It's currently January 2011. The last time I saw this two-parter, prior to this weekend, was probably back in the spring of 2008 (though I may have watched the first part again that summer). Therefore, the things I remembered going in were:
It has Satan in it.
It has Sutekh in it (Gabriel Woolf plays the voice of the Beast; he was Sutekh in Pyramids of Mars).
It's an Alien knockoff, which is truly tragic when one considers that Alien is just The Ark In Space with a tiny bit of feminism and a better budget.
It has a security officer named Mr. Jefferson who, though he has a fairly pointless death (but a fairly awesome death scene), stood out as the most memorable character.
Oddly enough, on re-watching it I decided to play the Plinkett Challenge. If you've ever seen RedLetterMedia's review of The Phantom Menace, you know what I'm talking about: describe a character without mentioning how they look or what job they had. For example: Han Solo was a cocky jerk with a heart of gold (eventually). Mr. Jefferson: ...uh...
This is good acting: I'm assuming the script said nothing more than "Mr. Jefferson is a security chief who had some undefined problem with his wife." But actor Danny Webb took that little bit of one-dimensional characterization and ran with it, and made "...death by Ood" my favorite line in this two-parter.
But really, there aren't characters here (complaint 1). There's the Acting Captain, the Possessed Guy, the Older Woman, the Geek, the Security Chief, a couple of Nameless Redshirts, and the Chick Who Dies 20 Minutes In. And on top of that travesty, it took the production team 2 years to realize that the Doctor would have a problem with the Ood being a slave race (complaint 2). Good grief. Maybe it's because the new guy goes on and on with his speeches and refuses to take anything seriously.
Which brings us to Complaint 3: there's nothing for the Doctor to do in "The Satan Pit" other than make four (count 'em!) speeches, jump down a pit, and destroy an urn. All the action is happening upstairs. Now granted, it's a ton of techning the tech and running down corridors, but this is what Nu Who does. (Hell, it's what Old Who does too.)
I wonder if Ten would have been so fantastically anti-gun if he'd been upstairs when the sh*t hit the fan (cf. "The Doctor's Daughter"), and the answer is probably "yeah, why not."
Anyway, other complaints: Rose is an extra dose of annoying; this is going to be par for the course from here on out. Somehow, Buffy could take charge of a situation without sounding like she was trying to be her boyfriend... oh wait, that's because the show was about her. Having Rose try to just channel the Doctor seems like a big step back from Buffy, which is odd for a show that so heavily plunders Buffy's techniques.
Then there's the scene where the Doctor realizes he'll have to get a house (and a mortgage), and Rose suggests they share one. Yeah. You are the same Rose Tyler who sat through "School Reunion," yeah? And then "The Girl in the Fireplace?" Unless your brain is literally the size of a pea, you have to realize after going through those two back-to-back that "happily ever after" is not what the Doctor has in mind for your relationship. (Hey, at least Rose never begs the Doctor to bite her so she doesn't grow old and die. Yeah, I just tried to defend this plot by comparing it to Twilight; you know things aren't looking good for this episode.)
Next (or actually first): The Only Black Man is the Acting Captain because the Real Captain died in the landing. Um... what? When in the entire history of the show has anyone, ever, died in a rocket landing???
Yeah, I'm thinking Planet of the Daleks, and that is not something you want ever brought up in comparison to anything else, ever.
Finally: Jefferson's idiotic death. The moment he starts shooting at the Ood in the vent shafts, you know he's not going to make it. The Acting Captain yells at him to get moving, but he's so determined to hold the line, so he doesn't, not until he's all out of ammo and time. For a character that has thus far behaved so calmly and rationally, this just smacks of bad writing. On top of that, the entire vent shaft sequence doesn't make sense. Consider: Jefferson gets stuck at section 8.1 because Flane has to open 8.2. There are no doors between 8.2 and 9.1. Behind 9.1 are Ood; when 9.1 opens, Rose and the others go up. They push away some wire mesh and go up. Last time I checked, wire mesh isn't airtight. So Rose, in between 8.2 and 9.1, is not relying on the limited air that Flane can move around (which he does through, um, quantum). Ergo, there is no reason in the Universe why Flane can't re-fill 8.1-8.2, open 8.1, and save Jefferson. Impossible planet indeed.
Lastly, the villain of this episode is, in case you missed it, Satan himself (probably). But David Tennant treats this threat like he would any other golf ball in front of a green screen. No, that's not a dig at the cringe-worthy effects. This is a Doctor who utterly refuses to take anything seriously (unless it's a human being wielding a gun). Even Tom Baker was capable of the occasional bit of moral outrage. (Tom Baker had the advantage of never getting to face CGI monsters [with the possible and inane exception of The Stones of Blood], and usually instead had an actor in bad makeup to play off of.) But David Tennant just laughs in the monster's face, monologues a bit about how he believes in Rose, and waltzes merrily on his way. His fear (and therefore drama) -less confrontation with the Beast is at tremendous odds with his earlier performance on the lip of the pit, where he actually demonstrates trepidation for quite possibly the only time in his run.
"The Impossible Planet": 5 out of ten for a halfway decent setup but a truly lame cliffhanger (something is rising out of the pit OMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! Next episode: jk).
"The Satan Pit": 3 out of 10 for giving the Doctor nothing to do for the better part of the episode, except be totally insincere to what should have been the greatest threat he ever faced.
Go read more snark about other episodes here.
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