Monsters of Television

“Because you knew if I stayed here, I’d be faced with an impossible choice.“

“The Beast Below” is an episode that shows that the new series of Doctor Who is still not done cooking.

To be fair, I’ve always found the second episode of any new series in the relaunch to be a little “Meh.” Sure, “The End of the World” had the Doctor grooving to “Tainted Love”, but it was a weak episode overall. “Tooth and Claw” has a LOT of running around (even for a Davies episode), “The Shakespeare Code” is just plain bad (so bad), and “The Fires of Pompeii” retraces old ground about the companion wanting to alter time to save some bystanders. Indeed, the job of the second episode seems to be to provide any newcomers to the franchise a sense of how the show operates. And while this is an admirable thing, it’s still something that your first episode should really accomplish.

A part of this could just be the expectations that I have for Moffat’s brand of storytelling. He excels at creepiness (“Are you my mummy?”) and working in humor to those situations (“All that dancing!”) so that both feel exceptionally enhanced. Of course Moffat’s not writing all of these episodes, so I shouldn’t expect it all the time, but there’s very clearly a thematic bent to the series that I hope the rest of the staff is able to follow through on. As a result, “The Beast Below” has a great deal of potential for creepiness and twisted fairy tale stuff, but it’s not exactly fork tender yet.

The episodes establishes the creep factor with the fortune teller clown booths. Both things by themselves are creepy (that fortune teller machine is just one of the reasons why Big is a scary movie), but by combining them, the episode twists the creek dial up to level about an 8 or a 9. It could’ve been an 11 if the episode allowed their ominous presence not to be so explicitly explained by the Doctor.

Which leads to another concern about this episode and the previous one. The Doctor survives not just because he’s an alien lifeform with two hearts and travel back and forth between time and space but because he’s clever and brilliant (as he himself will often point out). In “The Eleventh Hour” I was fine with the David Fincher-meets-The Matrix observational vision scope cinematography. The Doctor is always noticing things, but I don’t necessarily need to see him noticing them. Likewise, I don’t really need to see Amy do the same thing, but with her memories. It’s more effective character work if I can see the actors doing it with having it shown to me through flashy effects work.

The fairy tale aspect of this series is at play in a number of ways. Amy’s clear joy, wonderment, and love of the Doctor and the world(s) he’s able to show her. Indeed, the last scene, with them on the observatory deck, reminded me of tender moments in any adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, where Beauty accepts the Beast for who is, and who is he in this case is a human-looking (ahem, Time Lord-looking) alien. It’s a nice moment, but one that gets injured by the desire to make the parallels explicit. I understand that Who continues to be “for children” but give them some credit to make the connections themselves, eh?

The other aspect, the one that would’ve worked better had the episode not felt quite so rushed, was Elizabeth X’s story. There’s a clear sense of tragedy of her story and that she keeps re-living the same story over and over again, only to make the same choice and over again, but the episode doesn’t give it enough time to breathe, and so the final reveal that she is the one who made the decision to enslave and torture the Star Whale doesn’t land as hard it should, nor is her own pain clearly expressed.

It gets sacrificed to allow the Doctor to show some off some of his new personality. The 10th had a great love of humans (though that slowly faded away as his tenure wore on), and the 11th does to an extent. But like the 9th before him, the 11th has a more pronounced impatience with humans. Indeed, the 11th’s reaction to the Star Whale’s enslavement mirrors how I think the 9th would’ve behaved as well.

So while I’m not exactly eager for the Daleks operating in World War II (I’m a Cybermen fan myself), I’m still eager to what’s next, and to see if some of my quibbles get addressed.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• It may just be my desire for continuity, but I really hope someone is keep track of all the timelines at play in Doctor Who. The far-flung future episodes tend to have the same “Earth wears out/gets destroyed” mentality, that keeps me in the dark about as to what happens when. It’s a minor quibble overall, but the passage of time is an important issue in the episode, and thus worth the quibble.
• Also not thrilled about the crack appearing on the ship. Let the arc go for a bit? Maybe in a couple of episodes?