Doctor Who - The Star Beast

A Wolf In
Meep’s Clothing

Doctor Who - The Star Beast
Airdate: 25th November 2023
BBC 1 (co-produced with some other
evil studios who are ransoming it to
the rest of the world on a streaming
channel, thus becoming typical
Doctor Who villains).

So, Doctor Who - The Star Beast is the first of three Anniversary episodes to commemorate Great Britain’s favourite Timelord’s 60th year... puzzlingly airing two days after the actual 60th anniversary date but, it makes more sense to air it on the traditional Saturday evening anyway... back where it belongs. And it’s adapted from the always brilliant Pat Mills’ and Dave Gibbon’s Fourth Doctor comic strip from Doctor Who Weekly from way back when (to read more about that, see my very recent review of Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Anthology, right here). It also marks the return of David Tennant to the role of The Doctor, making TV history by playing a second incarnation of the Timelord (who mysteriously regenerated into new clothes too... I hope they address this issue soon) and the brilliant show runner who brought the show back in the early 2000s, Russell T. Davies.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about this, to be honest. I loved the majority of the Davies era and think the show started going progressively downhill since he left. Tennant is maybe my second or third favourite Doctor of all time and I know he can act the heck out of this role so, I wasn’t worried on his behalf but, I dunno, I had mixed feelings about all this.

And, yeah... maybe I was right to.

This new show was both brilliant but tempered with some really bad stuff also. Still, my favourite Camden Town shop, Cyberdog, was featured in a few shots at the start and end of the show so... that was cool. But yeah, seriously, I also had reservations about how long an adaptation of The Star Beast could take in terms of screen time... I guessed about 15 - 20 minutes but, of course, it’s a) not about jumping through sets of panels and b) there’s all the other stuff about why The Doctor has the same face, not to mention the fallout from what would happen to Donna Noble if she ever remembers The Doctor due to her life saving memory wipe (aka she will die).

Okay, so the story worked fairly well and, it was well performed by just about everyone... and some of the comical dialogue and physical comedy was fantastic. I’m not sure that The Meep came off as evil as it should have done from the comics but... the insectoid Wrarth Warriors were well handled and the bigger budget, presumably half funded by Disney, meant it feels a little more epic than we might have hoped for but, luckily, it was directed with a deft hand and it really somehow felt more like Doctor Who than it had in a while. So that’s all good.

There were problems with it too though, at least from my perspective.

Number one was the truly cheesy, break the fourth wall opening where The Doctor and Donna are kinda filling in the back story for people. Honestly, I suspect this was added after the ‘Disney masters’ or somebody overly cautious at the BBC panicked about it because there were two reasons why this sequence didn’t work. Firstly, standing in front of a screen and filling it in with special effects later, as we’ve seen on lesser shows like The Mandalorian, doesn’t have to look that cheap. Were those matte lines I could see around The Doctor? That doesn’t really matter though... it’s Doctor Who. It’s supposed to look cheap and wobbly. However, all the bits they filled the audience in on... which was admittedly needed at some point... are already firmly flagged up and highlighted to death within the story itself. It just felt like they were repeating themselves later and it rendered the opening sequence completely superfluous anyway. So why include the bloody thing in the first place?

Number two... when the show was relaunched with Eccleston and later Tennant, all of my friends who, I assure you, are all more ‘woke’ than me (which isn’t hard... so apologies for that, I guess... not really though, I am who I am) were complaining about how politically correct and tick boxy the show had become and, in the intervening years, that aspect just kept getting worse (alienating a lot of viewers, from what I could see). And, alas, this one is absolutely devoting loads of time to being horrendously twee and ‘down with the kids’ and, it felt like it was just ramming the whole mental illness rebranded issue and so on down the throats of the viewers. It’s fine though. Unlike some of the more tolerant and modern thinking people I sometimes deal with... I can totally live with it and just ignore it when it comes up... but just wish I didn’t have to. I’ve already had one derogatory text from a much more enlightened friend than I expressing a little disappointment with this angle on last night's episode. Still... it is what it is, I suppose.

Thirdly, the IMDB and various other outlets have been lying to us again. Listed in this episode’s credits are Jemma Redgrave, Bernard Cribbins and Bonnie Langford, returning to their respective roles but... nope... none of these people are present and correct here, I’m afraid. The show and disclosure of some of its contents was always deceitful in its marketing since its return in the early 2000s and, nothing has changed it seems. I get annoyed about this stuff but move on and just carry on trusting my own instinct about what’s going to happen next... rather than attempt to get my information from the ‘official source’, so to speak.

But, those three problems aside, the episode was a hoot and I mostly had a blast with The Star Beast. I especially loved Murray Gold's score and the way he kept teasing the old Tenth Doctor action music, All The Strange Creatures, in different tempos and orchestrations throughout the episode... the Tenth Doctor's theme in Fourteenth's clothing, so to speak. And I am looking forward to seeing where the TARDIS has fled to for the next chapter (and oh, by the way guys, lovely redesign on the regenerated interiors... shame you had to blow it all up only a couple of minutes after we get to see it). The next episode has been shrouded in secrecy so it’s the one people are most wanting to see, of course. I’ll probably be late to seeing that second one, unfortunately, due to an early Christmas function but, I am still hoping to get my review up next Sunday. It just might come in the evening rather than in the morning this time. Keeping my fingers crossed I won’t have to run something else and hold it over until Monday though. Allons-y!