The Star Beast

Chapter the 284th, one November spawned a monster hit.

Plot:
[Beware spoilers! This is the most recently aired Doctor Who story at the time of writing, so I'll content myself with a teaser synopsis as per the previews in Doctor Who Magazine or Radio Times, but I do have to reveal a few plot details in later sections below.] A spaceship crashes in north London. Not that Donna Noble noticed; she had other things on her mind. Besides, there's no such thing as aliens - right?! But then one turns up in her garden shed: the Meep. Another - the Doctor - barges into her kitchen. By the time a squadron of Wrarth Warriors shows up on her doorstep, the Noble family must face facts: Donna's past is catching up with her. And her mind is about to be blown...

Context:

The override of the usual random selection of Doctor Who stories for the blog continues. This is the last of a trilogy of stories selected to post about in November 2023 to tie in with Doctor Who's 60th anniversary celebrations. After watching The Tenth Planet, one of the most significant stories of that 60-year period, and then viewing a celebratory docu-drama about the creation of the series, the final November post brings things bang up to date with the first of a different 60th anniversary trilogy. The Star Beast is one of three specials with a returned David Tennant and Catherine Tate for late 2023. I watched it go out live on BBC1 in the UK on Saturday 25th November 2023, accompanied by the whole family (Better Half and three kids, boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11). Everyone enjoyed it. The youngest adored the Meep at first sight, was a little taken aback when it was revealed to be the baddie, but ended up adoring it again by the end of the story despite that. She expressed the desire to have a Meep plushie for Christmas. A merchandising trick was missed there, I think.

Milestone watch: I started the blog in 2015 to cover the stories of both the new and the classic series of Doctor Who in a randomly shuffled order. All these years later, I am closing in on the point where I complete the stories from between 1963 and 2023, and catch up with the serial broadcasts of new episodes. This time marked the first point in over a year - the longest period ever since the series returned in 2005 without a new Doctor Who story broadcast - that a new item has been added to the 'To Do' pile. Even with this, two more 60th specials, a Christmas special and a series starring Ncuti Gatwa, I don't necessarily have enough stories left to keep up my usual blogging rate through to the end of 2024. We'll see how it goes...

First Time Round:

I first experienced the story in its original comic book version. In 1979, Marvel comics created Doctor Who Weekly, a magazine that featured a mix of comic strips and articles about the series. Slowly it morphed into a monthly then four-weekly publication that leaned more into the articles, but kept a few pages reserved for an ongoing comic strip, and it has remained that way to date. In issues 19 to 26 of the Weekly, from February to April 1980, The Star Beast appeared. I didn't get into Doctor Who until the following year, and didn't start buying the magazine until the year after that, so my first read must have been in 2004 when The Star Beast was collated with a few others from the early days of the magazine and released as a graphic novel titled The Iron Legion (after the first story in the batch, also written by Pat Mills and John Wagner and drawn by David Gibbons). I'd definitely heard of Beep the Meep long before that, though, it's one of the enduring legends from Doctor Who's long history.

Reaction:

Before it aired, this story was loaded down with probably more anticipation than any other in the history of Doctor Who. Of the other contenders that occur to me, The Day of the Doctor was a keenly awaited anniversary celebration, and Rose was the first story in a brave new era for the show. The Star Beast effectively had to be both, and it exceeded expectations. Adapting the comic strip story was a great choice for an engaging opener to the trio of specials, and writer Russell T Davies expertly weaved the Meep and Wrarth Warriors plot into the story of Donna and the Doctor. Catherine Tate and David Tennant instantly and effortlessly click back into their on-screen relationship. The script doesn't make us wait too long before they're together, with their meet cute the first thing to happen in the story bar a short explanation for viewers who may not remember their situation from episodes shown 14 years ago. That sequence involves both the characters talking to camera, the Doctor in long shot superimposed against a starfield background. It's an odd choice, but this is probably my only quibble about the show - I loved every moment that followed unreservedly. I've liked or loved most Doctor Who stories made since 2005, and then gone online to see fans ripping them apart, sometimes based on rather trivial points. Something else that was nostalgic was seeing that happen again after all these years to Davies, undoubtedly one of the greatest UK TV creatives currently alive. You think there was a clunky line of dialogue or a poor resolution sequence? It's Russell T flippin' Davies - isn't there just the tiniest possibility that he knows what he's doing, and can be trusted?

