Doctor Who (2023): The Star Beast - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still writing about The Star Beast, the first of Doctor Who's three 60th Anniversary specials. You can read PART ONE by clicking that text.

I've noticed that a few fans seem disappointed that we've gotten David Tennant back for three episodes as they wanted to get straight to Ncuti Gatwa. I guess some people are kind of done with the idea of returning to older characters and legacy actors in general, after the onslaught of nostalgia we've had this past decade.

In the last 8 years we've had movies and series starring Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, Mulder and Scully, Jean-Luc Picard and Seven of Nine, Neo and Trinity, Rocky Balboa, John Rambo, Laurie Strode, Maverick, Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator, Michael Keaton's Batman, Indiana Jones, Rick Deckard, Captain John Sheridan and Dave Lister. Plus they just made a game with Peter Weller playing RoboCop again!

Personally though, I'm one of the people who keeps watching all this stuff. In fact, I've been thinking I should check out some Big Finish audio dramas, where the classic actors have been reprising their roles consistently for 24 years. It's all good as long as it doesn't get in the way of new characters and actors being introduced, and I don't think it has in this case. Filming for the Barbie movie overlapped with the specials so it doesn't seem like Ncuti Gatwa was ever an option and I'd rather have three bonus episodes with David Tennant than nothing at all. They can continue giving me bonus Tennant stories next year as well if they want, I won't complain.

There will be SPOILERS below, for this and earlier stories.

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Previously on Doctor Who:

The Doctor is confused. For him it's been at least a thousand years since he took his best friend's memory to save her life and then regenerated into Matt Smith, so it can't be a coincidence that he's been thrown into another adventure with Donna Noble right after inexplicably turning into David Tennant again. Donna's family have found themselves helping a fugitive alien called the Meep and now the Doctor needs to get them out past the brainwashed UNIT soldiers and alien hunters fighting it out in their house. Fortunately, his new sonic has an extra feature: drawing bulletproof shields.

And now, the conclusion:

The Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver to draw a bulletproof barrier and then slides it in front of Colonel Chan's brainwashed UNIT troops at the front door. Then he draws a second one and does the same to block the bug-like alien hunters lurking in the kitchen.

It all kinds of works as you're watching and I like how Donna has a subtle moment of recognition when he instinctively passes his sonic to her. But if you think about what's happening then it becomes obvious that with the soldiers blocked there's nothing stopping the hunters from walking into the living room. And there's nothing stopping either side from sliding the shields out of the way again.

In fact, when the family gets upstairs the hunters just blow another hole in the wall, showing that they could've gotten into their living room at any time.

The family needs an alternate exit so the Doctor shows off what a sonic screwdriver is good at: resonating concrete.

The Doctor didn't have a whole lot of success resonating concrete back in The Doctor Dances so this is almost certainly a callback to that. Even though Shaun points out that it's actually mortar. He's not making it easy for me to nitpick.

The Doctor wrecks house after house as they make their way down the street to Shaun's taxi, but I like the shot that peeks in at them through the loft windows so I'll let him off.

You'd think someone would've been chasing them by now, but everyone's pretty busy with the war going on outside in the street. Major Singh's squadron arrives to find Colonel Chan's troops fighting bug-eyed monsters, though some of the brainwashed soldiers find the time to turn and shoot at them too.

It's nice to see that Doctor Who hasn't lost its passion for pyrotechnics. It takes real confidence to launch a car into the air right next to someone's house. I know it wasn't CGI, because I have absolute faith in the production crew to do explosions properly... though I should probably take a minute to check.

Yeah, it was done for real, of course it was done for real! I never doubted them.

At this point the Nobles have made it to the house next to the car, and now they just need to sneak outside without waking the owner up. I like how the producers spent time and money to show them creeping by, even though this dude's already slept through an explosion outside, and it doesn't even matter if they do wake him up. He's just going to get mad and want them out, which is where they're going anyway.

They make a run for the taxi right behind the alien hunters' backs, and then the Doctor does something kind of stupid: he sneaks over to check if the UNIT soldier on the ground is alive.

