Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Beast Below

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This page is for discussing the ways in which The Beast Below doesn't fit well with other DWU narratives. You can also talk about the plot holes that render its own, internal narrative confusing.

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• At the beginning of the Beast Below, when Timmy (the boy who scored zero) entered the lift the Smiler had a happy face in two shots. In the next shot of the Smiler, it had a sad face. But when the head turns, it turns from a happy face, to a sad face. Is this deliberate? Or a simple mistake?

It is deliberate. It is meant to be strange and they all do that.

How is it deliberate?

This is a production error, not a discontinuity.

• There was only one star whale which saved Starship UK, so what happened to the other starships?

As Liz's recorded message refers to other nations leaving before the Whale arrived, it seems the UK was the only one unable to leave on its own.

• Why is the Doctor surprised that the ship is moving even though there are no engines running? It's a spaceship. The law of inertia means it only needs engines to accelerate or steer.

I think it's because of the speed that the starship is moving. I don't know my physics... but I guess it couldn't slow down while in space since there isn't any friction? Now I'm thinking that the big issue is gravity--how would the ship be able to produce a gravity field without an engine? Or any other life support system.

You guys are missing the point. Without engines, how could it take off? That's what the Doc didn't get.

No, no, you're missing the point. According to Newton's first law, a spaceship does not need its engines on to move; just to accelerate. They could turn off the engines once they accelerated to a certain speed. Perhaps the doctor noticed that they were accelerating without engines, as this could be felt on deck or observed on the TARDIS. The fact that Liz 10 would notice the acceleration is more surprising, as they are presumably accelerating very slowly, as there are no visible effects of acceleration. (Have you ever felt yourself get pushed back into your seat when you accelerate in your car?) There are most likely signs of acceleration, but one would have to be extremely observant. The glass of water would also be a good medium through which to observe acceleration. But Liz 10, who we can assume lived on board for a very, very, long time (if not her whole life) would probably assume any acceleration to be regular, and not know a world where acceleration is not present.

Perhaps the acceleration was why they had 'gravity'.

There is friction in space, because there's interstellar hydrogen, helium, photons, neutrinos, and possibly whatever dark matter turns out to be. For slow-moving or tiny objects, the friction is so low that you can pretty much ignore it. But for a massive starship travelling at an appreciable fraction of light speed, it would affect them.

Coasting at high speed would take a lot longer than continually accelerating. (I'm talking about the on-ship timeline here. Going from 0.98c to 0.99c is barely noticeable to a distant observer, but cuts your travel time in half as far as you're concerned.)

If they're searching planets one by one, they're repeatedly changing direction. If you want to travel at an average speed of, say, 0.25c for 10 years, it's a lot cheaper (and a lot easier on your ship and your people) to accelerate gradually for 5 years than to accelerate all at once and then coast.

Perhaps it is travelling faster than the speed of light, which is outside of current physics and might require a continuously running engine.

On a ship like Starship UK, the engines would have to be always in use. Space is big, you know. They won't find a habitable world by just blindly drifting.

• In the pre-titles sequence the boy who scored zero is not allowed to use the lift-like systems. He does; disobeying the law and thus he is sent below to feed the beast. It is established that the Beast never eats children so he survives. It is stated that anyone who disobeys the law is sent below to feed the beast e.g. the Doctor and Amy. But why would the Starship UK have laws stating that zeros couldn't use the lifts. Additionally why would disobeying such a meagre law be punishable in such a severe way. To sum up, why is the police state so concerned over one child getting a zero?

Not everyone was aware that it never ate the children, and Starship UK was a morphed world with a twisted government. That is why they did things in such strange ways, they knew little to not better until the Doctor arrived.

He's a "person of limited value" - they're on a starship, "back to basics", and have decided that he would take too many resources to support, and instead try to use him to feed the beast.

• Why does the UK need a starship to survive? They didn't seem to have any particular destination planned, and they had been going for 300 years without arriving at a planet or anything, so why not just build a Space Station U.K.?

They needed a Starship to survive the solar flares roasting the Earth. As for why they didn't set up on another planet; that implies that space was available. Other races may not have had the space or resources to put up an entire planet's/countries' population, and they may have lacked the resources or were unable to find a suitable planet for colonisation. As for why they didn't just have a Space Station, Starship U.K is one, more or less. Why have a static and vulnerable spaceship when you've got a suitable means of propulsion?

We've seen the future, so we know that if they wait out the flare period they can just return to Earth. But they have no idea whether this is true. Hence they're looking for another permanent planet. If they're travelling sub-light, they've only had time to check out a handful of potential planets at best by this point, so it's not surprising that they're still looking.

