The Star Beast: Ranking - N/A (although somewhere around #80)

 

The Star Beast

(60th Anniversary Special, Dr 14 with Donna, 25/11/2023, showrunner; Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Rachel Talalay) 

Rank: N/A (but around #80 if I had to pick)

 ‘Baby you can drive my shuttle-car, yes I’ve come from a far-off star, and poor Meep doesn’t know where he are…Meep meep, meep meep, kill!!! [evil cackle]'

You wouldn’t think there would be space for nostalgia in a programme that was all about change and regeneration, that reinvented itself every few years, but there is. Dr Who is a programme that worms its way into your heart and mind so that once seen you carry parts of it with you for life and going back to those times can be a wonderful thing when done right. Russell T Davies knows that better than anyone: he brought back this show the first time round, against all the odds, because he loved it and wanted other people to love it too. And he knows how much people love his era, especially the fourth year with Catherine Tate’s Donna alongside David Tennant’s 10^th Dr, particularly – that there’s been very nearly almost long enough now for the children who got hooked on this show in the 2005 comeback to have children of their own now old enough to be introduced to that series. So for the first fruits of Russell’s comeback as showrunner, something we never thought in all of time and space we’d ever see again, fans get all the heart-warming things we thought we’d never get to experience new again, most of them within the opening few minutes: a newscaster giving updates on the plot just like the olden days, the clever mirroring of how the Dr and Donna meet again and his reaction to the name ‘Rose’, allonsys, multiple what?’s, references to Nerys, the Doctor being whalloped by a mother-in-law, being trapped by plastic screensan forced to make a sacrifice, even (massive spoilers alert) the return of the Doctor-Donna: you name it - if it’s a bit of folklore that people remember about the 10^th Doctor era then it’s here somewhere.As classy as Steven Moffat was at writing for the 10^th Dr in the 50^th anniversary specials nobody’s words fit this doctor’s new teeth as well as Russell T Davies. One of the most impressive things about ‘The Star Beast’ is that it feels as if actors and writer both have never ever been away. You could beam the plot beats and most of this dialogue back through a wormhole to 2008 and nobody would notice the change: there’s all the joy, all the intelligence, all the emotion of old. And it’s wonderful.

 
This isn’t the same doctor who left in 2010 though, but a whole new regeneration whose lived that bit longer and is more in touch with his feelings (it happens with age). Russell T Davies had been busy regenerating too. After all, the Earth isn’t the same way it was thirteen years ago. We’re divided more than ever, especially the younger generations, between people who care more than they ever used to and people who couldn’t care less and Russell knows which universe he likes better. This is an era when we’re heading closer to the fascist parallel world of ‘Inferno’ than ever before, with right-wing governments arriving in power all around the world (including Holland just this week), the frustrations of modern day living splitting people apart and setting communities on another. This is a fanbase who notoriously won’t agree on anything never mind politics, so despite being a series that’s promoted inclusivity and togetherness in 99% of episodes and delivering ecology tales about green maggots and stories about 1960s revolutions and endless tales about being kind in its early days, when the series was let’s not forget made by the first female producer and black director at the BBC, there’s been a growing backlash against the perceived ‘wokeness’ of the Chris Chibnall era, as if that’s a bad thing (and even though that era had ‘Kerblam!’, the most openly right-wing pro-Capitalist Dr Who story since The Dominators’ back in 1968). Russell could have chosen to do the easy thing, told himself that he was after Dr Who being big and family and mainstream again with the new backing by the Disney corporation (surely the most family-orientated business on the planet) and that he couldn’t afford to ruffle feathers. Especially in an all-important first episode. Every other showrunner would have sat on the fence and waited. But Russell knows that all eyes are on him with this one for the first time in a long time and he might never get an audience this big again. And so he says it anyway, because that’s what Dr Who is for: fighting these social battles in public and giving a voice to marginalised voices who just don’t get seen on mainstream television (at least not without their gender or their sexuality becoming the whole character, rather than an incidental detail the way it is with straight  white middle-aged men). As much as this is a show about time travel, its always been the job of Dr Who to reflect the full range of society that watches it and has since the beginning (it was the first show to have a black man on telly in a heroic role after all, as an astronaut and a show that, when everyone else was doing blackface as a matter of course, painted Mavic Chen to make him blue). Russell’s one big regret the first time round s showrunner, as is clear from his interviews, is that he didn’t include as much inclusivity as he should have done and, while his big ambition was to put more gay characters into Dr Who to give people like him and his friends someone to seen television like themselves, he stopped there and didn’t help the other marginalised groups out too. Every era fights its own battles on its way to things become seen as ‘normal’ and accepted in society and one of the biggest battles over the past few years has been Trans rights, with disability a little way behind. Russell could have gone the other way: after all, we know from his first era that he worships at the altar of J K Rowling storytelling and could have followed her attacks on the Trans community and he wouldn’t be the first person in the gay community to pile on an easy target (indeed, he wouldn’t be the first person in the gay Dr Who writer community). But instead Russell goes the other way, puts the character of Rose, Donna’s daughter, front and centre and makes one of the most beloved characters in all of Dr Who a proud and protective mum proud of her. He even makes Rose’s non-binaryness part of the plot so that it can’t just be dismissed (spoilers again), riffing on the lucky coincidence that the Doctor-Donna’s last words in a completely different context in 2008 were ‘binary’ and having Rose’s non-binaryness become effectively a scifi superpower that saves the day (‘I’m neither, I’m more’ Rose, referring to her gender, the line that’s most got fans in a tizzy).Russell’s risking a lot to say something that matters. And that’s even more wonderful and Dr Whoy.

