation has, not representative of the real thing. Given this story’s half-themes about prejudice and the strength needed to resist temptation I wish they’d run with it (the idea was changed when it was discovered that the Slitheen costumes were in a really bad state and the costumes had to be built from scratch again so they might as well invent something else – one reason they become the Blathereen in the Sarah Jane Adventures).  

There are other little moments that work nicely too: the Doctor and Rose laughing at the idea that they would ever go back to the Tardis ‘at the first sign of trouble’, the Doctor’s shock that his Tardis translator circuits aren’t kicking in for the body-writing which must be ‘impossibly old’, Rose accidentally referring to an Ood as a ‘dinner lady’ and having to backtrack. There aren’t anywhere near enough of them to cover up the massive flaws though and, like a black hole all the very obvious mistakes suck my enthusiasm away. Even compared to ‘42’ this is B movie stuff, not worth thinking about while it’s on never mind afterwards, the way the best Dr Who stories live with you long after they end. 

Even more than that it has the plot of a computer game, those annoying cut scenes you skip because you’re here to play and get involved rather than listen to people natter, only you never get the chance (specifically ‘Doom’ given it features the Devil; the story does lift sound effects from the franchise, particularly the door sounds. They should have made it more like the organic games like the under-rated franchise ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, or ‘Beyond Ood and Devil’ as it could have been called). It’s all the things modern Who has done so well to avoid till now: the clichés, demigod beings, ventilation shafts, black holes, quarries as alien planets – everything people once criticised Dr Who for doing repeatedly is here all in one handy place to chunter about, none of them well.  Usually the regulars save a story but not here - The Doctor and Rose don’t get much to do, but then neither do the people on the base and nor, really, does The Devil. So, truly what is the point of this story? They go for a base under siege and blow the ending, they go for a Christian parable then tell us the devil isn’t actually real after all but a ‘concept’. They go for a horror figure that doesn’t do anything. They go for a plausible future world that mistreats people and an allegory about slavery, that doesn’t end with The Ood saving their masters and proving their brilliance. It tries to be a ‘Doctor and Rose can never ever get home story’ until, ooh look, the Tardis magically turns up. It tries to remake ‘The Daemons’ with a decent budget and trips over its own horns so that it ends up looking sillier than it did in 1971. Even the acting is ropey from the writing despite having so many people who are so good in other things (such as Big Finish regular Danny Webb as Mr Jefferson and Shaun Parkes as Zackery, whose so good as the ‘friend’ in Casanova he even steals the show from David Tennant, not an easy thing to do). One ood idea still isn’t enough to make up for a story littered with so many errors and watching this story still comes close to my idea of Hell, in a lot more ways than anyone intended.

POSITIVES + Knock the design as we have at least The Beast sounds good and every bit as deliciously nasty as you’d expect, a being that can get his way with whispers while the Humans shout at each other. Gabriel Woolf, making his second Dr Who appearance following a full 31 year gap, was hired when Russell read the script and suggested to casting director Andy Pryor was someone ‘just like Gabriel in that story I really like, what a shame 1975 was so long ago he’s probably long retired by now’ – and the casting director came back and said ‘actually he’s still around and would love to come back’. He’s perfect casting: other lesser actors would have made The devil ranty and shouty, like Stephen Thorne’s Azal in ‘The Daemons’, but this one feels like a real ancient threat rather than a ranting bully. Thank goodness Woolf was valuable – not least because if he wasn’t the production team, wanting to keep Billie Piper sweet, were seriously going to consider asking her ex and still good mate Chris Evans to play him after months of pestering her for a part in the show (the DJ, not the actor. Which would have made a lot more sense. It would have made even more sense if they’d made the Devil her next ex, Laurence Fox, but he wasn’t quite so weird and, well, Davrossy back then).

