Tripwire’s Man In Los Angeles Reviews Doctor Who Special: Star Beast

A Starry Return

Tripwire’s man in Los Angeles Robert Cave takes a look at Doctor Who Special: Star Beast which was on last night…

The Star Beast
Written by Russell T. Davies (from a story by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons)
Directed by Rachel Talalay
Stars David Tennant, Catherine Tate, Yasmin Finney

Wow. That was fun. But, Wow. That really looked like the show Doctor Who had always been in our heads. An extravagantly gorgeous show. A show whose ambition no longer exceeds its budget. It is fitting that the first episode of the Disney Who era is an adaptation of a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, itself adapted from a pitch for the classic era TV Who. Everything old is new again. And bigger and bolder and sexier, like the new title sequence. I wish I could have seen that on a cinema screen, and it’s not like my TV screen is particularly small to start with.

Yes, Russell T. Davies is back (for some reason I feel the need to refer to him a Russell T. – Mr Davies sounds too much like a schoolteacher). David Tennant is back too as the Fourteenth Doctor, and Catherine Tate as Donna, and Murray Gold providing the music, and director Rachel Talalay and a whole host of others. In fact, there are so many folk returning that it is probably quicker to name the people who aren’t returning – mainly Ruth Madeley as UNIT’s latest scientific advisor, Miriam Margolyes as the Meep and Yasmin Finney as Donna’s non-binary daughter, Rose Noble.

I can fully see why Disney seems to be holding fire on the full press campaign until the arrival of Ncuti Gatwa as the Fourteenth Doctor. The Star Beast is completely entangled with Doctor Who continuity, so much so in fact that the Disney+ version starts with a recap for everything viewers need to know. But it also gives us something we haven’t had since season 21 of the classic era: a mid-season Doctor regeneration.

Yes, I can hear you all disagreeing, pointing out that these aren’t episodes, they are specials ahead of a newly renumbered season 1 that will inaugurate the Fifteenth Doctor’s run. I don’t care. I just think these episodes under Russell T. fit better as part of the forthcoming season 1. And it gives that season a longer run.

Then we get to the story. The basic idea of something that looks cute actually being evil is perversely fitting for a Disney co-production, but it the way that Russell T. seamlessly blends that in with solving the problem of Donna’s terrible fate. That really makes this episode sing for me. There was a lot of technobabble, but her brain was being overwhelmed by carrying a Time Lord mind. Without some form of intervention, she would have died. The solution that The Doctor (and Russell T.) came up with at the time was to erase Donna’s memories. This struck many fans as being incredibly cruel and unfair. On the one hand, that’s the kind of response writers hope for as it is a sure sign that their work has really connected with its audience, on the other hand, it is painfully unsatisfying for anyone wanting or needing a happy ending for characters they have come to love. There is already enough hurt in the world. Fiction is where we go to explore that hurt and heal from it.

Russell T. has had time to explore how to heal this fictional wound in a way that doesn’t detract from its pain. He revisited Donna to give her the husband she’d been searching for, and financial security. But it was giving Donna her daughter, Rose, that he gave Donna the family she’d always wanted. Donna loves Rose unconditionally in a way that her own mother has not always been able to express.

Rose is trans and non-binary. That’s both incidental to the plot and the whole point of it. Russell T. has a long history of placing queer and otherwise marginalised characters on screen, in roles both starring and incidental. It is choice of inclusion that he’s actually embraced even more over time, as he has rethought things he previously accepted uncritically, such as his complicity in occasionally using disability as a shorthand for evil. He wrote John Lumic, the megalomaniacal inventor of the Cybus Industries Cybermen as a wheelchair user. With the Children in Need charity short, Destination Skaro, Russell T. has now recast Davros as able-bodied, and in The Star Beast he’s brought in Ruth Madeley, a wheelchair-using actress, as the latest UNIT scientific advisor. Of course, It would be wrong to attribute more inclusive casting to Russell T. alone, or even to Doctor Who casting supremo Andy Pryor, but they have put the work in and Doctor Who and its fandom has undoubtedly benefitted from it.

But getting back to Rose, and the final resolution of Donna Noble story arc. Donna is ultimately able to spread the load of the Time Lord mind with the help of her daughter, and then do the truly remarkable; something thrilling; something that the male-presenting Doctor could not think of – to just let the burden of that mind go. It is a lesson for us all. The power of a different perspective, coming up with elegant solutions that are simply inconceivable from a narrower point of view.

And it doesn’t just apply to character story arcs and plot points of long-established narrative continuity. Just letting it go is pretty useful multipurpose advice for us all, particularly male-presenting Doctor Who fans like me. If you don’t like something about Doctor Who? Just let it go.

Altogether, The Star Beast is a pretty satisfying story, and a great amuse-bouche for the rest of the delights Russell T.’s second stint as show runner has in store. The visuals have once again been kicked up a notch. We have fantastic drone tracking shots of the streets of suburban London filled with soldiers and alien police in a full-on laser battle. Then there’s that new TARDIS control room. It is utterly gorgeous. It’s huge! It’s multi-level, although we have seen that before, but now we have doors, plural, to the rest of the ship. Oh, the infinite promise that lies behind those doors; TARDIS corridors, TARDIS bedrooms and that weird TARDIS swimming pool from The Invasion of Time…

I literally cannot wait to see what comes next. And fortunately, we have but a week until the next special, airing on Disney+ at 10:30 AM PST and on the BBC for UK viewers at 6.30 PM GMT. No more months long gaps between episodes. It really is just like time travel. See you next week.

Incidentally, the old DWM comic strips are well worth checking out. The comic strip Star Beast is different enough to be enjoyable in its own right and contains a couple of brilliant sequences not included on the screen version, such as the Fourth Doctor desperately trying to catch a bus to escape the Wrarth Warriors, then the Wrarth Warriors enjoying some tea and cake, and K9 getting clobbered. And the Iron Legion is a pretty great story too… I mean it, track down all those DWM strip collections.