The same with UNIT’s new scientific advisor Shirley, who has weapons smuggled in her wheelchair and who gets to make barbed comments about being one of the most important people in the world needed to keep us safe who can’t even access most rooms, because disability access is so poor (even the Tardis has disability ramps now). Because Dr Who is for everyone, whatever half the fandom might tell you. This series should be a safe space for everyone to watch without feeling attacked – you know, in between the constant alien invasions. After all, nobody knows what it means to see someone like you on telly as much as a boy growing up gay in the 1970s and 1980s and Russell has never forgotten the power of television to shift perceptions and make what to people who don’t see something every day seem odd and strange and scary be perfectly normal and acceptable. And the Doctor’s seen everything in his travels: he doesn’t bring the ethics of the generation of viewers but something bigger and more accepting. I love the scenes of him recognising a kindred spirit in Rose who feels like an alien and an outsider because of who they are and the comparisons made to a timelord who flip-flops between genders and so is effectively non-binary too. Whereas the Chibnall era paid lip service to certain ideas some would call ‘woke’ but is really just good manners (such as giving Ryan dyspraxia and making the Doctor a woman) he never followed through (Ryan’s disability came and went, sometimes in the same scene, whereas there’s nothing Jodie Whittaker does that’s more feminine than her predecessors unlike, say, Romana) and things like that ended up as just window dressing in there for the sake of it – this is how you do inclusion properly, Rose’s gender confusion and Donna’s fierce protectiveness a part of their characters (I’m so pleased Donna didn’t end up like her mum despite her genes, dismissive and cold, but uses that big heart to fight alongside her daughter – and that even Sylvia’s trying these days, softened by the events of 2008). As much as these scenes are kicking up a fuss in fandom, they were designed to – and I’m all for it (not so sure about meddling with the past and retconning Davros out of his wheelchair that’s actually a life support mechanism mind, especially now there’s a strong good character in a wheelchair for disabled kids to point to, but that’s another issue for another review). Dr Who was always the bravest show on television. After a slight wobble, it still is. One other quick thing that’s changed since 2008 too: the truth is no longer honoured in the news the way it was. Note how this reporter is hauled away before he can discover the truth – something that never happened to Trinity Wells, but then didn’t happen to anyone in real life back in 2008 back when hurting a journalist would be seen as the worst possible thing you could do as a new regime or terrorist group (or alien invader) but would totally happen and be covered up in our age of ‘fake news’.

