Sanctuary Base

We left the Doctor on the edge of a bottomless pit with something monstrous rising toward him, and “The Satan Pit” has the unenviable job of paying that off. Resolving the terror of The Impossible Planet was always going to be tricky — reveals rarely match the dread of the unknown — but this one mostly rises to it, because it understands that the real question isn’t what is in the pit. It’s what the Doctor believes when he stares into it. This is the half of the story where the horror becomes a character piece, and it gives Tennant his best material of the season.

Into the Pit

The Doctor descends into the abyss on a cable that runs out long before the bottom — and, in a lovely beat, he lets go and drops anyway, trusting that a planet holding an ancient prison wouldn’t be built to kill the one visitor who came to look. What he finds down there is genuinely enormous: a colossal, horned, chained creature, a devil straight off a medieval fresco, roaring in the dark at the heart of the world. The twist is a clever one. This vast brute is only the Beast’s body. Its mind — the intelligence, the malice, the voice — has already slipped its cage, leaping from Toby to the Ood and back, waiting for a way off this rock.

The design of the creature is a proper swing-for-the-fences moment — cloven, horned, mountainous, chained to the rock in a cavern lit like a cathedral of hell. It’s an image the classic series could only ever have dreamed of attempting, and the show is wise to keep it mostly still and looming rather than lunging about. A caged god, roaring but bound, is far more frightening than a rampaging one.

The prison itself is beautifully conceived. The whole impossible arrangement — the planet in defiance of physics, the black hole, the gravity field pinning everything in place — is the lock. The ancient Disciples of the Light chained the Beast here at the dawn of time and made the planet its jailer: kill the body and the entire system collapses into the black hole, taking the prisoner with it. It’s an elegant, awful trap, and it hands the Doctor an impossible choice. To end the Beast he has to shatter the prison, and shattering the prison means dropping the planet — and anyone still on it — into oblivion.

The Doctor’s Leap of Faith

Here’s where the episode earns its title. Faced with a thing claiming to be Satan himself, older than creation, the keeper of every devil-myth humanity ever whispered, the Doctor is forced to confront the limits of his own certainty. He’s a man of science and reason, and this creature is daring him to admit that some things sit outside both. All through the story the Beast has been getting inside people’s heads — whispering their private fears and failings back at them, needling every crew member with the worst thing they secretly believe about themselves. When it turns that weapon on the Doctor, it goes for the one foundation he stands on: the conviction that the universe runs on rules he can, in principle, understand. That’s the real battleground of the episode — not claws and fire, but whether the Doctor’s entire way of seeing the world can survive contact with something that claims to predate it. His response is one of the finest speeches the revived show has given us. He doesn’t claim to have it all figured out — he freely admits he doesn’t know what the Beast really is, or whether it’s telling the truth about the time before time. But he knows what he believes in. He believes in the people around him. He believes, above all, in Rose. It’s the culmination of everything that quiet, marooned conversation about a life together was circling in part one, and of a bond that’s deepened all season long, ever since the pair of them lay grinning in the apple grass back in New Earth. And that faith — not certainty, faith — is enough to make him take the gamble.

It’s a genuinely thoughtful bit of writing, and Tennant sells every word of it. The Doctor works out the trap’s cruel logic and chooses to spring it: he smashes the ancient urns that keep the body imprisoned, freeing the Beast’s mindless shell to die as the planet begins its long fall into the black hole. He’s betting everything on the belief that Rose and the crew can get clear in time — and that the mind of the Beast, wherever it’s hiding, will die with them if he times it right. He can’t prove any of it. He just believes.

Rose Takes Charge

While the Doctor is having his reckoning below, the episode remembers that Rose Tyler is a hero in her own right, and gives her the other half of the win. Up on the base, the Ood are butchering the crew on the Beast’s command, and it’s Rose who holds the survivors together, who refuses to be left behind when Zach tries to bundle her onto the escape rocket without the Doctor, and who works out the piece the Doctor can’t see from the bottom of a pit: the Beast’s mind is riding along with them, hidden inside Toby.

