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This week’s Who review goes from one dark, dank, and depressing hellscape to another. The difference is I find nothing redeemable about these two episodes of Doctor Who. Yes, while I would howl like a cat in heat over the comments about “my god, color television!” in “The Idiot’s Lantern,” I really don’t care for this one. Well, two but it is one story across two episodes. I’ve never liked “The Impossible Planet” or “The Satan Pit,” it feels like it was created out of the screenwriter equivalent of Ikea furniture parts. Which, I’m sure someone on the internet would call ironic, as The Doctor spends a good few minutes complaining about the space base being just that.

I tell a lie when I say there is nothing good about the episode, there is one thing. Aliens are always a bit of a tricky thing to make feel somewhat new or interesting, but the Ood are just that. They are a wonderfully horrific, humanoid design that is both familiar and completely alien. Sure, it looks like they have thick minced beef coming out of where you or I would have a nose and a mouth, but that is good. It scares children, and being a misanthrope that has a disdain for children (usually), I love that idea. Underneath their exterior however, they are big cuddly aliens that turn out to be slaves to the human race.

Yes, if there is one thing we humans are good at, it is being the worst of the living beings in the universe. Always assuming the worse of someone and enslaving or domesticating anyone or thing that is deemed as lower. Yes, these scary looking beings that are enslaved are the nicest possible creatures in the universe, left only to speak through a little orb they all must hold. Nonetheless, we can talk about their slave labor at a later date, as we have a dull episode to talk about.

“The Impossible Planet” and “The Satan Pit” are both an example of making sci-fi out of nothing and still doing a bad job with it all. Within the first few minutes, The Doctor and Rose are asked “you really don’t know?” a million and a half times. I’m exaggerating on the amount, of course, but the question doesn’t add to the plot. It also doesn’t add to the episode, and doesn’t give us anything new after the first time the question is asked. It is, in fact, using up valuable screentime to set up a mystery that we’re on a mysterious world, which is something we already know as there is this thing called the TARDIS that you may have heard of already.

You know, The Tardis! The time and space machine that can transport you anywhere in the universe at any time. It might just land on a mysterious planet in the far reaches of the galaxy once or twice a series, as it did with “The Girl in the Fireplace,” already. My point is, we know there is a mystery, that is why we’re here, so wasting time setting that up doesn’t make sense just so we can have more gawking. “You really don’t know?” might as well be replaced with a clip of that Cyberman in the park, for all it is worth.

Either way, after several minutes of a build in a nearly 100-minute story, we finally get to the crux of it all. The planet they have landed on and the base they are in, is positioned right next to a collapsed star, a black hole. Where they are sitting is about the same place that Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb” theorized with colleagues is the location that time itself stops as everything folds in on itself. It is a simplified explanation, but still the point is they shouldn’t be in orbit around a black hole on a planet that is having tectonic shifts like clockwork, all without an atmosphere and such to create earthquakes, hurricanes, and other extremes.

I think what makes the episode hard to digest is the set design. It seems like a small gripe to have, but it does make a difference to the blocking of a shot. Everything looks like that late 90’s to mid-2000’s spaceship/base/house, it is grimy, it is grey with points of interest in a single color, and nothing looks remotely interesting. That worked (and still does) for Red Dwarf, as it made everything look like a TV set, making it a bit more tongue-in-cheek. Here it is all designed to, at a glance, be a place people actually live in and move around. This in turn made it look less convincing as something in space on a far distant planet.

I also don’t like the characters. They were picked off one-by-one, but they didn’t and still don’t resonate between my first viewing and my latest. They are characters in a TV show pretending to be people, not people pretending to be characters for a TV show. Instantly you can pick out who is going to die, when, what they do on the base, and their role in the plot. Older guy with dog tags in a leather jacket? Grumpy old man that will show honor. A larger older woman who introduces everyone? The mother. The younger women? The baby of the group.

It is all a bit on the nose. Less than fifteen minutes in and we’ve got The Doctor figuring out “666;” yet no one, including the weird alien that references Ian Dury and Kylie, gets the reference of “the number of the beast.” I also don’t like him in this episode alone. The Doctor isn’t the one to ask about the Ood, and he doesn’t care like he’s supposed to. The only time he’s willing to care about someone is when he says to Rose that he’s trapped her there, all with remorse following arguments about saving the TARDIS first. There is just something about him this episode I don’t care for.

I think it is the “to kill god” and other bits like that that turn me off. I’ve never been a fan of the whole killing god thing, it doesn’t work here and doesn’t work in JRPGs. The entire premise feels wrong because often it is a group of humans fighting an omnipotent being that lives in the clouds and the minds of people. It is quite hard to kill that, I’ve tried. The same could be said of the other one, the magic jester with no power other than fronting Foo Fighters. It takes the episode to an unbelievable place, while the set and premise itself stays true to everything else we know and feel comfortable with for our own lives, minus the space bit.

There is also quite a bit of telling without a lot of showing, with the perfect example being the Scarlet System being pulled into the black hole. Now, one of the rules of script-writing and making TV, film, or games is to “show, don’t tell.” We’ve never head of the Scarlet System or the Pallushi people, but we’re expected to believe they are important because we’re told: “they had an empire that spanned a billion years.” No one cares. No one cares because you are having to tell me about it. Tell me Earth is being sucked off through the black hole, or possibly a planet we could terraform and live on and I’m going to care. However, using something I’ve never heard of or seen, doesn’t give me a reason to care at all.

Overall I think the story (and two episodes) is a very bad B-movie take on all sci-fi of the 90s to mid-00s, with acting being either out of place, or purposefully camped up in all the wrong places. Nothing about it feels Who-like or Who-adjacent, and saying it is a bad B-movie version of Stargate is a disservice to Stargate SG-1. The only thing I can thank the episode for is the Ood, who we’ll be meeting once again sometime in the future. I like the Ood, they are nice, a bit heavy on the killing of those that enslaved them, but nice nonetheless. Next time we’ll have “Love and Monsters!”

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Doctor Who "The Impossible Planet" & "The Satan Pit"

4

Score

4.0/10

Pros

• The Ood are always great.

Cons

• Without the story (episodes) the series would be fine.
• Lacked anything Who-like
• The Characters lacked likeability.