As well as honouring the nation’s confused youth, Russell honours his own, right down to the ‘Tuna Madras’ of his childhood (a cuisine he swears his family served him all the time, even though nobody else thinks it’s a real thing). We said in our review for Steven Moffat’s series four story ‘Silence In the Library’ that this was Moffat thinking about becoming showrunner himself in the near footage and going back to his first memories of Dr Who: reading the target novels in the library. Russell’s equivalent already sort-of made it on screen, the Tardis-travelling-down-the-motorway-as-seen-by-kids ride in ‘The Runaway Bride’, which came from Russell’s long car journeys as a child, whiling away the time by imagining the Tardis travelling alongside the car and what adventures it might get up to. There’s another source though away from the TV series: the comic books. The original version of ‘The Star Beast’ wasn’t the first Dr Who comic strip, they’d been running in the ‘TV Action’ comic since pretty much day one, when the 1^st Dr travelled with his ‘grandchildren’ John and Gillian (who were a lot less wimpy than Susan, if a bit bland, the illustrators not willing to pay the extra money for the likenesses of the real Tardis crew – even the William Hartnell profile is a bit questionable at times). But it was when Dr Who got its first magazine in 1979 that most fans got to read one rather than a  general audience and ‘The Star Beast’ was one of the first regular strips, back when the Dr was still Tom Baker. The first comic strips for the magazine, then still out weekly not monthly, are the best: they get all the most important comic artists from Marvel back when it was trying to launch the publication and get it taken seriously (before realising there was enough of a regular readership to buy the thing anyway so they could use it to train new talent for their other franchises) but with a continuity-free lightness of touch that meant it went to places the series couldn’t touch.  Back in the days before regular repeats, BBC i-player Whoniverse, home videos DVDs or Blu-rays, it was the only place fans could go back to stories over and over and we already know how Russell was stuck on long car journeys for much of his youth with nothing else to do but read and dream. Of course something like this would have made an impression. Particularly this story, which is the first since Susan left to have a proper bona fide child involved in the Doctor’s world and a setting recognisably like contemporary Britain (Sharon, the girl who finds the Meep in the story being technically the first black companion, twenty-five years before Mickey and twenty-seven years before Martha depending which one you count on screen – and another smack in the face to people who say Dr Who has gone all ‘woke’ including people of colour on screen; and don’t think I didn’t notice the Indian UNIT captain too while we’re about it). One of the ‘other’ people this strip surely inspired is Steven Spielberg, as 1982’s ET nicks the whole idea (including a first draft, when the film still had half the plot of ‘Poltergeist’, where the alien hiding amongst a child’s soft toys turns out to be secretly evil – they got changed to ghosts and separated into two films, with ET made sweet and cuddly throughout). For fans of Russell’s age, this episode is nostalgic in a whole other way on top of the 10^th Dr era, a fitting choice for an anniversary and a throwback to when Dr Who inspired him (and let’s not forget Russell was never showrunner during an anniversary before: this is his first chance to do something he could never have done during a ‘normal’ story).

‘The Star Beast’ isn’t quite the best of the comic strips (‘The Iron Legion’, from a parallel world where Rome never declined, is even better) but it is a good and worthy one, Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons delivering a very Who-like morality tale that could still only ever be told in the comics (back in the ‘classic’ series budget days anyway) with a cute monster discovered by two schoolchildren, Sharon and Fudge. This ‘furry little cheeky’ with the big eyes and floppy ears is as cute as cute can be and is being chased by ugly hulking brutes The Wrath (who look not that different to Davies’ own Hath) in green metal casings. However, in a twist that wouldn’t have been out of place in 1^st Dr stories like ‘The Sensorites’ or ‘Galaxy 4’, everyone’s got things the wrong way round and (mega huge spoilers) it’s Beep The Meep that’s evil. If you’re a new kid watching this series for the first time then the Beep is the perfect introduction, making the viewer go ‘aaaah’ then ‘aaaaagh’ in quick succession (just as you think this show’s turned soft it goes properly mad and scary) and he/she/it (I love the gag about Rose asking for its pronouns: another thing that would never have occurred to Russell fifteen years ago and the Beep choosing ‘the definite article’, my books have a gag about alien argibraffes identifying as ‘its’ so there’s something in the air) is well realised on screen, just as cute and cuddly as the comics, even if the human-like hands are a bit odd and I miss the comic strip’s internal monologue, as the Meep promises to murder in cold blood all the people that are stroking it adoringly and treating it like a big fluffy child. Miriam Margolyes can be a bit dodgy in other things, but she’s having great fun unleashing her inner monster in a story that’s about being careful about judging by appearances throughout. The story is nicely respectful to the source material too, with the original characters Sharon turned into Rose and Fudge a name-less child who has a couple of scenes. Of course the plot is all tidied away a bit quickly, sorted in 35 minutes so we can go back to the Dr and Donna and the Meep turns evil before even that, which is a bit of a shame (it lasted for seven whole issues back in 1980) but you can see why, in a special, with so much to do, there just isn’t time to do everything. As an aside, one of the stories that had just been on TV a couple of years before the comic strip came out was ‘Stones Of Blood’ which features a similar scene to this story of the 4th Dr getting a wig out of his pocket and becoming judge and jury, but not executioner, a good joke recycled.  

