Doctor Who “The Beast Below” (Season 5 Ep. 2) Review
I am warming to Matt Smith as the Doctor very very quickly. This time the Doctor and Amy are aboard the Starship UK. Every nation on Earth boarded star ships into space when solar flares became to much for the planet and everyone was forced to evacuate. But something is afoot on the Starship UK as wind up “Smilers” judge people and send them to “the Beast Below”.
The Doctor and Amy investigate what is happening, with the Doctor investigating a hunch in the engine room and Amy following up with a child they had witnessed crying uncontrollably earlier. Amy’s investigation proves fruitful as she discovers a scorpion like creature on one of the decks of the ship before she is mysteriously carted off by “the Winders.”
The Doctor also makes a discovery, the ship has no engines. It’s in space, moving forward but there are no vibrations and no electricity hook ups to an engine. A mystery woman comes into play, as she too knows something on the ship isn’t right.
The Doctor as Harry Potter?
Amy wakes in a cell and is forced to watch a video about what the Brits did to get into outer space. She is given the option to remember and protest or forget and go about her life. Without being privy to what Amy sees she chooses to forget and records a video telling herself to get the Doctor off the ship. Just as she is about to leave the voting booth the Doctor arrives and out of curiosity pushes the protest button, at which point the Doctor and Amy fall into a giant pit.
To go into any more detail about the plot of the episode would reveal too many a spoiler, and I try not to do that. I will say the Doctor is forced to make a very hard decision and Amy reveals, very early in her tenure as a companion, that she knows the Doctor very well. The most recent incarnations of the Doctor have had wonderful companions, and Ms. Amelia Pond is shaping up to be my new favorite.
With Amelia, we get a wonderful familiarity with the Doctor right away, because, as established in the “11th Hour”, the Doctor was Amelia’s imaginary friend growing up. She may not know everything about the doctor, but she knows him as she imagined him as a child. I think we may be heading down the same path of Rose and Tennant’s Doctor where romantic feelings took over, but that’s okay. I loved that aspect of the show, right up until they regenerated Rose a fake “human” Doctor. It gives the companion and the Doctor something to lose.
“The Beast Below” is great for a couple reasons. Number one is the fact that we immediately jump into a moral quandry for the Doctor. My favorite episodes of Doctor Who have been where the Doctor has had to make a choice that has no wrong answer but both choices have huge moral impact. That is the basis of the episode. Number 2, this episode fills in some of the time line gaps from Davies’ Doctor. Remember Rose’s first journey into space, where they see the earth overtaken by the sun? This episode is part of that timeline and takes place when humans were still fresh from the original evacuation. It’s nice that Moffat is doing his own thing, but also folding it into stories told before. This episode has a perfect ending and establishes a great relationship of trust between Amy and the Doctor. Plus, we see that this Doctor is a little more needy, even though he came off as extremely autonomous and strong in the first episode when he and Amy hug, for a very long time, at the end of the episode.
Next week is looking to be freakin’ awesome though, as we get Winston Churchill, Space fighter pilots, and the return of the Daleks! Only on BBC One!
