Who Review: The Star Beast
The TARDIS lands in London and the newly-regenerated Doctor walks out onto the bustling streets only to encounter Donna Noble. Donna was his companion some years ago but the Doctor had to wipe her memory to save her life thanks to a metacrisis that made her part Time Lord. If she ever remembers the Doctor, the memory will trigger the return of the metacrisis and it will kill her. Thankfully she doesn’t recognize the Doctor, and while her back is turned, the rest of London watches in amazement as a spacecraft appears to crash land somewhere in the distance. The Doctor takes a cab, driven by Shaun, Donna’s husband, to the crash site. But the ship hasn’t crashed; it has landed. And its pilot has escaped…
SPOILER ALERT!! My comments may (and likely will) contain spoilers for those who haven’t seen the episode. If you want to stay spoiler-free, please watch the story before you continue reading!
Doctor Who is back, as is Russell T. Davies, the man who returned the show to television back in 2005. While never admitted by RTD or the BBC, the widely-held view is that the BBC brought RTD back to win back its audience after a huge decline in viewers in recent years. Many (me included) blame the heavy-handed way Chibnall incorporated social messaging into his stories and the seeming inability of the writers to write stories that weren’t overshadowed by the messaging. Can Russell T. Davies rescue Who from the grip of wokeness and bring some of the joy, imagination, and sparkle back to the show? Would RTD’s writing talent, strong as it is, be up to the task of winning back a skeptical audience?
The BBC no doubt has great confidence in RTD’s skills, but to be sure, they also brought back David Tennant and Catherine Tate for this story and the next two. Tennant is the Doctor again but this time he’s the Fourteenth Doctor, not the Tenth. Catherine Tate returns as Donna Noble, his companion from 2008. They had such obvious chemistry back then that clearly, the hope was that viewers would flock to the show in droves to see them together again in a new story.
The story RTD chose as the inaugural episode of the show’s soft reboot is “The Star Beast,” adapted from a Fourth Doctor comic strip by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons that originally appeared in Doctor Who magazine in 1980. This strip introduced Beep the Meep, a furry alien from a race whose peace-loving nature was corrupted by radiation from a passing Black Sun. Pursued by law enforcement in the form of the giant insectoid Wrarth Warriors, Beep the Meep was shot down over Earth where he hid from his enemies, adopting a cute and cuddly persona to ingratiate himself with the natives.
RTD adapts the main thread of this story, weaving the Doctor-Donna narrative around it to make it his own. In RTD’s version, the Meep is taken in by Donna and Shaun’s teenage child, Rose, forcing the Doctor and Donna to work together to help the Meep escape. Eventually, however, the Meep shows his true colors, and they must work to try to stop him from tearing London apart to refuel his ship and escape.
Davies’s version is full of wit and the kind of down-to-earth dialogue we have come to expect from Donna and her family. Part of the appeal of RTD’s writing has to be the fact his settings and characters tend to be low to middle-class families living in council housing or, as in Donna’s case, on terraced streets. Everyday, ordinary people living ordinary lives that are disrupted by the chaos imposed by the Doctor and his world. This is how RTD relates to his audience whom, he suspects, largely fits this demographic.
The Tennant-Tate chemistry is back in spades, and no matter what you think of Donna as a companion, it’s undeniable that the two of them always pull off an entertaining performance. They both slide back into their parts as if it has only been a few months since they were last on Who together as opposed to 14 years. But that’s what happens when you have well-written characters played by gifted actors.
There’s no mistaking Disney’s financial involvement in the show. The special effects are on par with any other show or movie you might see, even from the big Hollywood studios. The decision to blend practical effects with CGI was a good move, in my opinion. Actors respond much better to things that are actually in front of them rather than playing to a green screen. Modern technology can produce creatures and prosthetics that are much more believable than those in years past, making the actor’s task of selling the effect easier. In this story, the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver can now generate images that we all can see, and it can craft protective shields out of thin air. This latter may be a bit much, a lazy way to give the Doctor and his friends protection while they escape. I believe it was RTD who once said the sonic screwdriver was necessary because simple things like locked doors shouldn’t get in the way of the Doctor’s plans. In this case, it would have been nice to see some clever thinking rather than a clever effect.
