Previously on Doctor Who…

In the last episode, the Doctor met a little girl named Amy Pond. Then some timey wimey stuff happened, and he encountered her again as a young adult. Then more time travel happened, and he finally recruited her as a companion on the night before her wedding. Of course, she hasn’t exactly told him that she’s getting married yet.

This episode begins with a big ol’ spaceship with the Union Jack painted across the side. Topping off the ship are towers with the names of British counties written across them. Inside one of those towers is a classroom full of children. School is out, and the kids are being judged by some sort of talking carnival booth Smiler thingy.

If you’ve got a better name for these things, tell me.

The Smiler tells the kids things like “well done” and “good girl/boy” before sending them on their way. But one kid seems especially nervous. When he approaches the Smiler, it tells him he got a zero for the day, then its head turns around to switch from a smiling face to an angry one. The boy’s friend, a girl named Mandy, seems especially scared for him. She tells him that he can’t ride the elevators to London with the other kids because he’ll be “sent below.” He gets on an elevator by himself, anyway. It turns out there’s another Smiler booth in the elevator, and it switches from smiles to anger as well. The elevator starts plummeting downward at incredible speeds until it stops on Floor 000. The floor of the elevator then opens to reveal a glowing pit beneath. When the floor fully opens, the little boy falls to his death.

And that’s how this week’s episode of Doctor Who begins. With the death of a child. Start the all new “scary” theme song, Murray. It’s gonna be a cheery year for Doctor Who.

Amy and the Doctor are exactly where they left off in the previous episode. The Doctor is showing Amy that the TARDIS is also a space ship by allowing her to dangle outside in the air bubble surrounding them, as they hover over the big British space ship we were just following. The ship, the Doctor explains, is the Starship UK. Solar flares have made Earth practically unlivable, so every nation on Earth has packed up temporarily and found new homes among the stars. Starship UK is the whole of United Kingdom (with the exception of Scotland, who hate the English so much that they wanted their own ship) crammed onto a big ol’ space vessel.

This scene of the Doctor explaining stuff to Amy is one of the first times we’ll be seeing one of Matt Smith’s all new “doctorisms.” Every actor who played the Doctor had something about their performance that made them unique. David Tennant was hyperactive. Patrick Troughton was nervous. Colin Baker was a dick.

Does the Doctor have to choke a bitch?

In the previous episode, you could tell Matt Smith was channeling David Tennant to smooth the transition from one Doctor to another. In this episode, We get a really good look at the 11th Doctor’s behavior. Right off, you’re going to notice Smith bowing his head and gesturing with his forearms. In fact, you had better get used to the fist-clenched swinging forearms, because he does it a lot.

As they land, the Doctor tells Amy that he has a policy against interfering with the affairs of other peoples and planets. This is, of course, utter bull. Not 5 minutes after telling Amy this, the Doctor runs outside to comfort a crying little girl. It’s Mandy, the friend of the boy who died earlier. Amy follows, and she immediately marvels at the idea of being on a space ship in the distant future. Also, she remembers she’s still wearing her nighty. The Doctor notices that Starship UK is apparently living under a police state. He starts telling Amy to use her eyes to notice her surroundings, but he quickly gets distracted by the sudden need to put a glass of water on the floor.

Even he’s not sure why he did it, because he’s usually thinking of 10,000 things at once. After the water thing, a man in black steps out of the shadows and starts watching the Doctor. He immediately reports it to his superior. His boss leaks the information to a mysterious woman in red who has an entire room filled with glasses of water on the floor.

Pay attention, kids. This MIGHT be important later.

Back to the Doctor and Amy. The Doctor points out the signs of a police state to Amy (and us, the viewers). It involves the sight of Mandy crying, and the fact that everyone who passes by is too scare to comfort her. It turns out the Doctor managed to steal Mandy’s ID card when he bumped into her, and he tells Amy to follow her to figure out what’s wrong. Amy doesn’t want to, but the Doctor uses some psychological mojo to convince Amy to do it anyway. He also sees that everyone seems to be scared of the Smilers in the booths scattered all over the place. Amy goes off to investigate Mandy, and the Doctor runs off to look for something else.

Mandy notices Amy following her home, and confronts our Scottish heroine. However, the two notice a hole in the floor that’s been closed off and covered by a tent. Not one to follow the rules, Amy checks out what’s hidden under the tent. It’s a big ol’ tentacle claw thingy that nearly kills her. A nearby Smiler in a booth watches this, then turns its head to reveal a really pissed off face. When Amy escapes the tentacle claw thingy, she’s cornered by a bunch of men in black who knock her out with gas and take her away.

