Doctor Who, "The Beast Below" - Comments

My post on the TWOP forums about last night's Doctor Who, in response to another person's post:

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

"Now, I'm not saying that this was a perfect episode by any stretch of the imagination, but I will say that if you try to pick it apart, you're just going to kill it, so I, at least, am not going to try. Does it really matter, at the end of the day, why they made the smilers or why the UK couldn't get into space or how, exactly, one can make a starwhale throw up using a sonic screwdriver?"

Perhaps not. My own take on it was that the Smilers were in a lot of the promotional material, much like the clockwork androids in "Girl in the Fireplace" and the Weeping Angels in "Blink", so I was expecting them to be the Big Bad. Now, I'm happy for the Doctor Who team to completely subvert that - humanity is the Big Bad - but if that's the case, the Smilers just left me feeling confused, since there seemed to be no explanation for them to have that particular "fairground-booth" form whatsoever - ordinary "secret police" -type humans would have worked just as well.

Side note: The Doctor Who / Torchwood writers seem to have a real hatred for school league tables, don't they?

To me, it did matter why the UK couldn't get into space, because for me, it undermined the emotional punch of the Doctor's dilemma (or at least what he saw to be his choice): kill all the humans on board, let the star whale continue in horrible pain, or lobotomize it so that it can't feel the pain, because I was too busy wondering "Why is any of that necessary?"

Why on earth doesn't the ship have an engine?

Why is it necessary to torture the whale to keep it swimming, particularly if it showed up wanting to help?

Why feed it humans, when it presumably didn't eat them when it was swimming freely between the stars?

Why keep feeding it children who fail their exams, when it obviously doesn't eat them?

I can think of my own explanations for these points; maybe the catastrophe was so sudden, so horribly unexpected, that the star whale appeared just as all seemed lost, and Liz 10, desperate to save her people, seized on the idea of building the ship around the whale and the "engine room" was built to keep up the illusion (so that when people 'forget', they aren't reminded by the absence of an engine on the ship). Was that actually meant to be the explanation? Likewise, maybe the whale actually eats something entirely different and feeding people to it is a means of social control. Or...

Well, one can continue on this line for quite some time, though I can't help thinking that the story might have made a little more sense if, instead of "Starship UK", it was "Starship Earth", so I don't have to start thinking up fanwanks for why every other nation on earth either managed to build a functioning ship and leave, or perish. Plus, it would have made the Doctor's choice even more horrible if the ship contained the remains of the entire human race, not just the British part of it.

The humans on board do seem to be getting off lightly, though... every single one of them apart from the children was complicit in torturing an innocent being. (And what exactly did the "if 1% of everyone on board does this, society falls apart" warning actually mean? Shades of the Ursula Le Guin story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"...) I'm becoming very fond of Matt Smith's Doctor, but couldn't help thinking that a certain amount of Ten-style fire and brimstone judgement a la "The Christmas Invasion" was called-for there.

I suppose I can let every other plot hole go, except for that one point about why it was necessary to torture the whale. Wouldn't it have made for an even more wrenching outcome if it was explicit that the decision to do that was because Liz10 and/or her advisors couldn't conceive of the idea that a being could be so altruistic, so simply assumed they'd have to torture it to make it power the ship?

Last question from me: how and when did Amy record the message of herself warning her to get the Doctor away from the ship, and how did she arrange for it to be delivered to her?

My Thoughts on Dr Who: Farewell to Tennant

I originally posted this on Television Without Pity, but it fits just as well here. Enjoy.

After watching this episode, my second thought (first thought = "Shit, I'm going to really, really miss David Tennant" - no disrespect meant to Matt Smith) was "If you put a much-loved Companion on the mantlepiece in Act One, she needs to do something important by Act Three". I suppose I was expecting something along the lines of either:

a) Donna's memories start coming back, and she chooses to be the DoctorDonna again to save the lives of others, knowing that she will die. I know that the deal is supposed to be that memories coming back = instant death, but it could have been worked around to give her at least a few minutes of DoctorDonna, perhaps even by having the Doctor sacrifice enough of his life energy to keep her alive that he needs to regenerate afterwards.

Or, b) Donna does something heroic without her memories coming back because she is in fact awesome with or without the Doctor, and we get a little extra layer of tragedy in that the Doctor sees his beloved Companion as she was with him from a distance, knowing that they can never again meet without her dying.

As it was... yeah, I get that Donna's got her Happy Ending. I suppose what bugs me a little about it is that I really wanted to see some signs of her recovering the strong self she had with the Doctor and actually doing something of her own volition, not being the recipient for the actions of others. Of course, for all we know her new hubby's amazing and inspires her and together they'll discover the cure for cancer, but alas we will never know this since we've seen barely five minutes of him on screen and will never see any more.

Did anyone else find this two-parter to be unusually male-dominated? With the possible exceptions of Lucy Saxon and Sassy Vinvocci Lady (I haven't managed to find out her name), both of whom played fairly minor roles, all the characters with really significant parts (the Doctor, the Master, Wilf, Rassilon, Joseph Naismith) were male. That's not intended as a criticism, as the scenes between Tennant / Cribbins and Tennant / Simm were great verging on phenomenal in places, it just feels odd in a series which has to date made a big point of having strong female characters.

Agree to the nth degree with all who have said that this had far more plot than was needed. It's easy to say this in hindsight, but if there was going to be this much plot, "Planet of the Dead" could have been sacrificed (wishful thinking) for another episode which could have dealt with getting some of the exposition out of the way. As it was, just the Master's plan alone could have carried the two episodes, plotwise.

I'm still thinking about this several days later, and... I don't know. I feel like I saw much of this already, and it was called "Journey's End". The Doctor's already said goodbye to his companions, and the extended farewells, for me, drained much of the momentum out of the ending.

Also, I feel like now, whenever I rewatch any episodes with Tennant's Doctor in, it's going to be overshadowed by the thought "Yeah, now you're all brave and happy and saving the universe in between snogging your Companions, but you'll die a lonely and slightly pointless death which you'll hate and be fighting right up to the end". (Pointless in the sense that the "lockable box" mechanism felt just a bit too contrived, not that saving Wilf was pointless.) The final shot of the Doctor's bereft face at the end of Journey's End was enough tragedy for that character, for me.

When I compare that to Nine's regeneration, who at least got to go out in the knowledge that the danger was over and his regeneration (or the actions leading to it) saved the life of his Companion, it just seems a bit too tragic.

Final question: how the hell can a planet "stir in the deeps"? It's a planet. It orbits. It doesn't have a mind of its own (unless I'm missing something from old-school Who) and it doesn't move except in response to the laws of physics. Hmm?

Ah well. Bring on Matt Smith for the girly hair and GERONIMO!