High marks for compassion, but he's got four humans and the Meep to protect and they're waiting for him to drive.

See, this is what happens when you hang around instead of driving away! He's really lucky that the taxi is bulletproof or else he would've been dead here.

You've seen the episode already so you know that I'm wrong and the alien weapons are non-lethal. But scroll up to the previous picture again and take a close look at the top right side. That was a UNIT bullet bouncing right off without even scratching the paint! And when have you ever seen a UNIT bullet be this ineffective?

I still think it's strange to see the Doctor driving a modern car, even after watching all of the Third Doctor era. He does it so infrequently that I forget that he even can drive.

The Doctor stops in an underground car park (leaving the headlights on), whips out a barrister wig, and somehow manages to teleport two hunters in. He says he intercepted a teleport, but that only raises further questions.

The biggest question on my mind is also the most obvious one: why are the headlights so blue? Why is everything so blue? I'm less curious about the wig as I know exactly where that's from.

Doctor Who (1963) 16-12 - The Stones of Blood, Part Four

It's from The Stones of Blood, which aired back in 1978. I remember, because it was my favourite serial of the Key to Time arc. Tennant's Doctor isn't quite crazy enough to sell the fact that he'd just have a wig in his pocket, but he also mentions the Shadow Proclamation like Ten always used to do, so it's okay.

The reason that the Doctor's suddenly so sure that these aliens will play along with his car park court instead of just murdering them all is because he noticed that the taxi wasn't damaged. Plus the UNIT soldier on the ground was still alive.

The two aliens introduce themselves. That's Constable Zreeg on the left and Sergeant Zogroth on the right, and man they look retro. Starting both their names with the same letter is very retro as well, and I've always hated it when sci-fi stories do that. No exceptions. Except for all of Star Trek.

They claim that all Meepkind was mutated when their living sun went mad and they became evil monsters. The creatures got as far as eating the Galactic Council before the Wrarth Warriors were called in to apprehend them all. Now only their leader survives: the Meep.

Interesting story, though not necessarily true.

Oh, well there you go then. The Meep pulls a Captain Jack, whipping out a Men in Black-looking pistol from an undisclosed location.

Honestly, I pretty much saw this coming. I've watched way too much Twilight Zone recently for this to be a shock. I am a bit surprised that the Meep's face has switched to Evil Mode though.

The Meep blasts both the Wrarth Warriors, killing them. So this has all gone a bit sideways really. To be fair to the Doctor, he had no reason to think that the Meep was armed. He also had no reason to think that the mind-controlled UNIT soldiers would find them here immediately afterwards, but now that's happened too.

It turns out that Colonel Chan's men are now the Meep's Soldiers of the Psychedelic Sun. I guess the Meep keeps a bit of the living sun in the ship just in case it's necessary to brainwash some troops. There's no sun effect in the Meep's eyes by the way; they're not possessed, they were mutated.

The Doctor thinks fast, giving the Meep reason to suspect that his presence here is part of a plan against them and pointing out that the family could be kept alive as hostages to get the truth out of him. And then they guy gets knocked out in one hit while he's saying something clever, just like in the good old days.

The Doctor wakes up in the back of a UNIT truck with the Nobles. Thankfully none of them are dead yet, though Donna's beating herself up over not using the lottery money to move them somewhere else. I mean, she does have a point, aliens do tend to target London more than anywhere else... though she shouldn't know that, as she always misses everything.

We finally get an answer to the mystery of why she gave the money away: because other people needed it more and it seems like something he would do. On the one hand, it's nice that her time travelling with the Doctor is still an influence on her, even if she can't consciously remember it. On the other hand, she seems dangerously close to consciously remembering it now, and that's going to kill her.

This is a good scene! You know you're watching an RTD story when the quiet moments are the best part.

The truck arrives at the steelworks and it turns out that the Meep landed here deliberately for repairs. I guess the Soldiers of the Psychedelic Sun know how to do that.

