Story 205 - The Beast Below

In which Amy Pond takes her first trip in the TARDIS, and she and the Doctor come upon a vast spacecraft. The Doctor is intrigued and decides to land there. They discover that it is the year 3295, and this vessel contains the entire population of England, who have fled from a devastated Earth in search of a new home. Each county has its own huge residential block on Starship UK, and a number of historic buildings have even been preserved on it. The TARDIS has materialised on Oxford Street in the area designated for the population of London. The Doctor sees a schoolgirl sitting by herself who appears to be upset, and so goes to find out what's troubling her. Her little brother had done badly at school, and has disappeared after being banned from travelling in an elevator with the rest of the class. Unbeknownst to the girl - Mandy - her brother, Timmy, was dropped through the floor of the lift. All the children on Starship UK fear the "beast below", to whom wrongdoers are supposed to be fed. The Doctor is suspicious about a few things. He places a glass of water on the floor and studies it, then he points out a booth containing a smiling mechanical man which no-one ever approaches. He is observed by a man dressed in a black hood, who reports what he has seen to a masked woman nearby.

Amy follows Mandy whilst the Doctor goes off to make his own investigations. She comes upon an area which has been cordoned off, and inside a workman's tent she sees a large barbed tentacle emerging from a hole in the deck. On leaving the tent she is attacked by more of the hooded men and knocked out by gas. She wakes to find herself in a booth where a recorded message plays. She is going to be shown something and at the end she will be asked to vote on whether or not to forget what she sees. She suddenly finds that the message has ended, and she has pressed the "Forget" button. The Doctor meanwhile has checked on the engines and discovered that the vessel does not appear to have any. This is why he placed the glass on the floor - to test that there were no vibrations. Engine equipment is not connected. The masked woman appears and tells him she has also noticed this, and she wants to know why - hoping the Doctor will help her. The woman tells the Doctor that she is called Liz 10, and she will come looking for him after he has investigated further. He is then reunited with Amy. He discovers that the last 20 minutes have been wiped from her memory, but he cannot play the message as the equipment doesn't recognise him as human. The other button which Amy could have selected is marked "Protest" so the Doctor decides to hit this. The floor opens and both plunge down a chute into a massive rubbish heap.

The Doctor realises that they are actually in the mouth of a gigantic creature. To stop themselves from being swallowed, the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to make the creature vomit, and they are flushed into a side chute. Here they see a pair of the mechanical men. They have pleasant smiling faces, but their heads then turn to reveal angry scowls. They emerge from their booths and are about to attack when Liz 10 appears with Mandy. She shoots the men then takes them to safety. Her home proves to be Buckingham Palace and her name refers to her title - Queen Elizabeth the Tenth. She tells the Doctor that she is convinced that her government is keeping a secret from her, and from her subjects. She claims to have been on the throne for ten years, but the Doctor points out that her mask is at least six times older, even though it was tailor made for her. Her own memory has been tampered with. One of the black-hooded men arrives. They are known as Winders. He has come to take them all to see a government official named Hawthorne, who is based at the Tower of London. Liz 10 angrily demands to know what Hawthorne has been doing, but the Doctor has already guessed.

Starship UK has been harnessed to a giant space-travelling creature similar to a terrestrial whale, and it has been providing the motive power to take them across the stars. Part of its brain has been exposed and it is being struck by electrical charges to make it move. Liz 10 was one of the architects of this plan, even though she hated doing it, and allowed her government to wipe her memory of it. Every few years her curiosity gets the better of her and she rediscovers the truth - only to have the memory wiped once again. She has the option to choose "Forget" or "Abdicate". All adult citizens of Starship UK are told about the whale in the voting booths every five years, and have the option to forget or protest against it. If the majority protested, or if Liz 10 chose to abdicate, the whale would be released but the entire spacecraft would be destroyed in the process.
The Doctor is furious at Amy for having learned about this exploitation of an intelligent alien species, then choosing to forget about it. As releasing the creature would destroy the vessel, the Doctor has no option but to give it a lobotomy so that it will no longer feel pain. Mandy is reunited with Timmy who is with some other children. Hawthorne states that the creature never harms children. Amy realises that the whale would never do anything to harm people, so she hits the "Abdicate" button. The whale is freed, but elects to stay where it is and continue to carry the spacecraft. It never needed to be enslaved in the first place, as it only ever wanted to willingly help the humans.
Starship UK continues its voyage through space as the TARDIS departs - the Doctor failing to notice a jagged crack on the hull, shaped like a crooked smile...
The telephone rings and the Doctor has Amy answer it. It is a call from Winston Churchill, asking for help from the Doctor...