The TARDIS has also had a makeover and I have to say I really do like what they’ve done with the interior. White walls with roundels and white floors strongly suggest a Classic era design but with a spacious modern feel. Of course, two minutes into showing off this new set Donna ruins it by spilling her tea on the console causing explosions and triggering the cliffhanger to the next story.
So this was a great start, and things are looking good for the show, yes? Well… not quite. Yes, this was, at heart, a solid story with a lot of potential. But I have some issues. Big issues. And they give me grave concerns for the future of Doctor Who.
Before I go on, let me explain a couple of things. First, I took time before writing this review to do something I don’t normally do before writing Who Reviews: I read and watched a bunch of other reviews, positive, negative, and all shades in between. I did this to try to temper my initial reaction, to give me some perspective in the event I’m overreacting with my concerns.
Second, if you’ve spent more than a few minutes on this blog, you know I’m a Christian, and I approach everything from that worldview. I don’t apologize for that, but I state it as a fact so you know where I’m coming from. It should not surprise anyone, therefore, that I was more than a little uncomfortable with the sub-plot and messaging of this story. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the very pro-transgender messaging infused into the story.
I understand that RTD is gay, and as such considers himself a part of and an ally to the LGBTQ+ cause. He was back in 2005, and nothing has changed there, except in 2005-2009, he exercised sufficient restraint to not let his personal convictions run ahead of good storytelling. His Who stories during that period included gay and bi-sexual characters, and the Doctor was always someone who accepted people, cultures, and lifestyles of all kinds without judgment. RTD would argue that back then, he wouldn’t have been able to get away with the kind of stories he wanted to write, but this is a different time and we have to keep up with the times.
We got a hint of that with his Children in Need special a few weeks ago. In that five minute short, Davros is musing over his newly created fighting machine with one of his minions, trying to decide what to name it. He’s called away and in his absence the Doctor arrives, breaking the machine’s grabbing arm. The Doctor accidentally suggests the name “Dalek” to the minion, then, realizing he shouldn’t be there, he hands the minion a plunger to replace the arm he broke and disappears before Davros returns. It’s a fun story, meant as a light-hearted prequel, surely, since the Daleks are brand new and unnamed, and Davros is standing on two legs, not in his Dalek-styled travel chair…?
Not quite. In the “Making of” special that accompanied the short, RTD explained that he was always uncomfortable with “Davros in a wheelchair.” He felt it sent the wrong message, that being in a wheelchair meant you were evil. It seems for decades of film and television no one cared about this, but nowadays things are different. We need to be sensitive to the disabled community, and portraying bad guys in wheelchairs only serves to support bad stereotypes. That was RTD’s reasoning, and not only was I disappointed, but I saw it as a red flag, a bad omen of things to come. Aside from the fact that Davros’s travel chair was never intended to be a wheelchair, and I don’t know of any Who fans who ever thought of it that way. And while I’m sure there are those who consider disabled people to be evil (there’s always someone!), I find it very hard to believe they constitute a concerning number of people. I imagine it to be a very small minority of people. It is true that there’s a long history of disfigurement being seen as a sign of divine displeasure or an outward manifestation of a crippled heart. But since when has that been a mainstream view, at least enough to retcon a much-loved and well-established villain like Davros? Further, is Davies now denying disabled people the opportunity to play Who villains? So much for diversity, inclusion, and representation. Are we to believe disabled people can never be evil? That so long as someone is in a wheelchair they can be trusted implicitly? If I had never heard RTD’s comments, or if he had kept his views to himself, I would have enjoyed the short and thought nothing more of it. However, after RTD’s comments, I feared that ghost of woke Who had returned, the same ghost that haunted Chibnall’s era, but worse because the showrunner is so brazen about his intentions. If you don’t see the progressive woke messaging, he’ll be sure to point it out if you ask.
