Revisiting Doctor Who - Series 2, Episode 9 - The Satan Pit

Revisiting Doctor Who - Series 2, Episode 9 - The Satan Pit

Last week...SATAN APPEARED!

Cue title sequence...

The crew open fire on the Ood as the ship goes back into orbit. One more of the crew that I swear has only just been added gets killed, as Captain Zach narrowly escapes, and they agree to enact Strategy 9. The Doctor makes contact, telling them that the pit is open, but there's no sign of the Beast. Scott ignores Zach's orders to return to the base, but The Doctor advises retreat for once. Shit must be about to get real if he wants to go home.

Strategy 9 is to open the airlocks with the crew inside the main control centre, jettisoning the Ood. Before any of it can happen though, the Beast, or at least the Beast talking through the Ood as 'The Legion', tells them all that this is his domain and that they'll die. Apparently, some people of the Light chained him 'before time', so he's a bit pissed off. He taunts them all, before flashing an image of a Balrog on screen again. The Doctor tries to keep them calm, playing them up against the Beast playing their fears. In the middle of this, the cable holding the lift breaks, stranding The Doctor and Scott at the bottom, with only 55 minutes of air left. 

The Ood begin to break through door bolts. To buy them time and find an escape route, Zach reroutes power from the rockets. On the base, Danny realises that if he can flip some monitor and transmit a flare it'll disrupt the telepathic link, but they need to go to Ood Habitat to do that. Zach will have to manually send air along with them as they go. They all drop into a ventilation shaft to begin their journey as the Ood break into the room behind them. After a short while they pause while they wait for more air, when the Ood appear at the end of the shaft, scuttling quickly towards them. They flee as quick as they can with the Ood in hot pursuit, Jeffersen staying behind to buy them some time, ending up trapped on the wrong side of a locked door. The other reach the final door, but when it opens there are Ood there waiting. As Zach tries to get that door shut again, the crew flee, escaping upwards as they-WAIT! OMG! TOBY IS STILL EVIL! HE HAD RED EYES AND TOLD THE OOD TO WAIT! OMG! WHAT A MEAN PERSON! Anyway, Danny gets the signal sent out, and the Ood collapse. 

Down below, Scott makes plans to use the broken cable to abseil into the pit, but The Doctor insists that he should be the one to go down. He waxes lyrical about beasts and myths to Scott as he goes, until they run out of cable. He knows that he has no choice but to jump, and he needs to take that leap of faith. Gods, that's a big drop - he just keeps going into the darkness until he's disappeared. As Rose makes contact again, Scott tells her that he mentioned her before the end. Zach tells her that there's no way they can save her, and they have to leave her down there. Though Scott agrees, Rose refuses to leave The Doctor, so she has to be restrained. They head for the rocket, noticing that the Ood are beginning to wake, as the telepathic field begins to re-establish itself. Rose wakes as the rocket leaves base, pointing the gun at Zach, but he knows she can't go through with it. 

Many miles down in the pit, The Doctor has survived with nothing more than a bit of unconsciousness and a broken bit of visor glass. He struggles to his feet, somehow able to breathe - there's air down there which helped to cushion his fall. He sees cave paintings that tell of how the Beast was imprisoned. He finds two urns that glow when he touches them, as depicted on the wall, and then he sees a Balrog chained in front of him. As it makes eye contact with him, Toby starts cackling on the rocket. The Doctor questions the Beast, realising that it won't or can't talk, though it spoke before on the ship. Of course, this is just the body - his mind has escaped upstairs, and its on its way to Earth. Reading the paintings again, The Doctor sees that the pit was designed to destroy the gravity funnel if it was opened, sending the planet (and the Beast) into the black hole, but the concept of the Beast/Satan is just an idea, and if its mind escaped then that idea would escape with it. The Beast's jailors left the air cushion so that someone could make their way down and destroy the Beast before its mind could spread. But destroying the prison would destroy the planet, the gravity funnel and therefore Rose. 