Meanwhile, the Doctor checks the lower decks and the engine rooms. There, he runs into our mysterious woman in a red hood who’s wearing a mask. Her name is Liz 10. She and the Doctor come to understand that there doesn’t seem to be an engine humming on Starship UK. If there was an engine going, the glasses of water would be shaking like that one scene in Jurassic Park. Instead, the water doesn’t move. The power couplings in the engine are also disconnected. Something strange is definitely going on with that ship.

If you haven’t figured out the truth yet, then it’s coming. If you’ve already figured it out, then prepare to soldier through the rest of the episode with every character being completely clueless.

Anyway, Liz 10 hands the Doctor a gizmo so he can track down Amy, then disappears into the mist.

Amy wakes up in what is apparently a voting booth. The booth identifies Amy by Amelia Jessica Pond, age 1306 (get it? Because she was born in the late 20th century, but she’s in the future. It… it identified her age by the day she was… nevermind). Anyway, a video comes on. Amy is told that she is about to be explained the dark truth about Starship UK. She can press the “Protest” button (which will carry consequences) or she can press the “Forget” button (which will allow her to forget the horrible truth and go about her life as normal). The video starts up, but then we quickly cut to Amy with her hand on the “Forget” button– visibly crying. Whatever she learned, it was so terrible that she’d rather forget it than protest it. She left a recording for herself, warning that she and the Doctor have to get away from that ship and stop investigating.

The Doctor finds Amy in the voting booth, with Mandy standing nearby. Mandy explains that everyone is allowed to watch the video and vote on their 16th birthday, then once every 5 years after that. Thing is, everyone chooses to forget instead of protest. And for those 5 years between voting days, everyone has to walk around with the burden of knowing that they chose to forget a terrible secret that’s allowing them to live under a totalitarian government. They can protest the police state with a vote, but every election day they choose not to. They choose to live in a police state, and then choose to forget why. That, ladies and gentlemen, is one psychologically fucked up society.

During this scene, the Doctor reveals to Amy that he’s a Time Lord, not a human. He also says that he’s the last. The Doctor’s explanation isn’t what you’d expect, though. Rose and Martha got the ever so dramatic, “There was a war. A Time War. The Last Great Time War. My people fought a race known as the Daleks, etc. etc. We lost, etc.” The 11th Doctor apparently has less of a flare for the dramatic. He simply explains in regard to there being other Time Lords, “There were, but there aren’t– Just me now. Long story, it was a bad day, bad stuff happened. And you know what, I’d love to forget it all, every last bit of it, but I don’t. Not ever.” Smith delivers the line in a manner that suggests the Doctor is simply tired of explaining that he’s the last of his kind, and there’s sadness to it that seems to say, “I don’t want to talk about it right now.” So while the Time War seemed to be this defining moment that drove the 9th and 10th Doctors, the 11th Doctor seems to be moving past that. It was the single most important and terrible thing he’s ever done, so let’s not talk about that just now.

The Doctor wants to see what happens if he presses the “Protest” button, so he does. The floors open up similarly to what happened to the little boy at the beginning of the episode, and the Doctor and Amy plummet to their doom. Outside of the voting booth, Mandy runs into Liz 10, who takes off her mask to reveal…

SOPHIE OKONEDO?! (marry me?)

The Doctor and Amy fall down a chute and drop into what appears to be Starship UK’s rubbish dump. They’re ankle-deep in discarded food waste. Amy notices the floor feels all rubbery, and the Doctor figures out why. They’re standing on a tongue. They’re inside of a huge mouth. Rather than allow themselves to get swallowed, the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to induce nausea in the creature so they’ll be vomited out. Believe it or not, it’s entirely possible to make someone want to throw up with sonic waves. Send the right frequency through a huge set of speakers, and you can make everyone in the room sick. Or give them a headache. Or make them sleepy. But I digress. (with SCIENCE!)

“GERONIMO!”

The Doctor and Amy end up in an over-spill pipe, where they’re attacked by two Smilers that exit their booths. But all is not lost, because Liz 10 has come to the rescue! And she’s packing heat! Whoever Liz 10 is, she apparently knows who the Doctor is, and she says that she never voted because she’s technically not a British subject. She also knows that the Doctor was Henry XII’s drinking buddy, was knighted and exiled by Queen Victoria on the same day, drank tea with Elizabeth II, and deflowered Elizabeth I. In case you haven’t caught on yet, “Liz 10″ knows about the Doctor’s exploits with the royal family because her name is short for Elizabeth X.

Queenie’s got a gun.

Liz takes everyone back to her palace so they can get cleaned up. Liz explains that her government has been keeping secrets from her throughout her 10 years on the throne. Oh, and Liz is 50 years old. They’ve slowed her body clock to keep her alive longer.

The government has noticed that Liz has been investigating on her own, so they initiate a protocol to bring her to the Tower of London to explain. They notice children walking around the Tower. It turns out while all protestors and stupid children are flushed down to be eaten by the creature under the UK, the creature refuses to eat the children. Yes, that means the little boy who was sent below at the beginning of the episode made it out alive.