The payoff is fantastic. As the rocket claws its way up out of the dying system, Rose clocks the ancient markings crawling back across Toby’s face and hears the Beast sneering through his mouth — and she doesn’t hesitate. She grabs a bolt gun, blows the safety belt and the windscreen, and lets the vacuum rip Toby and the thing inside him out into space, straight down into the black hole. It’s the mirror of the Doctor’s own gamble: no certainty, no clever gadget, just a companion making a terrible call under pressure and being right. Everything Rose has grown into since she took the Doctor’s hand back in Rose is in that moment.

The Doctor, meanwhile, finds the TARDIS fallen to the bottom of the pit, scoops up Ida, and hauls the rocket free of the black hole’s pull at the last second. They get out. Not everyone does — Jefferson and Scooti are gone, and the Doctor is quietly haunted that he couldn’t save the Ood, dragged to their deaths serving a master they never chose. And he never does get a straight answer about what the Beast truly was. The episode is confident enough to leave the biggest question hanging in the dark where it belongs.

What The Satan Pit Leaves Us With

A muscular, thoughtful finale that turns a monster into a mirror. Here’s what it plants:

• Faith over certainty. The Doctor can’t solve the puzzle — so he chooses to believe in Rose anyway. The clearest statement yet of who this Doctor is.
• The unknowable stays unknown. Refusing to explain the Beast is a bold call, and it’s the right one. Some horrors are bigger when you never get the footnote.
• Rose, fully a hero. Her half of the rescue matches the Doctor’s beat for beat — the same leap of faith, made without him, and dead right.
• A cost that lingers. The dead crew and the doomed Ood aren’t waved away; the victory is real but it isn’t clean, and the Doctor carries it.
• A two-parter that delivers. Dread in part one, meaning in part two — together, one of the strongest stories the revived show has told.

Rating: 4.5/5 — A reveal that can’t quite out-scare the brilliant build of part one, but more than makes up for it with a story about belief that gives both the Doctor and Rose their finest hour. The speech alone is worth the price of admission.

Faith, a bottomless pit, and a companion who saves the day herself — “The Satan Pit” is Doctor Who thinking big and feeling deep at the same time. After all that darkness, I could do with something a bit lighter next. Wonder what the show’s got in store.

Sometimes Doctor Who wants to make you laugh, and sometimes it wants to scare the living daylights out of you. “The Impossible Planet” is firmly in the second camp — a slow, dread-soaked descent into the best kind of sci-fi horror, all clanging metal corridors and whispering shadows and a fear that gets right under the skin. After the retro fun of The Idiot’s Lantern, this is the show reaching for Alien and Event Horizon, and reaching them. It’s the first half of a two-parter, and by the time the cliffhanger hit I was genuinely rattled.

The Impossible Planet

The TARDIS materialises on Sanctuary Base 6, a cramped, functional research station bolted onto the surface of a planet that has no business existing. The world of Krop Tor sits in perfect, stable orbit around a black hole — a thing that should be physically impossible, since anything that close ought to have been ripped apart and swallowed long ago. Yet here it hangs, held in place by some vast unknown power source buried at its core, and a human expedition has come all this way to drill down and find out what’s generating it. The Doctor, reading the situation, is almost giddy with terror and wonder in equal measure: this shouldn’t be here, and he loves it, and it frightens him.

The visual of it is stunning. When the base’s great shutters roll back to reveal the black hole filling the entire sky — a churning maw of doomed, in-falling light — the show simply lets the crew, and us, stand and gape at it. It’s one of the most genuinely awe-inspiring images the series has managed on a BBC budget, and it doubles as a ticking clock: everything about this station is precarious, held together by bolts and back-up systems and luck, and you sense from the very first minute that it is not going to hold.

The base crew are one of the show’s better ensembles — Captain Zachary Cross Flane, the steady science officer Ida Scott, the jittery archaeologist Toby, ethics officer Danny, gruff security man Jefferson, and young Scooti. They’re ordinary working people a very long way from home, and the episode takes real care to make them feel lived-in before it starts putting them in danger. Serving them are the Ood, a new alien species — softly spoken, tentacle-faced telepaths who carry glowing translator orbs and exist, a little uncomfortably, to serve. “We must serve, we have nothing else in life,” one says, and the Doctor’s flicker of unease at that is well judged.

