From MadCap's Couch - Doctor Who: "The Beast Below"

"Hey, have I got something in my teeth?"

So, remember how I last time that I was talking up Moffat's era?

Yeah... here's where I have to give him a firm "Nah."

Let me elaborate.

We begin IN THE FUTURE! Starship UK is apparently a ship where a bunch of English counties have been stacked together and the school system has returned to that of the 1940s. A bunch of students are getting their marks from a definitely not at all creepy robot with rotating heads that we later learn is called a Smiler. Mandy gets a passing grade however, a boy named Timmy receives a zero and Mandy tells him he'll have to walk home rather than taking a lift back to London. A menacing lift operator scares Timmy away from the lift and so he decides to take another one.

On a small screen, a little girl narrates a poem about "The Beast Below" (take a shot!) as the floor of the lift opens up and Timmy presumably falls in while a Smiler - now with creepy red eyes - watches.

Alright, so... keep this all in the back of your mind for later. It's going to make you feel very stupid indeed. I know it did me when I gave it more than five seconds of thought.

We pick up with Amy being held drifting out of the TARDIS by the Doctor, with her put in an unfortunate position that the Doctor can look directly up the skirt of her nightie and give the fangirls more shipping fodder. After bringing her back in, the Doctor announces that they're in the 29th century and rattles off some historical info while Amy calls to him, apparently somehow having ended up back outside the TARDIS and holding onto it despite having been pulled back in.

...no idea how that works, but okay.

Before they head out, the Doctor attempts to lay down some ground rules - namely that they are not to get involved in the affairs of other peoples or planets. One would think that Amy would immediately call him out on the BS for that, but the Doctor gets distracted looking at the scanner and seeing Mandy sitting by herself and crying. Amy watches the girl, lamenting how much it must be awful to not interfere... to see the Doctor immediately interfere, having somehow left the TARDIS without making a sound. To give the Doctor credit, he lasted a full twenty-five seconds (yes, I counted it off).

Nice to see V.A.T.S. made it to the 29th century.

Amy steps out of the TARDIS at the Doctor's beckoning onto Starship UK, finding a world that looks suspiciously like a shopping mall crossed with any set from Firefly. The Doctor encourages Amy to look around, asking her what's wrong with this picture. Eventually, the Doctor insists that the society is a police state on the brink of collapse, demonstrating this by taking a glass of water off of a couple's table and setting it on the ground. Strangely enough, this causes no vibration... which is a plot point, but it's also noticeable that the Doctor moving the glass also doesn't seem to make the water move.

The Doctor's reasoning for the police state, though? Mandy is crying and no adult is paying her any mind. Also, one of the lift operators from earlier - the Winders - is tailing the Doctor and Amy. He calls in to his boss, the pair either recognizing the Doctor or noting that he messed with the water. The leader insists that they must tell "her", and we cut to a woman in a crimson cape sitting with dozens of glasses of water nearby, none of them moving either. She tells the leader that she will handle it, picking up a porcelain mask along the way.

The Doctor sits Amy down and explains his reasoning... Mandy is crying quietly and no parent walking about is asking her what's wrong, so clearly it's some sort of sinister conspiracy that they don't talk about. Moffat is going for "the Doctor is insightful and clever" here, but he ends up with him jumping to conclusions at a greater distance than he fell from the Vinvocci mining ship. He's right (sort of), but the case is absolutely flimsy at best.

He gets Amy to go after the girl (after admitting to have bumped into her four times to get her to drop her ID) and ask her why everyone avoids the Smilers in the booths. Amy finally does what I thought she'd do earlier, calling the Doctor out for interfering in the affairs of other peoples or planets... because there's a child crying. The Doctor heads off to "stay out of trouble... badly" and Amy meets up with Mandy, who knows that she's being followed. Finding a keep out area, Amy picks the lock in spite of Mandy saying that they shouldn't.

A Smiler notices the pair and the face shifts to the "mad" face. Amy gets a bit in about her wedding the next day, having the most Moffat-ish line of the episode when she says she's getting married: "A long time ago tomorrow morning. I wonder what I did...". After Amy picks the lock and goes in, Mandy noting the Smiler changing faces and freaking out, Amy sneaks into the restricted area and finds a very alive-looking tentacle bobbing about. She backs out to get away from it... and the Winders dose her with a sleep gas.

