El Moose Monstero wrote:
I get that lots of death has become the norm, but to be honest, I didn't even notice that noone had died in the last two episodes, and certainly didn't miss it.
In "The Eleventh Hour" I doubt Dr. Ramsden or her colleagues and patients got out of that hospital ward alive after Prisoner Zero snaked into it (you don't see them again and the music is sinister).
In the context of the previous series, the 'everybody lives' ending of the gas mask episode was awesome, but the emphasis on the lack of death lost something by repetition in the library episodes.
On the flipside there seemed to genuine tension and menace when we saw all those thousands of Daleks in the closing seconds of "Bad Wolf" (but RTD's Hovering Legions of Doom were met with increasing ho-hums by the time we saw that plot device again in "The End of Time").
It wasn't registered in these two episodes, and wasn't made a big thing of, so if he can tell good Doctor Who stories without necessarily needing to rack up a bodycount, then I'm all for it.
I agree the quality of the story should not be attributed to the amount of extras and supporting characters who are killed off, however that said low to zero fatalities could be a creative handicap that's going too far in the other direction, with no balance established (though we're only two episodes into Moffat's season, too early to form a fair opinion). However episodes where few to no people ultimately died after the timeline was restored did not stop them from being very dark and suspenseful, with the Doctor getting killed in the broken timeline ("Father's Day" and "Turn Left").
Moffat's better stories have death in them, he just treats death differently - the Weeping Angels did not kill their victims per se, but they still just as effectively nullified them by confining them to die in the distant past, so there was still tension and threat (and if they seized the TARDIS, the solar system would've imploded). "The Girl in the Fireplace" had the strong threat of death with those clockwork droids and people were killed enmasse by them just before the episode started, while Madame de Pompadour dying off screen (whether through illness, accident or court intrigue) was a horrid slap in the face. "The Beast Below" in comparison felt kinda of defanged and cosy for a story about a dystopian dieselpunk space city(though
Doctor Who shouldn't be too much like
Babylon 5 or
Farscape).
On reflection, the main problem of this episode for me was that it doesn't really stand up when you stop and think about it - yes, they're torturing an innocent lifeform for their own ends, but it's hardly the worst thing we've ever seen anyone do, and you would think that there'd be a good number of the population on Starship UK who'd just shrug their shoulders and go 'fuck the whale, I want to live'.
"The Beast Below" as second episodes go it is certainly better than "Tooth and Claw" and "The Shakespeare Code", but I did not like it as much as "The End of the World" and (controversially) "The Fires of Pompeii", I'd give it a fairly solid
7/10, but again mainly for the witty Moffat dialogue, the dieselpunk space setting, a few cleaver plot twists, the way the episode led into next week's, and the minty freshness of the 11th Doctor. And I felt that Smilers were little more than scowling window dressing and Terrance Hardiman was wasted (he was the motherfucking
Demon Headmaster you know).