His ship uses a Double-Bladed Dagger Drive, which is a clever piece of technology that draws its fuel from the ground. Useful for landing on unexplored planets, less good for urban areas as it'll burn five square miles... so everything in a 1.25 mile radius. And it seems like it's ready to go, as the Meep has the prisoners taken to the ship... as food.

Fortunately, Shirley is still around and she saves them by firing knockout darts into two soldiers' necks from her wheelchair with pinpoint accuracy.

I'm a bit torn on this idea. On the one hand, the UNIT science advisor with access to all the alien weapons in the Black Archive could probably figure out how to strap a dart gun to a chair. On the other hand, the execution feels off to me. It's a bit cringy. Maybe it would've worked better if she'd joked about having gadgets earlier, and this was the payoff.

The Doctor races to save the day while the others get to safety, but Donna locks herself in with him! Worse, she called him "The Doctor". I mean you want her to remember, but you also don't.

Oh that is a nice looking set! Look at all the lights they've got wired up.

The Meep activates the deadlock seal from the cockpit above, which basically just means 'sonic screwdriver don't work'. That's fine though, as there are plenty of buttons to press.

Unfortunately, a window comes down dividing the room! Which is an extremely contrived way of keeping half the buttons out of his reach.

Damn, giant firey cracks aren't what you want. I mean it looks good, but people's cars and houses and cats are going to fall in.

Donna's not an idiot, she's able to follow the Doctor's instructions and flick the right switches just fine, but it's apparently not enough. He needs a super-intelligent Donna to solve this problem. The problem of sabotaging a spaceship.

Bloody hell, that's a lot more than just five square miles! London is getting absolutely wrecked. They're fortunate it mainly seems to be affecting the roads as even that is enough of a disaster.

Donna still doesn't know about the metacrisis or her time with the Doctor, but he tells her that he has a solution that will also kill her and she just says ''Okay". Honestly, I totally buy it. There's no way she's going to let her daughter die, or the 9 million other people. So he reveals that he has a secret code phrase to undo the mindwipe remotely. He's the Doctor, he overthinks stuff.

He's really pissed off that this has to happen, it's an emotional moment, but he starts saying the words. "Westerly. Pelican. Dreams. Tornado. Clifftops. Andante. Grief. Fingerprint. Susurration." Donna joins in with the last few words herself: "Sparrow, Dance, Mexico. Binary. Binary. Binary". Hey, that's what she said in Journey's End! The first clue that she was in trouble was when she got stuck repeating 'binary' over and over while talking about fixing the chameleon circuit.

There's a bit of a regeneration effect, and DoctorDonna is back! Russell T Davies giving the fans what they want.

I've been wondering how Donna would react to learning what the Doctor did to her, because it was an absolutely non-consensual mind-wipe. She was telling him no and he did it anyway. And the answer is: she is furious. She had a subconscious infracutaneous retrofold memory loop and it made her give away £166 million in lottery winnings! Which, to be fair, was a gift from the Doctor.

With only seconds left to save London they finally leap into action and have a bit of a technobabble battle. They're just yelling out increasingly ridiculous things while racing around and hitting buttons, until it's done.

Donna mentioned earlier that if anyone threatened to hurt her daughter she would descend. Now that she's stopped the ship and saved everyone, she triumphantly declares "Donna Noble is descending."

Now that the drive has been reversed, the streets get repaired, with the bits that crumbled away flying back into place.

I'm okay when a sorcerer uses the arcane to magically put things back together, I've never questioned how Star Trek's dermal regenerator works, I can meet a story halfway on this kind of thing. But this is 100% bullshit. They wanted dramatic shots of London in flames without any actual consequences, but there are consequences. The episode has been left damaged.

It's not as bad as the moon hatching into a dragon which then immediately lays an egg that's exactly the same size as the moon, because nothing can ever be that bad. It's pretty bad though.

Anyway, the bulkhead separating the room lifts and Donna collapses.

Donna guesses that the Doctor might have gotten his old face back so that he could say goodbye to her before she died. It doesn't look like the Doctor's got much longer himself though, with the Meep's troops coming to kill him. He's pretty resigned to his fate, partly because he's grief-stricken about Donna's death, partly because they've already won. The Meep's not going anywhere, London is safe.

