The Satan Pit by: Matt Jones

 

The Satan Pit was written by: Matt Jones, based on his episodes “The Impossible Planet” and the episode of the same name.  It was the 202^nd story to be novelized by BBC Books.

 

It’s no secret that the BBC decision to continue novelizations of the revival is one mainly aimed at the fans of Doctor Who.  The home media market already started to make the novelizations at least partially obsolete in the late 1980s, and by the time of the revival in 2005 and streaming video being just around the corner, there was no reason to really continue them.  That means that often the best of these revival novelizations do something to set themselves apart from just a standard retelling of the original episode.  Matt Jones’ The Satan Pit takes the approach of not centering the Doctor and Rose, instead telling the story near exclusively after the fact from the perspective of the three survivors with one interlude, placed just after the adaptation of “The Impossible Planet” from the perspectives of the detective and corporate representative interrogating our protagonists, and one scene from the perspective of the Doctor for the actual confrontation with the Beast.  That latter scene is the closest the novel gets to Jones just taking the script and translating it into straight prose, though he is very much interested in exploring the Doctor’s love of Rose Tyler through subtle amendments to the dialogue tags, channeling David Tennant’s performance into the prose.  This should annoy me, the Doctor in my mind should be an asexual character, however, Jones sells it particularly well because it’s one of those romances where “I love you” isn’t actually said.  There’s also the insecurity that the Doctor isn’t able to get Rose back home, he did promise her mother and it is eating him up from the inside.  Jones makes it explicit that the Beast is psychically enhancing everybody’s fears and trauma’s on the base, including the Doctor emphasizing the Doctor as fallable but not human.  His mind may work differently, but he is against something far bigger than him.

 

Jones is also careful about when he gives the Doctor his scene, instead of putting it in chronological order, it’s moved towards the end.  Ida, Danny, and Zach have actually finished their individual interrogations and we as the audience see a portion of their trial.  For the reader this has the effect of a mysterious resolution, theoretically we don’t know exactly how they got out, especially Ida who was unconscious for the climax of the story.  There was a possibility of ending it before the trial, and letting the audience not know the fate of the three, even if Big Finish Productions have brought them all back in their Torchwood range.  The trial sequence does make up for it in general.  Jones brings in ideas from “Planet of the Ood”, that the Ood are actually freed by the Doctor and Donna in between the end of “The Satan Pit” and the survivors making it back to Earth, and The End of Time, with the psychic link of the Ood to the Doctor specifically near the end of his life and the visit to people the Tenth Doctor had previously met included as an epilogue.

 

The Satan Pit’s worldbuilding is its biggest success.  Because we are in the heads of the supporting characters, many of the scenes that are just the Doctor and Rose that couldn’t be overheard are either omitted completely or are trimmed down to what could theoretically be on security cameras.  This makes the pair more distant and the supporting characters, especially Ida and Danny, as our real humans here.  Their traumas are always just below the surface of the mind, the Beast bringing them there for as long as they’ve been on the base, even before the beginning of the story.  It also adds this pressure of a society not so much on the brink of collapse, but one built on a capitalistic empire.  The interrogations take the events of the story as ridiculous, something cooked up between the three survivors for some unknown and frankly impossible game.  Jones uses it to reflect the current system of capitalism, stretched quite thin while being under the thumb of corporations who only care about the capital and not the human life.  Jones also posits an almost religious like fanaticism forming around the Doctor because of the destruction of property which while slightly silly feels almost like a commentary on certain aspects of internet culture.

 

Overall, The Satan Pit is a riveting read.  There is a sense that Jones isn’t actually writing for Doctor Who fans, which makes sense as he has written books that are meant to be for the general public even if they were technically spin-offs.  Swapping out the protagonists means the novel is a fundamentally different experience, with the focus on different aspects of the story and the society in which it is set and reflecting upon.  It changes much of the horror to work in the prose setting over two episodes of television.  10/10.