Review: Doctor Who, “The Star Beast” | 60th Anniversary Special #1

David Tennant and Catherine Tate return in a near-perfect episode

Photo: Disney+

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s 2023 coverage of BBC drama Doctor Who, beginning with the series’ 60th Anniversary specials and continuing with its holiday special. As always, this first review is free for all, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. For more information on what shows we’re covering and what your subscription supports, check out our About Page or become a free subscriber for future updates.

“I’ve got this friend called Donna Noble. And she was my best friend in the whole wide universe, I absolutely love her—oh, mmm, do I say things like that now?”

The Doctor isn’t good at emotions. Some regenerations, like Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, simply don’t understand them. Some, like Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor, do their clumsy best to accept them. And some, like David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, repress them because that’s easier than living with the pain of admitting how much they care for other people and how painful it is to lose them.

That was never the case with the Noble family, though. There was something about Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), her mum Sylvia (Jacqueline King), and her grandad Wilf (Bernard Cribbins) that cracked open the Tenth Doctor’s usual brand of emotional denial—getting him to say aloud the feelings he could never quite articulate to Rose Tyler or Martha Jones or Joan Redford or Sarah Jane Smith. In the Tenth Doctor’s 2010 regeneration special “The End of Time,” he openly refers to Donna as his “best friend” before later turning to Wilf and simply saying, “I’d be proud if you were my dad.” Every Doctor/companion relationship is special, but the Nobles are woven into Ten’s story like family. No wonder his face returns when they need him most.

Photo: BBC

In many ways, “The Star Beast” is a massive shift for Doctor Who—the start of a new Disney+ synergy era, the return of showrunner Russell T. Davies, and the first time the Doctor has regenerated into one of his old faces. Yet what makes it a truly magical hour of television is how seamlessly it slips back into the comfort of its old rhythms. I spent this weekend rewatching Tennant and Tate’s original 2008 run of the show, and it’s gob-smacking how much this 15-years-later reunion feels like no time has passed at all. When Tennant returned for the 50th Anniversary Special “The Day of the Doctor” back in 2013, it felt like the show shoving a square peg into a rectangular hole. It worked, but something was missing too. Here, however, the fit is as seamless as Tennant’s natty new checkered suit.

The moment I first fully felt that sense of comfort wasn’t when Tennant first stepped out of the TARDIS or when we saw his Chuck Taylors or when he reunited with Donna over a pile of packages or when he name dropped her old frenemy Nerys or even when he delivered his first “Allons-y!” (Although all those are great.) No, it was the quiet kitchen scene where Donna and Sylvia lovingly but imperfectly discuss how best to support Donna’s trans teenage daughter, Rose (Yasmin Finney). It’s the sort of realistically observed bit of human drama that Steven Moffat didn’t particularly care about in his era as showrunner, and that Chris Chibnall tried and failed to return to in his. Under Davies, however, Doctor Who was always as much about the everyday lives of the show’s human companions as it was their adventures in time and space. And it’s a gift to watch the show return to that empathetic focus here.

Photo: BBC

Which isn’t to say things aren’t different too. This isn’t the Tenth Doctor, but the Fourteenth—which matters only as much as it means he’s had all the experiences of Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor, and Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor in the interim. Ten’s personality is back in full force, but he’s evolved a bit too. He may have always been more emotionally available with the Noble family, but openly admitting he loves Donna? That’s all Thirteen.

Indeed, that mix of old and new elevates this entire episode, which takes great advantage of the influx of Disney cash to deliver a far more cinematic look than Davies was ever able to back in his original 2005-2010 run. While Davies smartly kicks off this trio of 60th anniversary specials with a relatively simple story about an alien fugitive and the extraterrestrial forces hunting it down (it’s a bit “Smith and Jones” in that way), the aesthetics put it on a whole new level. Though I suspected we were in for a twist about the impossibly cute space creature The Meep being the villain of this story, that didn’t stop me from cackling like mad every time the show cut back to the adorable little muppet barring its razor-sharp teeth and deranged red eyes.  

