|
Original Transmission
Cast The Doctor Matt Smith
Crew Written by Steven Moffat
Associate Designer James North
Plot outline from Wikipedia The episode opens with the view of the top of a spaceship on which is a Manhattan-style city full of skyscrapers which bear the names of the counties of England, such as Surrey", "Kent", and "Devon". We then see the inside of a schoolroom where cildren are given various marks by a motionless enamel-painted head (a smiler) in a fairground booth. The last child to recieve a mark is Timmy, who receives a zero. On giving this information, the head rotates to show an angry expression on its reverse. Timmy is reminded by another pupil (possibly his sister) called Mandy that the zero mark means he can not board the London Underground-style lift the other children use to get home, and must instead walk back to the London floor. Timmy protests and goes to enter the lift anyway, but is blocked by a hooded man. However, once the door of the lift carrying the other children closes, he enters an adjacent lift instead, which is empty. A screen in the lift shows an image of another girl who reads a poem that concludes "The man above might say hello, expect no love from the Beast Below!", while another smiler turns its head to show an angry expression. The floor then rolls back and Timmy is dispensed to what is apparently a fiery pit below.
We then see the Doctor showing Amy the wonders of the Universe - firstly by proving to her that they are travelling in space by holding her by the ankle from the door of the TARDIS as her hair billows in the gravity-free space. When they get inside the spaceship, the Doctor explains that he has extended the air shell of the TARDIS. While travelling, they see a spaceship below, a colony ship from the Planet Earth which has been devastated by solar flares. The ship is said to contain the remnants of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, although it later transpires that Scotland is excluded from the ship as the Scottish people have chosen to take their own ship. Before leaving the TARDIS, the Doctor explains to Amy that he never intervenes in the affairs of people they visit (a statement of intent, rather than an accurate representation of what he does). Amy likens this to naturalists and crew filming a wildlife documentary, but as she relates this simile to the Doctor, while viewing the scanner screen, she sees him enter the picture and start to talk to Mandy, who is quietly sobbing, presumably because of the loss of Timmy. Amy leaves the TARDIS and joins the Doctor. The Doctor's deductive powers come into play as he wonders why Mandy is crying, and why nobody seems to notice or care. He also borrows a glass of water from some diners at a pavement cafe and places it on the floor. Unbeknown to Amy and the viewer at the time, he does so to detect the vibrations he would expect to see from the ship's engine. There are none.
He then sets Amy the task of talking to Mandy and asking her why everybody is afraid of the things in the booths (the smilers). The Doctor says that while she does that he will do what he always does: "Stay out of trouble...badly". Noting his earlier insistence that they do not interfere with events, Amy observes that that rule seems not to apply if a child is crying. Although Amy starts a conversation with the girl, this takes a different turn when they discover a locked workman's tent marked 'keep out' blocking their way. Despite Mandy's protestations, Amy unpicks the lock with a hairpin and enters while a smiler watches and rotates its head from the benign to the malevolent expressions. Amy gets into the tent to be confronted by what appears to be a monster's tentacle. She flees this only to be confronted by four more dark, hooded figures. One sprays her with a gas from a ring on his finger, and she falls unconscious. The Doctor, while investigating why the ship he is on seems to have
no engine, meets a mysterious woman who reveals herself to be Liz10,
who wears a mask. She seems to be conducting similar investigations
to the Doctor, though confusingly was made aware of the Doctor's presence
in the first place by a mysterious man seemingly linked to the Amy, meanwhile, regains consciousness in small room which is revealed to be a voting booth. A machine with TV screens scans Amy, identifies her and reveals her age to be 1,306 years old and her marital status to be "unknown". The first piece of information amuses Amy and the second unsettles her, as she was due to get married the day after the Doctor collected her from Earth.
