The Satan Pit

Dear Gary—

There are two whoppingly glaring faults in The Satan Pit that totally deflate any sense of tension, threat, and meaning.

One. The group on the run enters and exits the ventilation shafts through open air grating. Those tunnels that they are racing through and that the Acting Captain is frantically aerating are hardly airtight.

Two. The Beast in the Pit is out of the pit before it is even open. In the previous episode he was not only possessing Toby, the Ood, and the computer system, he was talking directly to people. And as the Doctor discovers, it is only a body, a great beastly body to be sure but still only a body that is tethered below. “The devil is an idea,” the Doctor reckons. “But an idea is hard to kill; an idea could escape.” Could and did escape. The beast, the real beast, hasn’t been in the pit for some time.

But you know, Gary, I just don’t care.

The Satan Pit is packed with tension, threat, and meaning despite the holes. And it all comes down to a matter of faith. (The devil is an idea after all.)

Rose, Danny, Jefferson, and Toby believe there is no air in those tunnels; Zach believes he is diverting air for his crewmates; I believe in the peril they face. The actors and the director and the editors all do their job convincingly; so what if someone fell down on the job and lined the shafts with those grills. (And by the way so what if the Ood seem to be able to survive in both aerated and non-aerated sections with no problem.) I can almost believe that there is some invisible coating over those grates that hermetically seal them shut.

Then there is the devil in the pit. Much fanfare is given to the opening of the pit at the end of The Impossible Planet. The ground shakes, the planet moves, the trap door opens, and the voice proclaims, “The pit is open and I am free!” Now the Doctor and Ida stand before the chasm as calm returns and there is nothing; no beast emerging, no hellish screams from below, no fire and brimstone; just a great gaping bottomless hole in the ground. And that is scarier than a hundred horned monsters ascending.

The fault, Gary, lies not in the fact that the pit is empty or that the beast has already escaped. The problem is that Doctor Who has chained the beast in that pit in the first place.

Satan is a slippery little devil, hard to pin down; an idea; the idea behind the myth; the idea behind all of the myths on all of the planets. Weapons are useless against such a being. Guns and bullets, fire, explosives, bombs. Nothing of a physical nature can ever prevail against such a threat. Not even chains, a pit, and a black hole.

Faith, and faith alone, will succeed. The Satan Pit explores faith; the nature of faith; the multifaceted aspects of faith. It is provocative and compelling and rich in its telling. And yet ultimately Doctor Who has no faith. Ultimately Doctor Who takes chains to the beast and tries to pin him down. In so doing it forgets that the Devil has already slipped those chains, if indeed they ever did hold him.

This is an impossible planet and the crew has lived with impossibilities as fact; the Doctor has accepted the impossibilities as fact. They believe the impossible because they see the impossible. Satan, the Doctor states, is impossible. “I accept that you exist,” the Doctor says when confronting the giant creature chained at the bottom. “I don’t have to accept what you are,” he continues, “but your physical existence, I’ll give you that.” It is not the Doctor but Doctor Who that has given him that, his physical existence. A great hulking physical existence chained to the bottom of a pit; no longer impossible because it can be seen; it can be pinned down; it can be killed.

A point of digression here, Gary. Horrors of the mind are always the most effective; Doctor Who has dabbled with this in the past; but Doctor Who always reverts to the tangible. Recent case in point, the Wire in that horrid little thing called The Idiot’s Lantern.  Now the Wire didn’t exactly exist in the mind, but it was confined to wavelengths and fed on the activity of the brain. In this ethereal existence it was most terrifying. Its sole goal, however, was to obtain its corporeal form, and the Doctor’s aim was to prevent this.  Who knows but that once more flesh and blood the Wire might have been satisfied and left Earth forever more. Or not; we’ll never know. But no matter how big or bad or ugly it would have become, it couldn’t be scarier than when it was sucking people’s minds dry.

