Review of The Star Beast
Warning: This review may contain episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Going into this run of 60th Anniversary Specials, it had been a full thirteen months since the last new episode of Doctor Who aired. Such a gap is enough to whet any fan’s appetite, but add in the return of a hugely popular lead actor to the role of the Doctor, a well-regarded but hard-done-by Companion, and the first modern-era showrunner, and you have a recipe for ratings records.

Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2023 BBC

But was the episode really that great? As always, it’s a matter of opinion. But for my money (and yes, this time that’s literal, since I had to overcome my four-year resistance to giving The Mouse any of my money for streaming), there was a lot more in the positive column than the negative. I’m calling it a win.

The biggest element of this special is having a Tennant Doctor and Donna Noble back together. On one hand, that’s great—I adore Donna and was really crossing my fingers they’d finally do right by her after the terrible, awful, no good, very bad way they ended her time on the TARDIS. (More on that later.) On the other hand…

Okay. Time for an unscheduled (though not new) Confession: I’m one of those fans who doesn’t care for the idea of Tennant returning as the Doctor outside of a multi-Doctor scenario. To me it smacks of pandering in a way that bringing back former Companions or creatures or what-have-you does not. I suppose my reaction stems in part from the sense that fans from one of those No One Will Ever Be As Good As My Doctor camps are being appeased, such that future objections to some new “not right” Doctor will be all the louder. “They brought Tennant back; why not My Doctor?”

We don’t know yet why the Doctor’s old face has returned—that’s the story-arc mystery that will presumably be revealed before Ncuti Gatwa finally makes his entrance—so I guess we can’t answer that hypothetical future Entitled Fan’s question. And I continue to reserve judgement on Tennant’s lead actor status until I learn the in-universe reason. (I recently learned that the production reason was that Gatwa’s shooting schedule didn’t allow him to begin in time for the 60th, and so this was the stop-gap. Somehow I’m more willing to accept it all, knowing that.)

In the meantime, this is the Doctor Who that I have been given, and I am grateful for it.

Among the things for which I am grateful is the return of Donna, who is one of my all-time favorite Companions. She is an older, mellower version of the Donna we watched travel with the Doctor—perhaps slightly more like her post-Doctor self than her pre-Doctor self due to the passage of time—but she’s still Donna. She still misses every hint of alien weirdness, still tries to make her fella jealous, and still goes all mama bear on whoever would dare to try to harm what and who she loves.

And oh, does she love her kid. I do, too, for that matter (even though she’s clearly older than fourteen, which is the oldest she could be to fit in with Donna’s timeline). Rose is fantastic, and it’s wonderful to see an explicitly, canonically trans character played by a trans actress. I hope we haven’t seen the last of her.

While I loved Rose and the real struggles both she and her family faced, and I was glad to have her point out that the Doctor was defaulting to masculine pronouns for the Meep, I can’t say the episode was an all-around win in terms of trans and nonbinary representation. That’s because the final resolution of the metacrisis issue at the end of the episode undermined a lot of the good that had been done before.

The mechanics were fine. I don’t mind Donna and Rose solving the problem of the extra Time Lord “power” simply by releasing it into the universe. But their insistence that “a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand” their idea completely ignores the fact that the Doctor is a trans character themself!

Just because they present male right now doesn’t mean they have never experienced presenting as female. The Doctor is the same person—they haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be a woman! That line is incredibly insulting, and discounts the existence of trans men. Let me tell you, trans men are out there, and they are Doctor Who fans, too (I know and love a few myself!). I can guarantee you they saw themselves being erased—again—and are not looking favorably on that dialog.

So, much as I enjoyed this episode overall (there were so many things I loved, but I just don’t have room to talk about them all; I’ve barely even mentioned the Meep, for goodness sake!), it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. At least Donna is back in the game, and on board for two more episodes. Hopefully the next installments will give me more of the sweet bonbon experience we started with here, and less of a bitter finish.