The screen she is watching then shows a man in a smart suit who tells her that she will now be shown the truth of the spaceship's travels, and afterwards she will be faced with a choice of whether to "Forget" everything she's learned in the booth, or to "Protest", which might have terrible consequences for everyone on board. She sees the film, which shows an extremely fast succession of subliminal images, suggesting a huge inflow of information into Amy's mind. After the film, Amy quickly chooses to "Forget". An image of Amy herself then appears on the screen, telling herself to send the Doctor back and stop him investigating anything. The Doctor comes into the room and deduces that a machine in the lamp above her head has made her forget everything she learned in the last twenty minutes. The machine then tries to scan the Doctor but is not able to because, he suspects, it knows he is not human. This is how Amy finds out the Doctor is not human, and how he also tells her he is a Time Lord and that there are no other Time Lords because there was a 'bad day' (presumably referring to events in The End of Time). After tinkering with the machine to no avail, the Doctor presses the 'Protest' button, which causes the door to shut and the floor to roll back, sending him and Amy hurtling down a chute to the same red abyss the boy Timmy fell into at the start of the story. They land in some red liquid, apparently containing food refuse. The Doctor tells Amy that this is the tongue of a large beast, presumably anyone who chooses to protest is eaten by the beast. He then uses his Sonic Screwdriver to make the owner of the tongue vomit the Doctor and Amy out. As they are thrown out of the beast's mouth with the vomit, the Doctor cries 'Geronimo' while Amy screams. They land into a sort of pipe where they are confronted with a door and another "Forget" switch. Presumably if they press the switch they will forget what they have just seen and be readmitted into the main part of the ship. On refusing to press the switch, two watching Smilers not only rotate their heads to show their angry face, but also open the door of the booths and to the astonishment of the Doctor and Amy, stand up and start to chase them. They are rescued by Liz10, who has followed the Doctor using the device she gave him earlier, and who has a gun capable of temporarily disabling the smilers.
Liz10 reveals herself to be Queen Elizabeth the Tenth of the United Kingdom. The Doctor deduces that the creature who owns the tongue is sending out roots, like the tentacle that Amy discovered in the workman's tent. It is initially suggested the creature has infested the ship and is a threat. Liz10, who has the girl Mandy with her, explains that she has been investigating the creature for ten years, since she came to the throne aged forty (she says she looks younger than her fifty years because they "slowed her body clock"), because she believes her government are conspiring against her, and feeding her subjects to the beast. She explains that while investigating she wears the mask to hide her identity. The Doctor notes the mask has been made to fit her perfectly so it stays on by itself. The mysterious man is made aware that the Queen is close to uncovering the creature conspiracy, and he tells a hooded man to start a pre-agreed protocol. The Doctor, Amy, Liz10 and Mandy are then captured by hooded figures. When the Queen protests the men's faces rotate to reveal them to be half-human and half-smilers. They are taken to the Tower of London in the bowels of the ship where Liz10 meets the mysterious man, who is called Hawthorne, and who seems to be a senior member of the government. It is discovered that the ship has no engine because a star whale is providing its power and propulsion, goaded by a ray penetrating its brain and hurting the creature. The Doctor and Liz10 are outraged at the cruelty being unleashed onto the star whale, with the latter demanding it be set free. Hawthorne insists he is simply obeying orders from a higher authority, implying Liz10 herself is that higher authority. He also reveals that while the creature will eat adults sent falling into its mouth, it will never hurt children. The Doctor then deduces that Liz10 has actually been Queen for hundreds of years (and not ten as she said), but has chosen to forget her past years of rule whenever she discovers the truth about the star whale. He has deduced this because the Queen's mask is hundreds of years old, yet was clearly made specifically for Liz10. A video of Liz10 is then played confirming this to be true. In it, she explains how the British people faced destruction when Planet Earth was devastated by solar flares, and that the British children cried. Then the star whale - thought to be the last such creature in the universe - appeared like a "miracle", and they captured it and used it to power their space ship. Liz10 is then presented with two buttons, but instead of "Protest" the second button says "Abdicate". Pressing that button would release the star whale and destroy the ship and all who are on board.