Back in the rocket, Rose is realising that they've gotten away too easily, as the Beast could have stopped them unless it wanted them to escape. Toby, rather uncharacteristically Rose must think, tells her to shut up. The Doctor decides that, whatever he believes in, he believes in Rose, and so he smashes the urns trapping the Beast anyway. As Toby begins to rant and go all Beast-ified again, Rose shots out the window and unlocks his belt so that the mind of the Beast flies into the black hole, followed by the planet, and soon it'll be the rocket. Below, The Doctor runs away from a disintegrating Beast body, only to collide with the TARDIS. As the crew in the rocket accept their fate, they suddenly start to turn around, and then The Doctor's voice speaks to them as he tows them away. He saved Scott too, though he lost all the Ood. 

BIG HUG TIME as The Doctor and Rose are reunited. The crew debate what the TARDIS was exactly, as he tells them that he genuinely doesn't know what the creature was. They all bid their goodbyes, as the TARDIS leaves and the crew fly off...

Aw, crap. I've got to sit through Love and Monsters next time.

As a second part, I think this was an improvement in many ways. You can't always say that Doctor Who second parts improve on the first, but the way the Beast was defeated made sense (the civilisation that trapped it there obviously wouldn't want to destroy their own planet so had to leave it to a future generation), and the performances, though by no means shoddy last week, were raised this time.

The Doctor's face as he reveals that he couldn't save the Ood sums up everything great about David Tennant in the role. It's that haunted expression as he feels the pain of not being able to save someone, despite the fact that there really wasn't anything that he could do about it. I'm guessing it's a fixed point in time, or he could just go back in time and pull them out seconds before. Tennant's whole performance in this episode is great, actually. From his musings on the Beast as he descends into the pit, to his excited cries towards the Beast as he figures out how to destroy it, he's absolutely superb. I feel like he's not in this episode quite as much as normal, too, but the impact he has on it is massive. 

Rose, too, was fantastic as she took on the role of motivator and organiser, when she was trapped with Danny and Jeffersen. In the absence of The Doctor she really stood up, and it shows how far the character has come since the early days of Series 1. Rose's tears and refusal to leave The Doctor are one of Billie Piper's high points of the season. Gods, that woman and character can make the strings pull on my heart!

Of the guest performances, my favourite was Shaun Parkes as Zach, for whom the burden of being Captain weighed heavy on his shoulders throughout, but ultimately stepped up to play his role when it was needed. Claire Rushbrook as Ida Scott was also particularly strong, her interactions with The Doctor around the pit being excellent.

With regards to the characters, talk about a senseless death. Danny tells Jeffersen not to open a door, which he does anyway only for the Ood to then kill someone, exactly as Danny warned. You SUCK as head of security, Jeffersen!

The Beast foreshadows Rose's death, as we often do so see things prophecised in Doctor Who. She will, of course, 'die' in the series finale, so the Beast was partly right, though he's obviously not so powerful that he can't tell the truth behind it (that she was actually just sent to a parallel universe). At this stage, we have no reason to believe any but that the Beast lied, as The Doctor says.

The Bad Wolf theme plays softly in the background as The Doctor tells Scott to tell her...something. Which we all know is that he loves her, right? Of course it is. I'm trying to decide if I mind the whole 'Doctor in love with companion' thing or not, and really I think I'm fine with it. I think it's logical. The Doctor has found someone that makes him happy again after all the crap of the Time War, so why wouldn't he fall in love? His role as the Ninth Doctor was of someone introducing Rose to the universe, but now she's more of an equal. 

I do have a quibble with some of the science: so Rose shoots out the window of the rocket, letting the cold vacuum of space straight in, but none of them suffer at all? Did I miss something there?! Surely I missed something!

Torchwood Mentions

The expedition represents the Torchwood Archive

Overall

An improvement on part one, with a particularly strong performance from David Tennant as he destroys the Beast to save Rose and the crew. 

8/10