I was willing, however, to set my concerns aside. Maybe this was a one-off. That was just a fun little story. For the main show, RTD will surely be more subtle, finding a balance between being true to his values and not alienating those in the audience who may not agree with his social views. Nope. Throughout the show, we’re told (more than once), that Rose is a girl, Rose is beautiful, and Rose is special. RTD is good enough of a writer to find roundabout ways of tell us Rose is not biologically female. Rose’s schoolmates taunt with Rose’s “deadname.” Donna’s mum talks about how she sometimes slips up (presumably using the wrong pronoun, or referring to Rose by birthname) and worries about being sexist. Rose is the one who chastizes the Doctor for assuming the Meep’s gender. Actually, I thought this was fair given the Meep is alien, but it was presumptuous of Rose to assume the Meep cared. But the real eye-roll moment was when the Meep responded to the gender question by saying, “My chosen pronoun is the definite article.” Really? An alien drops onto Earth from who knows where or when, and suddenly starts talking about “My chosen pronoun…”?
The climax of the story, however, is where the messaging really started to take over. Remember the metacrisis? Well, it seems the fact that Donna had a child means the metacrisis was shared. Some of that Time-Lord-y-ness ended up in Rose, and, when Donna remembered the Doctor and seemed to die, she was able to revive because the metacrisis was split. And that would have been good enough for me… but no. RTD had to take it one step further. It’s also because Rose is “non-binary”–somehow that made a difference because Donna kept saying “binary” when the metacrisis overwhelmed her back in 2008. I still haven’t figured out how that works, but the fact RTD used this clearly as an excuse to draw attention to Rose being “non-binary” was too much.
Sad to say, it didn’t end there. Toward the end, while everyone’s gathered at the TARDIS, Donna and Rose explain to the Doctor that the metacrisis is not a problem for them because they can choose to let it go, something that he as a male-presenting Time Lord wouldn’t understand. This scene, the way Rose and Donna berate the Doctor for being male (or “male presenting”) and therefore not able to get it, was by far the worst piece of writing for Doctor Who since 2005. Yes, that includes all of Chibnall’s episodes. It’s incoherent drivel that insults the Doctor on multiple levels. How many times has the Doctor had to “let it go”? Remember 10th’s regeneration? “I don’t want to go,” he said, but he did. He let go. The 12th went through a similar experience. And, not to put too fine a point on it, in his previous generation, the Doctor was actually a biological female, not simply “female-presenting.” Why wouldn’t he understand?
Lest you think I’m being harsh, or I’m allowing my Christian convictions to cloud my judgment, I found many of these sentiments echoed from a wide variety of people, many of whom were not Christian, some would consider themselves LGBTQ+ or allied to that group. A few comments I read were from people who identified as “trans” and found the whole show “cringy.” They felt RTD ruined the story by trying too hard. The term I would use is “virtue signalling,” and I think it would apply here.
As if all that’s not bad enough, how has RTD responded to the criticisms? A few of the remarks from him I’ve seen on Twitter/X amount to curt dismissals or accusations of bigotry. He’s clearly not interested in a discussion of the issues. He’s right, he’s in charge, so like it or lump it.
Some reviewers have suggested that RTD is being strongly encouraged to pursue this agenda, for want of a better term, by Disney. The suggestion is that part of the contract with Disney+ included ramping up the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) messaging–something Disney itself has clearly been doing in recent years. While this isn’t outside the realms of possibility, I’ve seen no evidence to back this up. For now, I’m willing to believe that Disney truly has exercised no creative influence and this steaming pile of mess is totally on the shoes of RTD.
When it was announced RTD was taking over, as well as being encouraged, I expressed concern that over the years since 2009 he has changed, and it’s possible he may want to go directions with the show he wouldn’t have dared tried in 2005. I really, really hoped I was wrong and my concerns were unfounded. Unfortunately, it seems I was right.
There are still two more specials to go, then a Christmas special introducing the Fifteenth Doctor. Perhaps this episode was an anomaly, and the next special will not be nearly as woke-heavy. Maybe RTD will tone down the messaging and just tell a great story. I’m willing to see. But I’m losing patience with New Who. If “The Star Beast” is a foretaste of what we can expect from RTD from now on, then I’m done with Who. I’ll give him till Christmas to convince me all is well.
If you watched this story, what did you think? Share your respectful comments below…
