The Beast Below
(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy, 10/4/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin, Pat Mills, director: Andrew Gunn)
'Where do you weigh a (space) whale? At a whale-weigh (space) station of course!'
Ranking: 225
In an emoji: 🐳
A whale crossing space, man’s inhumanity to man and a British colony in the 29th century fleeing the mess they’ve made back home on Earth make for the sort of timeless Dr Who story that could honestly have been made in any era (well, any time before the 29th I guess to be pedantic). And it sort of is this story, with ‘The Beast Below’ having what must surely be one of the longest whale-sized gestation periods of any Dr Who script ever. Surprisingly the credits don’t mention it, but a version of this story was first submitted by Pat Mills for the 4th Doctor era as ‘Song Of The Space Whale’, heavily rewritten for Peter Davison’s first year in 1982, rewritten again for his second (when it would have introduced Turlough as a companion and been linked to The Black Guardian), was revived for the 6th Doctor and Peri as part of season 23 that got cancelled (and replaced by ‘Trial Of A Timelord’- you can hear that version as the Big Finish ‘Lost Stories’ audio ‘Song Of The Megaptera’ and very good it is too) then stuck in a drawer and forgotten until being extensively rewritten and finally making it to screen in 2010. With admittedly an ocean full of differences. And while the story is timeless and half of the additions improve it beyond measure to anything we would have had in the 1980s, the other half of the changes, well, don’t, with all the strengths and weaknesses of the Steven Moffat era magnified: fantastic ideas, often glorious one-liners and a script that never stays still long enough to get boring full of such imagination that it makes you ask ‘what were they drinking?!’But also a story that makes less and less sense the more you think about it, with too many promising ideas that are dropped without fulfilling their potential when something more interesting comes along and occasional scenes that make you wonder ‘what were they thinking?!’
The good parts first. This is a truly brilliant and oh so Dr Who plot and I can see why so many production teams tried to make it. Especially this one as it touches on so many of the issues Moffat holds dear in his own concepts: there’s a space whale travelling with the remnants of the United Kingdom on its back across the stars to a new home (like many a spaceship in the 29th century in the old series) whose been captured as an ‘engine’ out of greed but (spoilers) came out of love and didn’t need to be locked up. The idea of a space whale being used by the very humans it was trying to save very much suits the Moffat era of a child’s eye view of the universe who don’t understand why adults always have to make everything so dark and complicated when people (and animals) really aren’t that different and tend to do things out of love automatically unless they’re been cowed into reacting to fear first. Adults on first meeting tend to be automatically wary of each other and suspicious of differences until learning to trust and relax, but children tend to be trusting first and wary later if earned. And the space whale might be fully grown but it still acts instinctively like a child and clearly has an affinity with the human children (whom it refuses to eat – presumably on moral grounds, though for all we know maybe they just don’t taste very nice and it’s a bit like humans throwing tiny fish back into the sea?)They can actually make a sort of semi-realistic space whale on screen properly in 2010 too (the main reason why so many production team reluctantly dropped this story) and it really does look amazing. Like many a Moffat story there are no obvious heroes (besides the whale) or out and out villains (even the worst person in this story thinks they have no choice but to carry on the charade or millions of humans will die) and certainly there are no easy solutions and is all too plausible a story of man’s cruelty (if you’re content to believe in a whale that crosses outer space anyway). Like all the best drama (and indeed the best Dr Who stories) you can sympathise with everyone in turn. We can understand the Doctor’s anger that humanity has chosen to look the other way and forget. We can empathise with Amy, the new companion in only her second story, out of her depth and panicking, forced to make the same decision to remember or to forget and finding out that space travel isn’t always as fun as it sounds. We can see why so many of the local population, on learning the horrible truth, have chosen to look the other way rather than the alternative: perishing in space. And most of all we sympathise with the space-whale, who would gladly give humanity a lift on its back for free if only they'd thought to, y’ know, ask in the first place. You can see why so many production teams tried to make this story down the years because it asks so many big questions – and why it finally found a home in this era, which has more answers than most about the importance of trust and kindness, contrasting how the universe ought to be a magical place but humanity keeps getting in its own way. Unfortunately a lot of the Moffat era gets in its own way too, with lots of clunky bits added from elsewhere that don’t always fit that well, comedy scenes and OTT dramatic sections that no writer in the 1980s would have dreamed of putting on telly (and viewers were starting to get a bit sick of in 2010 too).
