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The Star Beast sees Russell T Davies return to writing Doctor Who, as if he didn’t destroy it enough last time, trying to throw in diversity amongst the cast, over writing a coherent script.
Last year, it was a surprise to see David Tennant return as the Doctor, but in the end, we knew Catherine Tate would return as Donna Noble. At least with her, that’s a good thing, since while I thought her Runaway Bride episode was terrible, she actually made for a surprisingly decent companion.
But ultimate wokeness is afoot. At home in surburbia, Donna is married to a black man, and their daughter is transgender actress Yasmin Finney (Heartstopper). Donna’s only been gone 13 years, while Yasmin is 20, in real life, but… timey-wimey.
The next Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, describes himself as queer, and I look forward to seeing how many diversity boxes RTD can tick when his first episode takes place on Christmas Day. At least for the festive episode, we always know NOT to expect any sort of proper scripting, so I guess we’ll have to wait a while for his first real episode.
But for now, as The Star Beast begins, Christmas is on its way, again, for Tennant’s Doctor. Let’s just hope he doesn’t spend all day in bed, again.
A spaceship crashes in London, stranding a creature called the Meep, who’s like Gizmo from Gremlins, but can talk. The army are after him, so, basically, this is RTD’s E.T.
But hold the front page, as Tennant’s Doctor talks about the Meep, saying, “Let’s get him home”, to which Rose replies, “You’re assuming ‘he’ as a pronoun”, and Doc takes this onboard as a sensible statement. And quite rightly, too, because when someone declares they have pronouns, that means they’re very important and MUST be listened to!
So, Tennant asks the creature, “Are you he, she or they?” Well, you’ve got an hour, and there are around 78 different pronouns you can go through, but the response comes, “My chosen pronoun is the definite article. I am always the Meep”.
A similar conversation came up about pronouns in Transformers: Earthspark, and the world groaned back then, too.
Can this script get any fucking worse? There was still 30 minutes to go…
Now that this is a BBC/Disney+ co-production, there’s a lot more money for special FX, but sadly, only five pence to go on the script. Certainly no money went on ideas, since when we got a shoot-out, it was nothing we haven’t seen before. RTD isn’t interested in sci-fi. And for reasons I couldn’t begin to figure out, there’s so little going on that Tennant has time to waste pretending he’s a court judge in order to get through the next bit of plot exposition.
Once again, Davies has proved he’s more interested in wokeness than anything else, and I haven’t even mentioned all the ticked boxes, so that’s your homework, to figure out more.
As for Bernard Cribbins, he’s not dead in this, just resting, in sheltered accommodation. I do hope we don’t get a CGI recreation of Wilf.
And as fine as Ruth Madeley is as an actress, I doubt very much that even a steelworks building is wheelchair-friendly. In so-called Great Britain, not even a corner shop can often manage to eradicate a single step to enter its establishment(!)
As for whatever caused the big hoo-hah, it took about five minutes to press a ‘big red button’ and undo it all.
And to cap it all, a Doctor Who episode is, once again, directed by Rachel Talalay, and I can never forgive her for how bad she made Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.
Oh, and to cap it all further, the solution to Donna shouting “binary”, was in how her daughter declares herself as “non-binary”? Along with pronouns, that’s all part of a concept which came from the U.S. in the last few years, and for RTD to adopt it and twist his script around was just ridiculous. Even Rose criticises Tennant’s Doctor as not understanding the situation, because he’s a “male-presenting Time Lord”.
It’s fine for people to be what they want to be, except for Russell T Davies to assume the pronouns of serious/script/writer.
Although I haven’t seen Game Of Thrones, I heard complaints about how a lot of people would like the last season to be remade because it was bad.I also felt the same with the last season of Top Boy, on Netflix. Now, add this episode of Doctor Who to the list, because whoever’s in charge is clearly taking the fucking piss.
In fact, thinking about this further, the next day, I think it’s just going to confuse confused kids even more. Kids don’t know what they want at the best of times. When I was young, I would’ve identified as Buck Rogers!
Doctor Who continues next week with Wild Blue Yonder. You can watch The Star Beast on the BBC iPlayer.
You can pre-order The Season 14 Specials Steelbook on Blu-ray, ahead of its release on December 18th.
There’s are also available in regular Blu-ray and DVD, on the same date.
Director: Rachel Talalay
Producer: Phil Collinson
Writer: Russell T Davies
Story: Pat Mills, Dave Gibbons
Music: Murray Gold
Cast:
The Doctor: David Tennant
Donna Noble: Catherine Tate
Rose Noble: Yasmin Finney
Shaun Temple: Karl Collins
Sylvia Noble: Jacqueline King
Melanie Bush: Bonnie Langford
Shirley Anne Bingham: Ruth Madeley
The Meep (voice): Miriam Margolyes
Kate Stewart: Jemma Redgrave
Wilfred Mott: Bernard Cribbins
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.