After writing his new Doctor's introduction story, and working out the story arc / resolution, Steven Moffat had to get on with writing the intervening "ordinary" episodes that would make up the bulk of the series. Whilst the series opener would introduce new companion Amy Pond, it obviously had to concentrate on the Doctor. The second episode is the one where the focus can be shifted onto the companion, and give the audience an indication of how the pair are going to interact with each other.
In particular Moffat wanted to show the companion resolving the problem, saving the Doctor from making a mistake - her reasoning behind this being her equating the Star Whale with the Doctor.
The post credits scene shows us Amy's first taste of space travel, as well as providing an eye-opening sequence for the audience. It is clearly only moments after Amy has entered the TARDIS at the close of The Eleventh Hour as she's not discovered the wardrobe or popped back home for a change of clothes.
Setting the scene in space also allows for a smooth transition to the main action of the episode as she and the Doctor see the Starship for the first time.
Earlier, the pre-credit sequence has introduced us to the new monster, the Smiler, which has already featured in the 3-D cinema trailer for the forthcoming series.
Moffat has raided childhood fears for some of his monsters, but he also has a thing about building upon a striking image - in this case the sudden change from happy smiling figure to frightful angry one.
With their painted faces, the Smilers look vaguely clownish - always a potential scare factor - as well as ventriloquist dummies, which also freak a lot of people out.
Another visual inspiration is fairground arcade fortune-teller machines, which feature a dummy in a glass booth.
The Winders are simply an extension of the Smilers. Clockwork people need someone to wind them up, and the rotating head image worked for both.
Liz 10 is the latest British monarch to feature in the series, with her original namesake featuring in The Shakespeare Code, Victoria in Tooth and Claw, Richard I in The Crusade, a fake John in The King's Demons, and the second Elizabeth appearing on several occasions, from Silver Nemesis to Voyage of the Damned. Others have been namedropped by the Doctor.
Starship UK is supposed to be the country in miniature, with all the counties represented by tower blocks and with certain landmarks also present - such as Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London. Technically, it ought to be Starship GB, as only English counties are seen. (There's no mention at all of Northern Ireland or Wales on screen). What we do hear is that Scotland has gone its own way - a dig at the Scottish independence movement. What we actually see of the interior of the starship suggests the London-centrism which the BBC has always presented. We have Oxford Street, with all the street furniture associated with the touristy idea of London.
There are also obvious London Underground trappings.
In one of the LU style lifts we see a monitor with a little girl and a blackboard. This is a reference to the old Test Card F which the BBC used to transmit in the days before we had 24/7 telly. It was designed to illustrate colour and geometric patterns which helped engineers test the picture quality. The girl was Carole Hersee, who went on to become a costume designer.
The setting of a space ark abandoning an uninhabitable Earth, is not a new one in science fiction and has featured twice before in Doctor Who, with the destruction of the planet featuring on another three occasions.
Back in 1966 we had The Ark, which is supposedly set in the far future after the Earth is no longer habitable, and we see the planet begin to burn.
1975's The Ark in Space features an entirely different spacecraft, and it is claimed that Earth has only been temporarily rendered uninhabitable due to solar flare activity. The planet survives and is ready to be repopulated, as we see in The Sontaran Experiment.
Frontios presented us with the fate of one of the spacecraft which fled the Earth. This can't be from the solar flare event, as there Nerva was supposed to be the sole repository of Earth's flora and fauna. The Doctor also states quite clearly that they are in the far future - so far that he might be in trouble from the Time Lords for coming this far - so the Frontios vessel has to have come from the final destruction of the planet. It might have been an independent vessel which left not long before the one with the Monoids on board, or perhaps it left because of some other event which occurred between the two Arks.
We know of one of these - the Ravolox incident. At some point in the far future the Time Lords destroyed the vast majority of life on Earth. It may be that some people foresaw this and managed to flee - we don't know the exact circumstances of what the Time Lords did, though it does sound as if it was a sudden event.
Some people might simply have wanted to leave a crowded, polluted planet without needing a cataclysm to give them a push (such as the misguided Operation Golden Age followers).
The planet is definitively destroyed in the aptly titled The End of the World. However, we learn there that the planet was abandoned some time before and the Earth maintained for a long time - suggesting a long gap between the departure of the occupants and the final destruction we see here. This does not fit with what we saw in The Ark.
If Starship UK left before a solar flare type event, and a specific date implies this, then you have to wonder why they didn't want to wait a bit then go home again. Does this also mean that the future of Earth after this event is completely devoid of British people? That dating is Amy's age, which is given at just over 1300 years old - giving us a date of around 3300 AD.
The idea of a space whale is another very old one in Sci-fi. Doctor Who almost delivered one back in the early 1980's, when DWW and 2000AD comic writers Pat Mills and John Wagner tried to get a story about one made. This would have gone for the Jonah and the Whale notion of people surviving in the belly of the beast, and one version of the story - before it was finally abandoned - would have introduced the male companion to replace Adric.
Moffat brought back prequels for many of his stories, released on-line or saved for the DVD box sets. This episode had a TARDIS scene in which Amy accesses information about some of the Doctor's previous companions - concentrating on the female ones. Images of past companions appear.
In terms of the story arc, Amy mentions needing to be back home for her wedding the next day, and we see the crack from her bedroom wall replicated on the starship's hull. We also get a throw-forward to the following week's instalment as the Doctor gets a call from a certain wartime Prime-Minister, and we see the shadow of a well-known denizen of Skaro.
Next time: Winston Churchill vs the Recycling Bin Daleks...
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