Saturday 25th November 2023 - The Star Beast

60 years after An Earthly Child, Doctor Who in 2023 returns - but it's quite a different viewing experience. The fear, anxiety and incomprehension of An Unearthly Child is absent in The Star Beast. Instead, reassuring opening monologues allowing the audience to catch up with what's happened (a "Previously on..." showing the Doctor standing in brechtian space for some reason while Donna Noble sits at her soap opera kitchen table explaining things with a handy montage of aliens and other worlds). It's this pairing of the space cosmic and the mundane that characterises the show since its 2005 return. Instead of carrying human companions away across time and space, the Doctor now happily shares the quotidian existence of (idealistically affluent) British working class domesticity. The Fourteenth Doctor fretting over not being able to see his friend, Donna, again is a far cry from the First's disdain for humans when he meets Ian and Barbara. This opening - and the whole episode is the entrypoint for the Disney+ audiences into what's being corporately termed the Whoniverse.

At 60, American tv-inspired Doctor Who is shiny, smooth and spectacular. Back in 1963, the show seemed claustrophobic, gritty and challenging. At the end of the first episode, when the Doctor abducts his new companions the audience would have no idea where the TARDIS ends up (other than seeing the ominous shadow that falls across the desert landscape). This 2023 special ends with the TARDIS console on fire and the Doctor shouting that he has no idea where he and Donna will end up. Of course both are cliffhangers but today's one doesn't seem to me to have the mortal terror that it did 60 years ago. I doubt the next special will be as violent and savage as The Tribe of Gum, but we shall see.

The Star Beast is an enjoyable Tenth Fourteenth Doctor and Donna romp which will undoubtedly please fans of the partnership of Ten and Donna Noble. It doesn't seem like much of an "anniversary" celebration - or, if it is, more a celebration of the current 2005 incarnation of the show. It seems to begin a process of producer Russell T. Davis (re)stating what he thinks is the essence of the show over these three specials before we have Ncuti Gatwa's Fifteen. (I've seen comments online predicting that it'll be next week's special episode that will deliver the anniversary fan-service, details of which has been kept more tightly under wraps). In The Star Beast, we see The Doctor's uncertainty about his own identity and a (sort-of?) resolution to the human-timelord meta-crisis seems to work. There's a new TARDIS interior which is always a visual indicator of the tone the showrunners want to establish. This TARDIS console room is immense, more like a space-craft, built around a huge time rotor and encircled by walkways. It's the biggest "bigger-on-the-inside" so far. The console itself now serves coffee (but this small detail among others seems to indicate that there's something going on about causality around the Doctor and Donna. Why does the Fourteenth Doctor have that face?). 

from Doctor Who Weekly #19 (1980)

It was great to see British comic creators Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons credited in the titles (no John Wagner, though?). The impact of 2000AD on Doctor Who always seems to me to not get the recognition it deserves. In the past Davis has referred to 2000AD stories - such a The Ballad of Halo Jones - as inspirations. (It may be that another difference with1963 Doctor Who is the influence of comics and other pop culture on the contemporary series whereas part of the genesis of the original series was decidedly literary - particularly Jules Verne's speculative adventure fiction.) I'm not sure that the attitude of 2000AD (or even Mills and Gibbon's Beep the Meep) is communicated as one of factious subversion. There's no sense of an ironic wink in how Beep the Meep is presented on screen.

It's the cartoonish elements of this special that draws attention to the difference with OG 1963 Who. An Unearthly Child is presented entirely seriously. The small moments that could be regarded as humorous (such as the flashbacks showing Susan's mistakes about maths and currency or even the Doctor's eccentric behaviour and attire) clearly weren't intended as such. As fantastic as aliens and a time and space machine are in 1963, they are treated within narrow parameters quite believably. But in this 2023 special, humour dominates. The Doctor's clothes are too tight and this is joked about. Almost every seen Donna is in is played for laughs. The Doctor carries a barrister's wig and conducts a trial in an underground car park. UNIT's scientific adviser fires missiles from her wheelchair. Donna spills a coffee into the TARDIS' console. Even the destruction of London by the Meep's spacecraft is rolled back improbably. That's not to mention the unblievably amazing things the Doctor's sonic screwdriver can now do. If you also include the effortless resolution to the meta-crisis, then the stakes seem so easily overcome or won that it seems to encourage audiences not to worry too much about what will happen next episode. More of the same spectacle I suspect.

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Ultimately, it was a dark November Saturday evening and a new episode of Doctor Who was on. What more could you really ask for?

Next week: Wild Blue Yonder.