Davies concentrates this story on three Fs that have served him and the series well in the past: Fun, Family, and Fucking off bigoted people. Let's take each in turn. It is undoubtedly a story pitched at 'romp'-level, despite the Doctor and Donna strain of melancholy within it. Davies has been influenced a lot by the knockabout style of the early Doctor Who Magazine comic strips, and in fact has - consciously or subconsciously - riffed on the Star Beast before in Smith and Jones, which has an innocent-seeming character turn out to be a nasty criminal on the run from aggressive troops who at first look like the bad guys. Like Smith and Jones this is a relatively lightweight opener to a run. There's loads of fun dialogue (The Doctor's desperate dissembling about being a friend of Donna's nemesis Nerys, "Tuna Madras", and many more examples). There are a couple of great new larger than life characterisations: Ruth Madeley's Shirley Anne Bingham, for example, the new scientific adviser to UNIT with inbuilt weapons in her wheelchair and a gobby Northern attitude. Miriam Margoyles does expert voice work as the Meep, complementing the immaculate combination of performance, animatronics and CGI enhancement used to realise the creature, which in turn make three-dimensional the wonderful design and concept originated by the comic makers (the Meep must inevitably come back at some point for a rematch with the Doctor). There's people taken over by a psychedelic sun whose eyes glow, there are exciting zap-gun battles on suburban streets, there's an escape sequence where the Doctor and the Noble-Temples creep through people's lofts. All this is expertly visualised by director Rachel Talalay.

The other returning actors also seem like they've never been away. Jax King as Sylvia Noble is as great as always - the scene where she sees the Doctor at the front door of Donna's house and advances on him aggressively was a highlight, as were her attempts to shield Donna from seeing him ("Skinny man!"). It was also good to have more time in the company of Karl Collins' Shaun Temple, a man happy and secure in the knowledge that he's not in charge. Yasmin Finney is perfect casting for the central and important role of Donna's daughter, Rose. The family are kept grounded and ordinary with an explanation of why they aren't rich (the last time we saw Donna she'd just won the lottery thanks to the Doctor's time-travelling ticket buying) that also adds to the melancholy (Donna was unconsciously channeling the Doctor to do good) and comedy (the first thing that occurs to Donna once she has her memories back is to bemoan that decision). A lot of Davies's other works, particularly those about LGBT+ characters, concentrate on chosen families, often because of a character's being rejected by the family assigned to them at birth. Here, he can show the strength that can exist in traditional families if there's tolerance and love. Donna will protect Rose come what may, Shaun will love unconditionally, Sylvia will do her very best, worrying about saying the wrong thing, and that's okay. All of that was wonderful to see. To put it into a realistic context, though, there's a scene early on where some kids deadname Rose, and this really shocked me. It's rare that Doctor Who depicts such direct queerphobia; there's enough such awful things happening in the real world without it intruding into Doctor Who's usually more utopian fantasy.

Of course that's the whole point of why it was crucial to challenge audience members like myself there, but Davies goes beyond just representation and polemic, and creates a kind of poetry. Rose being trans is crucial to the resolution of the plot, binary ideas being restrictive when dealing with the cosmic problem of a Time Lord meta-crisis. At the climax, Davies creates a punch the air moment ("Binary, binary..." "Non-binary") out of some nonsense dialogue he wrote in a story in 2008, and he also makes the meta-crisis a metaphor, an embodiment of the feelings of otherness and isolation Rose felt - when it's resolved, she finally can be herself and let some of the negativity go. What an ending! People online still criticised it as being too easy, and coming too early with "10 minutes left"; actually it was only six minutes, and those included a lead-in to the next story and the end credits, as well as the reveal scene of the magnificent new TARDIS control room. People who were perhaps less progressive criticised references to pronouns, but the only reference to pronouns is regarding the Meep; it's as innocuous as someone accidentally misgendering someone else's cat (no offence to the Beep of all Meeps) and being corrected. It's barely political at all, though it acts as a reminder to us all to be thoughtful and polite. A few people took exception to the sonic screwdriver being overpowered; sorry, but the Doctor creating screens and shields with it was very cool. To sum up: it was wonderful. I waited patiently for this story for 13 months. After watching it, I could barely stand to wait another week to see the next one. You can't get better than that.

