DOCTOR WHO-New Series-s5e2-The Beast Below

 

DOCTOR WHO-THE BEAST BELOW re-watch and commentary part one

 

A show can have a really catchy opening and a scary start. That’s all well and good and this has both of those in one opening as a child in danger, Timmy, gets taken down below in a wilding elevator. As we shall see, this story, THE story behind all of this, MAKES NO SENSE whatsoever and this is part of why I loathe the Moffat Era so much. Good ideas, even good scenes and sometimes, rarely, funny jokes and some sense of humor, and even rarer, good acting to go along with it but when push comes to shove, the reasoning behind 90 percent of his stories, both the long running so called arcs and the individual stories, falls apart. With no solid basis for grounding the work and no real sense to be made, a fairly good adventure is laid to waste when you realize it is total bullshit. This is the case with THE BEAST BELOW. Moffat and his writers (but mostly Moffat) shows flash and prop with extravagant moments and beautiful sequences but …nothing to back them up …such as story and logic and reasoning. Here, Timmy has an elevator floor open up under him and he seems plunged a thousand or more feet below (and no, not like in the far better LAND OF THE LOST TV show(s)).

 

So the new theme grew on me. Karen has not. She does, in some later episodes, impress me but overall, I was never fully a Karen or an Amy fan. Here, she’s just awkward as are some of the scenes. Amy drifting out the door after the Doctor starts to talk is one of them. Matt’s still in that phase where he’s believable as the Doctor and not annoying at all. That’ll change but for now…he can deliver the lines and impress. Even give exposition as he does in this scene when they arrive on the city in space. Which looks fantastic.

 

Why would the Doctor leave the TARDIS without waiting for or telling Amy? How did she not notice? Why did the Doctor approach and talk to the sad little girl and then leave her to go talk to an emerging Amy? There’s lots of exposition about what meeting the girl in the first place would be like and in typical Moffat (in his own era) fashion, he wastes a lot of time. Rather than say, have Amy and the Doctor learn info from the girl in a fashion after say, Tom Baker’s Doctor and Louise’s Leela in THE SUNMAKERS where they learn from a man about to kill himself (dramatic) about some of the problems in the current time and place, this seems to go on forever about how to learn these things and nothing yet happens. The Doctor surmises quite a bit of info by just looking around and yet none of his clues seem “fit” and/or to make the same sense he seems to squeeze of them.

 

Why are the booths clean if no one wants to go near them? Shouldn’t they be dirtier? Dustier? So…in another bad move, Moffat separates the Doctor and Amy artificially. Rather than have some moment of crisis where they are forced to separate, he has the Doctor just leave Amy on her own. It’s a dumb move by the character and the writer and it makes him and Amy look completely stupid. WHY would he do this? WHY would she let him? He seems to be training Amy. BUT the other Doctor educated their companions in what to do but not in an outright test like he seems to be doing.

 

Then the worst thing: Liz 10 appears. She needs the Doctor’s help but tells him little to nothing and leaves him. As we will find out, this makes little sense either. It also reminds me of a few movies that might make more sense: maybe V FOR VENDETTA. She’s one of many female gimmick characters that will plague the Moffat Era.

 

The Doctor’s rhetoric is not annoying here but sort of fun and telling, as he and Amy get to know each other. He tells her she looks Time Lord when she tells him he looks human. He says, “We came first.” I guess from what he knows, they did (see or rather don’t see the awful season 12). What were the tentacles? Part of the space whale?

 

Amy and the Doctor plunge down tubes into a gross area that…makes them not act as if they’re in a gross area. It totally takes one out of the adventure when the characters’ actions don’t match the actual…uhh, action or setting. They should be smelling gross things. They act as if they’re having a minor inconvenience on a pleasure holiday cruise.

 

The Doctor and Amy confront the scary face men who emerge from the voting booths. They’re also saved from those men by Liz 10 who has been tracking the Doctor and Amy …uhm, with Mandy. So…we’re going round and round in circles for…uhm, no reason?

 

Now comes a major part of the new series and Moffat in particular that’s annoying. The Doctor has become a political known figure. Liz 10 goes on that she was brought up on the “stories.” And she goes on and on about others of the royal family that knew him. It’s almost embarrassing. The idea of the Doctor just being a traveler in time and space seems gone. Even Tom’s Doctor said once he was a nothing, a no body, no one of any importance. Now, the Doc is this heralded big wig of a figure and I don’t like it much. The dialog goes south with the advent of Liz 10 who brings the entire story to a standstill IMO.

 

Moffat has to give us stilted dialog like, “I’m the bloody queen, mate. Basically, I rule.” Sigh. It’s embarrassing to hear this stuff and if I wanted anyone to like DOCTOR WHO I would NEVER show them this episode.

