Finally watched a Dr Who episode. Seriously, hadn’t seen more than a clip or three before. Full thoughts will come in episode 19 of the Implausipod.
An odd episode: it felt like a speedrun through the required story beats to link everything together, and a lot of the rest was elided. So I’m not sure it was a representative story of the franchise; we got equal parts “very special episode” and “fanservice”, and while I was able to make some external connections early (and by the midpoint too), by the end it was all internally referential, and the titular Star Beast was a very thin foil for the rest of the internal narrative that the showrunner wanted to hang over the episode.
As a new viewer, I’m not entirely convinced to stick around. Let’s see how the next one goes…