REVIEW - Dr Who - The Beast Below (1.2)

Yes, I'm back, with my weekly Dr Who review! I hear you all cheering over there in the background.... :) (And yes, I have other blogs on the way too, so sorry for being lax recently. I shall attempt to fix this soon)

But now, and without further ado...

DR WHO - THE BEAST BELOW

In Which: The Doctor and Amy visit the future, find the entire UK on a Starship (well, except for Scotland) and then face some tough decisions...

What did I think?: This episode was very interesting, and I think this is where we really began to get differentiations between the current Moffat era and the RTD one. Yes, elements of the basic shape of this story can be traced to RTD episodes (and, in fact, way further back in Who-story (That's the word I just invented for Dr Who History. You like?) than that), but it's both the atmosphere and the character work that just lends a small twist to the proceedings.

It just seemed, to me, to work on every level. There were children, who work as the audience identification figure for the kids in the audience, there was political allegory, there was still a huge dollop of sci-fi, and there was a giant space whale! What's not to love?

The evolution of Amy and the Doctor so far is huge. We get to see the Eleventh Doctor here firstly deal with his history in a completely different way to the tenth (where he tells Amy he's the last of his kind very quickly, and chooses not to elaborate) which I think is a good move, because the Time War became the focus for the end of the Tennant years, and it's nice to move away from that for now. We also see him being more alien, which I like. When he gets angry, bellowing "Nobody human has anything to say to me today!" you really get to see the other side of him, which I think is important. He's not human, that's why he needs a companion.

And that's where Amy comes in. She makes the connection between the Doctor and the whale. She puts the pieces together. And she solves the problem with an irrationality that only a human could show. It's nice to see the companion being reckless rather than the Doctor (the tenth could be horrendously reckless sometimes) and the Doctor being torn between being grateful and horrified.

Their relationship too appears to be growing in interesting, multi-dimensional ways. Yes, she obviously still has some form of attraction towards him, but it's also tempered against the fact she's discovering, on some level, that he isn't the imaginary figure she dreamt up in the twelve years between first meeting him and then meeting him again, which gives us the unique advantage of having a companion who in some ways knows the Doctor better than he does himself, and in some ways just thinks she does..

As for the supporting cast? Liz 10 was pretty cool - a gun-toting future monarch is a fabulous idea, as is the abbreviation of her name, and the kids were actually not that annoying. My one sort-of problem with the episode is the Smilers. I can see what they were going for, but it just didn't seem to follow through. It was as if they thought of the visual and then didn't really do anything with it. And the half human smilers seemed pointless to me.

I loved how the ending of this episode leads straight into the next one (and incidentally, I'm horrendously excited about the next one. Churchill? Daleks? WWII? Bring it on...) although it does lead us to the interesting point that the Doctor has been going non-stop since the End of Time Part One, because he hasn't stopped to sleep or eat (apart from some fish custard) since then...

Oh, and another crack in space and time appeared on the hull of the Starship? Now the question is, are they everywhere - so the Doctor will always run into them? Or are they somehow caused by the Doctor or Amy? Or, is the Doctor investigating them and chasing the cracks around without saying anything? I'm sure we'll discover...

The Good: Matt Smith and Karen Gillan. Both continued to grasp my attention completely, and I found myself warming to both characters. Liz 10 was also brilliant, and there was some lovely humour throughout the episode. Also, after last weeks I did worry that this series might feel a little more childish, but luckily here it didn't.

The Bad: The SmilerHumans seemed pointless. And I don't really understand why the kids who got zero ended up down below, especially since they already knew the whale wouldn't eat the children... There was the occasional bit of bad CG, but to me it felt better than last weeks.

Conclusion: 8.5/10. It worked better than last weeks, and felt like a nice slice of classic Who, injected with the pace of NuWho. Keep it up Moffat!