Doctor Who: The Star Beast

"I think the story hasn’t ended yet."

More than a year since the last broadcast episode, Doctor Who is finally back.

Please respect that I'm not going to use the tired old 'it's about time' gag at this juncture. No. I'm sorry. I just can't.

My phrasing preferences aside, I do want to make one quick caveat before we really dig into the episode. The first sentence of teaser text above the jump was originally 'Doctor Who is finally back.' The reason that I changed it was that the sentence as originally written could be easily misinterpreted as my saying, 'Thank God Chibnall is gone and the Doctor can pee standing up again like God intended!' which could not be further from how I actually feel.

If you want to know my actual thoughts about the Chibnall era, they're pretty well documented in my reviews of the last two- and a-bit seasons. Please feel free to check them out and maybe leave a thoughtful comment while you're there. Or a bad pun. Or whatever. My point here is that it would be wonderful and would mean a lot to me if we didn't turn the comment section here into a lot of criticisms of the Chibnall era disguised as compliments to this one, if that makes sense.

I know that our commenters at DouxReviews are awesome, positive, and not prone to such things anyway. I just felt like it needed to be said.

That said, 'The Star Beast' has finally landed. Was it worth the wait?

Well, kind of yes and no but then more yes. I've spent a lot of today trying to put my finger on exactly why I didn't love this as much as I felt like I should. Don't get me wrong, I loved it, but I loved it at like an eight when I wanted to love it at a ten. And I couldn't manage to puzzle out why that was, but I think I've finally gotten on the general track of it.

At the end of the day, it doesn't feel like 'The Star Beast' was really doing all that much. Which is an odd way to feel about an episode that kicks off a new Doctor, TARDIS, theme tune, network affiliation, and production staff. And I think that that's actually why. This episode is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting, but only a relatively small portion of it is 'telling the story of the titular Star Beast.'

Which is what led me to the realization of what my actual issue was. It feels incomplete. Which makes sense, because it is. It's part one of three. And so, all of the time repetitively establishing the 'why do I have this face again?' question doesn't come into play yet. And the 'net of coincidences drawing the Doctor to Donna' doesn't get to come to fruition either even though a lot of the plot here is completely predicated on it. We'll get to it later. Wilf gets mentioned on several occasions, but we don't get to see him yet, stay tuned for the rest of the story over the next two episodes.

And so on. And to be clear, these aren't flaws in the episode. Clearly the three anniversary specials were designed to function this way. They are, however, the reason I was left a little unsatisfied with this as an individual story. I'll probably feel very differently after we've gotten to see all three of the episodes.

The portion of the bigger picture that this episode really did have to completely resolve was the question of Donna's memory and the whole 'it might cause her to die' issue. And the solution to that turned out to be surprisingly elegant. And I'm so very glad that they 'fixed' the situation. I try very hard not to be the type of fan that insists that the show owes us anything or that they simply MUST do so and so plot whatever. I get why RTD chose to give Donna the ending to her season four journey that he did, it just always felt unbearably cruel to me and I'm glad that reversed it here.

Which brings me back to my original point that this episode, as a standalone, isn't really telling a lot of story, it's accomplishing a lot of setup. The story itself boils down to 'The Doctor and his friends meet a cute alien who is being chased by scary looking aliens. He initially sides with the cute alien as that's the one that appears to be in danger, but soon realizes that the cute one is evil, and the ugly ones are nice. That's pretty much the plot of 'Galaxy Four' and it wasn't a new twist even then.

That said, both Beep the Meep and the Wrarth warriors look great - the Disney money is clearly going to good use - and both the battle scenes and the sonic screwdriver effects showed a massive upgrade here. And the plot contrivance of having The Doctor being left with no choice but to recite the secret shopping list that will bring back Donna's life ending metacrisis through a handy plexiglass screen dividing a room in which buttons need to be pushed on both sides of the wall works well.

As a side note, it's interesting how often Russell T. Davies employs the dramatic device of two identical machines in order to get a dramatic resolution. Two big levers with Rose back in 'Doomsday,' two glass booths with Wilf back in 'The End of Time Part II,' two separate sides of a control room here. I'm sure there are other examples that I'm not thinking of at the moment. Feel free to leave them in the comments. He also has a recurring theme of 'too much knowledge can be physically dangerous and thus should be avoided,' which might be something for a therapist to unpack. Just an observation.

Which brings us to the non-binary elephant in the room.

I can't imagine that when Russell scripted Donna's final speech deteriorating into 'Binary binary binary...' that he already had this already planned, but what a wonderful way for it to get paid off. The entire episode I was constantly wondering 'How is this amount of information not causing Donna to die already? And in the end, it turns out that she had already been sharing the burden with Rose the entire time. Hence the greater resilience.