The illegal child labor by use of the surviving kids, by the way, will not be resolved by episode’s end.

The Doctor quickly puts 2 + 2 together, and shows Liz, Amy, and Mandy that the creature below Starship UK is what’s driving them along. There are no engines because they hoisted the whole of Britain (except for Scotland) onto the back of giant star whale. And they’re torturing an exposed part of the star whale’s brain to keep it moving. The tentacle claw things are appendages that are swinging around in constant pain.

It turns out Liz isn’t 50 years old like she believes. She’s closer to 300. After enslaving and torturing the star whale (which turns out to be the last of its kind), Liz made herself forget. But she also put several protocols in order. If she ever gets close to discovering the truth about what she did, the government men lead her to the Tower of London where she can watch a video and learn the truth. She then gives herself the option to either press a “Forget” button and repeat the cycle all over again, or she can press the “Abdicate” button to release the star whale. But if she releases the star whale, the whale will shrug off the Starship UK and kill everyone out of revenge.

And this is why Amy wanted to forget and leave the ship earlier. The Doctor now has to make a choice: allow the last of the star whales to be tortured so millions of humans may live, or let the humans of the UK die so that the star whale can go free. The Doctor gets upset at Amy for trying to stop him from making that decision on his own. He then gets upset at Liz and the British government for torturing the star whale. In short, the Doctor is pissed off.

The Doctor comes to the only conclusion he can: He’s going to lobotomize the star whale to free it of its pain. It’ll be functionally dead, but it’ll be painless and the people aboard Starship UK will still live. When Amy and Liz try to think of alternative solutions, the Doctor snaps at them.

And once again, I will compare Smith’s performance to David Tennant’s. Look, Smith is on his first few episodes. I’ll stop drawing the comparisons in an episode or two, I swear. Whenever Tennant’s Doctor was upset, he was utterly shocked and enraged. Go back and watch any of his episodes where he got mad at someone. It was uncontrolled fury. Smith’s Doctor seems more hurt than enraged. Tennant’s Doctor was always surprised to see someone mess up. Even Eccleston’s Doctor was never surprised to see the human race mess up, and had a fatherly way of making people feel small and embarrassed for their faults. Smith’s Doctor is disappointed and hurt. It’s like he expected better of everyone. Smith draws a lot of his performance from past incarnations of the Doctor, but there’s a lot in there that feels unique and all his own. If he keeps this up, he’s going to be a great Doctor.

But then Amy notices something. One of the star whale’s claws rises up from below and allows Mandy to pet it. No matter how badly the star whale is tortured, it never attacks the children. Even when they feed children to it, it never eats them. Amy notices an amazing parallel between the star whale and the Doctor. They’re both the last of their species, very old, and very kind to children. Amy grabs Liz by the hand and forces her to hit the “Abdicate” button. The star whale is set free, but it doesn’t shrug off Starship UK to kill them because it would never hurt the children aboard. Despite being tortured for years, the star whale decides to take them to their destination faster because it just isn’t that bitter or angry.

And thus Amy Pond saves the day. Amy and the Doctor bond over this. She stopped him from making a big mistake, all because she’s quickly learning to understand him. They even hug it out. If there’s a part of you that can be moved by emotional moments in a TV show, then this is the scene that’ll get you going.

So on their way back to the TARDIS, Amy almost tells the Doctor that she’s getting married tomorrow morning, but she gets distracted when a phone starts to ring on the TARDIS console. It’s Winston Churchill. Yes, that Winston Churchill. And there’s a silhouette of a Dalek in his office. Oooo, tune in next week, kids.

Oh, and there’s a crack on Starship UK shaped exactly like the one that was on Amy’s bedroom wall.

Dun DUN DUUUUNNNN!

And there we are. If this episode feels kinda short while watching it, it’s because this is the first episode of a normal length since “The Stolen Earth” in 2008. The 2008 finale, 2008 Christmas special, 2009 specials, and last week’s premier were all extra long episodes. It feels strange going back to normal. Special after special, and this is the first episode that’s “just another episode” we’ve had in 2 years. Of course, this wasn’t a bad episode. “The Beast Below,” along with “The Eleventh Hour” set the tone for this series. Everything feels dark and eerie, but it’s not trying too hard to scare us. There were a lot of things about this episode that could’ve felt overblown, but there was just enough restraint shown by the writer, actors, and director. The Doctor revealing that he’s the last of his kind, Liz 10’s real name, the revelation that the bad guys were working for our heroic queen the whole time– none of it is overdramatized or used to shock us. It’s revealed, and the story moves on. What this episode instead tries to do is get us emotionally involved with the characters. And it works. I’m enjoying it, at least. Doctor Who hasn’t felt this crispy and new to me since 2005.