Who Reviews The Beast Below by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony gets beastly. 

Of all the stories he ever wrote for Doctor Who, when asked if there was one he was least pleased with, Steven Moffat chose The Beast Below as an example of one that didn’t really work. 

It’s distinctly arguable he was a touch too hard on himself. There’s at least one element that’s patently absurd, certainly, but there’s a great deal to enjoy and admire about the Eleventh Doctor’s second story, and Amy Pond’s first real foray into the universe. 

First of all, like Wendy in Peter Pan, she follows her enigmatic friend into the wider universe dressed in her nightie – a first for Doctor Who companions (assuming Leela’s leather gear wasn’t used night and day), which makes her appeal to us immediately as a trusting ‘fan’ of her ‘Raggedy’ ‘imaginary friend. 

The story itself has some joy in its logic – and some human darkness too, to balance it. The idea that the human race, faced with extinction, got itself into a series of star arks, leaving only the UK (sans Scotland) unprepared, feels oddly resonant, somehow. The idea that decisions would be taken which go against everything in people’s natures, decisions that hurt a harmless, helpful creature, and cause people to regularly self-anaesthetise with forgetfulness – it’s darker than you might remember, The Beast Below. 

It’s also something of a triumph for Matt Smith’s new incarnation. Fresh from his regeneration story, he owns The Beast Below, from his bandy-legged Chaplin walk to his mysterious ‘Doing Of The Thing’ with the water glasses to discover a lack of engine vibration, his aching understanding of a child crying silently because no-one listens, his sliiiightly cringy self-definition as one who resists every chance they get, to his absolutely blow-the-doors-off sudden rage, declaring “Nobody HUMAN has anything to say to me today!” 

If you didn’t quite get the chills of New Doctor love from The Eleventh Hour – we’re not sure why you wouldn’t, but just say you didn’t – there is plenty in The Beast Below to make you love this quirky, funny, compassionate, old man, young body incarnation. The moment when he lets everyone hear the screaming of the star whale has resonances of the Tenth Doctor in Planet of the Ood, but it’s handled in a way that makes you somehow certain this is a very different Time Lord. It’s more an accusation here than it is an act of compassion or sharing, and you get a sense that while the Tenth Doctor was always giving people or menaces the option to turn away from their intent, this Doctor, when angered, might very well bring the roof crashing down on your head, and warnings be damned. 

Now, is it true that ultimately, it takes Amy pond’s faith in him to sway him from a ghastly course of non-Doctor action? Absolutely, but back then, they were both new and it felt like a pleasing balancing act – the new young companion challenging the old new Doctor into thinking bigger, and better, and more Doctor than the horrible options in front of him. 

Ironically of course, this is exactly the idea that Steven Moffatt would recycle in The Day of the Doctor, with Clara Oswald making three Doctors better than the options available. Here it feels smaller and sweeter, and somehow more resonant because it feels more every day. Amy Pond saving the Doctor from the box in which he’s thinking? Oh yes, we’ll have some of that, the companion showing her worth and her mettle early in her travelling time – great. 

There are other elements that work well, too – the idea of a Queen going under cover in her own realm is elegant, the heartbreaking pathos that it’s a scenario that’s been played out time and time and time again, her mask never changing because her lifespan has been artificially expanded and slowed. It all makes a kind of horrible, beautiful science-fiction fairytale sense, like Sleeping Beauty who every now and then re-sentences herself to ignorance and sleep, because knowledge while awake is too hard to bear. 

Creepy-seeming tentancles breaking through into the streets, undignified Geronimo-ing into the mouth of a giant star whale, and a subsequent hurl escape are all great fun, but fun with a dark tinge, revealing as they do another layer of the lies on which Starship UK is built. 

Sophie Okonedo as Liz 10 adds power and pathos in just the right amount to a story that needs them to bring the science-fiction elements and the human elements together, focusing the degree to which people will forget the suffering of their fellow creatures as the price of their own life. She also brings a glorious swish of style to the role, with her delivery of lines like “I’m the bloody Queen, mate.” Terence ‘Demon Headmaster’ Hardiman is a quiet, enigmatic force as Hawthorne too, never overshadowing the drama or its more dynamic players, but exemplifying the kind of public servant who would, for instance, efficiently feed people to the lions if their emperor commanded it. It all works extremely well to create a world weighed down with secrets and sadness, that needs a release no-one’s strong enough to give it. 

So, what doesn’t work? 

Annoyingly, it’s the Smilers and the Winders. A neat idea in themselves, creatures with revolving heads that change their face from benign to horrifying when they turn, there’s almost literally no purpose for them in the script except to force a couple of chase sequences and scare the toddlers. 

When we find out the truth about the Winders – the humans with Smiler faces on the back of their heads – the sense of the thing goes completely out of the window, forcing the conclusion that really, to make The Beast Below work as well as it could, you either need to pull out the Smilers altogether and replace them with a more mundane but more explicable threat, of you need more time than The Beast Below has in which to explain what the hell they actually are, and what they’re doing on Starship UK. Are they invented? Imported? Alien? Are they somehow channels for the pain and anger and grief of the star whale, or are they, as seems most likely, just a cool-ish idea with nowhere else to live, shoved into the story as the spur to those chase scenes? 

It’s the Smilers and the Winders that give any re-watch of The Beast Below that momentary pause for breath and brace-for-impact feel of slight disappointment. While they’re an interesting idea in their own right, and realised pretty well in terms of their physical impact, there’s zero logic behind their inclusion in the story, and they act more or less as a distraction from all the incredibly cool stuff going on in whenever they’re not pulling focus. 

Take another look at The Beast Below today. Focus on the ethics, the performances, and in particular the dynamics of a newly regenerated Doctor and a companion that proves beyond any doubt here why she’s better than many humans, and why she deserves her shot at the wider universe. For both Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor and Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond, this is at least as fundamental to their figuring out their way of being, and being in the universe together, as The Eleventh Hour with its moment of trust was. This is Amy Pond saving the Doctor from the limitations he’s imposed on a situation – the three appalling options he sets out before himself. The point being, in setting out those options, he’s Doctoring on auto-pilot. By opening up the options in front of him, and making him see the universe through the lens of how others might see him, Amy gifts the Eleventh Doctor the lack of limitations – and that in itself is enough to infuse both his journey and his nature with a brand new enthusiasm. And with it, we as fans get that same new enthusiasm, flying back into the universe with a brand new brilliant Doctor.