The original is a much more typical Dr Who story without as big a heart, a runaround with the Doctor or companions being arrested and escaping until the big showdown when they learn the truth of what’s going on (something they learn from the voting machines in Moffat’s script, one of his best additions). There’s no rebel Queen, far less politics and no story arc of Amy running away from her problems or the Doctor getting cross at humans (although the 6th Doctor does to gets to shout a bit in ‘his’ version – well, it is the 6th Doctor after all). There is, though, a computer thinking with a brain not a heart (this being 1980s Dr Who, when computers were the biggest scariest change happening to society) which the Doctor solves by infecting with a virus that makes it release its hold on the poor animal. In their place come a deeper sense of this starship as an actual place, with the very wonderful idea that every country fleeing a doomed planet Earth had their own spaceship (and the story’s best gag, perhaps the season’s best gag, that Scotland have their own breakaway shuttle, although I’m sorry that they missed the ‘Wales on the back of a Whale’ pun) with a whole backstory and a government which add a whole dimension and bite lacking in the original(s). There’s also, however, a much more convoluted plot, supporting characters who don’t get to make much of an impact, lots of this year’s big themes overlaid on top where they don’t really fit, a lengthy showdown that seems to go on forever and a lot more camp slapstick so broad they would never have tried even during the original run’s campest and most slapstick era (1987). Worst offenders are the Northern dialect Queen Liz10, Elizabeth’s multiple-grand-child whose black and streetwise, a great one-line gag that gets less funnier every time she re-appears (even if it seems more cutting than they meant it in 2010, given this was the era before Harry started (space)shipping Meghan and Haza’s family started puling faces at the skin tone of their children) and the awful scene where the whale has to, well, poo the Doctor and Amy out of its system (an oddly juvenile gag for such an intelligent plot).
Perhaps the best thing Moffat does to the original script is turn it into the ‘other’ style of script we used to get in the 1980s – the veiled political subtext. Note the Doctor’s dark and bitter comments about humanity ‘forgetting’ the truth every five years ‘because that’s how democracy works’. The 2010 election was one of the most divided in Britan’s history, so close to the wire that it was only decided by natural enemies the Conservatives and Lib Dems working ‘together’ (although in this context ‘working together’ ended up being like the way The Rani treats The Master in ‘The Mark Of the Rani’ or how Garron treats Unstoffe in ‘The Ribos Operation – Nigel Plaskitt would make a fine Nick Clegg when they come to make the inevitable TV movie about this era). Even though the election wasn’t until the month after this story was transmitted, we all knew this was going to be tight and the political mud flinging had been going on for at least a year and it was a nasty, bitter campaign from both sides: The Conservatives were quick to point out the credit crunch happened on Labour’s watch, conveniently forgetting that it was a worldwide issue (and one Gordon Brown’s policies had cushioned the UK from compared to other countries, until the Coalition’s policies of austerity made it far far worse and last far far longer). For their part Labour were quick to show that the problems all stemmed from Conservative policies in the 1980s and 1990s, conveniently forgetting that they’d had thirteen years to put them right and hadn’t. Both sides were pitched as polar opposites even though their electoral promises were pretty much the same (and both were dangerously close to centre so that there wasn’t all that much difference anyway). David Cameron was a nasty piece of work, so posh it wouldn’t surprise me if he kept his own space whale to torture in his swimming pool in between hopeless out-of-touch comments in the House of Commons and who made even Davros look cuddly. Gordon Brown was, by contrast, a malfunctioning robot who seemed to have problems even speaking like a normal person. They weren’t exactly the most hopeful and uplifting of choices. The phrase I heard a lot at the time was that people couldn’t decide on the lesser of the two evils and were forced to vote against who they felt were the evil of the two lessers. Here, freed of the ties to the rest of Earth as they drift in space, Starship UK’s government have become more deranged and shadowy, forcing people to vote in booths to give them a mandate to rule - but then wiping their memories once they’d made a decision, a plausible extension of what was happening at the time of transmission. Protesting is difficult and