Here’s Why The Impossible Planet/ The Satan Pit is Your Favourite Series 2 Serial

Philip Bates is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

It’s always tempting to say, ‘Doctor Who doesn’t deal with religion very often,’ but that would be a lie. The whole show is about faith. More often than not, faith in one particular person: the Doctor. We’ve had stories about belief systems before and since; just look at The Daemons, The Curse of Fenric, The God Complex, and A Town Called Mercy. So what makes The Impossible Planet/ The Satan Pit so special?

And it is undoubtedly that. 33.09% of polled readers agreed, pipping The Girl in the Fireplace (27.57%) and School Reunion (18.75%) to the top spot.

It’s easy to argue that, while religion has been covered numerous times, this is arguably the first full exploration of it, nonetheless drawing on previous adventures and influencing subsequent stories too. Frankly, it’s an incredible piece of work: the perfect mix of a solid script, strong cast, beautiful direction, and haunting music.

A one-line teaser –’the Doctor comes face-to-face with the Devil’ – is both captivating and, if you’re at all religious, a little worrying. But this is what Doctor Who does. The Doctor has seen fake Gods and bad Gods and demi-Gods and would-be Gods, but nothing is fixed. The Beast in the Satan Pit is just one version of evil, not the definitive article. We simply don’t know.

That’s fascinating because that’s what religion is. I’m a Christian, but I think it’s a bad thing to have such rigid beliefs. You can have faith without knowing the minutiae. The important thing, at least to me, is to carry on questioning everything. Understanding why and how religion exists is not the same thing as saying all faith is incorrect. As the Ninth Doctor once said, your vision of the world isn’t wrong; “there’s just more to learn.”

That’s the story of our Time Lord hero. In fact, pretty much all we learn about the Doctor’s religion is that he hasn’t seen anything conclusive. That proves very little, either way. We make up our own rules, our own justifications, strictures, and to some extent morals, and that’s true of everyone.

It’s all about the unknown: this episode and religion in general.

To the crew of Sanctuary Base 6, the Doctor and Rose are big unknowns. The power source is the tempting unknown. Krop Tor, at the edges of nowhere, is an unknown, impossibly orbiting a black hole – the very definition of the unknown. And the Doctor, it seems, is out of his depth.

The show itself breaks down boundaries and explores the Great Unknown, doing the preposterous. Time and space: immense factors that rule our lives, yet we understand so little about them. In The Impossible Planet/ The Satan Pit, we’re teased with a bleak future that hints at a struggling empire, desperate for some grasp of power, or, if you will, war. That this is set in the future makes it even more effective: there’s a hopelessness and isolation laced throughout the tale.

Examining the Unknown from the Doctor’s point-of-view is also fascinating: it’s a total role reversal, because he’s scared of our Everyday – a proper house, with doors and carpets and a mortgage. He made it clear in The Girl in the Fireplace that he’s not even quite sure how to get money.

It’s never made explicit whether the Doctor is actually afraid of the Beast and its possibilities, but he’s certainly scared of life without the TARDIS, despite having Rose beside him. David Tennant’s understated dread of the future (and guilt over not returning his companion to Jackie) reaffirms this horrendous outlook.

We learn of different belief systems, and different iterations of guilt as well. The Beast plays on the things that niggle away at us: Zachary is scared of being in charge; Jefferson is the soldier, haunted by the eyes of his wife; Ida is still running from Daddy; Danny lied; Toby is a virgin; and Rose is lost, perhaps in more ways than one. What sins scratch at the Doctor’s subconscious? What does he pray to?

These questions are pondered upon further in The God Complex, but it’s quite clear that everyone believes or has faith in someone. It appears all involved has faith in the Doctor (a notion subverted in Midnight), but none more so than his companions, and rather pleasingly, that trust is mirrored by the Doctor’s belief in those who travel with him.

The crew of the doomed mission have humour in their lives, and flirt with high art – the Bolero plays over the night shift – like they’re reminding themselves of humanity, but on this little outcrop in deep space, it’s as if they’ve been shunned by divinity, cast out by God, and left for the Devil.

Certainly, there’s something ungodly about Scooti Manista’s death, one of the most chilling but fantastic demises in the show’s history. MyAnna Buring radiates innocence and enthusiasm, and that’s why it’s so tragic that she’s the first to go, abandoned in space, drifting into the K37 Gem 5 black hole. It’s just as haunting that the inhuman computer voice is somehow tainted by humanity’s vision of evil, just like the Ood (“the Beast and his armies shall rise from the pit to make war against God”).

And in Doctor Who, has there been a more poetic line than “he bathes in the black sun”?

It comes as a great relief that Zachary, Danny, and Ida escape. Here, unlike The Doctor Dances in which everybody lives, it’s amazing that some survive.

The brilliance of this two-parter doesn’t complete revolve around religion, but so many lines are touched by the topic that you do get a sense of witnessing something immense and deeply searching.

When it comes down to it, The Impossible Planet/ The Satan Pit is the stuff of legend.

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