Connectivity:

I thought I'd struggle to link anything to the last story as it wasn't an episode of Doctor Who, but I can say that the lead actors of both The Star Beast and An Adventure in Space and Time were part of the regular cast of the TV show Broadchurch; also, both actors are depicting a new version of someone who last had anything to do with the series many years before. Both stories see weird creatures on the streets of London, which wouldn't have been that big a deal during many phases of Doctor Who's life, but it hasn't happened very much at all during Jodie Whittaker's tenure. RTD's style is more capital-centric than Chris Chibnall's clearly.

Deeper Thoughts:

Diamond Geyser: an outpouring of Doctor Who content for the 60th anniversary. From the start of November 2023, so much Doctor Who stuff has been created, shown or made accessible, that I thought I'd round it all up here (so I could keep it all straight in my head more than anything else!). On the 1st of the month, there was the launch in the UK of the Whoniverse, a branded collection of programmes made available on the BBC's streaming service, the iplayer, with a nice banner and ident animation reminiscent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was a definite statement that Doctor Who content was entering a new joined-up era. As well as almost all of the surviving classic and new Who stories, there were full runs of many spin-offs like the Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood and Class, full runs of making-of strand Doctor Who Confidential, and one-offs like 1977 Documentary Whose Doctor Who or Brain Cox's filmed lecture The Science of Doctor Who from 2013. The big delivery on that day, though, was something new: Tales of the TARDIS is a set of six new sequences that top and tail omnibus versions of classic Doctor Who stories, to frame them for new viewers and add to the overall tapestry. A wonderful new set to host these was created from the paraphernalia of 60 years, a memory TARDIS. This was a clever concept that allows - rather like the Edge and its Guardians from The Power of the Doctor - actors to return to their roles at whatever age without any visual trickery, and then to tell each other 'fireside' stories while we listen in.

In the order that they're presented, there is Earthshock with Peter Davison and Janet Fielding as the Doctor and Tegan, The Mind Robber with Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury as Jamie and Zoe, Vengeance on Varos with Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as the Doctor and Peri, The Three Doctors with Katy Manning and Daniel Anthony as Jo Jones and Clyde Langer, The Time Meddler with Peter Purves and Maureen o' Brien as Steven and Vicki, and finally the extended DVD / Blu-ray version of The Curse of Fenric with Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred as the Doctor and Ace. Between them, the three were written by showrunner Russell T Davies, Phil Ford and Pete McTighe, all of them channelling the style and emotion that the last listed of those gentlemen has brought to the short films that are part of the Blu-ray collection trailers; those have similarly brought back old characters for reunions over recent years. Like many a fan, I watched the new sequences early on the 1st, fast-forwarding through the stories themselves as I've seen them many times before. I couldn't pick a favourite as they were all so wonderful, but I will say it was fantastic to see Purves play Steven again for the first time since 1966. Watching them was emotional in another way too. I became a Doctor Who fan after watching a 1981 curated series of repeats from throughout Doctor Who's history. Could these Tales of the TARDIS become someone's Five Faces of Doctor Who style induction into the magic world of the series? I hope so.

