What’s the Show? Doctor Who returns with RTD back at the helm for three specials prior to the launch of the Fifteenth Doctor. You probably know that.
What’s it All About? The Doctor has regenerated from Jodie Whittaker back into David Tennant for reasons not yet explained. He bumps into Donna (Catherine Tate), whose daughter Rose (Yasmin Finney) has discovered an alien, Beep The Meep (Myriam Margolyes), and hides it – in true E.T. style – in her shed. Donna’s still got the whole mind block from Journey’s End in place whereby she’ll die if she remembers the Doctor (or there’s a big End Of Doctor special in the offing) so keeps missing things like a crashing spaceship. The ship carries soldiers bent on bringing the Meep to justice since, though looking cute and cuddly, it is, in fact, a vicious, evil thing. The Meep is stopped from destroying London by the Doctor and Donna, who eventually deals with the whole I’ll-die thing by having had a daughter and diluting the metacrisis then just letting it go. Hmm. Anyway, Donna pops off for “one last journey in the TARDIS”, it all goes wrong, and then onto the next episode.
Look, I’m not doing the Why Did You Give It A Go section for Doctor Who. You know why.
Is It Any Good? Ah, well, that’s the Big Question, isn’t it? After years of the much-maligned Chris Chibnall era, of complaints about “wokeness” because of Whittaker’s casting, of fans aching for a return to the old days, etc, it’s time for Russell T Davies to return to the helm and steer the ship out of troubled waters. This was going to be it. The Big Recovery. The chance for the wrongs of the past few years/decade (delete depending on your personal preferences or lack thereof for Chibnall and Moffat) to be put right. And the return of David Tennant too! The consensus-best Doctor of the new series and the consensus-best show-runner of the new series, back together. What could possibly go wrong?
I mean, nothing really, but the results are still spectacularly ordinary. It’s not so much steadying the ship in choppy waters as still working out how to get out of the harbour. And that’s the thing about “The Star Beast”. There’s nothing wrong with it but for such a monumental occasion it feels completely unremarkable. Old-fashioned, even. The return of Murray Gold cements this feeling even further. Gone is the more integrated musical approach of the Chibnall era (one of its few relatively limited successes) and back comes the familar bombast and here’s-what-to-feel that Gold brings. He’s a great composer – generally – but it really lends that throwback feel to everything. As one of three specials starring David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor, it feels almost wasteful to have such a slight script be the first one out the door. And slight it unquestionably is.
But also, slight by design. The whole Beep The Meep plot mostly just exists to get all the pieces for the other two specials in place. It’s nothing remarkable, left over as it is from the 70s comic strip and retooled here for reasons that don’t seem to go much further than, “just coz”. The story is completely rote – “cute alien isn’t, threat to London, the Doctor stops it” is also pretty much exactly the plot of “Aliens of London” / “World War III” and there’s even a spaceship crashing over London to complete the comparison – but then again, the story is only meant to burble along in the background while we catch up with the characters from the past and see what’s been going on.
Part of the problem here is the balance. The Meep plot – with a glorious Myriam Margolyes channeling her very best Brian Blessed once the Meep’s true nature is revealed – takes up too much screentime to just be a series of background beats, while the character work that’s meant to be front and centre is oftentimes just a series of statements rather than developments. One of Russell T Davies’s strengths as a writer is his ability to get us to care about characters but a lot of the heavy lifting of the “caring about characters” work here is done here by nostalgia rather than actual character work. There’s some typically great dialogue but beyond that, there’s not a lot of work in the character work.
That extends to newcomer and future companion Rose too. Yasmin Finney is fine in the role but just doesn’t have much to get her teeth into here. That’s fine – like Clara in “Asylum of the Daleks”, this is more of an introduction rather than the actual launch and there will be plenty of time going forward when the Fifteenth Doctor eventually arrives. Still, what we get is sweet, charming, and likable, if nothing especially distinguished just yet. But there’s plenty of potential at least.
So why does this seem so insubstantial? Well, the fact is that this seems custom-built to get people back on board who might have bailed out at the introduction of Smith, Capaldi, or Whittaker. And I suppose it does achieve this but, as anyone familiar with the history of Terry Nation ought to know, you can’t just do the same thing now you did fifteen years ago with only peripheral changes and hope to get away with it. This has been a hugely successful relaunch in terms of viewing figures, which is great for the series, but creatively it’s pretty hollow.
Because while this is, beat for beat, pretty much exactly where we left things when RTD left the series, just repeating it fifteen years later isn’t enough. The “emotion over plot” aspect in particular seems extremely threadbare and it wasn’t that convincing back in the day (this is exactly why and where “The End of Time” came unstuck). Of course, given a choice between the two, going for the emotional character work is more important than the plot logistics but the two aren’t in binary opposition – you can have both, but we don’t. Instead, we have the usual flood of bafflegab, London threatened more by poorly chosen CGI rather than anything more substantial (and of course any damage immediately undone by what amounts to the CGI equivilent of reversing the footage), and a vague hope that Catherine Tate and David Tennant can overcome any deficiencies by sheer force of will.
It’s all very RTD, for both good and ill.
Would You Recommend It? Well, if you’re looking to get back into the series after the Chibnall and Moffat series’ and you don’t want much to have changed since 2009, then absolutely. This continues “The End of Time”‘s largely-failed attempts to fix the whole Donna situation, except this time out it succeeds, having the metacrisis be both successfully resolved in-universe and also allowing it to be a metatextual comment on trans allyship.
