"The Star Beast" [review]
Nov. 27th, 2023 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverWell, it's here! The first of three specials for the 60th!
tl;dr: I enjoyed this episode a lot, but there are caveats.
Very long review. And yes, very spoilerific.
A few minutes into the episode, I paused the stream, turned to my husband, and said, "I think this is one ofbasmathgirl's stories!" No really, it made me laugh how the beginning scenes (not the intro speech) felt like a Ten-returning-to-Donna fic, with Donna saying how she had this amnesiac spell and somehow she just knows she had something wonderful but it's gone now. They needed to remind the audience of what had happened and show how it had affected Donna's life, and there are really very few ways to do that, but still, it was delightful how the show basically did the same thing that the fic writers have been doing for years.
I really enjoyed the adventure plot, which apparently was based on a DWM comic from the 1980s that was also done in audio format by Big Finish a few years ago - I guess the story has been good for forty-plus years! The twist was very well done. We were wondering what in the world was going on when the Wrarth and the controlled UNIT soldiers started firing on each other but didn't figure it out until the Doctor put on the barrister wig. I really enjoyed Shirley, the new UNIT scientific advisor. While I'm hoping that they aren't replacing Kate with her (add, not replace!), I liked Shirley's insightfulness and practicality, and her lack of star-struck-ness when meeting the Doctor, without Kate's daddy issues and writer-forced callbacks to the Brig.
It's a bit disappointing that the Meep was only insane and megalomaniacal - it would have been nice if the Meep had had a personal backstory and reasons for evil - but it really didn't detract from the story. It was, however, very disappointing that shutting down the dagger drive healed the damage that the ship was doing to the city. RTD usually doesn't pull his punches like this - his catastrophes normally have lasting impact - and this resulted in the only "Really????" moment in the episode.
The episode brought up gender and transitioning issues, and I'm sure that's what the fandom is quibbling about. In my opinion, I think they handled it well. Rose was a strong, confident teenager but still wrestling with her transition (as well as other issues she didn't know about). Sylvia and Donna discussed openly how difficult it is to know what's right in dealing with her, and the negatives, such as the schoolmates taunting Rose, were brought up as part of the plot, not as a separate discussion or a speech.
The one thing I didn't like - which actually made me angry - was the solution to the metacrisis, that it was something the Doctor, as a man, could not have thought of. That's simply sexist and not worthy of Doctor Who. I firmly believe that if you say that a gender is incapable of something that's not actually gender-specific, it's sexist no matter which gender is the target. If saying "a woman could not have thought of that solution" is sexist, then saying "a man could not have thought of that solution" is also sexist.
(I apply this criterion to other gender behaviors as well. If a man secretly spying on a woman having a private moment or forcing a woman to go out with him by not taking "no" for an answer is creepy and predatory, then a woman doing that to a man is also creepy and predatory, not cute and quirky, Clara.)
It also doesn't make sense. If a woman could come up with that solution, why didn't Donna save herself in "Journey's End"? She was female at that point as well, with the same metacrisis, and she knew it was going to happen (the dialogue reveals that) and should have been just as capable of solving it then as now, if the deciding factor was her gender.
In addition, it's just not a satisfying solution for a sci-fi show, to "let it go" - this is dipping into science fantasy. This is where all those JE fix-its and Ten-returning-to-Donna fics outshine this episode - they provide actual solutions, not just "okay, we need to get rid of this so poof! it's gone" plot points. Has the Doctor, in the 1500+ years since he last saw Donna (not counting the billions of years spent punching a wall - he was kind of pre-occupied then), never seriously thought about what he could have done to save her - if not to actually come back and fix it, to be able to do it right if it happens again?
But given the themes of the episode, having the Doctor solve this for Donna wasn't what they were going for. Neither was a technical solution. But they didn't have to solve it the way they did, with a sexist comment. In my opinion, it would have been better to leverage Rose. One possibility I could think of is to have Donna say that while alone, she couldn't control it, but now that there are two identical metacrises, they can do it together. Another is leveraging the idea that Donna passed down some of the metacrisis, so they each have half, by saying that with only half a metacrisis, their minds are clearer and they can see the solution now.