I'm not trans myself, for the record, so it's probably best to take my views here with a grain of salt. When I've finished this review, my next step is going to check if Jessie Gender has a video posted yet about this episode because if you want to understand trans experience and how the trans community feels about trans representation, you're pretty much best served by listening to a trans person talk about it. I will say that Sylvia's stumbling over pronouns and deep, deep concern about being supportive in the 'right' way and not accidentally saying or doing something wrong exactly mirrors my personal experience with the trans people that I love in my life. And from what little perspective I have, it feels like Donna is being the best possible parent and ally that Rose could have.

I also want to give the show a lot of credit for showing the hurt caused by deadnaming without making a big show of explaining what it is. I thought that was handled really well.

So, 'The Star Beast.' A fun little story nestled in a great big package of change, setup, and hints about the future. I really enjoyed it. But I suspect I'll love it more once we have the rest of the story.

Bits and Pieces:

-- I'll admit it. I kind of loved Shirley Anne Bingham. I mean, she's clearly factory designed to be the coolest possible person imaginable, not being terribly impressed with the Doctor, but not being in any way adversarial with him either. She takes all the right information in stride and then blows up a wall with a missile. She's just awesome. Apparently, she's a recurring character for next season, which is nice.

-- On the chance that it might be of interest to anyone, I did do a little research to check if it was offensive to use the phrase 'take in stride' when discussing someone that uses a wheelchair and was pleasantly surprised by how many online resources there are to provide advice on the topic. It's not considered offensive, for the record. There are a great many online resources as well on being a better ally to trans people which Sylvia might find reassuring. I know I have in the past.

-- Since it seems like a reasonable time to mention it, yes, I am aware of the – let's be gracious and call it 'discourse' – regarding Davros currently swirling around the internet. The only thing that I have to say about it is that I'm 100% not the right person to be speaking about it. When Doctor Who confronts the complex issues regarding talking to gay firemen, I'm sure I'll have lots to contribute.

-- So, Rose and Donna could just 'let go' of the metacrisis energy and be just normal and fine again. It might have been good for them to clarify 'We can do that now because we're sharing the burden together,' because as it stands the possibility that the Doctor could have just let Donna do that at the time makes him look like even more of a dick than he already did in that situation.

-- I love how they made lemonade out of lemons regarding the lottery ticket. Of course, Donna was subconsciously trying to be like the Doctor in giving the money all away to people she knew she could help. That's a lovely character beat that also happens to cover a massive plot issue.

-- I didn't love the direct to camera story time opening that brought us all back up to speed about Donna's memory wipe. It felt heavy handed, and the same information was conveyed again later much more organically between the Doctor and Shirley.

-- It was sweet to learn that Kate Stewart was making sure that Wilf was looked after. Bless her.

-- Possibly unpopular opinion (as well as being a very minor infringement of my own earlier request) I preferred both the theme music arrangement and opening credits during the Chibnall era. They just felt more alien and off putting in the way that the original William Hartnell versions of both did.

-- The new TARDIS interior does indeed look as impressive as everybody kept saying it was going to. I do wonder when it updated itself though. It sure looked like David Tennant was seeing it for the first time when he and Donna walked in. Also, invest in Formula 409, Doctor. All those white surfaces are going to show everything.

-- The 'bleeding through' of details from the Doctor's time with Donna into Rose's life was really nicely handled.

-- UNIT just straight up abducted a journalist on live television with their organization name clearly written on their jackets. Remember when they were a top-secret organization?

-- The connected attic at the top of row houses like we see here is technically called a 'cock loft.' They're quite often not separated by the brick-and-mortar walls that we see them break through here and are instead just one long open space. This tends to lead to fire spreading rapidly through them to the other houses. See, I told you I'd have something to contribute.

No, honest. It's really called a cock loft.
Roosters would hang out up there.

Quotes:

Donna: "A word of advice. You can wear a suit that tight up to the age of thirty-five. And no further."

The Doctor: "Grand Master of the Knowledge."
Shaun: "That says Grand Mistress."
The Doctor: "Oh, catch up!"

Shirley: "What I’m saying is, that ship didn’t crash. It parked."

Donna: "I would burn down the world for you, darling."

Shirley: "I’ve got this. Off you pop."
The Doctor: "Waited your whole life?"
Shirley: "You wish."

Meep: "You sound lonely."
Rose: "No. Just different."

Donna: "Because. There are places out there where people are in danger. And in pain. And fear. And I could help."

The Doctor: "You and I can stop this ship, together. But it will kill you."
Donna: "OK."

Donna: "No. Because summat will go wrong. And you’ll end up on Mars with Chaucer and a robot shark. And that’s actually happened, hasn’t it."

The Meep's hands never stop being creepy.

A wonderful start to the three-part Anniversary story. I really think that keeping that framing for it in mind helps immeasurably.

Eleven out of fourteen Doctors as its own installment. We'll see how we feel once we know the entire story.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, retired firefighter, and roughly 78% water. You can find more of his work at the 42nd Vizsla. If you'd like to see his raw notes for this and other reviews, you can find them at What Was Mikey Thinking.

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