fajrdrako | Doctor Who: The Beast Below... (Reply)

Tonight I watched Doctor Who episode 5x02, "The Beast Below". Another triumph for Amy. Looking over the second episodes of each season I've seen, I see that I've alternately liked and disliked them. I loved 1x01 "The End of the World" and 3x02 "The Shakespeare Code"); but didn't like 1x02 "Tooth and Claw" or 4x02 "The Fires of Pompeii". I did like "The Beast Below" very much indeed, so it fits the patter.

Creepy setting. The fact that the uninspiring architecture and dreariness of the place had names of the English counties was vaguely unsettling.
What happened to Scotland? If it couldn't travel because it didn't have a space whale, and couldn't stay where it was - did it disintigrate? What? (I'm picturing millions of angry Scottish ghosts.)
I liked the Doctor better than I did in "The Eleventh Hour". I still don't love Eleven, but he's... interesting.
Loved Amy even more than ever.
Three things generally sold me on this episode. One was the mood - things that ought to have seemed juvenile and absurd did not. The next was the characterization. The third and best thing was the self-referential twist: that the space whale/monster/beast below turned out to be the last of his kind, and an explicit analogue of the Doctor. Which Amy even pointed out to him.
And they hugged. Awww.
Not only do I love that approach, I love it that it was Amy who recognized that generosity in both the beast below and the Doctor. I love it when apparent villains turn out to be good.
I liked it that the Doctor and the space whale were both described as "kind". In the last few years, the Doctor's kindness has taken back seat to his pain, his courage, his anger, and his more dangerous qualities. It was good to see another, more benign approach. Would this Doctor destroy the offspring of the Racnoss Empress, destroy the career of a Prime Minister, imprison the Family of Blood, or try to shoot the Gallifreyan President? Maybe. But he seems gentler than Ten.
There were all sorts of conceptual fannish references here - Star Wars is an obvious one (I hope we don't get too much of that), but it also reminded me of Neverwhere, and books by Terry Pratchett.
Like the previous episode, it started with children. There seems to be a desire to catch the attention of a juvenile audience, more than in the Russell T Davies era. Or is that just coincidence?
Loved the references to Amy's pending marriage - the "uncertain" designation of its status by the ship's computers, her own expressed reservations about it. And that she still hasn't told the Doctor.
I liked Liz 10. And her mask. And the logic that led to the revelation of her advanced age and her memory loss. Memory loss seems to be a theme here; Steven Moffat introduced it in Captain Jack's two-year amnesia in "The Empty Child", and it was continued throughout Torchwood with the use of Retcon.
Nice uses of time paradox, too, especially with Amy's reference to "tomorrow" being in the distant past.
I saw another Torchwood theme in the sympathy shown for the physically tortured space whale (and his audible cries) as in episode 2x04, "Meat".
This episode copied the Russell T. Davies desire to have action moving up and down vertially, rather than just horizontally. I see this as less of an action-story value than they do.
Seems to me that we need not take it for granted that all space ships should have vibrating motors - though I liked the trick with the glasses. Seems to me that there are other ways a ship can be propelled, conceptually if not actually: by magnetism, by the use of solar wind or cosmic current or other ideas of terrestrial analogy; by teleportation, apportation, alchemy, magic, punting, poling, rowing, or some sort of gigantic transmat beam. Or something else. This solution worked, storywise, but wasn't the only way it could have been.
At first it seemed odd and then I rather liked it that we didn't know the destination of the ship. As far as I noticed, no one asked.
I suppose the crack in space and time will be the theme of the series - like Torchwood was the theme of season 3. I like this approach, keeping a running mystery that unfolds over the course of one particular series.