 

I like this actress and she was great in ALEX RIDER STORMBREAKER and should have been used in the upcoming ALEX RIDER tv series (but that show seems to have miscasting down to an art as they have the main lead who plays Alex totally miscast and aged up…sad mistakes both). Here, she’s fairly terrible and in a way that says, “I’m playing in DOCTOR WHO and playing having fun! Oi, it’s JUST Doctor Who.” As the feeling I get Moffat must have felt about Doctor Who: that he’s just too good to be writing for it so he might as well just write whatever. A lot of what he writes for the characters to say, no one in real life would say. And when they do, sometimes, he has novice actresses like Karen saying them. Here, she’s just barely passable and most of the time she’s unbelievably just not DW companion material IMO.

 

I didn’t remember Amy’s warning to herself about getting the Doctor off this ship. The Doctor and Liz 10 find the tentacles and realize the creature is infesting the whole ship and Liz 10 believes someone’s feeding her subjects to it. If Liz 10 was here all this time, WHY doesn’t she know about this? It took the Doctor and Amy all of 15 minutes to find out almost everything…and we still have about 20 minutes to go.

 

Moffat BTW seems to have a thing for women who shoot things with guns and feel empowered by it. It’s a problem. For fans. It also seems to go against a lot of what the Doctor stands for but here he says nothing about it as he’s in over his head in muck (literally).

 

Everything goes to another standstill with even more exposition. Liz 10 tells Amy that her body clock has been slowed. She’s been at this investigating for ten years and realizes the Doc found out more in one afternoon than she did. She also penetrated the lower levels for the first time? SO…if Liz 10 never voted, she must have never forgotten? Does this make sense?

 

Well, as we’re past the half of the episode mark, it’s time to stop. There’s only so much of this junk, I can take. If ANYONE can make sense of what’s happened already or what is about to, PLEASE explain it to me. Liz 10 makes no sense. Does he know about the space whale? Apparently not? Why not if she’s so long lived and never voted for FORGET or never voted? If this is her kingdom, why doesn’t she know?

 

Does the eventual “reveal” make sense?

 

In the meantime, it’s time to watch proper and GOOD, GREAT DOCTOR WHO: time for TIME WARRIOR part two. Hope it can wash this dirt out of my hair! ;)

DOCTOR WHO-THE BEAST BELOW-re-watch and commentary

Part two

 

What is that conversation between the Doctor and Liz10 about the mask about? So Liz 10 is the highest authority around? How is that? How does that not work? Work? She doesn’t seem to know what’s going on. And now the Smilers are half human. Oh. Kay. So let me get this straight: a star whale had time to hear the children screaming as the solar flares or the sun was burning away and …the stupid humans who couldn’t get a ship to work or fly on its own when all the others who built their other ships could----had time to build their city around the star whale after they somehow captured the star whale. We’re not told how any of this is possible, probably because it’s not. So the whole story, like many Moffat’s stories and stories by his other writers, falls apart. Liz 10’s life was prolonged? How? Why just her then? Why not all humans? On top of all of that preposterous nonsense comes the idea that came from TORCHWOOD: a tortured space whale and the exposed brain that reminds me of PLANET OF THE OOD.

 

Then…what makes it even harder when hating on a Moffat story comes a scene or two of merit. Matt’s quite good as he faces an impossible situation of either killing the whale, killing everyone on the ship, or leave it a vegetable. I don’t get why he’s so mad at Amy for trying to free him of making this choice but he is. Karen’s even good in this scene.

 

But with Moffat there’s always a but…or a however…here there’s both. But Amy however figures out that the whale came of its own free will, not just of a miracle. She figures out what the dopey Doctor couldn’t figure out AND the dopey, dumb humans didn’t realize; that the star whale came as a volunteer to pilot the ship. WHAT made the humans think torturing it would do that? WHY would the Star Whale continue if it was being tortured? It loved the kids but surely some idiot above it wouldn’t be so stupid as to not figure out that it would pilot the city for them better if it weren’t torturing them. AND not ONE adult would pick the other button to save it? In addition, it’s implied that the Whale ATE adults that were sent to it? Why would it do that? WHY would adults be sent to it in the first place if all of them voted to forget? Or did they all vote to forget? Does any of this make sense?

 

Okay, even I, who deem Matt as my least favorite Doctor and Amy, my least favorite companion, felt something warm and fuzzy as Amy and the Doctor bond some more and hug sincerely. It’s a nice moment. She also compares him to the Star Whale, which is also nice and makes for some nice lines.

 

Amy also asks if he ever ran away from something? He seems to bring up something but not really---could it be when he ran away from the Time Lord test of staring into the drumming hole that was mentioned causing the Master’s insanity (but only in the new series, not in the classic, that story proving once and for all that the classic series and the new series are separate universes).

 

Then they go and really ruin it by having Churchill phone the Doctor. I suppose with the idea that Rose and later Martha using a cell phone to call their respective mums, this does make sense but does it make a good dramatic sense? Wouldn’t it be more in line with DW if the Doctor just showed up to Churchill and he knew about the Doctor from either Torchwood or some other leader in the past? The phoning up the Doctor just feels wrong.

