It’s the 60th Anniversary of Doctor Who, and the celebrations are now officially in full swing. The BBC have pulled out all the stops with a charity mini episode that features the Fourteenth Doctor and a new version of Davros, and the Fifteenth Doctor has made his first canonical appearance in a surprise re-edit of An Adventure in Space and Time. Now though, we have the big deal in a brand new episode and the first of three specials that feature the return of David Tennant and Catherine Tate.
The Star Beast manages to recapture the style and pace of the previous era of David Tennant and Russell T Davies Doctor Who with surprising ease. When it was announced that David Tennant would be returning to play the Fourteenth Doctor, it would have been easy to expect that it would just have been a rehash of his role as the Tenth Doctor. I’m happy to say that this didn’t feel like they were just playing the old hits and it felt every bit a continuation of the show as it was a celebration.
The episode takes little time to get into the thick of the action. Within just a minute of starting, the Doctor is reunited with Donna Noble, and of course this causes him some panic. The last time they spent time together, Donna had taken in the essence of a Time Lord, which was too much for a human to handle and so the Doctor wiped her memory to save her life. That story was fourteen years ago, but feels like yesterday. This episode would have to resolve this plot point if they were going to go for a proper reunion between Tennant and Tate and they did so in a clever way.
Russell T Davies was the show runner of Doctor Who when it became new Who in 2005, and he has long been known for his work in the LGBTQ community, most prominently his previous show Queer as Folk. It’s nothing new for Davies to cast diverse performers or incorporate diverse storylines into the show, but this is one of the cleverest ways it’s been put into Doctor Who to date. To explain how will sound a bit complicated, but it’s actually very simple.
When David Tennant first became the Doctor, he lost a hand in a sword fight. Because he’d only just regenerated, he was able to grow a new hand, but the old hand was found by Captain Jack Harkness, who kept it in a jar, and used it as a Doctor detector of sorts. When the hand was returned to the Doctor he kept it in its jar on board the Tardis.
Then, a year later, The Doctor was fatally shot by a Dalek, and started to regenerate again. The Doctor was able to keep his appearance looking like David Tennant as he used some of the regeneration energy to heal himself, but syphoned the excess energy into his extra hand which stopped him changing appearance. I hope you’re keeping up with this.
Then, Donna Noble touched the jar which was glowing and her DNA was exchanged with the hand in the jar which did two things. Firstly, the presence of Donna’s DNA caused the hand to grow into a full sized duplicate of the Tenth Doctor, but with aspects of Donna’s personality. Donna also managed to get something in the exchange and was left with the full knowledge and intelligence of the Doctor.
This was too much for a human and we got a scene where Donna started to explain how the Doctor could fix the Tardis’s ability to camouflage itself. Mid-sentence she got stuck on the word ‘binary’ and repeated it over and over before the Doctor pointed that her mind couldn’t handle a Time Lord’ mind and then wiped it.
Back in 2009 it was long before the idea of a person being non binary became a commonly understood term, but proved to provide a route to save Donna in the story. It’s established in the show that Donna has had a child who is trans, and is now called Rose, which itself is a callback to Rose Tyler form the show and the Tenth Doctor’s past. Towards the end of the episode, we geta scene which is reminiscent of the Tenth Doctor’s regeneration in that both Donna and the Fourteenth Doctor are separated behind a glass wall just as the Tenth Doctor and Donna’s grandad Wilf were. Just like in that situation, The Doctor was faced that one of the two wouldn’t survive in order to save everyone else, and this time is was Donna who would have to sacrifice herself just as the Tenth had sacrificed himself to save Wilf.
Throughout the episode Donna mostly doesn’t remember who the Doctor is, but he is able to restore her memory and status as the Doctor Donna version of herself by saying a sequence of coded words. Eventually Donna starts joining in and repeating what the Doctor says (perhaps a reference to the episode Midnight) and Donna starts repeating the word binary again as she had all those years earlier.
So…after all this build up, this is where things get very clever. It’s revealed that as Rose’s mother, there is a connection between the two and as Donna was saying binary Rose was saying ‘non binary’ which reflects themselves in a clever reference, not only to their status as a member of the LGBTQ community, but in that it ties into the last words Donna was saying as the Doctor Donna back in 2009. This is a great sign of clever writing as there is no way Davies knew that this line would eventually be able to be used in this way over a decade later. The cleverness is further extended by this connection between mother and child in that Donna is able to spread the overload of Time Lord energy into Rose and it saves her life.
This could leave the show with the issue of there being three characters of Doctor level intelligence, but they quickly resolve it with Rose and Donna simply letting go of the energy. This was plot convenience and a bit of a cheap line, but quickly solve the plot issue. It does however show that the Doctor Donna could have just let it go like Elsa and not had her memories of the Doctor wiped for ten years.
The antagonist of the episode is the very cute and cuddly looking alien known as the Meep. The Meep looks like a giant Furby crossed with baby Yoda ears (maybe a Disney influence now that they’re funding it) and is muddled up with cuddly toys that Rose makes. There’s a hilarious scene where Donna sees the Meep and thinks it’s a toy and pokes it in the eyeball. In the same scene the Meep laments when Rose pulls the stuffing out of one of the toy’s tummy and the Meep wanted the toy to be it’s friend.
Of course, the Meep isn’t all it seemed and like one of those evil Furby looking toys that can suddenly have a mean face and pointy teeth, the Meep turns evil. I can’t wait for Meep merch to go on sale and have a mode to turn from nice to evil and scare kids. I think the BBC will get some complaints.
Despite how complicated the plot of Donna and Rose sounded when I explained it all, the episode is actually very easy to follow. When the Doctor first meets Donna he sees a space ship crash to Earth and then goes looking for the alien that turns out to be the Meep. The Doctor isn’t the only person looking for the Meep however and some possessed Unit guys are after it as well as some flying bug eyed monsters. The show pulls a similar trick to the introduction of the Judoon (the Rhino aliens) where the seemingly evil alien army are actually the good guys and they are trying to capture and arrest the evil Meep. There’s a great scene where the Fourteenth Doctor puts on a judge’s wig (we won’t ask how he got it) and looks at the evidence to reveal the Meep as the villain.
The episode also brings back Donna’s mum and husband and they are fun when involved in the action, but this is really about the reuniting of Tennant and Tate. The pace is quick and the dialogue is both clever and witty. The music is a return of Murray gold, and this goes along way to help the show feel like the Doctor Who everyone liked during it’s modern golden era of Tennant’s Tenth Doctor.
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