dangerous: if you’re brave enough to go through with speaking out then you’re space food (quick thought: how come a space whale eats people? Wouldn’t it prefer, ahem, fish and (space)ships?!?), so no wonder most people choose to ‘forget’ the truth of what’s driving the spaceship instead. So what you have is a society built on a lie that doesn’t really know what’s going on and in a situation like that the change needed to make things run properly can never happen. More than that, though, it feels as if Moffat is trying to make an allegory here that the ‘space whale’ is the working classes – sometimes called the ‘engine room’ of Great Britain - tortured into working hard, their screams muted to the people in power who don’t have to mingle with them and treat them as faceless statistics, convinced the poor are only poor because they’re idle, when left to their own devices most people would work hard to help the people close to them anyway.. I’m not sure if I’m too happy about being compared to a massive mute brute, but it’s the sort of contemporary point in a futuristic setting this show was born for, sly and subtle enough to get away with it in a way dramas that came right out and said this sort of thing would get into trouble for, there if you want to look for it, but part of a story that still works if you don’t. It’s very fitting for a Who story as this show tends to hate whichever government is in power, the closest the 21st century series has come to the occasional political gems of the past, like ‘The Happiness Patrol’ or ‘The Sunmakers’ and I admire the bravery, whatever the execution.
The take on Royalty is a bit more…confusing, but then so it Britain’s relationship with its figureheads to begin with. Liz 10 is a direct descendent of our Queen and somehow is still in nominal charge (she’s on the stamps and everything) but she doesn’t actually get to have a ‘real’ say (much like 21st century UK Politics, where the King or Queen officially has to declare laws to have them passed as bills, but don’t have any democratic say as to what those laws are –they just read a bit of paper and would be in trouble if they refused). They’re a much older representative of the establishment than government but are, for some reason I’ve never entirely understood, far more loved by the British at large. They seem exactly the sort of rich out-of-touch dictators the Doctor would overthrow on any other planet, but in this series (as mentioned in this very story) the Doctor has been known to save The Queen when a spaceship was about to crash into Buckingham Palace, sort-of protected her from Nazis and Cybermen (although I’m still not entirely sure which Royal that was supposed to be in ‘Silver Nemesis’) and even snogged the Virgin Queen. People here tend to feel as if they ‘know’ the Royals, even though all they see is the ‘face’ they put on for the media. Here Moffat tells that story in reverse: this is a Queen who is made to be the face of the government but she does genuinely care about her people, using a physical ‘mask’ to go undercover and find out what they really think and how they really live. Only whenever she finds out the truth, every ten years or so, and is faced with the choice of abdicating or forgetting, she too chooses the easier option of having her memory wiped so she starts again. It’s symbolic of every relationship the Royals have had with parliament every since Cromwell lobbed Charles I’s head off in the English (not so) Civil War (and as another aside I’m still anxiously waiting for a Dr Who set in this time period, not least because I’m intrigued who it would ‘side’ with: this is a show that’s always been against authority so it’s not a natural Royalist – but equally it’s not a lover of dictators pretending to be democratic and removing the fun in people’s lives either, so it’s not exactly a natural Roundhead). It’s another neat throwaway idea, the idea of a black Queen with a regional accent, but it’s all a bit odd how its shown on screen: why do the powers that be turn a blind eye to Liz 10’s investigations to the point of giving her a mask to do so and brainwashing her every time she discovers things rather than, say, just bringing in another Royal whose less likely to ask questions? (There is some Prince Andrew DNA in there after all – he could just make out he was at Pizzaus Expressus and never found out anything. *Insert the sort of ambiguous joke that won’t get me locked up in the tower about him having a use for all the lost children the whale didn’t eat here*) They just never do enough with an idea that doesn’t really have legs to last the whole episode. Also, the excruciating scene where Liz 10 declares ‘I’m the bloody Queen mate – I rule’ while posing Lara Croft style, is one of those dumb, clumsy, tone-deaf scenes non-fans like to beat us over the head with from time to time.
