The Fantasy Review’s review of Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Special 1, The Star Beast.
The Star Beast is the first of three 60th Anniversary episodes released in 2023. The story is written by Russell T Davies, but is based on the original comic story by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons.
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Spoiler-filled Recap & Review of Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Special 1, The Star Beast
Once Upon a Time Lord
Before we get into a recap and review of The Star Beast, I think we first have to address the opening scene before the title comes up. What exactly was that?
I get it, some people don’t know what happened, not everyone was there the day the Westfold fell, fine. If that little clip of the Doctor standing in front of some green screen, and Donna at her kitchen table, had been a video for the Doctor Who YouTube channel, I wouldn;t have minded.
But as the opening clip of the first 60th Anniversary episode? No, no thank you. Take it away. Forget it happened.
Watching it again for this article makes me want to curl in a ball with embarrassment for everyone involved.
Oh, but the title sequence. YES! Now we are getting somewhere. The TARDIS scraping along the Time Vortex, leaving sparks, and the gorgeous colours… And it ends with the new logo which Classic Who fans will love!
It’s a fantastic opening sequence. Not the best, sure, but it’s awesome and suits the new era well.
Thank You Very Much
The 15th Doctor lands on Earth, with his happy, smiling face I always get a kick out of seeing back on Doctor Who!
He bumps into someone struggling with boxes on the street and immediately bumps into Donna. I think the universe is trying to tell him something… The comedy is right where we left it after season 4, as the best thing the 14th Doctor can think of doing is to replace one of the boxes to cover her face.
That, I am afraid, is not going to get you out of this mess.
When Donna starts shouting “Rose!” I cackle every time when 14 looks utterly bewildered and says, “What?” Oh my GOD I have missed these two.
Rose, of course, is her daughter. Now, as is normal for Donna Noble, a spaceship crashes out of the sky above them and she is too busy restacking boxes to notice.
Donna does talk about a man with a goatee who initially stacked them in her arms for her. I assume this was the Toymaker, but I remember when this came out seeing a lot of fan theories it was the Master!
I mean, bringing back John Simm, again, with a goatee, again, would have been insane. But they were fun theories.
So, Donna misses the crashing spaceship, but she does mention Wilf and the 14th Doctor gets very excited about that (like the rest of us!) but his smile immediately disappears.
Either he quickly realises where he is and that he’s not supposed to see any of them, or he’s remembered why he lost this face the first time.
“You can wear a suit that tight up to the age of 35… and no further.” Donna is savage, as ever. Wrong, in this case, but absolutely savage.
Grand Mistress of the Knowledge
The Doctor hitches a lift in Shaun Temple’s (Donna’s husband) taxi to the crash site of the spaceship. In the back he’s nosey and wonders why they don’t have any money – considering he gave them a winning lottery ticket on their wedding day, before he regenerated.
It turns out, Donna donated all the money. Well, of course she did. But now they are in a bit of a tricky patch, financially.
We see a quick gag about the psychic paper not catching up to the latest gender swap, and we allons-y!
Shaun drops the Doctor off at the crash site as UNIT comes swarming in. The Doctor sonics his way in through a gate (it’s just a magic wand at this point!) and goes in to investigate for himself.
He sneaks his way past people putting out fires and runs into UNIT’s latest Scientific Officer telling a subordinate that the ship did not crash – it was parked.
I Will Descend
Donna and Rose arrive home, after a group of morons deadname Rose, and Sylvia Noble is cooking in the kitchen. It has been SO long since we had a well-written family of a companion in Doctor Who, and I have missed the Nobles.
Rose mentions the spaceship and Sylvia has a nervous breakdown (in her head) and makes sure Donna saw nothing. Then Donna proves she’s the best and tells Rose she will “descend” on anyone who messes with her daughter.
They handle Sylvia’s “clumsiness” about Rose’s trans identity well here. It’s gentle, kind, and welcoming to others who are watching and might mean well but are equally clumsy. It’s also a nice nugget of characterisation for Sylvia, as well as showing us what Donna’s relationship is like with her mum.
“Sometimes I think there is something missing. Like I had something lovely, and it’s gone.”
This is the first sign of the episode building up to the inevitable: Donna remembers it all. It’s tense and mysterious at the same time, as we know she will die if she remembers, but how will she survive?
There’s an Alien on the Loose!
A kid I didn’t catch the name of comes up to Rose out by her house and tells her an escape pod landed nearby, from the spaceship. I don’t know how or why he would know it was an escape pod, or say it was, but it serves as a way for Russell T Davies to spoon feed an apparently stupid audience.