The possibility I prefer is to have Rose, as the non-binary metacrisis, realize that she can just let it go and then instruct Donna. It would tie nicely into her story arc, as she'd expressed earlier how difficult her transition was and how she wasn't sure who she was, and now she's realized she's a metacrisis and can now let it all go.
One last possibility, which preserves the "ya gotta be female" vibe but, I think, does it better, is this: Fourteen presents the solution and says that he'd thought of it when he was Thirteen, when she thought about the problem (trying to figure out how to fix it in case it happened to Yaz) and viewed it from a female perspective. This not only isn't sexist, but it also demonstrates that the Doctor learned from being female.
In my opinion, the solution in the episode made it into primarily a gender discussion; up until then, gender was a sub-theme but it didn't supercede the adventure. As I noted above, up until this point, they handled it really well, discussing the issue without focusing on it. However, at the end, it eclipsed the real theme of the episode, which is the issues caused by assumptions and pre-conceived notions, a problem that's not specific to only gender issues. There must have been a reason why they chose to re-present a story that had already been published twice, and that was because it exemplified the problem they wanted to address; if they just wanted an adventure unrelated to their themes, they would have just written it.
One of the first things that Shirley says is telling the soldiers you can't just assume that the ship crashed, because from its flight path, it obviously chose to land. She then notes, when the soldier tells her there's no signs of life, that they don't know what kind of life they're looking for. The soldiers converged on Donna's house because Rose assumed from the Meep's appearance that the cute fluffy alien must be innocent and is entirely truthful, and thus fell prey to its fabricated story about being the victim, taking it home to protect it. The gender issues, which are in part driven by assumptions, dovetailed nicely into all of that, until they were unnecessarily made dominant by the metacrisis solution.
So, on the minus side, the episode made me angry with the end and I'm not quite sure what to think. I plan to rewatch it before the next one comes out and see how it feels. I think I can ignore the ending (or headcanon it with my own) and enjoy the rest of it, but it reminds me of "The Idiot's Lantern", another fine episode with a frankly offensive, anger-inducing ending which I refuse to watch. (That's Rose telling the son to go after his dad and get caught back up in the cycle of abuse he and his mom worked so hard to break. This is personal for me, as my husband was once that son.)
On the plus side, the episode is all I've been thinking about since I watched it, and not about the ending - I've been thinking about the adventure, the theme about assumptions, and Donna's family, and you know, I haven't spent this much mental time on an episode since "The Doctor's Wife". There's a quote from Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere character Hoid: "The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon." That's how I'm feeling right now, that the episode is giving me things to think about, not telling me what to think, which is what the last seven series have been doing. This bodes well for the future, at least for me. Also, it's giving me writing ideas, something I haven't gotten from the show in so long! But I'm not going to write anything new until the specials are all out.
Lastly, I wanted to mention that I really liked how the episode handled the overall story arc, which is "Why did the Doctor come back to this face?" The question is brought up many times, by various characters, and the Doctor is trying to investigate it but gets swept into the adventure. Then, it's brought right back up when it was over. We didn't get any clues* about the mystery, except that it seems to revolve around Donna. I contrast this to how it was handled in Big Finish's 60th series, where in almost every audio, nothing happens of relevance to the Doctor's problem and at the end, someone tells the Doctor, "Oh hey, if you want to find out about (the problem), you should go here," which is obviously meant to get the Doctor to the next audio. In this episode, getting the Doctor to the next episode is handled in-character, with Donna spilling the coffee.
By the way, that console room was gorgeous. I can't believe they built that beautiful thing for one thirty-second scene and then set it on fire. I'm hoping it was cosmetic/CGI fire and that we get to see it more in all its glory in the next two episodes.
* Talking about clues, did you notice that ominous chanting behind the outro theme? I think that's a clue.
Edit: I'm adding a link totrobadora's review, for the last bit at the bottom, the 100% love, because I totally agree with them (not assuming a pronoun here) and could not say it better.
tl;dr: I enjoyed this episode a lot, but there are caveats.
Very long review. And yes, very spoilerific.
