The New New Doctor Who
My POV:
So in that traditionally English way, our new Who is less Revolution and more Glorious. What Moffat does well in The Beast Below is what he's been doing well in the Nu Series for years: tapping directly into childhood horrors (masks, being eaten by a monster "under the bed," mechanical villains), witticisms, irreverence, astute humour, twisty plotting. I guess now he's just able to do it on his own terms. I'd like to give Moffat more credit here, particularly for (at last) writing a Doctor that does not feel instantly guilty and responsible for his companion's safety. Early in the episode he tells Amy to follow Mandy deep into a city which he is sure is both a police state and in some way treacherous. Giving her this task speeds up the plot by cutting out erstwhile obligatory emotions (although we still get the "oh my GOD I'm in space" moments), and it also bolsters our confidence in Amy's role as a lead character. Nice.
I've heard it remarked that this episode is, at last, Moffat In Charge, but he continues to water dead plants. The "last of his kind" angst that plagued Doctor #9 is still wretchedly attached to the ankle of the Doctor's character by its decaying teeth, and as a concept has not been altered or addressed in any worthwhile way since ever. I thought after The End of Time the Doctor might actually be GLAD he was the last, after being kicked in the head with the simple reality that his race are a bunch of arrogant, plot-pushing twunts and Timothy Dalton. To have it rear its head again is a disappointment, because I was at least hoping he'd have had enough Time Lord for the Time Being. To address the point, though, the Beast Below shares a second-episode philosophy with Russel Davies's The End of the World, which I think is both no mistake and suggests that we are not yet out of the big guy's shadow.
I felt I had to endure more than I should to appreciate the intelligence that Moffat brings to the enterprise (has Russel ever written a smarter line than "and once ever five years everyone chooses to forget what they've learned... democracy in action!"). Murray's music provides a stereotypically lobotomic experience, the colors are a comic-book, and other minor quibbles. There were parts of the design that I loved in this episode, but first I'm going to complain about the hyperbole. Slay me now. I think that for the most part Moffat handles exposition and information delivery 1000% more gracefully than his predecessor ever could, but why must we continue to suffer phrases like "and then it came - like a miracle - the last of the star whales" and "we never should have come here" that are always accompanied by the sound of our heart strings being hacked at relentlessly by Murray's unrosined bow. The Doctor's self-legendizing is nauseating ("I'd love to forget it all - every last bit of it - but I don't, not ever. 'Cause this is what I do - every time, every day, every second... this.") I understood this kind of stuff was a statement of character in The Eleventh Hour, where he terrifies some aliens with his reputation, but hubris is such a petty emotion that it rankles me and always has. Played unselfconsciously it is also a quality unique to the 21st century Doctors.
There is really no excuse for anyone to ever use the line "it couldn't stand to watch children cry" in regards to the motivation of a gigantic alien space whale. I get that it's a nice space whale and likes children to pet its hooked stabbing tentacles, but it's a space whale. The fact that it eats people at all suggests that it perhaps has a hidden psychopathy. Maybe the Doctor will legendize it to death in a sequel when it finally carries out its Xanatos gambit.
The resolution was a disappointment because the Doctor's intractable dilemma turned out not to be a dilemma at all, and the climax was Amy remembering something. No consequences, no win. Just earlier, the Doctor flips out at Amy by judging her unfairly in a manner we hadn't yet seen from him, but so suddenly that it felt like it was stuck in there like a Scrabble Triple Word modifier except for stakes. It's an anticlimax and even Mandy, the bright little kid from the beginning, looks bored to death as she slumps against a wall just before the climax point, having said all of her lines for the episode. She was our gateway into this future and world but transforms, just as hideously as any doppleganging monster, into an exposition dispenser no less mechanical than one of those creepy, swiveling faces.
And they were creepy. The design of the faces was one of the unreservedly marvellous things about the episode (I loved their clever resemblance to Steven Moffat himself). Even though they were unjustifiable as characters, the mechanical men were a triumph of design, just as were many other aspects of the set dressing: Amy's wind-up light when she's huddled under the tarp, the odd empty classroom, the cabinets where the faces sit... all excellent and unusual. Or rather, excellent because they are unusual. One of my favorite places, where the design and the plot and the theme integrate perfectly, is the Forget/Protest buttons. They work well enough to generate suspense early in the episode with Amy and again with the irritating action-Queen (neat idea though), but they also underline the true horror of the episode, which is "forgetting." The Queen's life is one tragic loop, and Amy's horror at her own decision does more for her character in a single choice than any lingering backstory about not getting married and running away. Volunteering to forget something, literally blocking it from your memory, is something one only does after the highest trauma - it implies (and Doctor Who has always done more with the imagination than with a million computer generated FX) true horror.
I was planning to end on a high note like that one, but feel obliged to remark that the "crack in space" runner is a tedious one. It is such an obvious tease, and bleakly reminiscent of Bad Wolf. Talk about trauma.
