Doctor Who and the Star Beast (2023)

Beep the Meep on Disney+. What a time to be alive.

Spoilers Ahoy

Kicking off the 60th anniversary proper, we have first of 3 specials with Tennant back as the Tenth, excuse me Fourteenth Doctor.

It was great! Perfect execution of what it was there to do, put Tennant and Tate back on screen having a throwback adventure. It’s the big anniversary party! Let’s replay some of the greatest hits!

On paper, this is a classic Russell T Davies season opener; funny, exciting, big feelings, but mostly about setting the table for what comes next. It looks great, and Rachel Talalay directs the hell out of it, making sure every penny of that Disney money is up on the screen¹. And after the last couple of seasons (and disappointments like Loki), it was a breath of fresh air to watch something so confidently competent.

I’d love to know how this played to a new audience, which presumably the Disney+ deal brought in. The opening narration does, I think, about as good a job as you could of spinning up a new audience on what they missed. And I dearly love the juxtaposition of the gorgeous 4k shots of Tennant in space cutting back to the blatantly standard definition “previously on” clips. Let the new kids know that this is a show with more enthusiasm than budget and that’s whats so great about it right from the start.

Everyone slides back into their old roles immediately. In a lot of ways, it’s as if no time has passed at all, one could easily imagine a version of this kicking off season 5 in 2010.

But both Tennant and Tate have visibly spent some time thinking about how to play older versions of their characters, both the characters are slightly different, changed by the experiences of the last decade and a half. Tate especially does some really nice work with “Donna, but a mom now”, where all that energy now has a place to focus, and informed by her relationship with her own mom. Speaking of Donna’s mom, Jacqueline King’s Sylvia, who was the third and least interesting of RTD’s “companion’s moms as bad mother-n-laws” is a million miles better here than she ever was before; here her objections have merit rather than just being obstructionist or cruel, all that energy redirected into a woman desperately trying to keep her daughter safe. And in addition, she gets to be the voice of the audience, saying “wait a minute, you said if this happened it would be bad!”

Finally, I had some initial qualms with Tennant coming back as a new incarnation, as opposed to “just” reprising the Tenth. But a few minutes in, it becomes obvious why RTD made this choice. Both the Doctor and Donna are older now, and emotionally the same amount older; all “that” was years ago now, they’ve both moved on, done other things, lived their lives, and now both older characters have come back together to deal with unfinished business. You couldn’t make that work with a version of Tennant’s Doctor from somewhere in that gap between Ood Sigma’s warning and his arrival on the Ood Sphere. This is a version of the character who’s past River Song, who spent some time with a hole in his memory where² Clara should be, and was a woman for a while. They’re older, and like the author, has a very different take on what happened in the 2008 season finale than they had at the time.

On that point, though: More artists should get the chance to go back and revisit their previous work.6 As much as this was a big reunion special, this was also very much an older author in conversation with his younger self, and handling some unfinished business. Specifically: It’s pretty clear RTD has been thinking about Donna’s end ever since 2008.

RTD always enjoyed giving his companions tragic endings; nearly everyone who travled with the Doctor between 2005 and 2010 came away worse for the experience. Donna though—I’m not sure that was supposed to be as tragic as it landed. I suspect RTD was going for “the grownup in the room doing something unfortunate but necessary”, and then Tennant and Tate played it as the assault that it really was. It’s clear that stuck with him, and it’s also clear that the fairly stinging rebuke of the story from the end of “Hell Bent/Heaven Sent” also landed.

RTD is—obviously—a very strong, very talented writer, but in his time with Doctor Who he had a bad habit of writing very compelling characters with complex emotional journeys, and then at the climax of their story, taking all their agency away and making it a story about The Doctor’s lack of good choices. Very few characters ever got a say in what happened to them, they would get backed into a corner and then the Doctor would just choose which of their bad choices they would get.

It’s a mistake to read too much into this I think? I always suspected this was less of a statement of purpose and more a factor of the fact that they made a whole lot of Doctor Who very quickly. The production schedule didn’t leave a whole lot of room for “rethinking ideas”. “Lonely God” was a very successful note for the show to play, and it makes sense to focus a finale on the character who’ll still be around to deal with the fallout next year, so it makes sense that in a pinch they’d head towards “David Tennant crying in the rain” as fast as possible.³

With The Star Beast, RTD goes out of his way to fix both issues. The plot is carefully constructed to give Donna the choice she never got back in ’08 to either get her memories back and die or live as she has been. And then, having made the choice she would have made then, but for reasons that are new, the show lets her (and her daughter) figure out the solution themselves, reminding the Doctor that just because he can’t think of a solution, that doesn’t mean there is one. You can almost hear RTD muttering to himself “see, this was how you should have done it!”

