Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Doctor Who, Series 5 - Episode 2: The Beast Below

Right. Delayed a day due to some sort of programming bug messing up the DVRs of both of my friends who have BBC America. Luckily the rerun was tonight and I was able to catch it.

SPOILERS BEHIND THE CUTS


THE PLOT

The Doctor and Amy Pond arrive on The Starship UK - a ship containing the whole of the United Kingdom - flying through space, fleeing an Earth made uninhabitable by solar flares. Breaking out of observation mode in order to investigate a crying girl who is being steadily ignored by the people around her, The Doctor discovers that there is something very wrong with the ship.

Joined by a masked woman who calls herself Liz Ten, The Doctor further discovers that the ship somehow moves smoothly through space despite not having any obvious means of propulsion. At the same time, Amy goes investigating on her own, encounters the tentacle of some giant beast and is eventually released into a voting booth, where she is told that she may learn the truth behind the Starship UK and then must choose to either protest the truth or accept it and have her mind erased.

Eventually, The Doctor uncovers the terrible secret of Starship UK on his own. Namely, that it was built around the body of a giant, sentient space whale - the last known member of its' species - and that the creature has been steadily tortured through several centuries in order to keep the people of the UK safe on their journey. The Doctor is ready to damage the whale's brain, allowing it to hold the ship together and continue traveling but without feeling any further pain. This would, it is pointed out, effectively be the same as killing it but the Doctor is not in any mood to hear backtalk from the people responsible for enslaving a creature like this in the first place.

It is Amy who realizes that while the whale has been force fed numerous "protesters", it had never eaten any of the children that were tossed to it. Making a connection between The Doctor and the space-whale - both the last of their kind - Amy realizes that the whale showing up was no miracle, as the history of the Starship UK says. The space whale heard the screams of the children dying in the disaster that threatened the Earth and came to help. It is Amy who deactivates the controls holding the whale back... but the Starship continues to function and the whale actually swims faster than ever.

As the two are getting ready to depart, a phone rings inside The TARDIS. The man on the other end of the phone is Winston Churchill. And he tells The Doctor that he thinks he will need his help very soon... as the shadow of a Dalek falls upon the wall behind his desk...




THE GOOD PARTS

* The scene where The Doctor explains his logic in figuring out several basic facts about the sort of society he is walking into based on how he people are reacting (or rather NOT reacting) to a crying girl is very well done. It explains how The Doctor seems to know so much even when he is walking into a place that he couldn't know anything about.

* Amy proves to be a very resourceful - if somewhat reluctant, at first - companion. She's naturally curious, as we see her move behind a "KEEP OUT" sign and start picking the locks on the doors there. And we definitely see some nerve and attitude when she tells off The Doctor after he condemns her for trying to hide the horrible truth of the Starship UK from him.

* The doll-like Smilers are a suitably creepy robotic villain and well in keeping with Moffat's ability to find the horrors in the mundane aspects of childhood.





THE PROBLEMS

* It's a little unbelievable that The Doctor is shown to have a fine deductive mind and yet he misses the rather obvious connection between the children being actively spared by "The Beast" and The Beast being far more intelligent and friendly than it seems.

* The relationship between The Eleventh Doctor and Amy is already seemingly a little derivative of Rose and The Ninth Doctor. The ordinary working-class girl who is a calming influence on an angry, vengeful demi-god.

* The no-win situation Moffat proposes here is a great philosophical point... but one has to wonder why on Earth any engineer would develop a system that causes the whole thing to stop working - as well as the utter collapse of society and the death of millions - if The Queen has a brief moment of guilt and pushes a button.





WHAT DO I THINK OF THE DOCTOR NOW?

... he's kind of a dick.

It's in the same way that The Third Doctor was kind of a dick and The Sixth Doctor was REALLY a dick. He's already coming across as much more alien and more oblivious than any recent incarnation of The Doctor.

For instance, he drags Amy into a futuristic marketplace, not noticing or - once she points it out - caring that she is running around in public in her nightgown. Granting that it IS a modest nightgown.... still! He's also very quick to push Amy - who is still adjusting to the whole idea of what he is - into the standard companion role. He abandons her to go investigate the ship engines on his own while she is supposed to talk to the crying girl and figure out why she is upset. The Standard Doctor/Companion ploy of "you talk to the people and charm them while I'll figure out what's going on here."

Eleven is also a lot quicker to jump to violent solutions than Ten was and he's certainly a lot quicker to anger, getting a very nice speech after he learns the truth about Starship UK, in which he says that nobody who is human has any right lecturing him about his plan to turn the space whale into a vegetable just so that it will stop feeling pain.

This actually fits in nicely with a theory of my own regarding how The Doctor changes with each regeneration... but that is for another time.



The Final Verdict: Probably Moffat's weakest story with The Doctor to date. It isn't bad but there are some logical problems with the base concept- brilliant though it is as a philosophical exercise. Amy is growing as a companion but The Eleventh Doctor is proving to be a much harsher man than Ten was and I'm not sure I like the change.

7 comments:

  1. Honestly my thought on the Rose/10 or Amy/11 relationship is a bit different. I don't think he picked her for the reasons that 9/10 took Rose. I think that Amy is in someway connected to her crack on the wall. The one that is all through out time and space, I think she's along to keep watch on her more than anything else. But since she's along for the ride... she might as well...
    And honestly it did bother me that a man who noticed the child crying didn't notice the creature sparing the children. He noticed the ship wasn't running on the engines!
    Also I loved Liz 10. Fun character. Or a fun idea. Warrior Queen with laser six shooters as it were.

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  2. Honestly my thought on the Rose/10 or Amy/11 relationship is a bit different. I don't think he picked her for the reasons that 9/10 took Rose. I think that Amy is in someway connected to her crack on the wall. The one that is all through out time and space, I think she's along to keep watch on her more than anything else. But since she's along for the ride... she might as well...
    Yeah. It may also have been guilt-driven since he did kinda mess up this one girl's life by showing up and then disappearing. Amy's reasons for going along are certainly different - she seems to be actively fleeing her life as opposed to Rose, who was a just-awoken adrenaline junkie. The scene with her telling him off and the hugging afterward just seemed like a rehash of Dalek to me...
    And honestly it did bother me that a man who noticed the child crying didn't notice the creature sparing the children. He noticed the ship wasn't running on the engines!
    I know! Then again, that may have been to show how this Doctor is better with logic than he is with people. Note how he seemed more interested in the whole concept of a nation on a spaceship than he did in going out and interacting with the people - which is total opposite from Ten, who just reveled in talking with the natives.
    There's also the fact that he notices the child not crying but then leaves Amy to deal with actually talking to the child while he's working on the problem that interests him more (i.e. how is this ship moving?).
    So yeah... apparently the new Doctor has Asperger's Syndrome.

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  3. Asperger's... huh that is kind of interesting maybe its a reaction to 10 being almost too involved with the natives and how badly things went for him.

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  4. Well, they didn't outright SAY that. But the behavior is very autistic. And I say that as someone with an autistic sibling.

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  5. Well, at least they fixed his hair.

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  6. That's all you had to say about this one?

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  7. Yeah. You already pointed out that he's kind of a dick. It had some interesting moments but overall the episode just left me with a "meh" feeling.

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