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The Star Beast
Season • Episode
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the first Doctor Who 60th anniversary special “The Star Beast.”]
“Why did this face come back?” Though that question is asked throughout “The Star Beast,” it goes unanswered thus far. But Doctor Who’s very fun, delightful, nostalgia-filled, cinematic, and, at times, funny first 60th anniversary special, featuring brilliant performances by David Tennant and Catherine Tate as The Doctor (yes, Fourteen feels very much like Ten) and Donna Noble again does solve one major problem.
At times, it feels like Tennant and Tate never left and The Doctor and Donna never parted — especially during a moment involving his sonic screwdriver (used in impressive ways). As Donna says near the end, “it’s like the old days.” But there’s the matter of aliens running around and, as The Doctor and Donna recap somewhat awkwardly for viewers to open the episode, the fact that she saved the universe by taking the power of a Time Lord into her mind, which resulted in her having to forget him and their travels together — or she’d die (“Journey’s End”).
Everything’s drawing them together in “The Star Beast,” starting with The Doctor going to help someone he sees carrying a tower of boxes only to realize it’s her (“Oi, do you mind?” she calls after him when he re-stacks the boxes and begins walking away). “What?” he asks (and it feels like this special was designed with making Tennant ask just that as many times as possible) when she then calls for Rose — her daughter (Yasmin Finney, who would be so much fun as a companion), not Billie Piper‘s character. Continuing the thread from their original run in Season 4, Donna completely misses the spaceship crashing because she’s turned away, dealing with the boxes. And in true Donna fashion, she leaves The Doctor with, “Nice to meet you, skinny man. Word of advice: You can wear a suit that tight up to the age of 35 — and no further.”
When Donna’s husband Shaun (Karl Collins) calls out to his family, The Doctor intercepts him and has the cab driver take him (“Allons-y!” — it had to happen) to the crash site. (“Catch up,” he tells the psychic paper identifying him as Grandmistress instead of Grandmaster.) He pretends to be a friend of Nerys (How is she? “She’s fine.” After the accident? “She’s not fine.” It was her fault. “She’s been fine.”) and learns that Donna gave away all the money she won with the lottery ticket The Doctor gave her (through her mother and grandfather) on the wedding day.
While sneaking around the steelworks factory where the spaceship crashed, The Doctor meets UNIT science officer Shirley (Ruth Madeley, who will hopefully recur going forward); she has figured out it actually landed, and he has determined there are two sets of visitors, at war. But, she wonders, why is he hiding? They’re on the same side. “It’s all a bit mad,” he admits. “I don’t know who I am anymore.” He looks like The Doctor. “Exactly, the one in a skinny suit. After that, I wear a bowtie. After that, I’m a Scotsman. After that, I’m a woman,” he explains, and that’s not his future. “I regenerated, and she became me.” What has him worried is Donna, “my best friend in the whole wide universe. I absolutely love her. Oh, do I say things like that now? … I won’t be the one who killed her.” And so of course, soon after, he encounters her again.
BBC
When The Doctor tags along with UNIT soldiers, he ends up on her block — just in time to hear her shouting about aliens (“We’ve got a bloody Martian in the shed!”). Rose stumbled across The Meep (voiced by Miriam Margolyes) and tried hiding the alien from her mother in her shed, with the toys she makes and sells online, but failed to do so. Despite the level of concern, it’s comical the way that Donna’s mother Sylvia (Jacqueline King), heeding The Doctor’s warning of what would happen if Donna remembered, tries to continue keeping her in the dark. There’s no such thing as spaceships in the sky. No, Donna doesn’t see The Meep clutching her leg. No, The Doctor — whom Sylvia hits — cannot come in, nor does Donna see him as she tries to hide him behind her.
Donna does wonder why The Doctor is so interested in them, and he doesn’t help matters by asking about her grandfather, Wilf (Bernard Cribbins). When she says he’s not with them anymore, The Doctor thinks he died. “Of course, he wasn’t young. I loved that man. I’m so sorry for your loss,” he offers his condolences, and we can’t help but think of their conversation about death in “The End of Time.” No, Wilf is still alive, in sheltered accommodation, paid for by UNIT’s Kate (Jemma Redgrave, who will appear in these specials). “I know her!” The Doctor exclaims.
He assures the family that he’ll help get The Meep — “My chosen pronoun is the definite article,” the alien says after Rose calls The Doctor out on assuming “he” — home. But soon after The Meep explains the Wrarth Warriors cultivated Meepkind for fur and slaughtered them, the house comes under attack — by the other aliens and UNIT soldiers who were hypnotized after opening the spaceship, fighting each other. The Doctor creates shields using his sonic screwdriver, which he hands to Donna at one point and she takes like the partners in crime they once were, and directs everyone upstairs. But after they crawl through adjacent attics and reach Shaun’s car, The Doctor realizes something’s off.