He Is Awake

Then the whispering starts. The Ood begin relaying messages that aren’t theirs: “He is awake.” “The Beast and his Legions shall rise from the Pit.” Something buried in the heart of this impossible world is stirring, and it is old — older, it claims, than the universe itself. It reaches into the mind of poor Toby first, scrawling ancient symbols across his skin and burning his eyes a hellish red, and it turns the placid Ood into a telepathic weapon, their translator readings climbing toward “the point of death.”

Director James Strong wrings every drop of tension out of the setup. The Beast’s messages arrive in fragments, half-heard over crackling comms, so you’re always leaning in and always a beat behind. It doesn’t announce itself with a big monster reveal; it seeps into the base through the people, one mind at a time, so that any face on the station might already belong to it. That creeping uncertainty — who’s still themselves, and who isn’t? — is far more frightening than anything with teeth.

What makes it work is how completely the episode commits to the horror. This isn’t a monster you can technobabble your way around; it’s a presence, an intelligence claiming to be the Devil himself, the thing every culture’s demon myth is a memory of. The Doctor — a man who prides himself on having an explanation for everything — is visibly wrong-footed, and Tennant plays that beautifully. When the possessed Toby’s power lashes out and young Scooti is lured to her death, sucked out through a cracked viewport into the void, the show makes it clear the stakes here are total. Nobody is safe, and the Doctor doesn’t have his usual head start.

No Way Home

And then it does the cruellest thing of all: it takes the TARDIS. A quake tears open the base, and the Ship tumbles down into a collapsed shaft, lost somewhere in the depths of a dying planet on the edge of a black hole. For once, there’s no easy way out — no dematerialise-and-flee. The Doctor has to sit with the possibility that he and Rose are simply stuck here, for good.

The scene that follows is my favourite in the episode, and it has nothing to do with monsters. The Doctor and Rose, marooned and scared, quietly talk about what a life without the TARDIS would even look like — getting a house, a mortgage, “the domestic approach,” the two of them just… living, somewhere, together. It’s tender and awkward and enormously revealing about where these two have ended up with each other, a world away from the giddy tourists who lay in the apple grass back in New Earth. The show doesn’t spell out what they are to one another. It doesn’t have to.

There’s a nice thread of continuity for eagle-eyed fans, too: this deep-future expedition is operating under the banner of the Torchwood Archive — the name Queen Victoria coined back in Tooth and Claw, turning up thousands of years later at the far end of space. Doctor Who is clearly building something with that word, and it’s fun to watch it surface where you least expect it.

With the drilling complete, the Doctor and Ida descend in a capsule to the planet’s core, to the source of the impossible power. The drop down the shaft is pure horror-movie grammar — the rattling little pod, the fathomless dark, their torch beams swallowed whole by a cavern far too vast to light. At the bottom they find an enormous sealed trapdoor, an ancient disc-shaped lid over a pit with no mechanism and no way in — and then, against every instinct screaming at them to leave it well alone, it grinds open of its own accord, revealing a shaft that plunges down toward the literal heart of the world. Some doors, you sense, were never meant to be opened.

What The Impossible Planet Leaves Us With

A masterclass in mounting dread that sets its trap with real patience. Here’s what it plants:

• Genuine, grown-up horror. Isolated base, dwindling crew, an ancient evil in the dark — the show hasn’t been this frightening in a long time, and it never blinks.
• A Doctor out of his depth. Faced with something that claims to predate creation, the man with an answer for everything has no answer, and his fear is the scariest thing in the episode.
• The Ood arrive. A new servant species whose forced servility the episode quietly refuses to let us feel comfortable about — and who make for deeply unnerving villains once the Beast gets hold of them.
• The Doctor and Rose, laid bare. Stripped of the TARDIS, the two of them contemplate an ordinary life together, and it’s the most honest their relationship has ever looked.
• That word again. The Torchwood Archive’s cameo keeps a season-long thread quietly ticking along at the edge of the frame.

Rating: 4.5/5 — Atmospheric, intelligent, and properly scary, with a stranded-Doctor angle that raises the stakes higher than any monster could. One of the best-directed hours the revived show has produced, and a superb first half.

The pit is open, the Ood have turned, Toby’s eyes are burning, and something enormous is rising up out of the dark toward the Doctor. That’s where they leave us. I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted next week to arrive faster.