A few minutes into the episode, I paused the stream, turned to my husband, and said, "I think this is one of
basmathgirl's stories!" No really, it made me laugh how the beginning scenes (not the intro speech) felt like a Ten-returning-to-Donna fic, with Donna saying how she had this amnesiac spell and somehow she just knows she had something wonderful but it's gone now. They needed to remind the audience of what had happened and show how it had affected Donna's life, and there are really very few ways to do that, but still, it was delightful how the show basically did the same thing that the fic writers have been doing for years.I really enjoyed the adventure plot, which apparently was based on a DWM comic from the 1980s that was also done in audio format by Big Finish a few years ago - I guess the story has been good for forty-plus years! The twist was very well done. We were wondering what in the world was going on when the Wrarth and the controlled UNIT soldiers started firing on each other but didn't figure it out until the Doctor put on the barrister wig. I really enjoyed Shirley, the new UNIT scientific advisor. While I'm hoping that they aren't replacing Kate with her (add, not replace!), I liked Shirley's insightfulness and practicality, and her lack of star-struck-ness when meeting the Doctor, without Kate's daddy issues and writer-forced callbacks to the Brig.
It's a bit disappointing that the Meep was only insane and megalomaniacal - it would have been nice if the Meep had had a personal backstory and reasons for evil - but it really didn't detract from the story. It was, however, very disappointing that shutting down the dagger drive healed the damage that the ship was doing to the city. RTD usually doesn't pull his punches like this - his catastrophes normally have lasting impact - and this resulted in the only "Really????" moment in the episode.
The episode brought up gender and transitioning issues, and I'm sure that's what the fandom is quibbling about. In my opinion, I think they handled it well. Rose was a strong, confident teenager but still wrestling with her transition (as well as other issues she didn't know about). Sylvia and Donna discussed openly how difficult it is to know what's right in dealing with her, and the negatives, such as the schoolmates taunting Rose, were brought up as part of the plot, not as a separate discussion or a speech.
The one thing I didn't like - which actually made me angry - was the solution to the metacrisis, that it was something the Doctor, as a man, could not have thought of. That's simply sexist and not worthy of Doctor Who. I firmly believe that if you say that a gender is incapable of something that's not actually gender-specific, it's sexist no matter which gender is the target. If saying "a woman could not have thought of that solution" is sexist, then saying "a man could not have thought of that solution" is also sexist.
(I apply this criterion to other gender behaviors as well. If a man secretly spying on a woman having a private moment or forcing a woman to go out with him by not taking "no" for an answer is creepy and predatory, then a woman doing that to a man is also creepy and predatory, not cute and quirky, Clara.)
It also doesn't make sense. If a woman could come up with that solution, why didn't Donna save herself in "Journey's End"? She was female at that point as well, with the same metacrisis, and she knew it was going to happen (the dialogue reveals that) and should have been just as capable of solving it then as now, if the deciding factor was her gender.
In addition, it's just not a satisfying solution for a sci-fi show, to "let it go" - this is dipping into science fantasy. This is where all those JE fix-its and Ten-returning-to-Donna fics outshine this episode - they provide actual solutions, not just "okay, we need to get rid of this so poof! it's gone" plot points. Has the Doctor, in the 1500+ years since he last saw Donna (not counting the billions of years spent punching a wall - he was kind of pre-occupied then), never seriously thought about what he could have done to save her - if not to actually come back and fix it, to be able to do it right if it happens again?
But given the themes of the episode, having the Doctor solve this for Donna wasn't what they were going for. Neither was a technical solution. But they didn't have to solve it the way they did, with a sexist comment. In my opinion, it would have been better to leverage Rose. One possibility I could think of is to have Donna say that while alone, she couldn't control it, but now that there are two identical metacrises, they can do it together. Another is leveraging the idea that Donna passed down some of the metacrisis, so they each have half, by saying that with only half a metacrisis, their minds are clearer and they can see the solution now.
The possibility I prefer is to have Rose, as the non-binary metacrisis, realize that she can just let it go and then instruct Donna. It would tie nicely into her story arc, as she'd expressed earlier how difficult her transition was and how she wasn't sure who she was, and now she's realized she's a metacrisis and can now let it all go.