My POV:
So in that traditionally English way, our new Who is less Revolution and more Glorious. What Moffat does well in The Beast Below is what he's been doing well in the Nu Series for years: tapping directly into childhood horrors (masks, being eaten by a monster "under the bed," mechanical villains), witticisms, irreverence, astute humour, twisty plotting. I guess now he's just able to do it on his own terms. I'd like to give Moffat more credit here, particularly for (at last) writing a Doctor that does not feel instantly guilty and responsible for his companion's safety. Early in the episode he tells Amy to follow Mandy deep into a city which he is sure is both a police state and in some way treacherous. Giving her this task speeds up the plot by cutting out erstwhile obligatory emotions (although we still get the "oh my GOD I'm in space" moments), and it also bolsters our confidence in Amy's role as a lead character. Nice.
I've heard it remarked that this episode is, at last, Moffat In Charge, but he continues to water dead plants. The "last of his kind" angst that plagued Doctor #9 is still wretchedly attached to the ankle of the Doctor's character by its decaying teeth, and as a concept has not been altered or addressed in any worthwhile way since ever. I thought after The End of Time the Doctor might actually be GLAD he was the last, after being kicked in the head with the simple reality that his race are a bunch of arrogant, plot-pushing twunts and Timothy Dalton. To have it rear its head again is a disappointment, because I was at least hoping he'd have had enough Time Lord for the Time Being. To address the point, though, the Beast Below shares a second-episode philosophy with Russel Davies's The End of the World, which I think is both no mistake and suggests that we are not yet out of the big guy's shadow.
I felt I had to endure more than I should to appreciate the intelligence that Moffat brings to the enterprise (has Russel ever written a smarter line than "and once ever five years everyone chooses to forget what they've learned... democracy in action!"). Murray's music provides a stereotypically lobotomic experience, the colors are a comic-book, and other minor quibbles. There were parts of the design that I loved in this episode, but first I'm going to complain about the hyperbole. Slay me now. I think that for the most part Moffat handles exposition and information delivery 1000% more gracefully than his predecessor ever could, but why must we continue to suffer phrases like "and then it came - like a miracle - the last of the star whales" and "we never should have come here" that are always accompanied by the sound of our heart strings being hacked at relentlessly by Murray's unrosined bow. The Doctor's self-legendizing is nauseating ("I'd love to forget it all - every last bit of it - but I don't, not ever. 'Cause this is what I do - every time, every day, every second... this.") I understood this kind of stuff was a statement of character in The Eleventh Hour, where he terrifies some aliens with his reputation, but hubris is such a petty emotion that it rankles me and always has. Played unselfconsciously it is also a quality unique to the 21st century Doctors.
There is really no excuse for anyone to ever use the line "it couldn't stand to watch children cry" in regards to the motivation of a gigantic alien space whale. I get that it's a nice space whale and likes children to pet its hooked stabbing tentacles, but it's a space whale. The fact that it eats people at all suggests that it perhaps has a hidden psychopathy. Maybe the Doctor will legendize it to death in a sequel when it finally carries out its Xanatos gambit.
The resolution was a disappointment because the Doctor's intractable dilemma turned out not to be a dilemma at all, and the climax was Amy remembering something. No consequences, no win. Just earlier, the Doctor flips out at Amy by judging her unfairly in a manner we hadn't yet seen from him, but so suddenly that it felt like it was stuck in there like a Scrabble Triple Word modifier except for stakes. It's an anticlimax and even Mandy, the bright little kid from the beginning, looks bored to death as she slumps against a wall just before the climax point, having said all of her lines for the episode. She was our gateway into this future and world but transforms, just as hideously as any doppleganging monster, into an exposition dispenser no less mechanical than one of those creepy, swiveling faces.
And they were creepy. The design of the faces was one of the unreservedly marvellous things about the episode (I loved their clever resemblance to Steven Moffat himself). Even though they were unjustifiable as characters, the mechanical men were a triumph of design, just as were many other aspects of the set dressing: Amy's wind-up light when she's huddled under the tarp, the odd empty classroom, the cabinets where the faces sit... all excellent and unusual. Or rather, excellent because they are unusual. One of my favorite places, where the design and the plot and the theme integrate perfectly, is the Forget/Protest buttons. They work well enough to generate suspense early in the episode with Amy and again with the irritating action-Queen (neat idea though), but they also underline the true horror of the episode, which is "forgetting." The Queen's life is one tragic loop, and Amy's horror at her own decision does more for her character in a single choice than any lingering backstory about not getting married and running away. Volunteering to forget something, literally blocking it from your memory, is something one only does after the highest trauma - it implies (and Doctor Who has always done more with the imagination than with a million computer generated FX) true horror.
I was planning to end on a high note like that one, but feel obliged to remark that the "crack in space" runner is a tedious one. It is such an obvious tease, and bleakly reminiscent of Bad Wolf. Talk about trauma.