Same can be said for this devil of an idea. Yet there he is before the Doctor. Very big. Very bad. Very ugly. And very impotent. All he can do is growl and snap and snarl at the Doctor. And all the Doctor can do is deny his existence, despite being growled and snapped and snarled at. Because what he is denying is not the growling and snapping and snarling, but the idea; the ethereal; the theory. The growling and the snapping and the snarling are real but the Doctor can do nothing because the concept is somewhere out there and he can’t grasp it.

The idea, the escaped intelligence behind the beastly body, is the real threat and it is not in the pit. It isn’t even residing in Toby or the Ood alone. The whispers are all around them and one by one their darkest fears are exploited. “The Captain, so scared of command. The soldier, so haunted by the eyes of his wife. The scientist, still running from daddy. The little boy who lied. The virgin. And the lost girl, so far away from home. The valiant child who will die in battle so very soon.” One by one the mark hits home. All cylinders are clicking in this scene. With just those brief lines and subtle acting we gain insight of and sympathy for each individual and we share their overwhelming sense of dread.

Such a powerful presence cannot be confined by chains in a pit. Not only can it take possession of a body, not to mention multiple bodies at once, but it can exist outside of a body. Rose might think she is sending the devil to hell in the black hole, but that is really only Toby. The thing inside of Toby, I have no doubt, is not defeated and certainly not destroyed.

The most effective weapon over such a creature is faith. The Doctor realizes this and tries to calm the panicked crew before he is cut off by the canny beast. Rose picks up from the Doctor and her rally the troops approach is one of her best moments. Finding the strength within, each rises to the occasion.

Communication cut off from the crew, the Doctor and Ida are left to their own musings about what evil lies below or within. “I am the temptation.” There it is again, that scary idea that cannot be confronted on the physical plane. And so the Doctor gives in to the dark whispers, or faces them with a leap of faith.

The Doctor abseils down the pit while Ida sits forlorn at the edge, and the two isolated souls share their deepest beliefs and non-beliefs.

“My old mum,” Ida reflects, the strong pull of a lifetime of memories reaching her in those dark caverns. “But no, I never believed.” The words speak her loneliness at that moment.

“I believe . . . I believe I haven’t seen everything,” the Doctor muses. “I don’t know. It’s funny, isn’t it? The things you make up?” The Doctor has made up his own rules, his own religion. The beast in the pit is challenging those rules. “Still, that’s why I keep traveling,” the Doctor concludes. “To be proved wrong.”

The two lost souls connecting through the desolate airwaves, and then they too are parted. The Doctor crashes to the bottom and is on his own. And that is only fitting; faith is a solo act; it can only be found in the deepest core of one’s being.

Except this is where Doctor Who loses faith and we have the giant creature in the pit. Confronted with the impossible made real, the Doctor looks into the deepest core of his being and comes up with Rose. The cult of Rose. The sect of Rose. Channeling this bizarre belief and faith and religion of Rose the Doctor decides that the only way to defeat the beast is to destroy his body, which means sending the planet into the black hole along with everything and everyone surrounding it. The beast, the planet, the things, the people all obliterated; the idea, the concept, the mind, the intelligence, the horror, the evil, the temptation,  the sin, the desire, the pain, the loss—none of it touched by the breaking of the urns, none of it flung into the nothingness of the black hole.

And so the beast in the pit is just that—a beast. Nothing more. Not Abaddon; not Kroptor; not Satan; not Lucifer; not the Bringer of Despair; not the Deathless Prince; not the Bringer of Night. He is a great hulking beast; all growl and snap and snarl; big and bad and ugly; nothing more. No more, no less than a Dalek, a Cyberman, an Ice Warrior, a Fendahl, a Krynoid, or a Haemovore.

As a reward for his monumental faith, the Doctor Who deus ex TARDIS comes to the rescue and all but the Ood (and Toby and Jefferson and Scooti and the red shirts) are saved.

The devil of it is, Gary, The Satan Pit works. It is one hell of a thrill ride, gripping the imagination in horror, and provoking profound thought. I suspend my disbelief and faithfully leap headlong into the story.

 The devil of it is, Gary, I like it. And that is why I keep traveling . . .