Season 2, Episode 9: The Impossible Planet
Doctor Who and Rose hubristically land somewhere, laughing the very thought that anything could go wrong for them. Then, they lose the TARDIS, and are stuck on a doomed mining station, situated under a black hole, staffed by cthulu butlers and a motley crew of humans. The legend that this asteroid/planet they are mining is an evil planet comes true, and their slave butlers attempt to murder them (not because of like dissatisfaction at being slaves, but more because some sort of satan being is possessing them).
Band Name of the Episode:
Today's winner is “Gravity Globe” (runner up: “The Blazen Scale”). I imagine it is either some sort of knockoff Radiohead type band, or maybe like a pop-friendly twist on shoegaze music.
Rose and the Doctor step out of the TARDIS and make some sort of joke that I don’t get. I suspect it is just meant to show that they are cavalier, so that the loss of the tardis is punishment for their Hubris, but maybe there was more to it.
OH BY THE WAY, THEY ARE IN OUTER SPACE!
Really. They are on an asteroid 500 light years or more from earth. And there are aliens there! And a black hole! And did I mention that they were in outer space?
So the TARDIS can’t translate random ancient runes, meaning the runes are “impossibly old”.
Oh also, this Sanctuary Base (located in outer space) houses CTHULU MONSTERS!
The Cthulu monsters can only say “We must feed” on repeat. Because the writers for this show are like one of those small horses with an extremely limited repertoire of maneuvers.
Seriously, bad guys can be menacing without walking towards you repeating a random word or phrase, I promise!
HAHA, but no, this was a reverse “how to serve man” (spoiler warning). Because, see, they were trying to say “we must feed you if you are hungry” not threatening to eat you.
This misdirect would be better if it weren’t kind of silly, and also if the phrasing weren’t so absurdly forced.
But we learn that the CTHULU MONSTERS are actually CTHULU BUTLERS.
So, people are very surprised that new humans are on board. They decide to act really sassy about it, though, and keep being like, “wait, you’re not joking, you don’t know where we are?” instead of telling them where we are.
THEY AREN’T JOKING. I PROMISE. JUST TELL THEM (US) WHERE THEY ARE!
They open the viewport and we learn that the space station is orbiting…the eye of sauron, I guess?
They say it is a blackhole, but since it is on fire and really bright, I suspect they are wrong.
At this point in the episode, I was hoping they were in purgatory, or literally in hell or something. Though, I guess I shouldn’t do that, since it would mean they weren’t actually in outer space.
There is some legend about this planet. The planet is called “the bitter pill” (seriously?) and apparently the black hole ate it, and then spit it out. But in that legend the black hole *was* a demon, rather than the bitter pill being a demon? So, whatever.
They say something weird about a gravity funnel or a gravity cone. I didn’t quite follow it, but I guess it was doing three things: a) keeping the planet in orbit, b) letting ships approach the planet, and c) in principle letting ships leave the planet without getting sucked into the black hole.
Oh, there was a like roll call for the whole crew, but I mostly tuned that out. The captain died, so there is an acting captain (who I really like, and suspect will die for that reason), and also an ethics committee guy, among like, six others.
The first thing we learn about the ethics committee guy is that he is perfectly happy with people having slave butlers. So, I suspect he is shitty at his job.
Rose asks one of the crewmembers (who is being melodramatic) if their job is chief dramatist. Nice burn, Rose!
And then we learn that the TARDIS was in a part of the ship that collapsed, and is gone.
Doctor Who basically orders the people to stop their drill operation to help him find the TARDIS, and seems to expect that people will just drop everything and do what he says.
I am going to guess that this is the THIRD great and bountiful human empire. But I have no reason for guessing that.
Ok, so at this point, everything starts going very “Event Horizon”. I won’t recap it all, but there are voices, seeming hallucinations, etc.
Oh oh, I've got it: Event WHOrizon.
Rose tries making small talk to a Cthulu Butler, and is awful at it.
The Cthulu butler responds by sounding like a crazy end-times prophet. So at that point I was thinking “maybe the opening misdirect was a double bluff?”
The event horizon antics continue, out the wazoo, until the archeologist guy turns around to look at the creepy voice talking behind him, and then starts seeing the ancient runes all over his body and dies.
Or not dies, I guess, just passes out and then wakes up possessed by the runes.
Rose and the Doctor talk about what they’d do if they escape the station but don’t find the TARDIS and it seems like they are playing up a romance angle here, and so I hate that.
Rose remembers her magic cell phone for once!!
Has it ever come in useful? No!
Its main function is to be forgotten or not work.
The Doctor reminds Rose that he promised her mom he’d always bring her back. Way to make reckless promises you had no idea if you could keep, Doctor Hubris.
Now Rose’s phone goes all event horizon.
By the way, all this event horizon stuff really seems to be going for a “you are close to waking up satan” vibe.
Evil Toby can apparently go outside without a spacesuit. He tricks a crewmember into watching him out the window, then he murders her with his psychic window breaking powers.