Elsewhere, the Doctor is in a corridor and is examining every bit of paneling and equipment he can, eventually finding his way to a glass of water on the floor. The masked woman appears and the two converse. The Doctor reveals his analysis. The water doesn't move because there's no engine and - pulling open panels, he finds that there are no connections to any power. The people of Starship UK are traveling about on a spaceship that can never fly. The woman gives the Doctor a device, introduces herself as Liz Ten, and then disappears in a very Batman-esque fashion after telling the Doctor that she will find him when the time comes.

This isn't a screenshot from the episode. This is a photo of Matt Smith when he read the script.

Amy awakens in a booth, getting a message on 1950s television and finds three buttons - "Protest", "Record", and "Forget". The computer pulls up Amy's information, as she's delighted at the fact that it reads her off as 1,308 and it comes to her Marital Status... reading it off as "Unknown" in a case of being hilariously cheap. A man appears on the monitor, a recorded message telling Amy about Starship UK and that she's about to be shown the truth about it and she will be given the choice to protest or forget.

Whatever Amy is exposed to, and we get a frankly weird overlay of... various things that have nothing to do with the actual thing itself... and she finds that she's pressed "Forget", but has recorded a message for herself Amy implores herself to get the Doctor and get off this ship, no matter what. The Doctor and Mandy arrive and the Doctor checks out the booth, finding that Amy's mind has indeed been wiped of the last twenty minutes.

We get a shoehorned bit about the Time Lords and the Time War - the latter of which the Doctor calls a "bad day, bad stuff" - and the Doctor decides to press the "Protest" button... in spite of the fact that he just said the machine wouldn't read him. The Smiler gets the creepy face, the floor opens up, and the Doctor and Amy get dropped in. Mandy, terrified, turns around to find Liz Ten behind her, reassuring her with a smile. Down below, what an incredible smell the Doctor and Amy have discovered! At first they think it's waste, but the Doctor reveals a terrible truth to Amy - they're in a mouth. On a tongue.

The teeth are visible, by the way, and the design causes a bit of a problem with A) why they didn't see it as soon as they fell in and B) what happens next and what we see later.

The Doctor induces vomiting in the creature and both he and Amy are cast out into an "overspill pipe". They find a "Forget" button on the only door out and the Doctor confronts two of the Smilers rather than press the button. They reveal here that the Smilers can leave the booths... only to be shot by Liz Ten, who has arrived with Mandy after tracking the Doctor via the device she gave him earlier. Liz apparently knows who the Doctor is because she's the Queen of England... descended from the line of British monarchs and, as we've established a few times by now, some people the Doctor has a mixed reception from at best. She, however, seems to be only too eager to ask for the Doctor's help.

"I'm pretty sure we've already done a Repo joke somewhere lately..."

Liz shows them more of the tentacles and the Doctor scans it to reveal that it and the one Amy saw up top are all part of the same creature - the one the Doctor and Amy were just in the mouth of. The Doctor laments that he and Amy should never have come here.

The leader of the Winders catches them on the CC TV monitor and tells his minions to "initiate the Protocol". In Liz's quarters, she reveals the glass project she's been working on and she mentions she's been investigating this for a decade. The Doctor, holding her mask, notes that if she took the throne at 40 and has a mask sculpted perfectly to her face... and then the Smilers pop up to be menacing and bring them all to the Tower of London... which is the basement. Here, we get some quick reveals.

Timmy, from earlier is alive! The children are not eaten by... whatever the creature is... and the Doctor and Amy are the first adults that it's spared.

Lasers are being shot into a brain.

Liz apparently set everything up to keep Starship UK going... and had her memory erased.

The Doctor reveals the truth: Starship UK is being carried by a starwhale, which the people of UK have enslaved for their own purposes, namely getting off of Earth before the solar flares in the 29th century burned them all alive.

Also, the Doctor reveals the truth of the mask - it's at least 200 years old, and perfectly sculpted to her face. Liz isn't 50, but around three hundred. She's been reliving the same ten years over and over and over again, all of them leading her back to a monitor of her own - with two buttons marked "Forget" and "Abdicate", where Liz explains to herself the situation as I've described it before. The starwhale, so far as they can tell, is the last of its kind. It had come to the UK in their hour of need as their children screamed. If she presses "abdicate", they release the starwhale... and the ship disintegrates.