I was wondering if RTD was actually going to go through with killing Donna in this story. A lot of fans were pissed off with how he wiped her memory and left her like that in Journey's End, but I liked that he didn't give her a cop-out happy ending and he even stuck with it in The End of Time. We know the rules: if she remembers she dies, so is he going to stick to his guns here?

Nope! Donna's not dead, and Rose is able to flick some switches downstairs and free the soldiers from the Psychodelic Sun! Yeah, there was a button to deactivate the psychedelic lightwave emanators down here outside the ship the whole time, don't think about it.

The Doctor figures out that the metacrisis passed down to her child, so it was split between them! They show this with a flashback to Rose saying "Non-binary," when Donna said "Binary" and regenerated a bit. The Doctor is 'male and female and neither and more', apparently.

Okay, two problems with this bit: first, Donna getting stuck saying "binary, binary, binary, binary..." about the TARDIS chameleon circuit has so little to do with gender that Rose saying "Non-binary," for absolutely no reason makes me cringe so bad. Second, Rose isn't non-binary. At least, I don't think she is. Everyone treats her like she's female.

RTD's heart is clearly in the right place here, but it's making my brain want to escape.

The Doctor and Donna realise that the memories were always in Rose, in her subconscious, and it's been influencing her without her realising. She chose the name Rose, her shed is like her TARDIS, and the toys she makes are all the creatures they met together.

We see a Dalek and a Judoon (The Stolen Earth/Journey's End), a Cyberman (uh...?), an Adipose (Partners in Crime), a Lupar (Donna never met these either), and an Ood (Planet of the Ood). Man, I just remembered that the Sontarans murdered all the Lupari and I'm sad now.

Hey, I guess this would count as an anniversary reference! The episode got there in the end.

We see the sun rising on a completely healed London, giving us a good look at Stark Tower. Oh hang, that's UNIT's shiny new HQ! It's much more modern looking than their last HQ, which got demolished last year to stop a Cyberman invasion.

It's actually been built across the street to the old HQ. UNIT's previous HQ replaced the real-life Leadenhall Building, which has now reappeared in its place. London really is healing.

The Wrarth Warriors will be taking the Meep away to pay for his crimes with 10,000 years in prison, after which they'll presumably let them out so they can get right back to killing and eating people again. The creature's been mutated by a mad sun and turned evil, that's a condition that needs to be cured.

The Meep has been obsessed with the Doctor's two hearts even since finding out about them, and they leave him with a warning: the Boss will be interested in hearing about a creature with two hearts as well. Oh no, not "The Boss"!

There's a more pressing concern: splitting the metacrisis between Donna and her daughter has bought them some extra time but they're still going to die unless they fix it. But then the Doctor and Rose pull out some classic Steven Moffat material about how men don't get how to let things go, and then just... wish the metacrisis away.

Okay, I have to be honest, there is something I like about this scene, and that's Shirley getting some of the metacrisis energy in her face and blowing it away.

What I don't like, is how they pulled this cheap solution out of their ass with the justification that a man would never think of it. Donna was right there the first time with a head full of super intelligence and she didn't suggest it either. Also, turning 'The Doctor mindwiped his friend for 15 years because she'd die otherwise' into 'The Doctor mindwiped his friend because he missed the blatantly obvious solution', is not good.

Plus it's hard to pull off a snappy 'men are x and women are y' line when you're also trying to be progressive, and the male the characters are talking to just spent decades as a woman.

DONNA

It's a shame you're not a woman any more, 'cos she'd have understood.

ROSE

We've got all that power, but there is a way to get rid of it. Something a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand.

Uh-huh...

The Five Doctors

Hey Doctor, would you like the power to rule Gallifrey?

Actually that's not fair, there's no reason to assume that RTD saw the 20th Anniversary just because he's writing the 60th Anniversary. I have reason to believe he knows about the Key to Time arc though, where the Doctor gives up absolute power over the universe.

