The Doctor and Amy arrive on the Starship UK, whose residents have left the uninhabitable Earth to find a new planet. There are scary robot-clown "Smilers" who send children to the beast. Amy follows a little girl and finds a huge tentacle-thing sticking out of one of the streets. She is captured by some monk-looking thugs who take her to a voting booth. She learns "the truth", then is allowed to make a choice - FORGET or PROTEST. She chooses FORGET.
Meanwhile, the Doctor puts a glass of water on the floor and notices that there are no ripples in the water, which means that there are no engines running. He is then taken by monks to meet Liz 10. Her whole chamber is filled with glasses of water.
The Doctor then finds Amy, who had somehow managed to record a video saying to get the Doctor off the ship. The Doctor shows up and sees the video, and he chooses PROTEST. He and Amy land in the throat of a giant animal.
Liz 10 and the little girl rescue the Doctor and Amy. It turns out that Liz 10 is Queen Elizabeth the 10th.
So it turns out that the thing that everyone keeps choosing to forget is that the ship is on the back of a star whale, and they have hooked up electrodes to its brain to make it go faster. The creature is being tortured, but they are are afraid that if they release the whale, the ship will be torn apart and everyone will die.
The reason that Amy chose to forget about the whale was because she didn't want the Doctor to have to choose between the whale and the British people
The Doctor flies into a rage, and he decides to make the whale braindead, so that it will continue on through space but not feel the pain. Just then, Mandy's friend (who earlier in the episode we thought had been eaten by the monster) shows up unharmed, and Mandy affectionately pets one of the giant tentacles. See, it turns out that the star whale doesn't eat children, it only eats adults, and apparently the children are just enslaved or something.
Luckily, Amy brilliantly figures out that the star whale had volunteered because the children were crying (I think Liz 10 meant metaphorically, but whatever), because she sees a similarity between the star whale and the Doctor (both are the last of their kind). To me, this was a huge stretch, but the Doctor frees the whale and they actually speed up!
Things that are ridiculous:
1) Liz 10. Not only was she a boring, classless character, it turns out she was hundreds of years old. No one questioned how that happened? All I have to say is someone who acts as ghetto as Liz 10 acted has no business being Queen. Plus, the fact that she seems extremely stupid is disheartening.
2) About twenty seconds after explaining that the whale volunteered, Amy had to repeat the idea to drive home the fact that she was comparing the star whale to the Doctor. Yeah. We get it.
3) HOW did Amy record the video? How did she figure out how to use the equipment? Why is that feature even possible? (Also, the "forgetting" and "recording" thing is something to remember for Series 6.)
3a) Why did Amy make that decision? We as viewers know it would be a tough decision for him to make, but how would she know that? She knows nothing about him, why would she take matters into her own hands?
4) The Doctor choosing to make the star whale brain dead. I felt he acted so out of character. He didn't even try to find a different solution, he just thought about it for about five seconds, threw a temper tantrum, and then decided to fry the poor thing. What?
5) They never explained why the whale doesn't eat children. How it can tell the difference between child and adult when a hunk of meat is simply dropped into its esophagus is beyond me. And why are the children enslaved then? I assume that the monks are in charge of that, but what happens when they become adults? Do they just get chucked back into the mouth? It's not like they can show up back in the ship. People would ask questions.
6) The water in Liz 10's chamber: she says that it's there to remind her that there is a secret being kept from her. Really? That's ... that's why the water is there? Not because all those people figured out something was wrong and the monks brought those people to her, and now they're her spies/monks/etc? LAME.
Things I liked:
1) I did like Amy at the beginning of this episode, but when she suddenly figured it all out, she became annoying.
2) I loved Liz 10's costume, but she turned out to be so boring that I wouldn't want to cosplay her.
3) Because we've already seen in previous episodes that the Earth becomes inhabitable, it was nice to see humans on their way out to find other planets.
4) I'm going to assume that the star whale is related to the poor thing in Torchwood that had its meat harvested.
5) The whales "tentacles" were SOOOO the wrong scale. Unless each of those was a hair.
And now, here's a non-Who palette-cleanser:
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