I’m sure Russell won’t try and annoy the perpetually online mob in his first episode back on the twilight of the 60th anniversary. Oh no, I’m forgetting who we’re talking about; the creator of Queer as Folk and It’s a Sin. The anniversary specials have begun as we head towards the “Wild Blue Yonder,” but first we need to talk about “The Star Beast.” This episode was directed by the wonderful Rachel Talalay, who did the fantastic “Heaven Sent” and “Twice Upon a Time.” Of course written by Russell T Davies in his return to the role as showrunner, adapting the work of Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons.

Bringing to life the furry little critter of The Meep (as voiced by Miriam Margolyes), “The Star Beast” is a wonderful course correction for the show. I won’t bring him up too much, but you have writing that has jokes, emotion, and some deftness that the past several years have been missing. I loved Jodie (and I should), I have a figure of her behind me in my office, but the writing for her Doctor was very much “They’ll see you for who you really are.” Russell’s writing here took some steps that a less skilled writer, (anyone really) would dare not take.

There are some things I’ll have to be very careful about how I phrase them here simply because while I don’t agree with those screaming about LGBTQ+ inclusion and Ruth Madley’s Shirley Bingham, they stumble into something and use it to attack people. I’ll simply say it, the line about “male presenting” is the clunkiest way of getting the point across. I’ve seen it labeled as sexism in the direction of men with the hatred you expect from Twitter, and I think that explains just as poorly the issue with it. There is very little to complain about, but this is one of them.

I’m not even going to go beat for beat on the episode, because that first 5-minutes post-credits is very Russell T Davies. There is breakneck pacing with lots of jokes, and the plot is already miles ahead. That said, aside from the male presenting line which is being held aloft by idiots for the wrong reasons, the first minute before the credits wasn’t great. Having David Tennant standing in front of a green screen expositing 15 years of the story felt like, “those in the back, listen up.” I understand why, 15 years is a long time, but to say it was great would be wrong.

It felt clumsy. While there is deftness, cleverness, and great stuff done throughout “The Star Beast,” there is something to it that just felt like it needed to be done but no one wanted to do it. Summing up Donna’s story and the last 15 years of Doctor Who as we’ve seen it is a task I wouldn’t wish upon anyone, especially a lesser writer than Russell. While there are bits here and there that I described to myself while watching as “a lot of catch-up for a show in a new era,” this magic man 4th wall-breaking did it arguably a little too much.

“Grandmaster of the knowledge;” the reason I don’t want to go beat for beat with a Russell story is that it is quite literally impossible to give all the details. We get the Hallmark/Rom-Com lifting stacked boxes to help, we get a joke about the psychic paper not being caught up yet, Nerys, Temple-Noble, Noble-Temple, and Allons-y(!), there is just a punchline or beat every few seconds moving us forward. It is brilliant writing, and difficult to talk about in detail.

Shall we get to the broad strokes? TARDIS lands next to Donna, The Doctor meets Donna, Rose, and Shaun, and a spaceship “crashes.” Unit investigates the crash and an escape pod lands near the Noble-Temple house. That’s all the set-up you need going in, no Chekov’s water or anything, but we’ll get to the new screwdriver in a second. Though it would be hard to ignore that this isn’t Who’s first time to Uskmouth Power Station, as it was Roger Lloyd-Pack’s Cyberman factory in “The Age of Steel” 2-parter, the kind of crap “The Doctor, the widow and the Wardrobe,” but most recently, “Into the Dalek” and the fun “Time Heist.”

The reason I bring that up is that we get one of our first discussions about inclusion and online cage rattling: Shirley Bingham is in a wheelchair simply because actor Ruth Madley is a wheelchair user. You’ll see it a lot in writing: you’ll have these characters with disabilities and it is rare that is used as a plot device for the character’s benefit. The line after the UNIT soldier apologized for the stairs, “Don’t make me the problem, just get in there” is a line I think a lot of people want to say. Disabilities aren’t a problem unless you focus on them and make them one.

