Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: bbc, doctor who, rachel talalay, Star Beast

Doctor Who Star Beast Director Didn't Know About Prologue Till Airing

When Doctor Who: The Star Beast was broadcast last week, it came with a Prologue. Just one that the director of the episode hadn't seen.

When Doctor Who: The Star Beast was broadcast last week, it came with a Prologue. The Doctor, played by David Tennant, in a fairly obvious greenscreen against a cosmic background introducing himself, and Donna Noble, played by Catherine Tate, sits in her kitchen on her laptop. It reprised aspects of the show from episodes a decade ago before the titles hit.

Some critics thought it was a little shoddy and unnecessary, given that the events were also reprised and repeated in the episode itself. While some saw it as necessary for new Disney+ viewers who had never seen the show before. Others asked if giving new viewers a reprise of something that they had no way of even seeing on Disney+ was confusing or off-putting.

Well, at the Chicago TARDIS convention event last week, the director of The Star Beast, Rachel Talalay, said that she hadn't anything to do with the prologue. Doug Zetlin, in the audience for the Q&A, told me that Talalay says she only found out about the prologue when her child called to ask about it, who had been watching the BBC broadcast live. And that was how Talalay found out that such a prologue had been added. At the time of the convention, she hadn't seen it. What she directed begins with the credits. She wasn't upset about it, but it did seem a strange way of doing things. It smacks a little of those Marvel post-credit scenes that the director of the movie discovers exist when the movie is screened…

Talking to last month's Doctor Who Magazine, her family also had a sneak peek as well. "I didn't know quite how well the episode was working till my family watched an almost-finished cut. I came downstairs, and my two girls were crying. It was like, oh, OK, this does work! And on a much, much deeper level too. To have them go, 'We knew it would be full of joy' – which I think it is – 'but we didn't expect it to be so emotional,' that was very satisfying. It was an emotional time all round."

Doctor Who: The Star Beast is available on the iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ in the rest of the world – apart from the Republic Of Ireland, who are out of luck.

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