Or maybe this story is more about authority figures of a different type? Though it’s more of a Russell T Davies thing to do, I do wonder if this story isn’t a little bit about Moffat being in the scary position of running the show he’s loved since childhood and all the guilt and panic that comes from not wanting to let anyone (including his inner seven year old) down – as it was, in all likelihood, one of the first if not the first he sat down to write as ’showrunner’ rather than ‘guest writer’ (with more of an eye for budget and time deadlines and all those sorts of grown-up things). Running any show and working out what you stand for is a hard job: it’s easy to say that, if you ever get the chance, you’ll use your voice for good and break all the rules and attack all the right people who deserve it– but at the same time, if you get into too much trouble your paymasters at the BBC get mad and start interfering, you get annoyed letters from all the people who don’t agree with you, the audience stops watching and you’ve ruined the series for future generations. It’s a difficulty Davies and Chibnall have wrestled with too: how far and how subtly do your push an ‘agenda’ without your audience running off screaming and looking the other way? (While, equally, if you try the opposite how long can a series lie this last if it doesn’t have anything ‘big’ to say and is pure escapism without any teeth to bare?) This is a story that hedges its bets throughout, making a comment without quite coming out and saying it and giving Moffat wriggle room until he works out what he really wants to do with this opportunity. It’s fitting then that it’s a story ‘about’ the battle between speaking the truth and risk having to ‘abdicate’ or vowing to forget the truth and carry on as if you never meant to do anything like that in the first place. In the end Moffat’ll choose the much easier path and forget about this aspect of writing altogether, before it kicks back in during the series 10 that he wasn’t expecting to write and when he didn’t need to risk being sacked (‘Thin Ice’ and ‘The World Enough’ particularly are his two edgiest scripts for the series).
It’s not just the script that’s a bit woolly, the acting is to and there are a few duff performances all round that don’t make the most out of this story’s excellent ideas. The cast and crew are still new to this as well, the second story in production under Moffat’s tenure and neither of the regulars has got it quite right yet: Amy is unlikeably haughty and aloof rather than defensive and street-smart or toughness hiding vulnerability as she’ll become. Karen Gillan has a nasty habit, soon reigned in once she sees the rushes and adjusts to the character, of acting very broadly, giving every big revelation a double-take and eye goggle or declaring a lot of her speeches. Matt Smith is worse: he’s too self-conscious and hasn’t got his tongue round the complicated speeches Moffat’s written for him yet, still feeling his way into the bowtie and tweed suit instead of wearing it naturally the way he will by his next story. Smith will always struggle most with doing rage and anger convincingly (something Moffat quickly realises and keeps to a minimum from now on, though it’s the Doctor’s de facto methodology here, closer to the aloof regeneration Peter Capaldi will be) but he’ll get there by the end of his run – here, though, he has to do that shouty thing a lot and it doesn’t suit him very well yet (you can tell, in retrospect, that this was written for other Doctors first who have more natural gravitas, although even the 6th didn’t shout this much in the audio version). Matt’s good at light but struggling to do dark convincingly, Karen’s good at dark but not so hot on the comedy, looking all at sea in a whale’s mouth or forcing the comedy too hard (for now anyway: they learn impressively quick these two).
