02x09 - Religion and Myth

[bunniefuu]

'He's seen off some disturbing
creatures in this series so far.

'But this time
The Doctor is going to hell and back

'to see off a terrifying enemy
who challenges his own beliefs.'

It's nice when you have
a bit of a know-it-all...
I'm very good.

..to every now and then
throw him a curve ball.

It's fears of the dark,
fears of the Devil.

It's terrifying.

Fire!

'Here we go then, and action!'

It's an action-packed episode.

The set was designed
so we could elevate it,

so literally we could feel
that weight of gravity on them.

When we shake it, they actually
feel like it's got movement to it.

It was great actually,

for the performances, because
it WAS claustrophobic, it was nasty,

you couldn't move.

It felt a threatening space.

We were all doing
this shaky-chair acting,

pretending that we're taking off.

Yeah, good fun, don't get
to sit in the driver's seat,
bit upset about that but never mind.

I'm getting to fly a spaceship,

I'm on a planet
dragged towards some black hole...

LIFT OFF!!!

THEY SCREAM

And we're having to do
lots of hyperventilating,

lots of Kirk acting,
lots of Star Trek acting,

and I've always wanted to do that!

I'm not going to be in a Star Wars,
and I missed being a Hobbit,

so this is the next best thing.

I am the rage
and the vile and the ferocity.

I am the Prince,
the fool, the agony.

I am the sin, and the fear
and the darkness.

What is he? What the hell is he?

Rose is trapped in a spaceship
with four crew and
this completely...this crazed man.

I shall never die,
the thought of me is forever,

in the bleeding hearts of men.

I am vanity, obsession and lust.

Nothing shall ever destroy me.
Nothing.

Go to hell!

I've worked out a system
when I can rehearse where I can stand
and look through the window.

We've still lost the gravity funnel.

We can't escape the black hole.

Arghhh!

As we've got to read in bits,
by accident we've worked out a system

where we can hear what they're saying
and talk to them through a lip mic.

First human beings to fall inside a
black hole!

What about that?!

History.

Shaking gets worse...

It's getting really bad...

Going in...

And calm.

What happened?

We're turning.

We're turning around.

We're turning away.

Sorry about the hijack, Captain,
this is the good ship TARDIS.

Now, firstly,
have you got a Rose Tyler on board?

I'm here! It's me! Oh my God!

Where are you?

I'm just towing you home.

His default mechanism
is to believe that everything
has a scientific explanation.

That thing that said it came from
beyond the universe, I'd believe it,

but before the universe? Impossible.

I think he believes
in what he can see,

and what he can understand,
and what is tangible.

That's partly why
I wanted to do the Satan bit,

was to take a rational man
and to challenge his beliefs.

What did 'before time' mean?

ALL: Before time, and light,
and space and matter.

Before the cataclysm.

Before this universe was created.

That's impossible. No life
could have existed back then.

Is that your religion?

It's a belief.

The best thing you can do
with The Doctor,
and with an actor like David Tennant,

is to keep pushing the character,
to put him in areas
where he's not comfortable,

and to find out
how The Doctor survives.

The Doctor under pressure
is the finest Doctor of all.

If you are the beast
then answer me this, which one, hmm?

Cos the universe has been busy
since you've been gone.

There's more religions
than planets in the sky.

You start to see a Doctor that,
I think, is wondering whether or not
this is something so intangible,

this is something he can't understand
and therefore how can you defeat
something you cannot understand?

This one knows me, as I know him.

As he usually is the man
with all the answers,

to even entertain the fact
there might be something other,

it unsettles him to have to even
confront those issues, I think.

And generally he avoids doing that.

Have I got to...beg an audience?

Is there a ritual?

Some sort of incantation, or
summons, or spell? All these things
I don't believe in that ain't real.

He gets down in that pit
and there does seem to be something
beyond his understanding,

something that is from beyond time,

which he has spent the last
two episodes denying is possible.

I don't have to accept what you are
but your physical existence,
I give you that.

It shakes him, and it worries him,
and he doesn't find an explanation.

In the end
he chooses to not understand.

Never did decipher that writing,
but that's good.

The day I know everything,
might as well stop.

It's an ambitious questing,
and imaginative programme.

You start to lock down
its imagination
the moment you give concrete answers.

When you come to design a devil,
you realise there are
million different varieties.

We had a bit of a competition
where we invited

all our operators to design a beast
and we chose the best from those.

We wanted the most devilish devil,

something that could have imprinted
its iconography onto the universe.

The horns, the redness, at the same
time I wanted it to be very muscular.

I wanted CGI for this devil to give
it a scale, to give it an inhumanity,

to give it a mouth that you couldn't
possibly make on a prosthetic.

One of the things that we need
to see is the size of this beast.

Is it going to be tower-block sized?

In order to see that we have have
to film it from the correct angles.

We will shrink those sh*ts down and
make them wider and bigger sh*ts,
into which we'll put this creature.

At the end of the Satan bit,
when the devil faces The Doctor,

and he's an ordinary Time Lord
without his TARDIS,

there's nothing more important
than the love of his best friend.

When he refers
to his relationship with Rose,

that's something very tangible,
very real, something that he
absolutely will always believe in.

If I believe in one thing,
just one thing,

I believe in her.

We never find out
if this was A devil or THE devil.

Or just a big beast, we don't know.

It's thought provoking cos it makes
you think, "What do I believe?
What's my religion?"

On one level,
it's a base on a planet,
with a big monster living under it.

On another level, it's humanity's
struggle against good and evil.

We've got enormous, great big
science-fiction spectacles to come,

especially episodes and ,
so "The Satan Pit" a little pause,

a chance to say,
"Focus on The Doctor for once"
and say, "What do you believe?",

before the real hell is let loose
by the end of the series.