• If Scotland has their own ship, this one shouldn't be "Starship UK", or even "Starship GB", just "Starship England" (or maybe "Starship England & Wales"). It's hard to imagine the Queen or Parliament making that mistake, especially if they'd just lost Scotland.

Unless Northern Ireland has its own ship too, "Starship UK" is still correct - it is the United Kingdoms of England and Wales and of Northern Ireland.

It's specifically mentioned that Northern Ireland is included on this particular starship.

It's only stated that Scotland wanted their own ship. This could still be the 'official starship' for UK. Furthermore, if Scotland had officially left the union, then UK is simply a union of 3 nations instead of 4.

• According to this story, Earth is abandoned to solar flares in the 29th century. Yet earlier stories, such as The Mutants, strongly implied that Earth was still inhabited and the seat of humanity's empire into the 30th century.

The Earth may not have been abandoned for all of the 29th century, just during the time of the soler flares.

The Doctor states that humanity left the earth "until the weather got better". In other words, they came back after the solar flares were no longer a problem.

But the doctor and Amy didn't visit the 29th century, that's simply when the flares started, they visited the 31-32 century because the queen had been reigning and forgetting for two hundred years and had lived a hundred years before that. The doctors states she's around three hundred; this means that the ship had been flying for about 200-300 years completely contradicting "The Mutants" implication that humans were on earth, not flying around, in the 30th century.

The Mutants also suggested that the colonial empire was in decline. The solar flares and forced abandonment of the planet could well have been contributing factors. What is perhaps more incongruous is the fact that if Earth was a massive colonial empire at the time - why was it so difficult to find other planets to evacuate the population to?

• The Union Jack has been painted upside-down on the ship.

The flag may have been painted specifically for the people living in the towers to look down at, in which case it would be the right way up.

• If the Scottish decided to fly off on their own, separate from the rest of the British, then why is the St. Andrew's saltire still in the Union Jack?

When the UK was partitioned in 1922 by the Irish Free State separating, the St. Patrick's saltire remained in the flag. Maybe some Scots remained, or maybe the events that led to the UK's ship departure happened too fast for anyone to consider a new flag design.

It's only stated that Scotland wanted their own ship. They might not have 'officially' left the union (yet).

• Why does no-one care about Timmy? I mean, parents don't give up their children to massive whales to use as fodder just because they got bad grades. And there are a bunch of children that have been taken and used as child labour with no explanation of how they came to be forgotten by their families.

The Doctor explicitly states that Starship UK is a police state where adults have learned to ignore the distress of small children, because they can do nothing to help them. And Timmy wasn't sent to feed the whale because of his bad grades; the punishment for the bad grades was that he had to walk home without using a Vator, and and when he broke that rule, he was punished more severely by (seemingly) being fed to the whale. Presumably his parents were informed that Timmy received death penalty for unlawful use of a Vator, and living in a police state, they could hardly protest or do anything. And the same presumably had happened to the parents of the other children we see.

• What are the smilers actually for? No-one says who built them, and they seem to work like the police, only we know there is an actual police to come get Amy when she is poking around.

As all around servicer robots like teachers and lift operators doubling as public surveillance it seems.

Also, they do something when Amy was poking around. They were surveillance. In the school, they were automatic teachers.

• And while we're on the subject of where the smilers came from, who wrote that poem about the beast below? No-one is supposed to know about the whale. Liz 10 certainly doesn't, and I'm pretty sure that's the whole point of the system. So there's no point in having a creepy little girl speak a threatening poem. Unless it's only shown to people who are about to be killed?

I believe it is only shown to people about to die because we didn't hear it from the other Vator, and the girl's timing matched the opening of the floor.

• Amy and the Doctor are vomited into an indoor corridor, yet at the end of the episode we can clearly see that the whale's mouth is no where near the interior of the ship.

• How can nobody have noticed that Liz Ten has ruled for over 2 centuries? First of all, what year does Liz Ten think it is? Secondly, just because she wears a mask, have the public really never noticed it's still clearly the same person? It's hardly a fool-proof disguise. OK maybe that second one can be explained by the point of the episode, that the people recognise deep down that it's clearly the same person all these years but really don't WANT to know, which fits with the Doctor's monologue about "lives led in fear" towards the beginning, and the few who do say "hang on, we've clearly had the same exact Queen for rather a long time and that mask she wears doesn't exactly hide that fact or the fact she hasn't even aged all that time" are probably fed to the Star Whale, but has Liz herself really never questioned something as fundamental as the current year? Is she actually so deep in denial she hasn't even questioned that, or do they give her false memories when they wipe her old ones, or what?

You know what year it is, you're unlikely to question that. If she did, it doesn't really matter as it would lead her to the animal. It's not like if she knew her true age the entire ship was going to get stuck in space, that was the issue with abdicating. It's also not a secret that she has a slowed aging, she is fully aware of it.