Dumb sitcom quips are one thing, but don't put people into boxes while you're celebrating diversity.

With the day saved and Donna's house apparently covered by UNIT insurance, the Doctor's ready to head off. Though he offers Donna one last trip, just to see Wilf. Donna knows something is going to wrong if Rose steps one foot inside, but she's thinking it'll be fine if it's just her and the Doctor.

Sylvia actually gives her permission, which shows how far she's come as a person. Also, how involved she's been in this story. Shaun too. They've become a proper loveable RTD Doctor Who family.

You want to know what's really amazing though? I had no idea what the TARDIS interior was going to look like when I started watching this, other than it's white. In the olden days I'd be reading spoiler forums, watching trailers and checking out leaked photos, but this time I'm actually going in blind.

First though I want to remind myself what last four console rooms looked like.

If I had to describe them all with one word it'd be 'distinctive', and if I was allowed more I'd start throwing in words like 'orange' and 'blue'. They've all got things I like about them, even the weird crystal spider one with the glowing giant pillars that obscure the actors, but I think they've all got room for improvement as well.

Alright, here's the first console room made especially for David Tennant's Doctor:

Holy shit!

When I see a new TARDIS console room I usually wonder how it compares in size to previous rooms. This time I'm wondering how it compares to the Death Star's reactor core. It was all built for real as well, this isn't a virtual set...which the Doctor demonstrates by running around in glee.

It's a big step up from Thirteen's TARDIS, as the actors can move around and you can see them. It also looks more expensive than Twelve's TARDIS, possibly because of how smooth and clean it looks. They've gone back to the sterile white of the classic series and it really works. And I'm not just saying that because they stole the entire design of the room from my mind.

There is one problem with it though: it's unfurnished. In fact, there isn't anywhere to put furniture. All those roller coaster track walkways just lead to doors so it'd be a struggle to decorate it with bookcases and chairs and stuff like Twelve's console room. The Doctor doesn't even have anywhere for his coat!

Now they're just showing off.

The Doctor demonstrates another new feature: a coffee maker, built right into the console! He's so glad to have Donna back, even after a thousand years or so he's missed her. So Donna points out that he's been given a second chance and an opportunity to do things differently this time, so maybe he should try visiting her family occasionally.

He's clearly not all that interested, though he's saved from having to discuss it further when Donna accidentally empties her cup onto the TARDIS console.

Donna's just done more damage to the TARDIS than any foe the Doctor's faced since, I dunno, River Song. When Mickey dropped tea into the TARDIS it was fine, but coffee is its kryptonite. That's some beautiful practical fire as well. Well, some of it. They didn't actually destroy the set. They've done it backwards though! They're supposed to blow up the console room, then get a new set, not the other way around!

The last time this happened, the Doctor got dropped out a mile over Sheffield and the TARDIS disappeared to another planet, so it's a decent enough cliffhanger I guess. Also, this means Donna's in the next story too!

Then there's the ending tune, which is very strange and I don't like it much. I mean the music is good, but it sounds like people are whispering over it or something and I wish they'd stop. I'm suddenly hoping these credits are just for the specials and season one's going to be different.


CONCLUSION

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You might not believe this, especially considering that the episode's got Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons' names right there under the title, but I had no idea that this was an adaptation of an '80s comic book until now. I'd been spoiled on Beep the Meep being in it, but not who he was or where he was from, so I gave the names about as much thought as seeing the names Bob Baker and Dave Martin on a story with K-9 in it. In fact it's probably for the best I didn't do any research, as looking up the comic would've spoiled the whole plot instantly. I did notice it had a bit of an 80s feel to it. In fact, I half expected to see BMXs and kids in baseball caps. Hang on, I think I did see that. The Star Beast comic actually came out two years before E.T. though, so any similarities in the story are coincidental.

