The Story
I thought it was a standard Doctor Who story. It is not outstanding. But it is not bad either. It was the sort of thing I might have expected had Davies made Doctor Who season five (he left the show after season four).
The stakes are high, and the story is very much what you would expect from a Doctor Who “Alien of the Week” story with high stakes. The Doctor has to save the day with his usual combination of intelligence and trickery. While vastly outgunned by technically superior forces.
I enjoyed the Meep well enough. He was fun and delightfully well-animated, mostly. But there was little there that surprised me. Your mileage might vary. I found it was predictable. But it was fun. The stakes were higher than you might expect from a story about a cute little critter.
The story makes a lot about Rose being transgender. It seems to be another thing for the Donna family to stress about. Later, it is something for Rose to scold the Doctor about, in a rather annoying and preaching moment.
However, I have mixed thoughts about how this theme manifests in the story. Russell Davies might have better integrated whatever he wanted to say into the story in a less ham-fisted and preachy fashion. Although to be fair, it comes up in a better moment near the end. In a more subtle manner. I wish the rest of the episode had been as subtle.
The story spends too much time on Donna and her family. Some such scenes are chaotic and forced. Although, it gives us a better idea of what has been going on with Donna than I expected.
We get some clues as to why the Doctor might have regenerated into a familiar face. It is interesting. Although, Star Beast does not leave us much time to explore this. We will discover more about this when we review the other specials.
The ending lets Star Beast down. I have already gone into that. The ending dealt with a rather significant element of Doctor Who lore. With a better resolution to the Metacrisis, I might have enjoyed this story a lot more. I will get onto that in the next section.
It is a story that is very enjoyable. It would be a fine story for a typical Doctor Who episode. As an anniversary episode, Star Beast was somewhat lackluster! It was yet another alien of the week episode, with slightly higher stakes than some similar episodes. Very disappointing for an anniversary special!
Hypocrisy
Doctor Who fans may know that the original creator of one of the arch-nemesis of the Doctor (other than the Master) is the Daleks. Their creator, Davros, has, until recently, always been portrayed as disabled and bound to a hovering wheelchair-like device.
Russell Davies decided this had to go. He believes this expresses the idea that disabled people are evil. On this topic, he has this to say:
“We had long conversations about bringing Davros back, because he’s a fantastic character, [but] time and society and culture and taste has moved on. And there’s a problem with the Davros of old in that he’s a wheelchair user, who is evil. And I had problems with that. And a lot of us on the production team had problems with that, of associating disability with evil. And trust me, there’s a very long tradition of this.” – Russell Davies.
That is silly and not what the writers intended. No sensible person would think, “A bad person who is disabled somehow implies that disabled people are bad.” I do not believe Davies gives people enough credit. That Davros is disabled implies nothing about disability itself. Most people understand this.
Russell Davies seems to disagree. So, he decided the character of Davros should no longer be disabled, largely for this reason. I have no problem with changing the disabled thing. Except that the previously stated reason is very flimsy.
In the special, we see our disabled UNIT hero help save the day by firing rockets from her wheelchair. I found this predictable. I saw this coming very early into the episode. However, I did not mind this, nor the predictability of it very much. It was gimmicky. However, it did not bother me. It got the job done and moved the plot along.
What I do mind is the hypocrisy that this represents. Here is a disabled UNIT character doing good things. Are we to suppose that this associates all disabled people with heroism? That is false; some of them are not heroes.
We are not, I suspect, supposed to take this message from this scene. We are not supposed to infer that one person committing an act of heroism implies that all disabled people are heroes.
If this is the case, should I infer that the depiction of one disabled person implies nothing about all other disabled people? That is so. We cannot imply that all disabled people are evil or heroic based on the actions of any particular disabled person.
Mr. Davies, do you accept you were wrong about Davros? By your logic, Star Beast implies that all disabled people are heroes. I can see how that would be less offensive than implying they are all evil. However, both options are false.
However, I have an idea. I suggest that whether someone is in a wheelchair is immaterial to an individual’s moral status. If they are in a wheelchair and do bad things, those are two independent things. Davros can be evil without his moral status reflecting on disabled people. Our UNIT agent can be as good without that reflecting on her disabled status.
Why do I mention this? In isolation, what would be wrong with Davies showing a disabled person as a hero? It shows how Davies often throws in messages like this without giving them much thought.
Here, it establishes a double standard with his previously established reasons for changing Davros. Earlier, I mentioned he implied women can choose to let things like the Metacrisis go. I hope we are not supposed to take that seriously.
Then we have the scene where Rose scolds the Doctor for misgendering the Meep. Excuse me? The Doctor did not know what gender pronoun Meep might prefer. However, Rose seemed shocked when the Doctor fell back on “he” instead of the preferred pronoun of “Meep.”
Rose acts as though the Doctor is supposed to know that. The Doctor has more crucial issues to worry about. Crucial issues that are more important than trying to guess Meep’s pronouns. Helping the Meep was one of those issues.
These three examples show a tendency for Davies to give little thought to his messaging. He sometimes seems to value the messaging more than the delivery of his story. It would seem so. Perhaps he needs to give more thought to the delivery of his messages. Specifically, the ham-fisted ways they sometimes come across.