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

[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.