Amy wonders why she would choose to forget this, the Doctor immediately turning on her angrily and telling her she has no right to decide what he knows, having taken it upon herself to keep him from investigating further. The Doctor gets an angry, shouty moment as he now has to make the impossible choice - humanity or the Starwhale. He begins to work on essentially lobotomize the whale so that it won't feel any more pain, but the humans can survive.

While he works, Amy has a sudden revelation. When she notices the star whale's tentacle not attacking Mandy and Billy. Then, it all gets put together and Amy pulls Liz over to the device and presses her hand into the "Abdicate" button. Despite some shaking about for tension... nothing happens. Starship UK continues to fly at a much faster speed than before and does not disintegrate. Amy tells Liz that the starwhale came to save the children not as a miracle, but as a volunteer.

"...okay, so we're going somewhere else. Let's go!"

Something that old, that kind, and the very, very last of their kind... couldn't just stand by and watch children cry.

We wrap up, Amy returning to the Doctor and telling her that Liz has said there will be no more secrets on Starship UK. The two muse over the starwhale, a creature that lives with so much pain and misery and loneliness... and all it did was make it kind. Much, indeed, like the Doctor as Moffat has Amy state in a very, very obvious parallel.

The Doctor and Amy sneak out to the TARDIS, Amy almost revealing the wedding to the Doctor and couching it in asking him if he ever ran away from something because he was scared... the Doctor bringing up the fact that, well, we have the show. Before Amy can spill the beans, though, the phone is ringing and it's none other than Winston Churchill on the other end. He's calling for the Doctor's help, and the shadow of a Dalek falls over him as he and the Doctor converse.

The TARDIS dematerializes, Amy recites another bit of the Beast Below poem, and we see the starwhale still transporting Starship UK... and a crack in time glowing on the hull.

So, okay... let's unpack a few things, shall we? I said before that the beginning bit with the school was going to hurt and boy does it ever! Why in the hell does getting a failing grade necessitate being fed to the starwhale?! The leader of the Winders mentions that protesters and citizens of lesser worth are fed to the whale... but the kids? Especially when we learn that the whale won't eat the children, which makes the whole thing even more ridiculous. What do they do with them? We see them getting put to work down below, but we really get no information apart from that. Forget the child crying and no one paying them any mind, this is the true sign of a police state. This, of course, is why this is never even addressed by the episode even when the Doctor is outright told about it.

On another note: how have the Smilers been able to keep Liz on the same path for going on three centuries now? Sure, Liz had planned for that and has been artificially stunted in her aging, but anyone else she might have interacted with probably doesn't get access to such medical care. Wouldn't she notice people around her aging? She does say she goes out with the mask and regularly interacts with people during her investigation into the conspiracy, so wouldn't she notice that people get older and eventually die to be replaced by other people? How much of her memory gets erased every time she hits the "Forget" button?

"This is no cave!"
"What?!"

On the note of that, why would you insist that the ship would disintegrate? Because it very clearly doesn't and if it did, then that would be a function of the ship (which you morons built) rather than because of the starwhale.

The entire thing is just a friggin' mess. To quote Madmartigan: it just raises too many questions! It really keeps me from enjoying the few bits of the episode I can actually enjoy, because I'm too busy trying to figure out if the people who run Starship UK are either stupid or actively malevolent.

Also, this has nothing to do with any of that (but I was going to mention it earlier) we see the starwhale in full for the very first time as the last shot of the episode. It's mouth is open to the vacuum of space. This wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that we literally saw its teeth and the Doctor and Amy were blasted out of its mouth, which means that they both should have died in the literal vacuum of space, particularly because we don't see a pipe of any kind anywhere near its mouth.

Cap this all off with the Doctor letting in pole vaulting to jump to a conclusion and get the plot starting, and you have a mess and a very rare complete and utter misfire from Steven Moffat. There's very little to like here, and it's buried under the Gordian knot of plot that this episode presents us.

Geez, Steven! Get it together!

Next time, we'll be heading over to let Mark Gatiss pen the first Dalek episode of Matt Smith's era, and one that will set the tone for future Dalek stories. It's also his first script since Series 2, so it's good to see him back and at it again. We'll see Winston Churchill, a color-coded for your convenience variant of the Daleks, and the most stupidly awesome thing in a Doctor Who episode since the series came back in 2005!

Be there!