Doctor Who: The Impossible Planet
I just watched The Impossible Planet. After some thought, my conclusion is that it was very good, but I didn't like it. Explanations, and spoilers, follow.
Essentially, if I wanted to watch claustrophobic scifi horror in the style of Alien, Deep Six, or the like, I know where to find it. It was very well done, although there were the usual plausibility issues - the people on the station took the arrival of two people in a science outpost in a near-impossible to reach part of space with near perfect calm, for instance, which was, well, silly. And then there was the part where the loss of the Tardis was just accepted - no attempt to, for instance, go out in a spacesuit and see where it went.
Atmosphere-wise, it was excellent. I just happen not to like that particular atmosphere.
It also seemed to be loaded with references to other settings and series. The corridors looked faintly Firefly-esque (some of the music was headed that way too). The rooms in the station looked like, of all things, Red Dwarf. There was a definite resemblence to Deep Six in places. The black hole looked like the Eye of Sauron, and the cave deep in the planet had aspects of Moria about it. And of course, there was the whole biblical thing, but that was front and centre.
In general, I can't slight the quality, but the content left me uneasy. I suppose that's what they were after.
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Posted by Drew Shiel at June 6, 2006 12:26 AM