So much content available to stream on that day overshadowed that two new programmes were shown on broadcast television (and, of course, immediately available as part of the iplayer Whoniverse after that). Talking Doctor Who was a David Tennant fronted compendium of clips from the archive, and was rather like sitting down to watch a Blu-ray special feature with the man currently playing the Doctor. The other programme broadcast was the Doctor Who @60 A Musical Celebration concert that had previously been available on BBC Sounds (I reviewed it in the Deeper Thoughts of a recent blog post) but this time with pictures. It was good to see it for the first time, and listen to it again. After that big day, there was a bit of a lull for a while. At some point a huge trove of archive material was uploaded to the web at www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho. There's documents, photos, clips and oral history there, more than I've had time to review in any depth as yet, but what I have seen is most interesting. In mid-November, two new Doctor Who sections appeared on BBC Sounds, The Missing Episodes and The Audio Adventures, providing content that had previously been a commercial concern free at the point of use to UK licence fee payers. The former is a space for the narrated audio versions of stories whose moving pictures are no longer held in the archives; the latter, a selection of Big Finish audios featuring characters from all eras of the programme in further adventures. I listened to Out of Time (a team up between the David Tennant and Tom Baker Doctors), The Beginning (companion actor Carole Ann Ford telling the story of her character Susan's first ever trip in the TARDIS) and Ravagers (a trio of audio episodes featuring Christopher Eccleston reprising his take on the titular Time Lord).

Friday 17th November brought the biggest thing yet: a taste of what was to come. During the Children in Need telethon on BBC1 (and thereafter available as part of the Whoniverse) was a five minute scene 'Destination: Skaro' bridging the gap between The Power of the Doctor and The Star Beast. It was a great amuse-bouche with some nice comic moments, though there was one music cue I'd have removed as it felt like it was trying too hard to suggest whimsy. There was also a taster for the new making-of show Unleashed, with a short version of an episode enthusiastically presented by Steffan Powell, behind the scenes on the Skaro shoot. Also featuring the Daleks was the big new (well, new-old) programme shown on the anniversary itself Thursday 23rd November 2023. This was a new version of the very first Dalek story, colourised and edited down from seven 25-minute episodes to a lean 75-minute omnibus shown in the evening on UK channel BBC4. The idea (and it seems to be one that will be repeated with future stories after this experiment) is to provide an alternate version alongside the originals that might better engage a modern audience, giving them an entry point into old Who like Tales of the TARDIS. Going in, the editing made me much more apprehensive than the addition of colour, but I tried to switch off my ingrained memories of every familiar scene and line of dialogue and concentrate on what was on the screen rather than what wasn't. It was a very effective and clever job done by Benjamin Cook in the cutting, with the story flowing nicely without being too choppy in most places. The colour also made the story pop in a way that it hadn't before, and the additions of new music, Dalek dialogue and effects sequences truly makes this a parallel universe version of the original.

The biggest surprise was at the end of the story, where there was a 'coming soon trailer' in the shape of several more colourised clips from throughout William Hartnell's era. The following programme shown that night also had a last minute surprise; this was a repeat of An Adventure in Space and Time but in the scene where William Hartnell, as played by David Bradley, sees into the future of Doctor Who, it was Ncuti Gatwa rather than Matt Smith looking back at him. Gatwa had such presence in just this short, silent performance, that I'm very excited for Christmas. In the week leading up to the anniversary, there were also several new radio shows related to Doctor Who, and all were enjoyable. Toby Hadoke's A to Z of surviving Doctor Who covered the fan experience; Matthew Sweet's The Wilderness Years covered the period when Doctor Who was off the air; The Welsh Connection outlined the special relationship between that country and the show; 60 Years of Friends and Foes discussed how Doctor Who has reflected political and social themes relevant to the changing times in which it was being made. There was a Doctor Who themed Bargain Hunt; David Tennant presented the Cbeebies bedtime story; there were countless appearances on news and magazine shows plugging the 60th anniversary specials. If you wanted more information on The Star Beast after it was shown, you could watch the corresponding episode of Unleashed, listen to a reaction podcast, and watch an in-vision commentary. You could even switch over to the UK's Channel 5 and get some gossip in Doctor Who: 60 years of Secrets and Scandals. I've probably missed a few things above, and there's still two more specials to come. We've never had it so good!

In Summary:

And we're back.