NEGATIVES - David Tennant's 10th Doctor remains the show's most widely loved incarnation, at least since the 4th Tom Baker, but there's a small percentage of fans who find him smug, rude, irritating and brash. Generally speaking Tennant's Doctor is charismatic enough for you to look past these short-comings but watching these episodes in particular you do wonder if the naysayers have a point. Poor Rose is left to spend most of her time working in the canteen while he mopes, haunted by the thought of being cut off from his Tardis and stuck in one place for the rest of his life. His coping mechanism then is to flirt with the rest of the base and ignore Rose for the most part, despite being the person who put her in danger, before leaping down to face the devil without a thought to her safety if she gets stranded here alone. That would normally be the sort of red flag the villains do in Dr Who stories if he hadn't been, y'know, eclipsed by the Devil. Putting Tennant in a spacesuit so we can barely see or hear him and then giving him massive long speeches to deliver is also a really really bad idea.

BEST QUOTE: ‘These are the words of The Beast and he has woken. He is the heart that beats in the darkness and he is the blood that will never cease. And now he will rise!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Like the rest of series two there’s a Tardisode mini-prequel for both episodes of this two-parter available on the BBC website and for mobile download in the week running up to transmission, both written by Gareth Roberts rather than story writer Matt Jones, neither of which add an awful lot to the story. In ‘Tardisode 8’ a lady named McMillan gives Captain Walker his orders: find the power source that prevents the planet with the official designation K37 Gem 5 from disappearing. He’s given a document full of alien writing and diagrams as rescued by The Galis expedition. He seems quite happy with his orders until a nearby Ood has a funny turn and starts talking about the beast ‘rising from the pit’, . In Tardisode 9, meanwhile, Captain Walker has died and his belongings are being passed on to a man called Curt. Flicking through the notebook from last week’s episode causes the lights to flicker and a chant from various Oods that ‘The Beast Is Awake’ (I’m not surprised with all that shouting going on).  The papers catch alight, the man tries to run and he finds the door is locked, the writing transferring to his face as he’s left in the corner, mad with fright. Yeah…Not sure that would make me want to tune in to be honest. Like the other Tardisodes this is something of a lost media in the Whoniverse, never officially released since (although you can see blurry copies on youtube at the time of writing). 

One odd (ood?) point: Captain Walker is the dad who kicks off ‘Tommy’, The Who’s rock opera about a child who grows up deaf, dumb and blind out of shock of seeing his father die horribly, although really it’s an allegory about neglect and the intrinsic need of every being to be loved and appreciated, with Tommy nearly sucked into the vacuous world of temptation and sin before coming out the other side more ordinary and sadder but more complete. Captain Walker never comes home in this story either and the Ood act deaf, dumb and blind and susceptible to the Devil in the middle of this story, with an undercurrent that if the Humans were nicer to them this sort of thing wouldn’t happen. A coincidence? Maybe, but see ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ for Dr Who’s take on another Who album ‘Quadrophenia’ about hippie ideals turning to cynicism.    

‘The End Of Days’, the finale of series one of ‘Torchwood’ also features a demon named ‘Abaddon’, the hint being that he’s similar if not the exact same demon seen down t’pit in this story (which had gone out seven months prior). Torchwood have been playing around with the rift too often (mostly due to their increasingly weird love lives) and now hell is breaking loose – or at any rate all of time, with UFOs over the Taj Mahal fighting soldiers from the English Civil War, not to mention Gwen’s hubby Rhys lying dead. Next thing you know there’s a devil too! Spoilers: Captain Jack lets the demon feed off his life because he’s immortal and can’t die (see ‘Bad Wolf’). Except apparently he can, the battle leaving him dead enough to be placed in one of Torchwood’s freezers for days until a sudden miraculous recovery when the Tardis comes calling on it’s way to ‘Utopia’. Amazingly no one ends up graffitied in this universe, even though getting tattoos and talking in tongues is such a Torchwood thing to do (they wouldn’t even need to be possessed, it’s just a normal Saturday night for this lot). 

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