Further queries and comments on The Beast Below

[tardis_stowaway]

-Scotland insisted on having their own ship.  Good for them.  But how does it move?  Did they actually bother to build engines?   If they have that capacity, why not share it with the main UK ship?  Or did they prepare to leave Earth earlier, with time to build a proper ship and not just a backpack for a whale?  But if the Scottish ship has been long separate and out of communication, then it doesn't make sense that the little girl recognizes Amy's accent. 

-Amy was hanging out of the TARDIS.  The Doctor hauled her back and clearly had her standing on her own two feet inside.  Then he walked away and started yammering, and a moment later she was hanging out of the TARDIS, apparently out of control and clinging to the top of the doorframe.  How did she get there?  With TEH starting with Eleven inexplicably dangling out of the doors, it seems that Moffat writes a very slippery TARDIS.

-The computer gives Amy's age as 1,306.  Did the episode ever give an exact date for what year this is set in?  If yes, then we could work out when she was born, thus adding some more data to the timeline questions raised by Rory's 1990 ID. 

-Was there a point to the video of the little girl reciting the rhyme about the beast below to the little kid who was being sent down?  Or was it just to take advantage of the fact the capacity of nursery rhymes to be really creepy?

-There were plenty of other plot holes and shaky logic here.  In a way, it felt almost like an Uncle Rusty episode in that it made really great emotional sense but much less factual sense.

-Did anybody die in this episode?  I can't remember anyone dying, though there was mention of past dissidents being fed to the whale.  Paging Mister Moffat:  it's not that I like seeing people die, but the "everybody lives" thing is special when it's unusual. 

-"Right then.  This isn't going to be big on dignity."  Ha!  However, what truly makes this line is that it's spoken as he adjusts his bowtie.  Eleven, ILU. 

Comments

[perfectivity.livejournal.com]

These are all very good questions, and you're right, him fixing his bowtie is great. I am definitely seeing some new 11 personality shining through.

I didn't really get Liz10... so she made the decision to ride the space whale, and then she chooses to forget? And instead her cabinet knows the truth and just gets on with it? Besides, everyone chooses to forget but everyone acts scared at the beginning--if they don't remember what are the afraid of? And why bother sending kids down below if they know nothing is going to happen to them?

(side note: that whale has a very small brain)

,,,Maybe I'll understand it better after I rewatch it.

[tardis-stowaway.livejournal.com]

In Liz Ten's message to herself, she says that forgetting will allow her to "be again the heart of this nation, untainted." I think she and this episode are operating under a romanticized version of monarchy where the queen is the spiritual leader, and if she were to go on ruling while knowing about the whale it would destroy her soul and turn Britain into something even more corrupt than the police state with conspiracy of amnesia that they already have. Only a few morally tainted people know the whole truth, and they use the Smilers to do much of the work. *shrug* It's not the most efficient system, but I guess it makes sense 1,300 years in the future.

The people are scared at the beginning of the smilers. They know that people who screw up can be sent down below. They don't remember what happens below or any of the secrets that the smilers protect, but they know how to be afraid of the government. As for the kids, my guess is that they are sent below so that when they get older they can be turned into the human-smiler hybrid things. No evidence for that, but it's my current theory.

I think that was only the pain center of the whale's brain sticking up through the floor, with the brain presumably carrying on for a good long ways below the floor.

This whole episode is rather full of things that don't make sense. Oh well. Coming up with kooky theories to try making sense of it is kind of fun.

[braidsofdeath.livejournal.com]

The thing that amused me most about the episode was that the star whale was *totally* visible from outside the spaceship. If the TARDIS had just appeared, like, to the side of the starship UK instead of above it, they would have just seen that it was actually a giant island on top of a giant whale, instead of having to go to all the work of figuring it out.

[tardis-stowaway.livejournal.com]

Ha, good point! What a crazy random happenstance that they never bothered to look around the ship from the outside. ;)

What started bugging/amusing me after I wrote this post is that the Doctor and Amy are in the whale's mouth, able to see through between the teeth, and then are vomited out into a corridor. Yet when you look at the wide shots of the whale, the mouth opens into space! Why were they not vomited into space? How was there air in the whale's mouth in the first place?