8️⃣🔼 → VERY GOOD!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

THIRD IMPRESSIONS: “THE IMPOSSIBLE PLANET”

They begin the episode right off the bat with that smug moment in front of the TARDIS. Blergh!

Fortunately, though, the focus quickly switches to some effectively creepy and fascinatingly sci-fi stuff—impossibly old wiring on the wall and whispery voices speaking to the weak-minded; a space station on a barren rock orbiting a black hole; and the introduction of one of the more successful aliens in Nu Who: the spaghetti-faced telepathic Sensorite cousins known as the Ood.

The worn-out space station and its crew are one of the more successful and memorable ones seen in the revival (together with Bowie Base One in The Waters of Mars). The fact that we spend a good amount of time with most of them helps to flesh out the crew members.

Themes of slavery are explored through the Ood, a race living to serve. It's not a very deep-cut commentary, though, and is returned to in Planet of the Ood in Series 4.

The episode largely plays with traditional Doctor Who stuff: a base crew partaking in a revolutionary project that goes horribly wrong; the Doctor losing access to the TARDIS; evil powers from before time and space uncovered and possessing people. But it does all of that while effectively building a tense atmosphere and consistently planting hints as to who or what the big bad is.

Silas Carson is the OG voice for the Ood, and he’s already perfect at it from the onset.

The one and only Gabriel Woolf, arguably one of the best actors to ever have played a Doctor Who villain, returns here to voice the Beast (joining the exclusive club of actors who have worked on both the classic and new versions of the show). That cold and menacing voice of his is just as effective as it was back in 1976, when he played Sutekh in Pyramids of Mars.

David Tennant and Billie Piper are fine when focused on the main plot points and interacting with the guest cast, but when left alone talking about mortgages and the like, they fall to that annoying smugness again, and I cringe all the way through those scenes.

They use very simple methods to make the possessed Toby creepy, but it definitely works. That writing all over his body and the red eyes, followed by his destructive actions, tell us all we need to know about the nature of the threat.

The latter half of the episode brilliantly builds up to one of the more memorable cliffhanger reveals in Nu Who: the Ood suddenly turning into killers; the creepy voice of Gabriel Woolf announcing the arrival of the Beast; and finally, the trapp door to the Satan Pit opening…