So, what we have is Russell’s childhood memories on screen (he’s almost exactly the same age as Dr Who…the series I mean, not the character, that would be rude), updated for modern-day children who are maybe seeing this show for the first time and want to see ‘their’ world they live in on television not some dusty relic from the past, with nods to the fans of the 2000 era and the 1980s, all juggled pretty much successfully. David Tenant and Catherine are line-perfect, as if they’ve never been away, though the scenes are really stolen by Jacqueline King as Sylvia, Donna’s mum, who has gone from being Donna’s biggest critic to her biggest protector. One thing Russell always did better than his successors was the sense of family life, of characters who exist before and after the cameras stop rolling, and that’s never more true than here as we see a family who’ve grown and changed with the times too. Even Donna, whose big tragic story the last twice we saw her was that she’s had her memory wiped and gone back to the abrasive nobody she used to be before she met the Doctor, but who has just enough Doctoryness to make her good (her very Dona-ish response, in the middle of a London invasion, that the Dr’s goodness made her give away her lottery winnings, something he totally would have done, is priceless – and it also gets the series out of a hole by making Donna recognisably ‘one of us’ again and proving that the likeable Shaun is with her out of love, not money: Donna does know how to pick them after all, given her first near-husband tried to feed her to a giant red spider). Hopefully we’re getting Bernard Cribbins’ final scenes as Wilf in a future special (the Tardis does have a disability ramp after all), but it’s a joy to hear that UNIT have been looking after him in his old age.  We don’t get to see Rose do much yet (that’s probably still to  come too. I’m surprised she wasn’t on the Tardis with Donna at the end) but I like what I see. The detail of her being a ‘toymaker’ (maybe a Celestial one? Or influenced by one perhaps?...) inspired by the Dr’s adventures and selling things she makes on etsy (another thing that wasn’t a thing in 2008) is a lovely detail too and a great way to see lots of  old monsters, if only in furry form (I so want a home-made Judoon!)

Which leads me onto another thing. More than anything else this is a showrunner returning to where he left off, in stories like ‘Midnight ‘Turn Left’ ‘Stolen Earth’ and ‘The End Of Time’, writing ‘about’ his time as showrunner and having to give up his dream job that he adored above any other (because, at the height of his fame and success, his husband Andrew Smith got sick and needed looking after – sadly he died in 2018). Russell’s never been able to let Dr Who go, much as he’s tried to do other things and had big successes with ‘Years and Years’ (a brilliant series about the world going mad and dystopian, that still ended up mild compared to real life) and ‘It’s A Sin’ (a more personal take on being a young gay man during the HIV outbreaks of the 1980s when nobody knew what it was, which even has its own Dr Who scene when the lead character we’re following becomes an actor and has a scene as an extra that looks remarkably like an outtake from ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’) there’s been a Tardis-sized hole in his heart. Donna’s lines about how, wonderful as its been, there’s something missing from her life is as heartfelt and direct as anything Russell’s written so far and an explanation as good as any for why he came back to the show that nearly wore him out (following a whole host of events after years away, including a covid lockdown tweetathon that reminded Russell just how beloved his era of the show was and the worry that the show might be axed before a big anniversary). There’s a part of this show that stays with you forever though and there are reminders of it everywhere in life. While the 10^th Dr started out as Russell’s mouthpiece and the person he longs to be (with a lot to say and a lot of mad dashing around) in time Donna became a more natural fit (she also has a mouth on her and ‘Turn Left’ is one long worry about how Russell might have turned out without this show to ‘save’ him, to make him feel heard and inspire him to find his calling as a writer, given over to Donna and her memory is wiped, because there’s no other way she’d ever just stop travelling in the Tardis she loves it too much). In this story he’s still Donna: her memory was wiped as he tried to move on and thin about other things, but he’s been writing Dr Who stories since he was seven and can’t stop, traces of Who-yness abounding in his other writing as a sort of folk memory. The people around him, who know how the pressures of the job nearly killed him last time round (well, properly tied him out anyway) have tried to keep him from it. Burt the lure is too strong (even if, sensibly, one of the dictates of Russell taking the job is to have less episodes to make and longer time to make them – it was having to do a Christmas special every year, on top of the twelve episodes as planned,  that nearly broke him). A little like Rose, Russell finds himself making Dr Who characters, without consciously thinking about it. All that scientific gobbledegook that’s been waiting in his brain to come out the whole time is still there, waiting. And even though he knows it might kill him, he has to come back – because even if its short, this is one hell of an adventure and nobody would give that adventurous life up if they had the chance. Note, too, that Donna is fiercely on Rose’s side,  offering protection after so much debate in fandom one way or another (it would have been easy not pick sides, but Russell can’t help himself). And has given away her millions because money is not what life is about whatever ‘Kerblam!’ said (There were accusations that Rusell took Dr Who over to Disney purely for the money -  hopefully those rumours have been put to bed now, as honestly he could have got more from them making a different series).

