The Satan Pit

Poor old Ood. It's not often that Doctor Who dispatches an entire species so casually, yet nothing it seems (despite a Doctor and his TARDIS nearby) could be done to save the poor old Ood. What a bum deal they got. Enslaved to the humans, mass-brainwashed by Satan, and then propelled into a black hole. An Ood might be forgiven for thinking it hadn't been such a great day.

The bastard child of "Planet of Evil" and "The Robots of Death", this adventure actually got markedly better in its second half. Or did it? I'm beginning to wonder if two-part stories are a curse, rather than a blessing, but for the opposite reason we all originally thought. Aside from any gains made in pace and storytelling, we're now part of an audience trained to treat each episode of Doctor Who as a standalone. How else can you explain the luke-warm verdict given to last weeks episode by this reviewer? Would I have judged a story as a whole in such a way after a 'traditional' Part 1?

The other thorn wedged in the foot of "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit" was the curse of its almost monumental build-up. On one level, this worked a treat, establishing an episode that not only frightened, but asked questions of the characters faith. "Do you believe?" seemed to be the epitome of it, featuring a force that upped the threat and made even the Doctor question if it could exist. Though all of this didn't scare as much as the cool CGI, which only goes to show you can't send a kid behind a cushion any better than with a big red horned thing, never mind the theological theorising.

But on the other hand, in heightening tension towards the unveiling of The Beast like nothing before, the story built an unwelcome rod for its own back. The old series did this occasionally, emphasising that this wasn't just yer average Doctor Who threat. This was something biiiiig. Of course, then you have to deliver with a climax like "Fenric", with possessed people, thunder and lightening, and a truly chilling menace. Alas, we saw very little of the Beast itself, the revelation that its mind had left its terrifying physical manifestation before we met it being amongst the biggest disappointments this year. Is this one of the very few stories where the Doctor doesn't even get to meet his foe?

Of course, everything else was fine. The first half of the episode was a tour-de-force of charging down tunnels, hiding from monsters and failing to crawl under sliding doors before they close. This, I believe, is what we all pay our entrance fee for. The denouement was also grand, exciting and blissful, leading me to believe that perhaps this is a story best enjoyed in one sitting, rather than having to judge it based on the very scene-setting first half. Of course, at the end of it all we're none the wiser as to if The Beast really was Satan, but one senses that this was the whole point. He is, if you wanted him to be. What he certainly wasn't was Sutekh the Destroyer or Azal the Daemon. We all seem really silly now don't we?

Still, if nothing else the hype about various old foes returning was unnecessary false propaganda put about my the production team, unnecessary because the story ended up only narrowly winning a war against mass expectation; it's a very, very good thing that "The Satan Pit" delivered on the scares front, if not on Doctor Who's renowned compassion. To whit, Rose flinging Toby out into the heart of a black hole and the Doctor leaving the poor old Ood to the same fate. All of them! Poor old Ood. Like their cousins the Monoids and the Robots of Death, they are surely destined to join the grand legion of Great One-Off Doctor Who monsters. Poor old Ood...