Ah yes, the trans stuff. It’s clunky in the extreme, in a way that makes Chibnall’s writing seem subtle and nuanced (some achievement, that). It’s extremely similar to the the way Star Trek: Discovery covers, or at least attempts to cover, trans issues, which is to say hoping that having it on screen is enough. And, you know, it is.
It’s unbelievably clumsy here but visibility is incredibly important, especially given the current trans discourse in the UK where things like gender self-ID in Scotland can be blocked by Westminster simply because they don’t like it despite it being passed in Holyrood by a two-thirds majority, or where JK Rowling can throw around virulent anti-trans views simply because she’s unfeasibly wealthy (and an appalling bigot). That’s the kind of attack trans people are under so to see an unabashedly trans character, on-screen and unapologetic or justified, is far more important than the actual quality of the writing around it. The fact that it’s present at all is more important than how well that presence is done.
It’s also worth noting in passing that UNIT has a new scientific adviser too – hopefully that means Osgood has been permanently relegated to Big Finish where she belongs, never to darken the series again – and this one’s in a wheelchair. Which is great. Simple, straightforward representation again without any real fuss. And an armoured wheelchair is good fun! Points on this front too.
So that’s all good. What about the Doctor and Donna though? Well… look, it’s lovely to see Tennant and Tate back together, of course, it is, and nothing on this Earth or any other planet is going to persuade me to say otherwise. They have always been a delight together and they remain a delight together. That’s uncontestable. The resolution of the metacrisis isn’t… great though. The whole “you wouldn’t get this as a male-presenting Time Lord” is especially poor since it seems to lean into the male=rational / women=emotional dichotomy that is profoundly unhelpful to the point of cliché.
It also feels slightly like Jodie-erasure – there’s a line a little earlier about how the Doctor and Donna are binary compared to Rose – the Doctor literally says, “we’re binary” – despite that being demonstritivly untrue given the Doctor isn’t binary at all and has in fact just been a woman and that fact is explicitly referred to in the episode (“That says, “mistress of the Knowledge””, Sean points out when the Doctor brandishes the psychic paper at him. “Come on, catch up!” the Doctor mutters, exasperated). It gives Rose the opportunity to be shown as non-binary, which is great, but that shouldn’t done at the expense of the Thirteenth Doctor. It does, I suppose, get the job done but it’s poorly handled. And “just let it go” is simply weak and unnecessary – the dilution via Donna having a child was more than enough. It’s a charming moment and, as always, we’re expected to invest in the emotion over logic, even though ticking both boxes just isn’t that difficult.
The question still remains whether this “fixing” needed to be done, of course – the tragedy of Donna’s ending is incredibly powerful, some of the best writing RTD has done in fact, and far better and more emotionally affecting than Billie Piper wobbling her lower lip in Norway (that’s not an insult to Piper, to be clear). But, while Tate is always fantastic, letting that ending stand still feels more effective. I get the whole “the Doctor can make better choices” thing, which was also the pivot of “The Day of the Doctor”, but also a tragic ending once in a while is fine. I’m not going to point to Adric here, for obvious reasons, but… well…
For the rest, it’s pretty much standard operating procedure. Donna is Outranged At Stuff (always brilliant to see), her Mum is stern and defensive but loving, her husband is goofy but likable, and so on… you know, just like it always was. Tennant and Tate pick up their rapport effortlessly and while the whole flod of bafflegab aboard the Meep ship is maybe a tad overdone, it’s hard not to get swept along with it. The whole situation feels very writerly-contrived so the Doctor is forced to reveal everything to imperil Donna’s life in order to save London but again, fine – it’s clunky as hell but it gets us over the line. You might notice there’s a lot of synonyms for “it gets us there” in this review, and there’s a reason for that.
See also, of course, the Meep, which is broadly rubbish but rather saved by both an excellent costume/bit of CGI and Myriam Margolyes’s take-no-prisoners approach to line delivery. Cute thing turns out to be evil is such a lazy cliché (“Galaxy 4” did it back in the Hartnell era, for Rassilon’s sake!) and nothing is done to subvert it here. Its whole motivation is evil-because-it-is – even the P’ting was better motivated, to say nothing of the Moopsy from Star Trek: Lower Decks. But – yes, yes, here we go again – it gets the job done. You might argue, conceivably, that this is simply the price of importing the story wholesale from the 70s comic, where that story beat originates. Which, yes, it is, but then if it’s not good enough… don’t do that?
But, honestly, “gets the job done” is just not what this episode needed to be. Maybe it’s not bad. Maybe it would fit quite easily between, say, the shit “Planet of the Dead” and the very good “The Waters of Mars” if it was part of RTD’s original run. But Doctor Who is rarely good at specials and “The Star Beast” continues this rather ignoble tradition. There’s some good dialogue, it doesn’t completely stink up the joint, there are some fun moments, and of course, Tennant and Tate are a delight together again. But the question remains – if you’re going to bring them back just to do exactly what you did before, what’s the point?
Hopefully, the remaining two specials will have a rather more convincing answer than this one does.
Oh and Time Lords can invent technology that can literally span the universe, from the beginning of creation to the end of time, they can go beyond the bounds of reality, move sideways in time, redefine what existence is, develop the most terrible weapons, rewrite reality at will, and do it all effortlessly, yet it turns out all the Daleks needed to defeat them during the Time War was a cup of coffee. That’s a choice.
Scores On The Doors? A fairly generous 6/10
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