April 22: "Meanwhile in the TARDIS" [Additional Scene #1] / "The Beast Below"

We start out with a scene designed to link "The Eleventh Hour" with "The Beast Below" (which technically wasn't released until the DVD/Blu-Ray box set was released, but as it's meant to go here we'll watch it here).  It's sort of cute, I guess, but it also seems completely unnecessary; we get more babbling from Amy as she tries to process what she's seeing, as well as a slight continuity hiccup (as the Doctor tells her here that he's an alien, yet she seems surprised by this in "The Beast Below"), and while it's nice to see her reaction to being in space, there's not much beyond this.  But I suppose there's only so much they can do, inserting a scene where one didn't need to go, and as long as you weren't buying the box set solely for this scene, it's probably all right.

The Doctor and Amy explore Starship UK. ("The Beast Below")
©BBC

"The Beast Below", on the other hand, is much more interesting.  The UK (minus Scotland) evacuated the planet after solar storms threatened the place in the 29th century (in what's almost certainly a reference to The Ark in Space²¹⁴), and we get a chance to see this new Doctor in his element, flexing his muscles and learning the dark secret behind Starship UK.

Except this is the Matt Smith story that it's probably easiest to imagine David Tennant in. All the things writer Steven Moffat's given the eleventh Doctor are the sorts of things you would expect the tenth Doctor to do (with the possible exception of comforting a crying child, and even then it's more a matter of emphasis than new personality).  It's easy to picture David Tennant gently pointing out to Liz 10 how old her mask is, or him raging against humanity for what they've done to the star whale.  This doesn't make it a bad story or anything like that, but it does make it slightly harder for Matt Smith to really set himself from his immediate predecessor.  He turns in a great performance, and if you were worried about the new boy you can rest easy, but they're not exactly going out of their way to give us a uniquely eleventh Doctor story (the way, say, Paradise Towers seems like a story designed for Sylvester McCoy).

Fortunately the central storyline is a good one, so it's not like they're selling Matt Smith short, as we're presented with an odd conspiracy that everyone is complicit in, although they can't remember that they are.  But we get the spirit of democracy, as everyone gets to either protest the treatment of the star whale or forget about the whole thing.  It's a nice little conceit, particularly as even the people who are investigating the truth behind Starship UK -- namely Liz 10 (and look, it's Sophie Okonedo, who you might remember was Alison Cheney in Scream of the Shalka) -- are going through the same motions as before, choosing to forget when they finally discover the truth.  There are also nice little touches that add to the feeling of a coherent world, from the bunting everywhere to the offhand reference to Scotland having set off on their own to the Starship UK logo that's designed to resemble one of the old BBC logos.  Thought and care has gone into this, to the point where it's very hard to actually poke holes in any of it, either in story terms or in visual terms.

Of course, another reason why it doesn't really matter that we don't get a showcase for the new Doctor is that this is a showcase for the new companion instead.  We see Amy not as the perfect companion but instead as a human one, one who's both made a mistake -- who's seen the history of Starship UK and has chosen not only to forget but also to try and keep the Doctor from discovering the truth, so that he doesn't have to make a decision about what to do -- and who's done what the Doctor said earlier, to observe.  It's this that brings her to (it turns out) the right conclusion, to stop forcing the star whale to fly Starship UK because the star whale wanted to help in the first place.  Amy makes the right decision, just by observing not just Starship UK but also the Doctor:

DOCTOR: Amy, you could have killed everyone on this ship.
AMY: You could have killed a star whale.
DOCTOR: And you saved it.  I know, I know.
AMY: Amazing though, don't you think?  The star whale.  All that pain and misery and loneliness, and it just made it kind.
DOCTOR: But you couldn't have known how it would react.
AMY: You couldn't.  But I've seen it before.  Very old and very kind, and the very, very last.  Sound a bit familiar?

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - The Beast Below)

"The Beast Below" isn't a flashy story, and we don't get much of an insight into what makes the eleventh Doctor different from the tenth, but what we do get is a solid, well-thought-out tale designed to appeal to our sense of wonder as it shows that Amy Pond has the right stuff to be the Doctor's companion.  It's a story that can make us both ashamed and proud to be human.  Not bad for only their second outing.

(Oh, and look... another crack, shaped just like the one in Amelia's bedroom...)







²¹⁴ Thus complicating Earth's history enormously for anyone trying to work these things out, as, while the Doctor thinks the Ark was built in the late 29th/early 30th century, fandom had generally assumed that either a) the Doctor is just way off-base with his guess, or b) the Ark was in service as Nerva Beacon (Revenge of the Cybermen) for a long time before it was converted into an ark to avoid the solar flares and that the beacon was built in the 29th century, as placing the solar flare event in the late 29th century tends to cause massive problems for anyone trying to square this with all the other things we know about this time period (such as The Mutants, which is set in the late 30th century and explicitly describes the Earth as "Land and sea alike, all grey.  Grey cities linked by grey highways across grey deserts").  But now that they've reinforced the date, I suppose we're stuck with it, and we just have to explain why they're still on Starship UK in the 34th century, despite things like The Mutants and Terror of the Vervoids seeming to contradict this.