 Of course, its not perfect. As well as the good in Russell’s writing we get the bad. There are scenes that go on too long in the middle. These characters pick some very odd moments to start opening up about their lives. Donna suddenly becomes her old self far too quickly, inspired by the sight of the Dr running as much as anyone else (she’s already seen him running earlier in the episode and didn’t twig; wouldn’t, say, the sight of a sonic screwdriver or an accidental glimpse of the Tardis give it away?) As much as we’re being led to believe ‘there’s something pulling you and me together Donna’ that might get explained later, it really is a whacking coincidence that the Dr comes across Donna in seconds and that her hubby is waiting in a taxi nearby (if this is the Celestial Toymaker doing this he’s working overtime). And the ending is suddenly resolved, in a wibbly wobbly timey wimey way, that makes less sense the more you think about it (what some fans call a ‘Davies Et Machina’, a plot resolution that comes out of nowhere). This isn’t one of Russell’s very very best, although it’s a good starting point to build on (and better than his previous average I would say). For all that, it’s a great little story. It does what it needs to do, updating an era that’s been tarnished by accusations of sexism on set and not being multicultural enough (every era of Who gets a backlash 15-20 years on, its normal; it was the UNIT era when I was growing up) without losing the hearts of what this series always was or the feel of the olden days. Ultimately ‘The Star Beast’ doesn’t undo what came before, which is what so many of us feared. I mean Donna got the perfect ending – heartbreaking and awful in many ways but perfect from a writing point of view – but this story doesn’t dismantle it, it regenerates it.

Seeing our old friends on screen as if they’ve never been away is an absolute joy. There’s moments of high drama and high comedy, mixed really really well together (something Chibnall really struggled with, before finally getting with ‘Eve Of The Daleks’): the line about the sonic paper (so good to see that again!) still thinking the Dr is a woman because it hasn’t caught up yet is right up there with the series’ best gags. And Beep The Meep is adorable (until they’re not) a great character even if he/she/it/the isn’t one of Russell’s. The cast haven’t lost their touch. Nor has the writer. The director Rachel Talalay is an old friend too, sensibly chosen. Even Murray Gold’s musical score was one of his more unobtrusive ones with nice nods to old themes and just enough balance of new ones. After a few years of characters standing around talking to each other, without much action or only one big set piece per story, it’s a thrillingly breathless rush that seems much shorter than an hour (the last Dr Who I re-watched this week for the revised review is ‘The Timeless Children’ and that felt like it lasted for seven). The result is a triumph, up there with the other anniversary stories of the past and even if it doesn’t feel quite as inclusive or as special as the multi-doctor stories, maybe that aspect of the anniversary special season is still to come? The first Russell T era was special, beloved amongst most fans. On the evidence of just this one story it looks as if the RTD2 era is going to be just as special. How things change – but how they stay the same.

+ The Tardis interior! For the most part the promised bigger Disney budget has been relegated to fight scenes, but you can really see where the money shots have gone here and it’s the right place to spend it. The sheer delight on David Tennant’s face as he ran up and down its ramps (the actor’s idea – and something he reportedly regretted after eight takes had to be made) was matched only by the smile on mine. And of all the Tardis interiors we’ve had on screen for any length of time since the 1960s it’s the one that most matches the original and best interior. It already feels like home.

–The very opening, though, is horrible. Voiceover moments that break the fourth wall never work in Dr Who, a series that otherwise tries so hard to feel ‘real’ however fantastical the setting may be, but seeing these characters talking to us about past plot developments in a void is somehow worse and breaks the entire illusion for no good reason. I understand the need to remind viewers what happened the last time we saw Donna (thirteen years is a while after all) but what’s wrong with a ‘last time’ caption and a clips montage?

BEST QUOTE: Donna’s pithy comment that if she gets in the Tardis she’ll probably ‘end up on Mars with Chaucer and a robot shark’, Russell getting in the criticism about his bonkers combinations of ideas and ‘shopping list’ way of writing stories in before his critics can.