Review by Tim Robins
WARNING: SPOILERS!
Three 60th Anniversary Doctor Who Specials, “The Star Beast” (25th November), “Wild Blue Yonder” (2nd December) and “The Giggle” (9th December) will reunite the Fourteenth Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna Temple-Noble (Catherine Tate) as they come face-to-face with their most terrifying villain yet: the Toymaker, played by Neil Patrick Harris, in his Doctor Who debut.
Last Saturday, 25th November, David Tennant, playing The Doctor, and Catherine Tate, reprising her role as companion Donna Noble, were reunited on screen in The Star Beast, the first of three Specials, tasked with bringing back the love for Doctor Who in its 60th Anniversary year. I am happy, and not a little relieved, to say that it succeeded beyond my expectations. We even got a new TARDIS interior. It looks huge, cold and empty of excitement. Good at conveying scale, but not so good at conveying the TARDIS as a place of comfort and safety. But I expect it will grow on me.
Behind the scenes, we get the likes of showrunner Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner (one of four executive producers), composer Murray Gold and producer Phil Collinson. So, the 2005 gang’s all here. And it showed. Leaked location photos revealed the night filming and battles on suburban streets that typified some of the best of the Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant stories, and it didn’t too many of those for me to realise that the first 60th Anniversary Special would be an adaptation of the early, Doctor Who Weekly comic strip “Doctor Who and The Star Beast”, most recently been republished in the Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Anthology from Panini, published earlier this month, albeit with Tennant rather than Tom Baker as the Doctor.
This put me on edge, because the strip was one of the few stories that successfully channelled the anarchic energy of 2000AD, thanks to writer Pat Mills (although co-credited in the original comic, he and John Wagner alternated on scripting the early Weekly stories), and the art of David Gibbons. But what works well in a comic doesn’t always work in other media.
In Doctor Who Weekly, “The Star Beast” is a comedic misadventure, built around the notion that appearances can be deceptive. The tragic and adorable Beep the Meep is being hunted across the galaxy by the Wrarth, a race of hideous humanoid crustacea. But when the Doctor intervenes, he discovers things are not what they seem.
Davies had additional goals for the TV adaptation, not least reintroducing Donna Noble (Tate) and introducing her new family. The trouble was that, when they last met, in “Journey’s End”, The Doctor had partitioned Donna’s mind after she absorbed the knowledge and energy of the Time Lords. If those memories come back, Donna will die – her human mind being unable to contain them all.
As abstract as all this fiddly continuity is, the Doctor’s meets Donna while she is staggering through town carrying a huge pile of Christmas presents, a physical manifestation the encounter meant.
Davies is great at writing relatable characters. Watching the impact of The Doctor’s action on Donna Noble’s life was heartbreaking. She had even blown the massive, life changing lottery win the Doctor engineered in “The End of Time”, unaware that she was enacting the Doctor’s own drive to rescue people. Davies writes about characters with heart not clever-clever intellects with merely looks-good-on-paper personalities. His stories are dramas in the Soap Opera sense, not the drama of mapping complex continuity points on a white board.
Why had Tennant returned as The Doctor beyond a much needed, soft reboot? In story terms. “How?” is the better question. We know the Doctor can regenerate to look like other people. The Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) looked like a Chancery Guard he had met on Gallifrey, and Peter Capaldi’s Doctor resembled a character (Caecillius) he met in “The Fires of Pompeii”. The latter was explained as The Doctor’s face being a subconscious reminder of a promise that he made to Donna Noble in the story. Then there was The Curator, a future Doctor revisiting the face of Tom Baker (in “The Day of the Doctor”). Still, this time out, the reason seems less playful and more ominous.
Then again, why did Donna Noble name her daughter after Rose Tyler? The answer to that question points again to the impact The Doctor has had on Donna Noble’s life and how her deadly dilemma was resolved, at least for now. It also gives new meanings to the plush toys her daughter Rose has been making and the shed in which she has been making them. Again, Davies succeeds in imbuing a plot twist with emotional meaning and, again, the cast rise to the occasion, to engage you in the most goofy sci-fi ideas imaginable.
