Fifteen years after Journey’s End took Donna Noble’s memory away, David Tennant and Catherine Tate are standing in a Camden street shouting at each other again, and it’s a genuine pleasure. Whatever else “The Star Beast” gets wrong, and it gets a couple of things properly wrong, the reunion is worth the wait. These two have always been the best double act this show ever put together. Neither has lost a step.
Russell T Davies is back as well, with Disney money behind him, and you can see it in every frame. The Wrarth Warriors are a full prosthetic build, the spaceship crash over London is a proper spectacle, and the whole thing has a gloss the show hasn’t had in years. As a statement of intent for the 60th, it announces itself confidently. On the story, I came away with more mixed feelings.
Beep the Meep is a great joke
The central gag is an old one from the comics and it still lands. A tiny, fluffy, enormous-eyed creature turns up asking for help, everybody immediately wants to protect it, and it’s actually a genocidal maniac being chased by the perfectly reasonable police officers it made look like monsters. The puppet itself is a big part of why it works. Beep is a physical build with real fur and real weight, so everyone on screen is reacting to something that’s actually there. When the voice changes and the face doesn’t, a real object sitting in someone’s arms being quietly monstrous is more unsettling than any animation would have been.
Miriam Margolyes voicing him is the best casting decision in the special. The moment the voice drops flat and bored and vicious while the puppet keeps blinking adorably is properly funny, and the episode gets decent mileage out of nobody quite being able to stop finding it cute. The Wrarth Warriors work for the same reason in reverse. They look like insectoid horrors and behave like slightly exasperated officers with an arrest warrant, and the joke is that everyone’s instincts about who to trust run entirely on appearance. It’s a simple idea cleanly done, and it’s the sort of thing this show does well when it isn’t straining.
Donna, and the problem with the ending
Here’s where it comes apart for me. Donna’s metacrisis has been the most famous unresolved thing in the modern show: a human mind holding a Time Lord’s knowledge, which would burn her up if she ever remembered. It’s been treated as permanent and terminal for fifteen years. The fix is that Donna and Rose let it go together, because a Time Lord mind is binary and they aren’t, and it’s delivered in a couple of lines before the crisis is simply over. I don’t have a problem with where the show is pointing, but it’s a line of dialogue where the story needed a scene.
Fifteen years of buildup, a rule we’ve all been asked to take seriously since 2008, and the way out is a bit of terminology stated instead of acted out. Nobody struggles, nothing costs anything, and the Doctor stands there and has it explained to him. Whatever I make of the idea itself, as storytelling it’s a shortcut, and it would have annoyed me whatever the wording had been. The follow-up is worse, because Donna lets go of the energy and a stray gag hands it back about ninety seconds later. It undercuts the resolution almost as soon as it’s delivered.
What makes it more frustrating is that the scene it needed was right there. Donna spent fifteen years not knowing what she’d lost, Sylvia spent fifteen years guarding the gap, and Rose grew up alongside a mother with a hole in her memory. Any of those three had a version of this that could have been played instead of stated. Give the resolution to the family that lived with the consequence and it becomes a scene about them. Hand it over as a rule about how Time Lord minds work and it becomes a technicality.
Everything around it is strong
The rest is genuinely good. Shirley Bingham is an excellent addition, played by Ruth Madeley as a UNIT scientific adviser who’s quicker than everyone in the room and has a wheelchair full of weaponry, and the show treats her competence as unremarkable, which is the right call. Sylvia gets the best small scene, snapping at the Doctor the second he appears, still furious with him and still right to be. Jacqueline King has always been underrated in this part. Rose is well handled too, written as a teenager with a specific hobby, a specific temper and a specific relationship with her mother, and Yasmin Finney plays her as somebody’s actual daughter.
The opening is a smart bit of housekeeping. Tennant narrates directly to camera over a montage that catches a newcomer up on fifteen years in about ninety seconds, and it could easily have been a slog. The pacing elsewhere is faster and more careful to be understood by someone who’s never watched the show, which is reasonable for an anniversary opener with a new international streaming deal attached, even if characters sometimes explain their own feelings out loud. Tennant himself is doing something subtly new. This isn’t the Tenth Doctor replayed; he’s warmer, more tired and visibly rattled at being back in a face he thought he’d finished with. The special is quietly about the show revisiting its own past and being slightly uneasy about it, and that unease is the most interesting thing running underneath the plot.
Rating: 3/5. It was ok. The reunion is a delight, Beep the Meep is a great joke well told, and the production values are the best the show has ever had. The metacrisis fix is a fudge delivered in dialogue after fifteen years of setup, though, and then it’s undercut almost immediately. That’s the one thing the whole special was built to pay off, and it’s why this sits firmly in the middle.