We don’t need to be told everything. We can work it out. It is okay to give us a few hints and move on.
Rose runs home and hears a clatter in the bins. It’s the Meep!
The Meep tells Rose that monsters are coming and they are not safe. Elsewhere, the kid from before that I don’t know the name of runs into some bug-faced aliens with shark jaws on their arms and runs away.
They would be relatively scary… if they didn’t sound like normal blokes in a halloween costume.
It’s a Magic Wand!
I am so glad this was just a special 60th Anniversary sonic, because it is insane. We’re back with the Doctor and he’s chilling at the spaceship’s parking space, waving his magic wand – sorry, sonic screwdriver – around in the air to make a TV screen in midair.
He analyses the data he’s gathered about the ship (which he used to do by just looking at the sonic itself) and the Science Advisor, Shirley Anne Bingham, comes by, welcoming him by. He pretends everything is normal and tells her (tells the audience) that the ship was damaged by laser fire. So it was being attacked, even though it’s “parked”.
The Doctor tells Shirley that he is very confused about his new-but-old face, and then talks about Donna. He calls her his best friend and says he absolutely loves her, which the 10th Doctor would have felt, but he would never have said it.
This isn’t the most subtle way of differentiating the different incarnations, but it does the job.
The Doctor puts together everything we have, with all the very odd coincidences we have seen so far. The Doctor lands in his TARDIS right where Donna Noble is, sees her husband, and a spaceship comes from the sky. Weird.
After the Doctor leaves, a group of UNIT soldiers go into the spaceship to investigate a signal. They open the door with a device they have never used before? Or, at least, they didn’t know if it would work. But then they are possessed by a strange light from the ship, with Shirley unaffected as she was unable to get up the stairs in her wheelchair.
Please Be My Friend!
The Meep is very confused about Rose’s collection of homemade toys she’s got lying around, asking them to be her friend, and it’s adorable. I can’t lie. I know what happens, but the Meep is cute.
We get some more characterisation for Rose, telling us she makes the toys and sells them to try and help her parents. The child of Donna Noble is obviously going to be one of the best people.
Donna barges into the shed and we get her hilarious reaction at meeting the Meep. Sylvia’s nervous breakdown from before spills out into the outside world. It’s all chaos.
Then it gets worse for Sylvia when the Doctor shows up. Oh, I have missed the comedy of this cast! Sure, we got lots of hilarity with 11 and 12 too, but these guys are something special on screen together.
We’ve Got a Bloody Martian in the Shed!
Into the chaos walks poor Shaun. “Something smells nice.”
And the best line Davies has ever written, Sylvia replies: “Tuna madras.”
Elsewhere, the possessed UNIT squad take control of the “escape pod” and it’s revealed they are looking for the Meep, so are under the control of the bug-faced blokes in halloween costumes.
Back into the chaos, the Doctor talks to “the ferret from Mars” (I swear, Donna gets the best lines). The most important thing, though, is that Wilf is not dead! He’s just in sheltered accommodation. Bernard Cribbins, the actor who played the beloved character, did sadly pass away before the airing of the 60th Anniversary episodes, so this scene hit hard with many fans.
When talking to the Meep, I’m not sure a conversation about pronouns was necessary, and it feels a bit forced (I use they/them by the way, so I’m not one of those rage-bait whores on YouTube).
To be fair, that is probably what a young, trans teenager might think and say in that moment, as it is something on their minds a lot, so it’s not crazy to put it in. Whatever, it just made me wince because it felt forced.
We then learn that the Doctor uses no pronouns too, using instead “the definite article,” like the Meep, but more importantly we get a name for the creatures chasing it – The Wrarth Warriors. They skin Meepkind for their fur, apparently.
It is strange in this moment too, before we get onto the next scene, that when the Meep reveals they have two hearts, the Doctor says he has two hearts too. But, when Sylvia tries to get him to say he means it “like a metaphor,” he looks confused.
As someone who was just very emotionally saying to Shirley, earlier, that Donna will die if she remembers who he is, he goes and blabs about having two hearts like he hasn’t got a care in the world? It doesn’t make any sense. Either he is aware of the danger or he isn’t.
Resonating Concrete
Chaos ensues in the Noble house when UNIT and the Wrarth Warriors start shooting at each other through the shed. The Doctor gets out his magic wand/sonic screwdriver and fabricates force fields so that they can escape the fighting unharmed.
For an unknown reason, the Doctor passes Donna the sonic so he can move the force fields, even though he could have put it in his pocket.