One last possibility, which preserves the "ya gotta be female" vibe but, I think, does it better, is this: Fourteen presents the solution and says that he'd thought of it when he was Thirteen, when she thought about the problem (trying to figure out how to fix it in case it happened to Yaz) and viewed it from a female perspective. This not only isn't sexist, but it also demonstrates that the Doctor learned from being female.
In my opinion, the solution in the episode made it into primarily a gender discussion; up until then, gender was a sub-theme but it didn't supercede the adventure. As I noted above, up until this point, they handled it really well, discussing the issue without focusing on it. However, at the end, it eclipsed the real theme of the episode, which is the issues caused by assumptions and pre-conceived notions, a problem that's not specific to only gender issues. There must have been a reason why they chose to re-present a story that had already been published twice, and that was because it exemplified the problem they wanted to address; if they just wanted an adventure unrelated to their themes, they would have just written it.
One of the first things that Shirley says is telling the soldiers you can't just assume that the ship crashed, because from its flight path, it obviously chose to land. She then notes, when the soldier tells her there's no signs of life, that they don't know what kind of life they're looking for. The soldiers converged on Donna's house because Rose assumed from the Meep's appearance that the cute fluffy alien must be innocent and is entirely truthful, and thus fell prey to its fabricated story about being the victim, taking it home to protect it. The gender issues, which are in part driven by assumptions, dovetailed nicely into all of that, until they were unnecessarily made dominant by the metacrisis solution.
So, on the minus side, the episode made me angry with the end and I'm not quite sure what to think. I plan to rewatch it before the next one comes out and see how it feels. I think I can ignore the ending (or headcanon it with my own) and enjoy the rest of it, but it reminds me of "The Idiot's Lantern", another fine episode with a frankly offensive, anger-inducing ending which I refuse to watch. (That's Rose telling the son to go after his dad and get caught back up in the cycle of abuse he and his mom worked so hard to break. This is personal for me, as my husband was once that son.)
On the plus side, the episode is all I've been thinking about since I watched it, and not about the ending - I've been thinking about the adventure, the theme about assumptions, and Donna's family, and you know, I haven't spent this much mental time on an episode since "The Doctor's Wife". There's a quote from Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere character Hoid: "The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon." That's how I'm feeling right now, that the episode is giving me things to think about, not telling me what to think, which is what the last seven series have been doing. This bodes well for the future, at least for me. Also, it's giving me writing ideas, something I haven't gotten from the show in so long! But I'm not going to write anything new until the specials are all out.
Lastly, I wanted to mention that I really liked how the episode handled the overall story arc, which is "Why did the Doctor come back to this face?" The question is brought up many times, by various characters, and the Doctor is trying to investigate it but gets swept into the adventure. Then, it's brought right back up when it was over. We didn't get any clues* about the mystery, except that it seems to revolve around Donna. I contrast this to how it was handled in Big Finish's 60th series, where in almost every audio, nothing happens of relevance to the Doctor's problem and at the end, someone tells the Doctor, "Oh hey, if you want to find out about (the problem), you should go here," which is obviously meant to get the Doctor to the next audio. In this episode, getting the Doctor to the next episode is handled in-character, with Donna spilling the coffee.
By the way, that console room was gorgeous. I can't believe they built that beautiful thing for one thirty-second scene and then set it on fire. I'm hoping it was cosmetic/CGI fire and that we get to see it more in all its glory in the next two episodes.
* Talking about clues, did you notice that ominous chanting behind the outro theme? I think that's a clue.
Edit: I'm adding a link to
trobadora's review, for the last bit at the bottom, the 100% love, because I totally agree with them (not assuming a pronoun here) and could not say it better. 
no subject
Date: 2023-11-30 03:35 am (UTC)I hope that shiiiny TARDIS design stays around past the specials. I saw it pointed out that else-net that it is all ramps and no stairs, which might have something to do with Shirley being in there at some point.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-02 10:04 pm (UTC)I just watched it, and it was pretty good. I got a mysterious lump in my throat at one point.
I love Donna being an awesome mom and the fact they did address the JE ending. And Sylvia trying so hard to assure everything is completely normal. I admit , when I heard the.name Rose my brain went “ Huh?” But I
like how Donna ‘s daughter makes plush based on the memories.
lol! I was thinking near the beginning, “ is this somebody’s fanfic? “