Though this skips the new feature of the screwdriver, it’s video game-y with creating a screen and eventually creating a bullet-proof shield. I don’t have a problem with the new screwdriver, yet. I think something else could have been done for the shields, as that scene at the house broke the flow. It felt like the loading sections of a game so we could quite literally get to level 2. The screen thing (I think) is a solution to a problem we had between 10 and 11, where they’d look at the screwdriver and have to tell us what it said, now it can be a blend.

Before I get to The Meep (previously Beep the Meep), I think we need to talk about that scene in the kitchen as that’s easily something that needed to be done on TV like this long enough ago. “I mean, is it sexist? Never said it to him when he was… Oh. Oh, sorry,” when we get those scenes on trans characters it is usually done with kid gloves or just a little bit of “I’ll write something horrible because it gets a bigger response.” That line from Sylvia talking about Rose’s transition and how a grandparent can be clumsy sometimes is the way to do it with love and compassion.

It was a slip-up for the character, something a lot of people do because as much as it is a transition, there is also a tiny bit of work to stop yourself as the friend, family member, or co-worker. Some people don’t do it, others try, and sometimes those trying to do the right thing slip up. We see in a scene before and in the lines after. You have the kids from school shouting at Rose “Give us a kiss Jason,” and you have Donna’s admission that sometimes she’ll slip up: Those are the opposite ends.

Not to mention Donna is like some mothers of LGBTQ+ kids I’ve met, ready to drop-kick a child and their mother for the kid attacking her son, daughter, or non-binary child. To say Tennant or Tate missed a beat, you’d have to be somewhere beyond blind as the characters have to have evolved a little over the 15-ish years/however many it has been in the show. Though I must say that I think despite liking Rose, I think there is something about her here that hasn’t fully landed yet.

I’ve seen some argue that her non-binaryness shouldn’t really be used for an analog of space magic, or at least there is something in there that uses her as a plot device rather than a character. There is something to it of sorts, especially as we get to the “male presenting” line, but I think it is just how she’s shown in the plot so far. Spoiler, she’s part of the big ending to the Doctor-Donna story, that’s apparent fairly early on. I think it is just how much she’s central to the plot up to that point I have an “issue” with.

Rose is the one that finds The Meep (told you I’d circle back), puts The Meep in the shed with all the stuffed creatures she’s sending to Dubai, and we get the “WHAT THE HELL?” from the trailer. I love Miriam Margolyes. She is just a beautifully self-labeled “elderly lesbian” who doesn’t care but does wonderful work. It is hard to say there is anything wrong with her performance as it hearkens back to some older episodes as well as the magazine which the episode is adapted from. However, some seem to have forgotten or don’t want to accept that Doctor Who is a bit camp at times.

We’ll get to NPH in the coming weeks, but I think the reason some have taken a visceral reaction to the camp alongside the serious is that there are bits that are diametrically opposed. One minute you have The Doctor asking The Meep what The Meep’s pronouns are (the definite article) and the next minute you have the slow scene of the shields being created while possessed UNIT and the wrath Warriors shoot up Donna’s house. Some who are clearly stupid have taken The Doctor acknowledging the pronoun and definite article thing as “gender politics” despite the fact they themselves will say “The Doctor” when they say the character is a man.

I’d be negligent to ignore the scene about Wilf, mostly because I’ve cried three times about it already. Four if we’re counting when I went back to watch the scene with the gun from “The End of Time – Part Two.” Again, much like the conversation with Sylvia and Donna, it is punctured with a joke and some detail about Kate looking after Wilf. It’s just a brilliant and simple bit of writing that for once gives us a chance to have a good ending to a good character. I know Bernard filmed a bit for an episode, but hopefully it involves being looked after by Kate.

Shall we get to the ending? The Meep isn’t as cute and innocent as we’re supposed to think: Shirley’s wheelchair has weapons, the family are told to escape, and we get Donna realizing and becoming The Doctor-Donna again. This is where we get the Russell T Davies special tool kit of storytelling: characters separated by glass, Tennant in his glass cage of emotions, and lots of words you don’t understand because it is sci-fi gibberish. Typical but lovely stuff getting us to have that final moment with The Doctor-Donna before she dies.