You only need to compare this tale
to the similar ‘End Of The World’ to see where the problem lies: both tales are
second in their run for the new Doctors/showrunners/companions and have the
newbie enter the Doctor’s world after a debut where he was in their world and
struggling to keep up wit the implications, especially as humanity is in big
trouble in both futures. Both stories are presented to us as a kind of ‘date’
(although Amy having the hots for the Doctor is played more as an escape from
the responsible life she was expecting to lead) but whereas Rose’s changing
thoughts about The Doctor changed subtly, over the course of forty-five
minutes, as she realised that just because he came from space didn’t mean he
was perfect or that she was his only love, this Doctor and Amy can’t decide if
they like each other or not, changing their minds between most scenes until we
end up in a shouting match and an all-forgiven finale (although I do like the
Doctor’s reactions to Amy’s first sight of an alien planet and garbled
questions: a sarcastic ‘Oh no, you’re a cheery one!’ There’s another obvious
influence too: Amy wanders round an alien planet, lost, in her nightie while
her alien companion is at home at last just like Arthur Dent in one-time Who
script editor Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, only he was in
a dressing gown). It’s exhausting trying to keep up, as if all the notes of the
space whale story are there, but somebody jumbled up the sheet music, so no
wonder the performers are a bit lost. Following how breezily note-perfect everyone
was in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ as if they’d been doing this sort of thing all their
own lives (recorded fourth in the run when everyone did know what they were doing
more but even so, it wasn’t recorded that much later) it’s a slight
disappointment: you’re not left at the end of this story waiting for next week
so you can travel with this pair again the way you did at the end of last
week’s. To be fair, though, it’s very early days for both actors – not just
their work on Doctor Who but in TV as a whole. In retrospect it’s amazing they
found their space-time legs as quickly as they do and a brave decision to have
three leads (once Rory gets going) who were all in their early-mid twenties and
comparatively inexperienced. I wish they’d done this story later in the run
though: this is one of Moffat’s sassiest, smartest scripts and it needs to be
delivered perfectly for added punch, while this might be the only story where
both lead actors drop the ball (the very first story they recorded ‘Time Of The
Angels/Flesh and Stone’ is the other but that one’s a bit easier to fudge, with
River Song doing so much of the work).
The supporting characters fare worse: Liz 10 is a one-joke character who doesn’t get much of a real personality and she’s a waste of Sophie Okenodo, an actress who was in huge demand back in 2010 (and one of the few Dr Who stars to have a Bafta) but who was impressively loyal to the show she’d helped out when it was off the air, in 2003’s aborted animated comeback ‘Scream Of The Shalka’. The script wastes Terence Hardiman too, the title star of the Sarah Jane Adventures’ biggest influence, Gillian Cross’ glorious series ‘Demon Headmaster’, with a character who doesn’t do much more than skulk about in a dungeon. The child characters too come and go: it feels as if brave protestor Timmy is going to be the main person here, a sort of mini-Doctor whose courageous enough to ask questions, but then we switch to his friend Mandy whose more ordinary, only for the script to sidestep her too for hi-jinks inside a whale’s mouth as Amy comes to the fore.
This is early days for Steven Moffat too of course and while he’s used to running other programmes (such as the superb ‘Press Gang’) he’d never been in charge of a programme quite this big. His takeover from Russell was (relatively) last minute too: Russell would have run this show forever if his partner hadn’t got ill and its pretty late on in the day when he finally did make the decision to leave (hence the ‘filler’ year of specials in 2009). Russell always said in the press that Steven’s were the only scripts he never tampered with when they were submitted (if only because he couldn’t always understand what was going on!) but out of all the Moffat scripts this is the one that most needs an editor to make the most of the bits that work and tone down or edit the bits that don’t. By his own admission this is the least favourite of Moffat’s own scripts for Dr Who and he calls them ‘a mess’ in one interview: they’re not that bad by any means but they are muddled, with people’s motivations unclear and tonally its all over the place, like many a Moffat script struggling to juggle what Russell did so effortlessly, the wide spectrum of viewers the show had. Some scenes are pure ‘Torchwood/New Adventures’, oddly adult gags about Amy’s short skirts and wedding night and political digs that small children wouldn’t get. And other scenes are as juvenile as this show ever was (far more so than ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ even at its silliest), the most notorious of which is the Doctor and Amy covered in gunk and goo and slime and sliding down a whale’s mouth. Moffat will get much better at combining the two, but here more than any other script of his the gulf between some of the lines, sometimes in the same scene, is huge.