While “The Star Beast” is Davies operating in a kinder, gentler, even more socially conscious mode of storytelling, it’s nice to see he hasn’t entirely lost the unhinged quality that defined his original run either. The idea of a race of child-sized Furbies driven to murder by a psychedelic sun is a perfectly bonkers touch from the man who gave us a piece of sentient skin blasting Britney Spears and a human/cat-man marriage that produced literal kittens. And the unexpected nobility of the bug-like creatures tracking down The Meep also feels distinctly Davies too.

Photo: Disney+

If I had to pinpoint one place where Davies’ old tricks and new sensibilities don’t mesh quite as seamlessly, it would be how easily Donna is ultimately able to get back her memories of her time with the Doctor thanks to an assist from her daughter and a rejection of the binary. If it were just a classic “Davies ex machina” or just a cheesy celebration of the trans experience, it’d be easy enough to get onboard. But I think there’s an unfair eliding of how traumatic it was for Donna to have her memories taken from her in the first place.

While the moment Donna gets pissed about the lottery money she gave away is a really funny return to the classic Doctor/Donna dynamic, I wish she’d actually taken the Doctor to task for how unilaterally he reshaped her life without asking her what she wanted. Davies certainly knows how to write emotional trauma when he wants to, but here he mostly steers in the other direction in order to give us a purely happy reunion.

Still, that kind of simplicity is also par for the course with a big, splashy Doctor Who special, which tend to operate in a broader, more heightened mode than the show’s usual episodes. And it is such a joy to see the Doctor and Donna together again that it’s hard to complain too much. Plus it helps that we’ve got two more specials left for the show to explore the fallout of Donna’s memory return more fully if it wants to.

Indeed, “The Star Beast” teases several questions to anchor us through the next two specials: Why did the Doctor return to an old face? Who is “The Boss” The Meep mentions? Where is the coffee-logged TARDIS sending the Doctor and Donna next? How will Wilf respond to seeing his old friend again? And what’s up with that woman from Abu Dhabi who loves Rose’s toy designs?

Photo: Disney+

Really, though, I didn’t need those overt plot hooks to keep me coming back for more. The best hook these specials could ask for is how much the Doctor and Donna feel like themselves—in her unquestioning willingness to sacrifice her life to save nine million people; in his pain at having to ask a beloved friend to make such an impossible choice. Some of the Tenth Doctor’s most powerfully emotional goodbyes happened when he was separated by an invisible barrier from someone he loved. That “The Star Beast” continues that tradition in order to say “hello” instead makes me incredibly excited to see where things go from here. Allons-y!

Stray observations

• Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Doctor Who! I truly, truly couldn’t be more thrilled to be covering a show that means so much to me as it returns to the hands of my favorite showrunner. We’ve got two more Saturdays of anniversary specials with Tennant and Tate, and then a Ncuti Gatwa-led 2023 Christmas special before the show returns for a proper season in 2024. If you need more Who content in the interim, the entire run of NuWho is currently streaming on Max, and I ranked all the episodes in season one, two, three, and four over on my Substack.

• This episode is so earnestly trying to be thoughtful and inclusive that I almost feel bad offering this critique, but I don’t love the fact that the “cure” for Donna’s Meta-Crisis memory issue is tied up in the fact that she had a biological child. (What if she didn’t want to/couldn’t have kids?) I did, however, like the “just choose to let it go” part of the solution.

• I like to imagine that shot of the Doctor running around his new TARDIS is just behind-the-scenes footage of what happened when they first showed Tennant the new set.

• I can’t say I totally loved the strange straight-to-camera Tennant/Tate recap that kicks off the episode, but I am glad it allowed “The Star Beast” to jump right into the action without too much awkward handholding or exposition.

• The episode doesn’t state this explicitly, but I kind of just assumed the Fourteenth Doctor isn’t bogged down by a usual sense of regeneration fatigue/disorientation because it’s easier to transform back into an old face than create a brand new one.

• Speaking of which, it was fun to revisit “The Day of the Doctor” and find new meaning in the scene where Tom Baker’s museum curator hints, “I know you don’t [forget a face]. And in years to come, you might find yourself revisiting a few. But just the old favorites, eh?”

• “Word of advice, you can wear a suit that tight up to the age of 35 and no further.”

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