Away from the action, The Doctor dons a barrister’s wig (we were expecting all the nods we got to previous Doctor Who episodes, but not to Tennant’s role in The Escape Artist), intercepts the Wrarth Warriors’ teleport, and extracts the truth: They’re using stun guns and trying to capture The Meep, mutated into a cruel beast by a living sun gone mad, for despicable crimes. The Meep kills the Warriors and uses the hypnotized UNIT soldiers to take The Doctor (who uses the fact that he, too, has two hearts, as a strategy the alien should want to unpack) and the others as hostages.
On their way to the factory, The Doctor, while dodging questions about his identity, asks Donna why she gave away the lottery money. “Because there are places out there where people are in danger, in pain, in fear, and I could help. It just felt like the sort of thing he would do,” she says. And if that “he” has Sylvia worried, that’s nothing on when Donna, as Shirley helps the group escape (weapons in her wheelchair, of course) and sends The Doctor to stop The Meep and the family to safety, stays behind. “If The Doctor can’t save the city, we’re all going to die. I’ve got to help,” Donna says, and her mother realizes she called him by name.
BBC
To be fair, The Doctor does try to keep Donna out of it, even as they’re trapped on The Meep’s ship, the alien is destroying London (and about to kill everyone) to take off, and a glass door divides the room in half, so the Time Lord can only reach half the buttons to stop it. But then, with time running out, he tells her, “You and I can stop this ship, together, but it will kill you.” She agrees because not only is it Rose’s life in danger but also nine million people. “Who cares about me?” she asks. “I do!” he says. “I’m just no one,” Donna argues. “No, you are not!” The Doctor tells her before raging, devastated, “Why does it have to be this?” And with that, resigned, he activates the Time Lord part still in her.
Here is when Donna feels (and sounds) the most like Donna again (other than her reaction to teen boys being awful to her daughter), as she rants about giving away her money because of a subconscious part making her act like him while also saving London and stopping The Meep. But then, with seconds left to live, she collapses. Maybe his face came back “to say goodbye,” she suggests as she dies in his arms … or not? Just as The Meep’s soldiers are about to kill The Doctor (do what you want, he says, “you were beaten by The DoctorDonna!”), someone begins flipping switches, freeing UNIT: Rose!
The Doctor realizes that the metacrisis passed down to Rose, a shared inheritance, and she, too, was activated when Donna was. That’s why Rose chose the name she did. The shed was her memory of the TARDIS, and she remembered the creatures The Doctor and Donna met as toys. While they’re binary, Rose isn’t, because The Doctor is male and female and neither and more.
After that, it’s just a matter of Wrarth Warriors taking The Meep into custody, though the alien warns The Doctor before the transport, “I will escape and have my revenge, so you beware, Doctor. Because there’s one more thing. … A creature with two hearts is such a rare thing, just wait until I tell the boss.” And while the metacrisis in Donna and Rose is still troubling, they solve that problem themselves: by just letting it go. (“It’s a shame you’re not a woman anymore because she would’ve understood,” Donna comments, with Rose adding, it’s “something a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand.”)
Then it’s back to the TARDIS for The Doctor, and Donna refuses to let Rose see inside “because something will go wrong and you’ll end up on Mars with Chaucer and a robot shark.” The Doctor does convince Donna to come for one last trip, to see Wilf, now that she remembers. “It’s like the old days, just me and The Doctor, together,” Donna says, happy.
It’s once they’re inside that we see how the TARDIS has changed: sleek, shiny, with lots of ramps for The Doctor to run up and down, which he does, exclaiming, “This is amazing! You clever thing!” He’s delighted in a way he couldn’t have been until now, with Donna back. She, at first, complains it’s still nippy before conceding, “it’s gorgeous!” And it is! Still, she asks about his face coming back. “Does there have to be a reason?” he asks. “We’re stuck with it now.” (We know that’s not the case.)
“I really do remember… every second with you. I’m so glad you’re back because it killed me, Donna. It killed me, it killed me, it killed me,” The Doctor admits, giving her a cup of coffee. She doesn’t see why he can’t stop by to visit with her family after this trip because “you’ve been given a second chance. You could do things different this time, so why don’t you do something completely new and have some friends?” He’s non-committal in his answer. And then Donna, just as she wonders, “What’s going to go wrong?” spills her coffee on the TARDIS console. She did warn him that was how she lost her job… And so the TARDIS takes off, and they “could end up anywhere in time and space,” according to The Doctor.
Since The Doctor might not feel like saying it here, we will, because we can’t wait to see where they land: Allons-y!
Doctor Who, 60th Anniversary Special “Wild Blue Yonder” Premiere, Saturday, December 2, Disney+
