*It’s right in the title: spoilers ahead.*
Okay—wow, wow, wow! We have the Christmas special next week, bringing us the Fifteenth Doctor’s first full episode, but while we wait, I want to unpack more about the three 60th anniversary specials we just finished, getting into details I avoided earlier for the sake of spoilers. I originally planned to touch on the first two and spend most of the post talking about the third special, but it turns out I wanted to geek out a lot more than that! So I’m giving each one a separate post, starting today with “The Star Beast” and continuing with the others after the Christmas special.
The resounding theme of these specials is, “David Tennant and Catherine Tate, holy crap!”, and that starts here. The whole episode, everyone is dancing around the issue of the Doctor and aliens, because Donna will die if she remembers her time as a companion. And Donna without those memories can be her old distracted self, but she’s never been dumb; she knows something is shifty here and it doesn’t make sense. When the Doctor boards the Meep’s ship to try and stop the Meep from destroying London during takeoff, Donna realizes she has to help him, even if she still doesn’t fully know why.
Just, the feels! The Doctor pleading with Donna to go and her refusing. The Doctor’s face when he realizes that the only way he can stop the Meep is by unearthing Donna’s buried Doctor-Donna memories, and her insisting that he do it, knowing she’ll die. “It’s not just [my daughter] Rose,” she tells him. “It’s nine million people. Who cares about me?” The Doctor answering, “I do.” Tears—flood of tears!
And then we get the Doctor-Donna back, the two of them working in tandem, and it’s beautiful. Is it a bit of a cheat that RTD is able to do all this without Donna actually dying? Maybe, but shut up, no it’s not! Apart from the fact that it’s Donna Noble and he’d better not dare, the reason he comes up with does have a kind of logic to it. I like the idea that, when Donna had a child, she passed some of her power to Rose, and when the Doctor reawakens her memories, the metacrisis is activated in both of them, allowing them to share the load. But yeah, what follows, with the weirdly gender essentialist remark that a “male-presenting Time Lord” could never understand their subsequent choice to “just let go” of the power in order to survive, lays it on pretty thick.
Ultimately, though, I don’t care, because it’s the Doctor and Donna Noble in the TARDIS! I love the Doctor’s absolute joy as he explores the new console room, Donna pretending to be unimpressed, and then the two of them jumping around gleefully together. This is something my heart needed.
This episode is also the start of showing us how Fourteen is a Doctor who says the important things. As an extremely long-lived person who mostly has ephemeral humans for companions, the Doctor is understandably protective of their heart and doesn’t always come out with their feelings. This can be especially true with their companions—there’s no doubt that the Doctor loves them, but they’re often cautious about how they express that. Fourteen, however, is more up front and vulnerable in that regard. And we don’t just see it when he tells Donna that he cares about her and tries to make her understand how important she is, in the heat of the moment when it’s literally life-and-death. We also have the moment in the TARDIS at the end when the Doctor says, “I really do remember, though. Every second with you. I’m so glad you’re back, ‘cause it killed me, Donna. It killed me, it killed me, it killed me.” Okay, first of all, heart on the floor. But second, yes! Tell her how much she means to you! It doesn’t matter that he’s looking away when he says it—this is huge for the Doctor, and it’s the start of something important.
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