Doctor Who: The Star Beast Review - 9 Ups And 3 Downs
6. UP - The Disney Money Is Paying Off
The Chibnall era was most certainly an upgrade in visuals compared to what came before, but The Star Beast felt like another huge step up. This episode was gorgeous – vivid in colour, and with a much-missed focus on practical effects, Doctor Who has never looked even close to this good before.
The set design and directing bought back a sense of fairytale magic of the early Moffat years, and seeing Tennant’s face in such high definition was almost a little uncanny valley.
It would be easy to gloss over the action sequence with the firefight between UNIT and the Wrarth Warriors, with its long shots and car explosions, but it’s easy to forget that we don’t normally get sequences like this in the show – these visuals genuinely wouldn’t have been out of place in a blockbuster movie.
If this is the cost of bowing to the Disney overlords, we’ll take it.