A spaceship in deep, deep space. A crew plagued by horrific visions preying on their worst fears. An ancient, malevolent force that threatens to break out of its prison, and brutally slaughter anyone standing in its way. It’s the ominous and grim premise that turned Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1997 sci-fi horror Event Horizon into a cult classic, and which spawned many copycats and homages. And one of those from a TV show you’d least expect to do a riff on a Paul W.S. Anderson gorefest: the Doctor Who Season 2 episodes “The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit.”
In “The Impossible Planet” and “The Satan Pit,” which aired on June 3 and June 10, 2006, respectively, the Doctor (David Tennant) and Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) land on a sanctuary base for deep space expeditions. But this isn’t just deep space — they’re at a far-off corner of the universe that houses no other life for thousands of miles. And this isn’t just any old sanctuary base — it’s on an unnamed planet that is impossibly orbiting a black hole. But things only get stranger from there: as the two explore, they find writing on the wall saying “Welcome to Hell,” along with ancient, untranslatable characters. It turns out the skeleton crew on the base arrived there because of the impossible existence of this planet — some great energy source is generating a gravity funnel that keeps it from being sucked into the planet, and that allowed them to fly safely in. They’ve been drilling for miles into the planet to find the source of this energy, and they’ve finally almost reached it. But then, that’s where things take a turn for the worse.