The Beast Below was written by Steven Moffat, and was first broadcast on 10th April 2010.
It was preceded by a short sequence known as Meanwhile in the TARDIS 1, which follows directly on from the ending to The Eleventh Hour. It can be found on the Series 5 DVD / Blu-ray boxsets.
This 4 minute item features just the Doctor and Amy in the TARDIS, as she asks him a lot of questions about the ship and about who or what he is. On opening the doors, Amy thinks that the view looks like some special effects, so the Doctor pushes her out to prove it is all real - which is where The Beast Below opens (Amy floating in space outside the TARDIS with the Doctor holding onto her foot).
In the episode itself, Amy learns that the Doctor really is alien when the voting booth refuses to recognise him as human, and he tells her a little about his being a Time Lord.
She has so far failed to tell him about her impending wedding to Rory, and when she gets her personal details on screen in the booth the part about her marital status is recorded as "not known".
There are clear parallels with the second story of the first series - The End of the World. There the Doctor took Rose into the far future for her first trip in the TARDIS, to a time of devastation to the Earth. Both stories even conclude with the image of the Doctor and companion staring out into space through a huge window.

Like many episodes in the Moffat era of the show, children feature prominently. Post opening credits, the story proper opens with Mandy and Timmy at school, and it is through Mandy that the Doctor and Amy are drawn into the mystery of Starship UK. The children also contribute to the resolution of the crisis, as Amy spots the star-whale's lack of hostility towards them.
The idea of a space whale story is not new to Doctor Who. Nor is the notion of a space ark.
There were two stories featuring an ark in space - 1966's The Ark, and 1975's The Ark in Space. Two other stories dealt with a cataclysm engulfing the Earth - 1986's The Mysterious Planet (the first section of Trial of a Time Lord) and 2005's The End of the World.
The Ark is set at the very end of the Earth's period of habitability, when the sun begins to expand, and the 1984 story Frontios shows what happens to one of the colony ships which left the dying planet. The End of the World shows that the planet was stabilised, after evacuation, by the National Trust, and only destroyed once the money had run out to preserve it any longer.
The events behind The Mysterious Planet are set millions of years in the future. Then, the destruction of the surface was caused by the Time Lords moving the planet across space.
The incident which caused Starship UK to be launched seems to be the same one that led to Space-station Nerva being used as The Ark in Space. This obviously changes how that earlier story should be perceived. Nerva wasn't carrying the sole survivors of Earth escaping the solar flares, but some smaller elitist group who did not want to join the nationality-based space arks.

Back in the 1980's attempts were made to produce a story, usually referred to as "Song of the Space Whale" or "Song of the Megaptera", which had been written by 2000 AD scribes Pat Mills and John Ainsworth. It would have been a Fifth Doctor story, designed to introduce the new companion who would become Turlough. He was one of the people, encountered by the Doctor, who lived in a colony which existed inside a giant space whale. Numerous attempts were made to get this story ready for production but it was never made for the TV series. It did appear many years later as a Big Finish "Lost Stories" audio.
The main guest artist for The Beast Below is Sophie Okonedo, who plays the gun-toting Liz 10. She had previously voiced the Doctor's new companion in the ill-fated animated adventures of the alternative Ninth Doctor (Richard E Grant) in Scream of the Shalka. The proposed animated on-line series had the misfortune to be released just as the BBC announced that the series would be returning to the screen in 2005.

Hawthorne is played by Terrence Hardiman, who is best known for the children's drama The Demon Headmaster. Appearing in the closing seconds as a throw forward to the next episode is Ian McNeice, playing Winston Churchill.
As far as the story arc goes, we have the crack appearing across the spacecraft's hull, and Amy is keeping her wedding secret from the Doctor.

Overall, proof that Steven Moffat was fallible. All his stories written for Russell T Davies had been hugely successful with fans and critics alike, garnering a brace of Hugo Awards. The Eleventh Hour had shown that the programme was in safe hands. And then this came along. The Smilers are great visually, but are totally wasted. And no-one likes programmes about kids. Even kids tend to hate programmes about kids. Of all the stories written by Steven Moffat as of 2013's DWM 50th Anniversary poll, this one was second to bottom - beaten only by The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. I gave it 1 out of 10.
Things you might like to know:

• Starship UK is seen to have branches of Magpie Electricals in the 33rd Century - the business first seen in the 1953-set The Idiot's Lantern. This is very good going for a one-man operation whose owner was killed shortly after collaborating with an alien invader.
• Starship UK should strictly be called Starship England, as Amy hears that Scotland launched its own spacecraft. A cut line of dialogue would have stated that every country had its own starship and people could travel between them, until Starship UK closed its borders. 
• In Canada and the USA, on initial broadcast, each episode of Series 5 opened with Amy giving a narration about the series, over clips from the show, for the benefit of new viewers.
• It's never clear how the Smilers can have three faces, when each time their heads turn there is only space for two.
• The little girl who reads the poem about "the beast below" on screen in the elevator is based on the famous BBC TV Test Card.
• There's a continuity error when the screen gives Amy's current age as 1308, when the computer says it's 1306.
• Something else which isn't very clear is how the Doctor and Amy aren't ejected into space when the whale is made to throw up.
• Moffat lifts a Russell T Davies line wholesale when he has the Doctor say: "And with that sentence you just lost the right to even talk to me". The Ninth Doctor said the exact same thing to the female programmer in Bad Wolf.