Day 758: The Beast Below

The Beast Below, unlike The Eleventh Hour, is not a perfect story. But that said, I do still love this story greatly because of how different it feels. One of the joys of having a new show-runner for Doctor Who means that the overall tone of the series has changed, moving from the more grounded Russell T Davies years to something more beautiful, more fairy tale-esque.

The best way to show this new approach to the series is to look at the design of the future world in The Beast Below. It's a future that looks slightly odd, and ever so wonderfully mad. We've got a starship that contains the entire population of the UK (less Scotland) that doesn't look like other spaceships, leaving sleek curves and bright white coats of paint behind for an image of tower blocks floating through space on a flying space whale. This goes towards presenting a vision of the future that actually looks rather fun to live in, leaving behind the technological advancements seen in the Russell T Davies era for something altogether more magical and exciting.

This can also be seen in the design of the Smilers, the 'monsters' of this story. Strongly present in the previews for this series, the evoke a certain feeling of fear and fascination from the audience. It's a design that feels slightly removed from the real world, as if it was dreamt up by an illustrator of a children's book and not by a real designer working for the government of Starship UK. And that lends the episode a certain special feeling, showing that Doctor Who is some sort of magical storybook land where all sorts of things can happen.

And it's through these designs that The Beast Below feels special, and helps to ingratiate this feeling of magic into Series 5. And it's all just more and more reasons for me to love this series of Doctor Who.