The Beast Below

Of course, once you've stopped torturing the pilot.

The Beast Below was a curious follow up to The Eleventh Hour. It was more in the generic monster-mystery style but the bigger thing for me was that after defining himself so well, the Eleventh Doctor had a relapse into Tenth Doctor mode. When I watched this the first time around several years ago, I was quite surprised at how unpleasant the Eleventh Doctor appeared when he tried to channel the Tenth Doctor's dark rage. It just didn't work for me. Sitting down with it several years later, it went down a bit better, but still not great.

Plot Summary

On a floating city in space, a boy named Timmy receives a bad mark in class, earning a reprimand from a statue in class. His friend Mandy warns him to walk home but he takes the elevator. As he does, the floor drops out and he falls into a pit.

The Doctor and Amy fly nearby in the TARDIS and the Doctor observes Mandy crying on the scanner. He goes out to comfort her but she runs away. Amy follows and the Doctor becomes distracted by a glass of water. He gives Amy Mandy's pass and tells her to follow her while he investigates another issue.

Amy follows Mandy and meets her outside a tent blocking off a damaged bit of street. Defying warnings, Amy picks the lock and enters the tent where she finds a snake-like tendril sticking up. She backs out and is surrounded by guards. They take her to a voting booth where she will watch a video. If she accepts it, she will vote to forget what she watched while the alternative is to file a protest. Amy watches the video and wakes to find that she has voted to forget and filmed a short video warning her to get the Doctor away.

The Doctor makes his way to the engine room where he is shocked to find no hookups and evidence that there is no engine at all. He is met by a mysterious masked woman called Liz Ten who echoes his suspicions. She gives him a tracker to help him find Amy, whom she has learned is in trouble.

The Doctor locates Amy's voting cube as she finishes watching her warning video. Mandy was waiting outside. The Doctor enters but cannot vote as he does not register as human. Curious, he votes to protest and the floor drops out. He and Amy fall through a tube into a large mouth, resting on the tongue. The Doctor triggers an upset stomach in the beast and a wave of vomit erupts from the stomach, pushing them back up to a service passage.

The Doctor attempts to open the door but it will only open if he presses a forget button. When he refuses, two smiler statues emerge from their kiosks and attack him and Amy. The door opens and Liz Ten pops out and shoots both robots. She and Mandy found the Doctor as he was still carrying her tracker. Liz Ten takes them out where she reveals herself as Elizabeth X, queen of Spaceship UK, a ship crafted to escape the Earth when it was devastated by solar flares in the 29th century.

Liz takes them to her apartment where she and the Doctor figure out that the ship is being transported by a large beast and that people are being fed to it. Her chamberlain, Hawthorne, has her guard enter and escort her to the control tower. There she watches a video made by herself that the creature is a star whale who came towards Earth during the time of the flares and they built their escape ship on it's back. The Doctor further reveals that she has also had her metabolism slowed so that she is actually 300 years old and votes to forget what they have done.

An angry Doctor amplifies the sound coming from one of the tendrils to show that the whale is screaming in pain from the electrical shocks they keep pumping into it's brain to keep it moving. He also turns on Amy, realizing that she told herself to get him away because he would be forced to either let the whale live in agony or condemn the colony to destruction. He decides to try a third option of sending a huge electrical shock into it's brain, rendering it a vegetable, depriving it of pain but keeping it alive to keep the ship alive. But he is furious with the choice and informs Amy that he will be taking her home after he has finished.

Amy is distracted by a group of children entering carrying tools. Hawthorne notes that the whale does not eat children that fall into it's mouth. She also sees the tendril playfully tap Mandy and tease her hair. Amy suddenly shouts for the Doctor to stop. She grabs Liz's hand and forces her to slap the abdicate button. The electrical impulses into the whale's brain stop but rather than it shaking the ship loose and destroying it, the whale increases it's speed.

Amy tells the astonished crowd that the whale came because it was alone and could not bear the cries of the children. It came to help and the humans were only holding it back in their misunderstanding of it's intentions. Liz thanks her and drops the mask, vowing to deal openly with the people for the rest of their journey.

Later, the Doctor asks Amy how she realized the nature of the whale. She responds that she saw similar patterns in how the Doctor behaved with Mandy. They head back to the TARDIS where the phone is ringing. Amy answers it to find Winston Churchill on the other end. He asks the Doctor to come to London to help him and the Doctor agrees.

Analysis

There is something off on this story and I quite put my finger on it. It has a moderately threatening villain, mystery and relatively quick pace. Yet I find myself being bored by it.

The Doctor is a little off in this story. He's not bad but he's not the full Eleventh Doctor that we grow accustomed to. I think that he might actually be trying a bit too hard here, which is rather interesting given that this story was shot after Flesh and Stone and The Time of Angels. But to me, he feels like he's trying a bit too hard at the whimsy or strange bits and then he goes way over the top with the anger at the end. In that scene in the tower, he feels like someone trying to do the Tenth Doctor rather than the Eleventh Doctor and it just does not work.

His vindictive spite towards Amy for trying to deceive him prior to her memory erasure at that moment is also very uncharacteristic. It recalls the contempt the Ninth Doctor had towards Adam after augmenting himself or he had briefly towards Rose when she saved her father. But in both those cases, there was a deliberate screwing or potential screwing with the flow of time. Here, he is just mad that Amy thought to keep the Doctor from a terrible choice. Terminating her travelling with him for that seems excessive even by other Doctor standards. It is a solidly unlikeable moment for the Eleventh Doctor and one for which he does not apologize. He simply moves on because Amy found an alternate solution.

Amy is pretty good in this. She has that starry-eyed whimsy going that you would expect from a first adventure out. She is compassionate and adventurous at the same time. She also employs the Doctor's technique of observation to solve the problem, something that the Doctor himself should have done if he didn't have his head up his ass at the end.

Liz Ten is about the only other member of the cast of note as Mandy is a pretty generic girl through the story. Liz Ten is alright but I felt like they were trying to hard with her. Her talking of herself as a badass was amusing but it had an over-the-top quality that I didn't quite care for. I also thought it a little lame that it repeatedly took her more than ten years to figure out the nature of the secret. Someone as sharp and as determined as she is portrayed to be should have put the pieces of the puzzle together much quicker. There is just a disconnect between the character as portrayed and what we are told about the character and it creates a schism for me.

I liked how the ship was laid out with the slightly grimy quality of it. It wasn't full Alien levels of grime but it had a lived in quality that made it believable. The smilers were something of a red herring and I couldn't figure out why Timmy was sent to the mouth of the whale in the beginning. It is one thing if a person votes to protest and may spill the beans, but scoring poorly in school and taking an elevator when told to walk home doesn't seem like proper justification for attempting to murder a child, especially when you know the whale doesn't eat children. It creates more of a headache to start. If you think he is going to be trouble, why not wipe his memory and then return him to society? It's a plot hole that is needed to get things started but it just sticks with me.

I think the story was pretty straight forward and reasonably well told so I don't think the script is really to blame for this not working. There are some lines that fed into how the characters were formed and that obviously contributed, but I think the overarching story was fine for a simple space adventure. It wasn't deep but second episode stories usually aren't meant to be.

In the end, this story didn't gel for me. It should work, not as a great story but one that works fairly well and it just didn't. I think it was just in how the characters were and interacted and the little problems that built up over time. It's a reasonable adventure and works fine as a have it on in the background story, but for me it just work and I felt a bit unsatisfied at the end.

Overall personal score: 2 out of 5