 

The scenes to next time are…embarrassing. Matt ranting, “I am the Doctor and you are the Daleks,” is just…so very bad. It might be where he went wrong. However, the Dalek shadow near Churchill, if we didn’t know how even worse that next story would be, is quite chilling. It would have helped if the Daleks being in it were a total surprise but of course, being named VICTORY OF THE DALEKS, it wasn’t. And it wasn’t a good story at all from what I recall.

 

So we’re one for one. THE ELEVENTH HOUR wasn’t as bad as I remember but BEAST BELOW kind of was. I mean, there are some scenes in BEAST BELOW that really resonate, mostly that last scene but even that is stopped short by the really dopey illogic that permeates the idea. The feeling with this one and a lot of Moffat was a first draft feeling that maybe with a little more care and time and editing some of the illogic and more dopey parts could be excised or changed into something worthy of DOCTOR WHO or even of being on TV. As it stands, if it is a fairy tale that the Doctor’s dreaming, that might be okay but as a science fiction, which, BTW fairy tales ARE NOT, nor are fairy tales science fiction, it lacks the science angle.

 

Another thing to note: the Doctor, being naturally curious, could have used the TARDIS to…IDK, look under the city and he would have seen the space whale under it. Also: the brain looks rather small to be a part of that creature which seemed to have a love for the children.

 

A curious episode, one that’s not really awful but not really very good either and which is forgettable and illogical. With a new Doctor and a new show runner and a new companion, they needed better than this and better than even THE ELEVENTH HOUR.

 

 

 DOCTOR WHO-THE BEAST BELOW rewatch and commentary part two

 

“Don’t mess with me, sweetheart?” Really?

 

“I’m always worried about the Daleks.”  That’s better.

 

The scene becomes a jammie dodger bit of nonsense. Also: if Bracewell was made by the Daleks, why is he helping the humans now? Can’t they just turn him to turn on the humans? But then…there are planes in space during WW2? No. Just no. I mean were these prepared before this? The pilots were trained for this? Even if they were, it looks so stupid and is so very out of left field. Matt’s starting to flop his hands around and be foppish and floppish and it’s not a good look for his Doctor…for any Doctor. It makes the Doctor look awkward. AND the Daleks try to exterminate the Doctor which they should have done already and haven’t. He just runs off. I guess INDIANA JONES movies…oh never mind.

 

Is the pilot called Jubilee supposed to be named after the BIG FINISH audio that spawned the far better DALEK ep of the 2005 season? I don’t know. I don’t care.

 

I feel as if we don’t really know the pilots in the planes and so…any tension or care we might have for them is reduced by one hundred percent. At 25 minutes in (what are they going to do with the rest of the time), I feel as if we’ve been robbed. Of a good story. Of anything that makes sense

 

In DALEK we’re told one Dalek can take over the planet. Here there are many and one saucer (remember they invaded the Earth in the future!) is brought down by…uh, space planes and the Doc fiddling with their shields. Uhm…

 

Okay, I have to admit I forgot that and didn’t see it coming the first time: Bracewell is a bomb. Now, that is clever. Unfortunately, we’ve seen this before and with what felt with more urgency and tension: when the ninth Doctor had to choose to destroy the Earth with the Daleks. Here, the 11^th Doctor has to choose to destroy the Daleks here in the saucer, which he believes are the last of them (dope!) or save the Earth. If the attack is not called off they will detonate Bracewell.

 

So why do they just leave?

 

Bracewell turning human I guess I can understand in a sort of LOST IN SPACE: THE ANDROID MACHINE kind of way but overlooking that, why do the Daleks just leave?

 

I want to hate this again but I can’t. It’s not that bad despite all the flaws and lapses of logic.  But wait…

 

…even Amy’s come up with something about the whole, “Ever fancy someone you know you shouldn’t?” thing. Having had that happen to me since I saw this episode back in 2010, I can take on a different POV and I get it now.

 

I don’t get why the Doctor can’t end the war early and/or stay to fight and his explanation is slim. I guess it has to do with changing time but he doesn’t really give Winston that. It’s also a bit endearing now that Churchill steals the TARDIS key and Amy catches him.

 

There’s a crack on the wall in Bracewell’s office. I like the scene where they let him go to find Dorabella.

 

Okay, so I am looking forward to the TIME OF ANGELS…

 

All in all, this wasn’t the terrible mess I thought it was. There are a number of problems with the whole thing though including using a jammie dodger to hold off Daleks, who should have scanned it from the start and exterminated you right away and that your menace just leaves for no reason.

 

Other than that and some dodgy stuff from both Matt and Karen, nothing too bad, mind you, this was quite okay. Mediocre at best but certainly not the *(*&^ I used to think it was. Hopefully this will go on…