They all run upstairs to the attic, the Doctor makes a “resonating concrete” reference I loved. He then breaks into the neighbour’s attic and they make their escape. As Shaun quite rightly put it, however, “That’s not concrete, that’s mortar.” God, I love this silly little show!
Before he jumps in to drive the getaway car, the Doctor checks the pulse of a fallen soldier and seems confused. The soldier was hit by a blast from a Wrarth Warrior’s gun, so we would assume there was no pulse, but 14th face says different.
Then, in the car, he gives the Meep some extreme side eye and says, “either we escaped, or we’ve got things very, very wrong.”
This Court is Now in Session
I love that he carries a judge’s wig in his pocket! Just tells you what he thinks of himself too, which would make for an interesting 5-hour-long video essay.
The Doctor summons the Wrarth Warriors and gets to the root of the problem. Can’t fix something if you don’t know what’s wrong.
So, we learn the plasma bolts made the soldier unconscious and left no marks on the getaway taxi. The Wrarth Warriors tell us Meepkind went mad due to come psychedelic sun radiation, or something, when their Sun went mad. Meepkind proceeded to try and conquer worlds, even capturing, beheading, and eating an important Wrarth council.
This reveal of the Meep as evil is pure Doctor Who, through and through! It’s silly, mad, bonkers. But it works and I love it. The Meep kills the Wrarth Warriors and the Doctor gives himself up as a hostage, along with the rest of the Noble-Temples.
Hail to the Meep!
“There are places out there where people are in danger and in pain and fear. And I could help.”
Oh, Donna, you absolute gem of a human being. These well-written emotional scenes with fully developed characters is something I’ve missed since 12 and Bill Potts had their last on-screen adventure.
The Star Beast is not an amazing episode, but that’s down to the wacky plot, mostly, not the character work.
So, they arrive as hostages at the steelworks where the Meep “parked” its ship to be fixed. The Meep is carried out on a throne by its hypnotised lackeys and I’m just fully embracing the insanity of it all!
We learn that the Meep plans to use a dagger dive to take off from Earth, which would destroy a lot of London, killing about 9 million people. Then the hostages are taken to go on the ship as future snacks for the Meep.
Binary. Binary. Binary.
Before they can be taken onboard the ship, the hostages are saved by Shirley and her badass wheelchair. The Noble-Temples are given an escape route while the Doctor runs to stop the ship taking off.
But, of course, Donna follows him. How could she not?
The Doctor scrambles to work out how to stop the ship, but he can’t get past the deadlock seal, and he’s cut off from half the room, forcing Donna to help.
“You and I can stop this ship. Together. But it will kill you.”
I remember the first time I watched this scene. From the promotional material, we knew Donna didn’t die and we just wanted to know how she survived. But the music and the following performances from Catherine Tate and David Tennant still had me on edge, terrified and emotional, like it was season 4 all over again.
Donna Noble is Descending
So, Donna remembers everything and stops the ship from taking off. But to those of us who grew up watching the DoctorDonna storyline unfold, this was all our dreams come true!
A lot of people – including me – love Clara Oswald’s transformation into a Doctor-like character. But it was Donna who did it first, and she is EPIC!
One of the biggest questions for this episode was how Donna survived the metacrisis. It was too much for one person, so the metacrisis passed down to her child, “a shared inheritance.”
The answer, as it turns out, is a little disappointing, but it made enough sense in the end that I just shrugged my shoulders and was happy Donna was off on her adventures with the Doctor again!
The binary/nonbinary joke was funny though.
Concluding Scenes of The Star Beast Review and Recap
The Avengers tower-like new UNIT building looked amazing. It’s nice to see the budget being spent on genuinely cool things like this.
The Meep is taken by the Wrarth Warriors to be imprisoned for 10,000 years. We then get a final line about “the Boss” from the Meep, giving us a mystery box for Ncuti’s first season.
I’m going to skip past the scene where Rose and Donna give up the metacrisis “powers” because it’s just insulting to the Doctor. 13 is still in there somewhere! Horrible line – skip over it and pretend they never said it.
The Doctor and Donna promise one last trip in the TARDIS – to go and see Wilf. I mean, Shaun is a taxi driver, so he could have taken them, but the show needed to get Donna in the TARDIS and I think Donna wanted an excuse anyway!
Inside the TARDIS, we see David Tennant not having to act as he gets very excited about the new design, running about and grinning like a child! Then, Donna does the most Donna thing ever and spills coffee over the beautiful new TARDIS interior (it looks purposeful!) and they are whisked away to a new adventure.