One thing Moffat’s always been strong at though (especially on ‘The Eleventh Hour’) is presenting a child’s eye view of the universe, with stories that often make fun of adults for making a cosmos so alive with wonder and magic so dark and mundane. This one especially does a good job at being childlike without being childish though. We follow children for much of this story and they’re the only people brave enough to speak out about the ‘truth’ without caring about traditions or consequences. The country isn’t big and sprawling and overwhelming but small and compact, like a school with layers, each city coming with its own ‘deck’ as if its made of Lego. Politics is a straight choice between two buttons, without the complexities, nuances and contradictions of running the world. The ’Winders’ are very much an adult’s eye view of adults (especially teachers!) too, who are either happy with you or angry, with no subtleties and faces that keep changing depending how you behave (one of the last things to click into place in a child’s development is the idea that humans can balance two feelings at one, that you can love someone to bits and still be frustrated with them at times without it being contradictory). There’s a cute animal at the heart of the story and massive spaceships that actually look like scifi spaceships, not the dirty realistic smoke-belching rockets of other Dr Who stories, both things with massive children’s appeal. We know that Moffat wanted to grab a whole new audience that would be ‘his’ generation but even so he abandons the pretty quickly after this (Churchill is not a natural kiddie attention grabber, even with Daleks) and this story feels far less cynical than that. So much so that I have to wonder… as this story at least partly written when Steven really was a child himself? (Perhaps after watching ‘The Ark In Space’, a 4th Doctor story also set in the 29th century spaceship breakout following ‘solar flares’ and which itself is a sort of fan homage to ‘The Ark’).We know that Russell T Davies was sat at home during his childhood writing his own Dr Who comics and that bits of those stories ended up in his scripts for the show as an adult (the scene of the Tardis travelling down a motorway in ‘The Runaway Bride’ for one). Is this story Moffat’s equivalent that he’d been carrying round with him for decades, just on the off-chance he got to write for the series properly one day? (Maybe even after reading about the cancelled original story and wondering what it might have been like? – the original is rather cartoonlike too, probably because writer Pat Mills wrote for the comic strips; he finally gets an on-screen credit for being co-creator of Beep The Meep and ‘The Star Beast’, an actual comic strip adaptation; interesting how both of his stories contain the word ‘beast’ in them). If so then you have to say he was one smart kid; all this story is lacking is the experience of how a great script will inevitably end up on screen after other people like directors and actors get their hands on it.
Tying into this is the way that so much of the story is about growing up, as if an old idea from childhood is being revisited through the eyes of an adult. Amy spends the story (and indeed most of series five) fleeing her responsibilities. At first, before we meet Rory properly and learn how sweet and caring he is, we think it’s her fiance she’s fleeing, but later stories will tweak this and make it plain it’s being an adult that scares Amy most (after all, we know from ‘The Eleventh Hour’ that bad things happen to adults around her and she was a child handed far too much responsibility for one so young: if adulthood is all responsibility as so many adults like making out to their offspring then it makes sense she’d be particularly scared of it after such a taste of it). There’s a telling line cut from the first draft of the script where Amy mentions an aunty once telling her that ‘your wedding day is the day you have to grow up’. The Doctor, her one-time imaginary friend, is painted here as ‘Peter Pan’ to her ‘Wendy’, with a time machine that can mean she can stay a child always, forever on the cusp of growing up but never quite getting there and she’s an eager participant. Just look at the scene where 12 year old Mandy talks about not being able to vote till she’s sixteen and she looks petrified at the idea. It’s another childhood source that’s in this story too though: ‘Pinocchio’. Part of this story takes place inside a whale for a kick-off, but it’s more than that: this is a story all about the consequences of lying, when it would have been better all round to tell the truth. This entire society is based around lies, that the space whale needs to be tortured to work properly when really it came to help. Every time adults learn the truth and look the other way, made complicit in the lie, they become more like wooden puppets every day, doing what they’re told. Speaking the truth gives you freedom and the responsibility to the truth is another aspect of responsibility and being grown up (so the voting on this ship is all ‘wrong’ –in this scenario only the youngest like Timmy should get to vote because they’re the only ones not worried about the consequences). As much as people like to make out that Pinocchio is a cute story about a puppet coming to life, it’s really a harrowing tale about innocence and trusting the wrong people to keep you safe, learning the hard way when to speak your truth and when to hold your tongue (and this is a story where the Doctor and Amy do just that, inside a whale’s mouth). The Doctor, then, is Jiminy Cricket, the ‘conscience’ telling people how they should act and cross with them when they don’t listen. And let’s face it if any fictional character was going to sing ‘hen You Wish Upon a Star’ it’s him. Right up until the last act anyway when Amy earns her stripes as a companion by working out the solution that even the Doctor doesn’t see and becomes a ‘real live companion’ of her own.