But speaking of unfinished business, The Star Beast itself feels like one too. The comic story this special is based on was a very successful, well regarded entry from the 80s, and it’s on the obvious short-list of spin-off media that could be adapted for the Main Show. It’s impossible to believe that the RTD that was adapting or recycling Jubilee, Spare Parts, and Human Nature wasn’t thinking about Beep the Meep. Heck, _”Smith and Jones”, the opening of Series 3, has a seemingly friendly old woman being chased by alien troopers, only for it to turn out that the Judoon are really the police and the old woman a criminal. I’d be very surprised if that didn’t start as a Star Beast adaptation, just continually rounded down to something the show could afford until it was two rhino-men costumes in a hospital. But now, goosed by Disney’s investment and a decade of computer graphics advancements, we get the real article.

Anyway, I loved it. Perfect job resolving the left-over business, now on to things to come. As I write this, we still don’t know anything of substance about that second special, which they’ve kept almost totally under wraps. What are they hiding for next week? Can’t wait to find out.

— Because I couldn’t help myself, I went and checked the tops of the waves of the reactions on the ‘net. And, as you might imagine, all the folks that were hoping for the end of “Woke Dr. Who” are all losing their minds, and: good.

But, one of the other criticisms I saw was that The Star Beast wasn’t very subtle. As if subtlety automatically meant high-quality! And look, subtle is great when it’s Hemmingway dancing around what really happened to Jake in the margins of The Sun Also Rises, but not when you have something to say. Subtle isn’t always a virtue. Sometimes “Subtle” is just “Cowardice.” Whispering when you should be shouting.

When it was announced that RTD was coming back to do more Doctor Who, the obvious question was: why? He already had a tremendously successul run, he can clearly do whatever he wants, why come back? What’s the upside?

In interviews, he always says something like he’s always been a fan, and never stopped thinking up ideas, and was excited to do more when given the chance—and I think that’s true. It also seems likely that the show wasn’t doing as well as anyone wanted, and with the transition to being make by Julie Gardner and Jane Trantor’s Bad Wolf productions that there was some strong desire to get RTD back to relaunch the show the same way he did in ’05.

But I think there was something else. He’s been a busy guy the last couple of years, between Years and Years and It’s a Sin, and he’s had plenty of time to be out talking into microphones, and it’s been clear that he’s angry. The last decade or so have provided plenty to be angry about! It seemed to me the reason to come back and do a show like Who now, on top of those other things, was the size of platform. A man with nothing left to prove but plenty to say.

I was going to bury this in a link, but no: go watch this acceptance speech he gave for one of the awards won by It’s a Sin. That’s not a guy who’s coming back to Doctor Who to do a series of interchangeable Base-Under-Siege stories. He’s got things to say.

And after The Star Beast, I’m pretty sure I was right. It’s a very angry show, but focused. It’s determined to show a world where diversity is a good thing, where UNIT officers wear turbans, where wheelchairs are an advantage5, where the secret to saving the day is being Trans, where surface readings based on appearance are wrong. It’s perfect that they waited until now to use The Star Beast—at the time it was calling out the parent show for constantly using disfigurement as a shorthand for evil, and now they get to use the same story to do the same thing again.

It’s a bold, brave statement of what progressive Doctor Who should actually look like (as opposed to what we’ve been getting the last half-decade.)

There’s always a portion of the audience—any audience—that would rather “whatever this is about” be stuffed down under the covers, hidden far enough away that they don’t have to notice or think about it. The kind of people who think art should “soothe, not distract.”

But fundamentally, art is about things. If you have things to say, subtle isn’t the way to go.

We’re in an age where we don’t need “subtle”, we need people to stand up and speak clearly. And if you can use Disney’s money to do it to a wide audience on BBC One, so much the better.

---

1. There were a couple of beats that seemed specifically built around the team giggling “look what we can do with this extra cash!” The holographic UI on the sonic screwdriver was one. But I thought the biggest was the opening credits, that had real “we always wanted to do it like this but couldn’t afford it” energy. Those drone shots of the battle between the Wraith Warriors and UNIT! And, of course, that new Console Room.

2. That is what happened at the end of Twice Upon a Time, right? Twelve got his memory back?

3. There’s a quote from RTD somewhere⁴ bemoaning that it’s the Doctor in balloon at the end of “The Next Doctor” instead of David Morrissey’s Jackson Lake. And he’s right, it’s Lake’s story, and Lake should be the one to resolve it. But this plays into what we’re talking about—in a pinch, go with a closeup of Tennant looking serious.

4. I could have sworn this was in The The Writer’s Tale, but a cursory exam didn’t turn it up. Maybe one of the DVD commentaries that used to be on the BBC website?

5. Ruth Madeley’s characer—the wheelchair using UNIT scientific advisor Shirley Anne Bingham—is a great character on their own, but represents something extra coming a week or two after RTD refused to keep Davros in a wheelchair.

6. The thing I kept thinking of while watching this was Fury Road. Very different content, obviously, but the same air of a creator looking back at his past work and disagreeing with his past self.