The Beast Below - The Jones Review

This is a companion piece plain and simple. But it also delivers some very clever exposition and announces a change in style quite nicely. And some creepy villains. And some silliness. And an outmoded sense of responsibility to the giant entity with a co-dependent leech like relationship. Of course here I speak of the Royalty, not the Star Whale.

A companion piece so it's about our friend to the right there. This sets the sensibility of the Amy Pond character, and quite rightly too as the Doctor is well established. There's a big Sophie's Choice moment and while the Doctor is centre stage and taking his moral bows - in comes a new broom and a skewed way to look at things and provide a new outcome. And that is by and large the way to get to the heart of this episode. It's about changing the game, for companions, for the future UK, for the royalty, for the role of a companion as a screamer and of course change the paradigm on the alien relationship. So that works quite well.

This feels like an episode that had to happen so other ones can happen next. It reminds me of Orson Scott Card's - Ender's Game. He wrote that novel ostensibly just so he could write the next one (Speaker for the Dead) and have it work the way it's supposed to and stay in character. Something the short story form would not let him do in the original form. Maybe I'm over thinking this but there's a lot of change in this episode where very little happens at all. The Doctor is shown up by a human's ability to reason. He let's go (or wants to) of the pain of being the 'Last' and the responsibility for that. The people who chose to ignore the torture and suffering to choose to live see another way to do it. This plot could have been delivered in 55 seconds of screen time but slowed down, deliberated and discussed and suddenly you have a philosophy being set for the coming season.

Things are looking up with a preview of the next episode before the old one even comes to a close, with a nice segue into episode 3 and the rotund Ian McNiece as Winston Churchill. Looks enticing, but it's even more evidence that this episode is a companion piece as it gets hungry for the ext episode before the dust settles on the current one.

Lessons learned, excellent and moving on to whatever comes next. And we know what this will be. WW2 Daleks!