The Doctor, after allowing the humans present to hear the star whale's screams of pain by using his sonic screwdriver, then takes control and tells the assembled people that he has no choice but to kill the conscious functions of the creature in order to avoid its feeling pain and to avoid killing the humans. He says this is a horrible solution, but better than killing all the humans on board or allowing the star whale to continue to feel horrific pain. He expresses anger with all the humans who allowed this to happen, and with righteous indignation tells Amy off for pressing the 'Forget' button, even though she probably did so to prevent him from having to make such a difficult decision regarding the fate of the whale and humanity. He says he plans to take Amy home. But as the Doctor sets up the large shot of power to make the space whale brain dead, Amy remembers the Doctor's encouragement to her in the previous story The Eleventh Hour to 'notice everything' and spots that while the star whale's tentacles attack adults they do not attack children, rather the tentacles caress and play with them. She then realises the star whale is in fact benevolent, and has been voluntarily paddling the ship for the humans. She presses the 'Abdicate' button and the stimulus to the brain of the creature stops. However, the creature continues to power the ship and Hawthorne observes that they have, in fact, increased speed. Explaining her deduction, Amy says that "if you are very old and the last of your kind", like the star whale (although she is looking at the Doctor as she says this), that "you couldn't just stand there and watch the children cry". The Doctor and Amy are reconciled, and disappear without saying goodbye and hurry back to the TARDIS. Amy is about to reveal to the Doctor that she is engaged to be married when the phone in the TARDIS rings, and it is the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who is in a spot of bother. We see the shadow of a Dalek in front of the PM. The Doctor and Amy set off to help Churchill. As the programme ends, the outer hull of Starship UK is shown to have a crack shaped the same as Amy's wall in the preceding episode.
Analysis by Cuisle My first thought was that this could have been the much discussed
Neil Gaiman episode. The set encompassing a kind of microcosm of ‘classic’
London was very reminiscent of Neverwhere. Add in mysterious hooded
people flitting about the place and the homage is complete. In the
end, though, a completely different fantasy writer is homaged with
the star whale carrying the UK on its back. The last scene of the
creature swimming through space had to put everyone immediately in
mind of Terry Pratchett’s discworld, floating through space
on the back of four giant elephants on the shell of a star turtle. There was a critic in some newspaper blog a week or two back who was hoping that the post-RTD era would see less emotionalism and more science fiction in Doctor Who. Obviously he couldn’t understand how both could be in the same programme. He must have been very disappointed in this episode, because it was all about emotions from the start. The Doctor betrayed his emotions by diving headlong into Mandy’s personal crisis after telling Amy he never got involved in the affairs of others. Amy betrayed hers time and again as she got deeper into the mystery of Starship UK. Finally, The Doctor becomes an emotional minefield as he warns everyone around him, including Amy, that ‘nobody Human has a right to talk to him today’ because humanity has disgusted him so very much. It’s not often that The Doctor gives up on us.
It was a dark story. There were some nasty ideas in it. Feeding the lowest achievers, the Human waste, to the beast below has the same unpleasant aspect to it as giving the lowest achieving children to the 456 in Torchwood: Children of Earth. The difference was that the star whale had compassion. It didn’t eat the children. It wanted to protect them. And like Children of Earth the overwhelming message was that the real monsters were the humans. The government of Starship UK had invented the Smilers and the Winders and instilled fear into the people. The queen, herself, the sharp-shooting Liz 10 had ordered the worst cruelty of all, the torture of the star whale, and then deluded herself year after year, into forgetting she had done it. Interestingly, it isn’t The Doctor who comes up with the solution, but Amy. It is she who realises that the humans have been getting it wrong and show them that the star whale is their protector, not their captive. The Doctor hadn’t thought it through far enough. That’s unusual for him, but not impossible. It’s happened a few times in the past.
Which brings them to the most emotional scene of all, when The Doctor and Amy face each other and realise that they need each other equally. The hug had nothing to do with sexual magnetism. It was about two people being best of friends. That was always the case, of course. The Doctor and all of his companions were friends. But now, more than ever before, he is equal with her. And that’s what this story was about. Those writing in blogs, complaining about the sparseness of the story and how they didn’t get it, probably never will. Don’t worry, guys. Apparently there is a new season of Primeval in the pipeline. And if that’s too complicated, Britain’s Got Talent is coming very soon. That should be simple enough for you. Leave the programmes that require thinking to those with more than a fifteen second memory.
|
 |
 |