In the resulting chaos, Toby makes it back inside and looks normal again, but Scooti (the now-dead crewmember) is missing. They track her bio chip to habitat 3, but it turns out she is just floating on the exterior window of that room.
If it turns out that Doctor Who has met whatever evil monster thing this is before, I am going to be very upset that he didn’t recognize any of the tell-tale signs in this episode.
The guy playing the acting captain is doing a yoeman’s job with this role. I approve of him wholeheartedly.
No one notices that Toby is acting all weird, and the Doctor and some other crew member go down to the bottom of the drilling to investigate whatever nonsense brought these people here in the first place.
Rose gets on the com to tell Doctor who to remember to breathe. There was no indication that he was on the verge of forgetting. Acting Captain correctly tells her to shut the fuck up.
The spelunkers use a “Gravity Globe” which, I guess, is just a chinese lantern you can throw in the air and it suspends itself and lights up?
Anyway, they find the ruins of a civilization for giant people (at least all the stuff they see is huge), including a giant metal manhole cover, presumably keeping the evil being at bay.
The Cthulu Butlers start behaving the way you’d expect if they are about to get possessed by the evil presence.
Evil Toby tries to do some mental intimidation by knowing stuff about the chief of security, asking and answering his own questions. This gets tiresome quickly, so the runes come off his face and go into the cthulu butlers.
Even though people have guns trained on them, no one even attempts to shoot the now-menacing cthulu butlers.
Seriously, one of them uses its translation device to stone cold face murder some dude, and no one reacts by trying to fight back.
The manhole cover goes through a very elaborate opening process, and the episode ends with someone (Satan?) laughing evilly.
The Many Uses of the Sonic Screwdriver:
Was not pulled out even once this episode, I don’t think.
The Doctor doesn’t seem that upset about the slaves. I guess I don’t know if that is in character or out of character for him, so instead, the top gripe is this:
No one on the ship was sufficiently curious about how Rose and the Doctor got there. Like, just imagine you are on a submarine deep underwater. You know that the doors have not been opened. Suddenly, there are people on board who weren’t there previously. You’d freak the fuck out. You’d want to know how that happened. If they said, “oh I have a ship that just sort of appears and disappears from places” you wouldn’t be like, “cool, then, guess we’ll just show you around.”
Now, heighten that times like a billion, because this is an outer space location at the edge of a black hole. Why doesn’t anyone care?
But that’s maybe not a legitimate “top gripe”, so I’ll do this one instead: this show is frequently clumsy with tone shifts. If you are going to try to pull a claustrophobic event horizon plotline, which is an excellent idea, you need to do it right. You need to make sure that the lighting isn’t quite so even and bright. You need to make sure that every line we hear from the crew that’s been on the ship conveys their exhaustion and isolation. They don’t all have to react the same. Maybe some of them react with deep suspicion to Rose and the Doctor, maybe some react with glee at seeing more people, people who haven’t been worn down by this doomed mining mission. The cthulu butlers should be more perfunctory and less friendly, or their friendliness should somehow come across as more ominous. The event horizon antics should be subtle at first, and escalate slowly.
This episode was decent enough, for the most part (as you’ll see when I take up my “anything nice”, but I feel like it was aiming to be unsettling in the way that The Empty Child was, or even just the beginning of The Girl in the Fireplace (before the clockwork robots started talking). Instead, it was more like, “I’d watch a sitcom about this wacky crew of miners and their cthulu butler slaves”.
What about me? I'd have to get one too. I dunno, could... could be the same one, we could both...
The Doctor looks at her - she catches his eye.
I dunno... share. Or not, you know. Whatever.
So, the line is supposed to be painful/awkward, because it is supposed to be like, Rose and the Doctor, unsure of their relationship, is it romantic is it not? Who knows! Aren’t you on the edge of your seat?
But instead it is painful because I am sitting here thinking, “wow, you are really trying to make this romantic/sexual tension between Rose and the Doctor thing happen. it’s just not going to happen.” So I felt embarassed for the writers, rather than embarassed for Rose and the Doctor.
Velveeta. There was a lot about this that might seem cheesey, but the actual cheesiness is pretty low.
The zero point of platypus, I guess. There was nothing especially inscrutable about this episode. I mean, there’s the mystery of who is in the pit (protip: it is space satan), but apart from ‘why didn’t they start shooting the cthulu butlers’, things more or less made sense.
This episode did not enrage me. My top gripes are legitimate gripes, but more or less, this episode was fine. It wasn’t great, for the reasons outlined, but it wasn’t bad. Some of the jokes landed, some of them didn’t, but on the whole, if the series were one I generally enjoyed, this would be a perfectly fine part of that. Of course, as with all two parters, much retroactive damage can be done by a bad resolution of the two parter. But on the whole, I am very mildly in favor of this episode.
Don’t worry, I haven’t gone soft on the show. It is very unlikely that this episode marks my turning a corner on things. I think it is just a surprisingly decent episode.