Well!… “Binary, binary, binary,” is either Russell playing a long game or he’s jammy and used it as a tool so Rose could take that Doctor-y-ness out of Donna. I think it is difficult to write a sci-fi story and a story with a central trans character, and not have the two intertwined, especially when you have a message of “you can just be kind to people, whether they are binary or not.” That said it is too easy to say that it was just done because she’s trans. There is a whole minefield here that a lot of people are either outting themselves on or stumbling through.

Where a lot of “The Star Beast” is clever and navigates these issues well early on, the ending is like many of Russell’s stories, a big red button of a solution. However, I think the issue I have is that it isn’t really a solution to the episode, as there are about 5-10 minutes of setup for special 2. I’d have maybe liked the resolution to be a bit longer. Give us something stronger rather than that scene of The Avengers planning their trip to the Shawarma place. Those last few moments were very Scooby-doo, setting up for The Meep’s return, then the final few moments of a Marvel film.

That isn’t a bad thing, not entirely anyway, but it does leave us lost in finding a hard-end to a story here. Maybe it will make a lot more sense when the specials are done, but that’s the thing about “The Star Beast,” “Wild Blue Yonder,” and “The Giggle,” it isn’t something we’re watching in a big bundle, it is over three weeks. If there is no satisfying ending, then we’re left with a week asking questions. Questions aren’t a bad thing, but not having a solid “this was the end of X” is a bit crap.

As I said, we’ve practically finished The Doctor-Donna story from “Journey’s End,” with that male presenting line. The point it was trying to make was fine, it is just how it came across. It was supposed to lift a group of people up, but the way it is done is by punching another group down. That isn’t progression. The rest of “The Star Beast” is progressive or as idiots who never understood Doctor Who call it, “Woke,” but this wasn’t progression it was the quick and easy line that got the desired solution.

If I’m going to ding Chibnall on the chin for quick and easy lines, I’m going to have a go at Russell too, no matter how many times I tell him I love him. It didn’t need to be a line about “men can’t let things go” or need to be tied back to Rose and her being trans-fem. It just needed to be a slightly different line that wasn’t pushing someone down for who they are. The episode and show are mostly about “it is okay to be who you are,” that clumsy line didn’t do that and now it is being used to attack.

This is where I’m saying the issue comes in when talking about this, as the conclusion. It is an episode written by a gay man and a line said by a trans woman. The people who are using this to attack the LGBTQ+ community aren’t doing it because “it’s sexist,” they are doing it because of who wrote it and who said it. It isn’t just being used to attack the show either, it is being used to attack the whole community and that’s where I have the issue with it. It was an easy line, but was it the right line?

Despite having minor issues with “The Star Beast” and one major one in that portion of writing, I think it is, for lack of a better term, the course correction we needed after Chibnall. It is unlikely to happen, but I want to see Russell’s writing for Jodie sometime down the line, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves. It was a wonderful episode that had hints of whimsy and wonder hand-in-hand with the danger and mischievous villain twirling fur in The Meep’s fingers.

Ultimately, I loved “The Star Beast” for not only returning characters I’ve known for longer than I’ve known some people. Some are going to argue it was bad and use not only the progressiveness of the episode but the undoubtedly lower TV ratings to attack it, forgetting that TV viewership has changed in the last 10-15 years. From Jacqueline King to Miriam Margolyes, Yasmin Finney, and Catherine Tate to David Tennant, no one missed a step either returning or joining the cast. Grievances aside there is something wonderful about saying that “Doctor Who is back!”

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Doctor Who "The Star Beast"

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Such a fast pacing before it is broken up.
• The Meep.
• Russell's grab-bag of tricks is refreshing.
• No one missed a beat.

Cons

• "Male presenting..." was clumsy.
• The new screwdriver feature seems a touch overpowered.