I initially thought it was weird that Russell T Davies would choose to bolt the emotional return of David Tennant and Catherine Tate onto an adaptation, but then I realised it's not actually the first time he's done this. The 40th Anniversary audio drama Jubilee became Dalek and Human Nature was based on a novel of the same name. So, he's had a bit of success with this approach in the past. Honestly, it just felt seamless to me, with the Meep plot providing a framework for RTD to attach the character scenes that have always been his strength. They're not always a complete success, there were a few cringy moments where I felt like pulling a Tenth Doctor and saying "No. Don't do that. No, really, don't," but I can't say that it wasn't made with the finest of intentions. And it's all delivered with a passion and conviction that the Chibnall era didn't quite have. It like RTD saw the criticisms of that era being too 'woke' and came in saying "That was only a fraction of our true power!"

The era might have only had a fraction of their new budget as well, as this is some slick-looking television with fantastic effects. The Meep is near perfectly realised, with the only issue I had being its distinct 'good mode' and 'evil mode' faces. Once it's found out it's all frowning and teeth from then on. Plus the Meep's spaceship set was a bit more elaborate than I'm used to, and that bloody TARDIS console room is so big I got worried when the Doctor ran off because I thought he may never find his way back. And I'm not even sure they had the Disney+ deal done by this point, so season 1 might have even more money to play with.

But the important thing is that the Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble are back, kind of! Time has passed, things aren't quite the same, and it's technically not even the same incarnation of the Doctor. But Fourteen is basically just Ten in his more troubled phase, except for the occasional moments where he catches himself doing something new and wonders if that's a new aspect of his personality. He's more honest and open with his feelings, which could actually be character growth after being Twelve and Thirteen for so long.

Donna's had some character growth as well, partly through being a mother and partly because her experiences with the Doctor were buried but not erased. The big tragedy of her mind-wipe in Journey's End wasn't just that she couldn't go on adventures anymore, it was that she'd become a better person and it was stripped away from her. So it's nice to learn that wasn't entirely the case. I mean, I'm one of the people who liked Donna's tragic ending, in fact I thought it was the best part of Journey's End, so I wasn't keen on RTD just fixing it. Some things should have actual lasting consequences or nothing matters. But 15 years is lasting enough I reckon, especially as those consequences have transformed Donna's life dramatically. It was a 'Turn Left' moment for Donna that put her on the path to becoming a mother and getting her memories now back doesn't change that.

And I'm glad RTD didn't go down the familiar miserable route where a character's life has been a mess since we last saw them, they have one last adventure, and then they die at the end so that the younger protagonist they've been mentoring can carry on. He didn't even go the 'they were miserable but we're fixing it now' route. Donna's life got better over time, with Shaun being the most understanding husband imaginable, Sylvia putting in the effort to be a nicer person, and Rose being the highlight of her existence. I'm glad Donna's sticking around for the next two episodes though, as she remains one of the best companions he's ever had.

So is the best episode in years? Personally, I have to say... nah, not really. In fact, I liked The Power of the Doctor a little more, Eve of the Daleks too. But it's way above Chibnall's average and it feels more like proper Doctor Who again, with some authentic RTD energy. It's fairly skippable for new viewers and people eager to get to Ncuti Gatwa, but for fans of Donna Noble it's essential viewing. I just wish that I was a little more in sync with Doctor Who, as there's always got to be something about an episode that really bothers me, like roads miraculously repairing themselves. I'm too emotionally attached to things making logical sense to get swept along in the moment.


Anniversary story ranking so far:

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1. The Day of the Doctor (10)
2. The Night of the Doctor (8)
   
3. The Three Doctors (6)
   
4. The Five Doctors (6)
   
5. Silver Nemesis (6)
6. The Star Beast (6)
   

This looks a lot worse than it actually is. I'm not saying that The Star Beast is a huge disaster for Doctor Who and that I hated every minute, it's just up against the Second and Third Doctors bickering, the Rastan Warrior Robot massacre, Lady Peinforte, and, you know, The Day of the Doctor. In fact, I was leaning towards a 7, but it loses a point for the roads.

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COMING SOON

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, I guess it's Doctor Who again! There are three specials and I've got two left. Maybe Wild Blue Yonder is something that works a little better for me.

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