The ideas are great then – but they don’t fit together to tell a story quite right. It’s like a piece of a puzzle is missing. There’s just a little bit too much going to fit comfortably inside a 45 minute episode – not the first or last time we’ll be saying that about a Moffat script. Out of the three showrunners in the modern era he’s the one who’d be most comfortable with the olden days of four 25 minuters stretched out across a month: he needs that extra time to explore his ideas and has a natural gift for changing a story’s direction just when it’s getting boring, which is how the best Dr Who writers used to use cliffhangers in the olden days. Here though, at half the length and no week’s pause between installments, it means we never get to the bottom of a good idea before another comes along to replace it. Moffat himself, a sharper critic of his work than either of his colleagues, calls this story the most disappointing of his Dr Who scripts because it ended up quite ‘muddled’ and sadly he’s right. People come and go without proper motivation and act out of character even for the brief time we’ve known them because the plot needs them to: the Doctor, especially this playful childish regeneration, is usually a lot more forgiving than this (especially after being all over Amy and wanting to make the missing years up to her last week), while Amy has seen too much bad stuff in her life to just randomly start messing with dark holes on alien planets (she’s brave and would absolutely do it if the Doctor asked her, but she isn’t foolhardy given the life she’s had and would be more likely to comfort a crying child than investigate what’s been scaring it). Amy also starts talking about her impending marriage at the most inappropriate times (it feels like Moffat had to fit this bit in somewhere and it wouldn’t go anywhere so he just dropped it in at random). Ditto the Doctor casually mentioning that he’s the ‘last of his kind’, something Amy doesn’t even react to (though she clearly heard it, given her comments later on comparing the Doctor to the whale). Why does a pre-recorded Amy leave herself a message of warning to run away? It’s not as if she heeds the warning or tells anyone about it and it feels as if this is going to be a major timey wimey sub-plot that never quite arrives. Most of all though, why would Amy choose to ’forget’ that a colony of Humans she’s barely met is being powered by a space whale? She doesn’t know the implications of people dying if the whale flies off and she’s one of life’s natural protestors, forever in trouble at school as we’ll soon see. The plot point that fitted Peri or Turlough or whoever the 4th Doctor’s companion was going to be in the first draft (Romana?), companions that are more naturally timid and afraid or used to seeing bigger pictures might side with the humans, but Amy has a low opinion of humanity anyway – she’d totally side with the whale every time, even at pain of ending up lunch. Things might be different if this was starship Scotland and she was saving Scottish people of course, but it isn’t: to Amy these people are foreigner sassenachs anyway.
Ironically then, for a story
thirty-odd years in the making, the overall impression of ‘The Beast Below’ is
a potentially great story that just needed a bit more time, to edit out the parts
that ended up a bit, well, fishy. Of all the stories in Moffat’s era it’s ‘the
one that got away’ and would have been catch of the day had the production team
just relaxed their hold on the fishing rod a little and let it soar. Or better
still had Steven submitted this to Russell and got a level of feedback to sort
out the oddities. But even this early in the new production things are going
too quick and time and tide on TV programmes wait for no showrunner, even
(especially?) shows about timelords. The result is a story I’m glad they tried
(especially after so many attempts in the past), which has some great ideas, a
brilliant message about humanity’s inhumanity and lots of great moments to keep
you watching and some cracking lines (Dr Who has got it in for one of the
places I live again. Hmm…I ought to be cross about hat but it Lancashire does
happen to look exactly like the inside of a whale’s mouth…) but still ends up
oddly slightly unsatisfying, a promised beast that turns out to be a tiddler
underneath it all. Even as one of the
era’s more average stories though it’s still worth watching though of course:
you’ll have a whale of a time in fact.
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