I was involved in all these conundrums but if that was all “The Star Beast” had to offer, I wouldn’t be enthusing about it now. There was action, spectacle, great costumes and rousing music. A lot of work goes into a production like this to make it seem effortless. That said, I wasn’t that keen on the look of The Meep. It wasn’t the rotund furball as first imagined in the Doctor Who Weekly. For me, the screen version’s lank, silky locks and spindly hands and figures made the Meep look like a grotesque granny.
As in 2005, Davies spares some thought about having an inclusive cast and characters. It was actually “The Star Beast” comic strip that introduced The Doctor’s first Black companion. Years later, Davies had to write in the margins of the script for “Rose” that Rose Tyler’s boyfriend Mickey Smith was black, to ensure the role was cast correctly.
“The Star Beast” wove in a mixed-race family, a trans daughter, non-binary identities and the wheelchair using Shirley Anne Bingham (played by Ruth Madeley) who was not, as TV Tropes would lead me to expect, an evil character in a wheelchair trope, but actually a UNIT scientific adviser – The Doctor’s old role.
Yasmin Finney played Donna’s trans daughter, Rose. This is a step forward for trans representation on television and has been welcomed by many Doctor Who fans, such as YouTuber Jessie Gender. There have been concerns that in the story Rose goes from a transgendered young woman unproblematically passing in life to a super-god-thing at the end. Really, most marginalised groups just long to be treated as ordinary people.
As for myself, I confess I couldn’t get my head around the concluding exposition, partly because it was delivered in a crescendo of special effects and orchestration. Can a person be transnon-binary? I suppose the answer is “yes”, but Davies’ personal trope of “I’m not just a person , I’m a space-god” could have been left back in 2005 when it was first used in “Bad Wolf”.
If you want to enjoy “The Star Beast” story as first intended, then please go and find the original comic strip. It has great comedic moments and is gleefully nasty. In a comic it is easy to juxtapose a character’s appearance, words and thoughts. And there are great moments, notably The Doctor mocking The Meep’s robotic “high chair” and the Wrarth having afternoon tea with a family.
As for the Special, The BBC are spinning the overnight ratings of 5.08 million viewers as a tremendous success, but the figures are also a reminder of how few people are actually watching TV these days on terrestrial broadcast, as opposed to streaming servies – at least on the date shows are first shown.
Meanwhile a critic for the Radio Times enthuses, “It’s the type of episode that will have the whole family crowding round the TV, the type that will make kids want to run around with sonic screwdrivers fighting monsters and saving the world, and the type that makes you believe in the magic of Doctor Who again”. I am sure that is the aim, I’m just wondering if Beep the Meep plushies will be on the shelves for Christmas?
Until then, a happy Sixtieth Anniversary to you all! Meep! Meep!
Tim Robins
• The Star Beast is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK and Disney+ worldwide
• The Star Beast became the biggest drama launch of 2023, as well as achieving the biggest overnight ratings for an episode of the sci-fi series since Resolution in 2019, with an overnight audience of 5.08 million
• Doctor Who: The Star Beast
By Gary Russell
BBC Books
ISBN: 978-1785948459
Based on a script by Russell T Davies, this brand-new adventure for Doctor Who’s 60th Anniversary features David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor and Catherine Tate as Donna Noble.
• Check out Doctor Who – The Fourth Doctor Anthology on AmazonUK (Affiliate Link – using this helps support downthetubes) | ISBN 978-1804911587
• Big Finish: Doctor Who – The Star Beast Audio Adventure features on Doctor Who: The Comic Strip Adaptations Volume 01
written by Pat Mills & John Wagner (adapted by Alan Barnes) and directed Nicholas Briggs
• Radio Times: What happened to Donna Noble in Doctor Who?
Get caught up on the fate of Catherine Tate’s character ahead of the 60th anniversary specials.
Further Watching…
• Episode 1: The Star Beast | The Official Doctor Who Podcast | Doctor Who
• Behind the Scenes | The Star Beast | Doctor Who
Coming Next Week…
A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: British Comics, Comics, Doctor Who, Features, Other Worlds, Reviews, Science Fiction, Television