Why are there kids in the dungeon? Specifically, let's say, the kid from the first very scary sequence in the 'vator' who was apparently in no danger whatsoever at any time? Oh, no reason. "Protesters and citizens of limited value" are fed to "the beast," but it won't eat kids. (CRYING kids? Silently crying little kids, maybe?) The Doctor tosses around yet more moral high ground about this situation as though it's real or has bearing, and then starts in with his pointlessly cryptic shit once again, with all the cast posing as straight man, Excellent Questions excised because they are obvious:

"Except it's not a torture chamber, is it? Depends on your angle... Like I say, depends on the angle. It's either the exposed pain center of Big Fella's brain, being tortured relentlessly... Or it's the gas pedal, the accelerator. Starship UK's go-faster button. Don't you [understand]? Try, go on. The spaceship that could never fly, no vibration on deck. This creature -- this poor, trapped, terrified creature -- it's not infesting you, it's not invading, it's what you have instead of an engine. And this place down here is where you hurt it, where you torture it, day after day, just to keep it moving. Tell you what. Normally, it's above the range of human hearing. This is the sound none of you wanted to hear!"

He makes the screaming of the SPACEWHALE audible, and they all bitch and moan, because it's so hard for the working class to believe that blah, blah, Tory blah. The Queen announces out of nowhere that they will release the SPACEWHALE and nobody does anything. So the Doctor is pointlessly cryptic again: "Liz. Your mask. Look at it. It's old. At least 200 years old, I'd say... An antique made by craftsmen over 200 years ago and perfectly sculpted to your face. They slowed your body clock, all right, but you're not 50. Nearer 300. And it's been a long old reign."

Liz, who we barely know and certainly don't care about any more than the Doctor does, who might as well be setting glasses of water on her face for all the irritating nonsense he's shoveling, explains the thing that the Winders and Sminders have essentially been saying all episode, which is that Liz has Memento disease and has been acting like V for Vendetta in an endless ten-year cycle for three hundred years, always coming back around to her own version of the FORGET/PROTEST button, but in her case -- Lovingly created by whom? And pristinely preserved for her every ten years by whom? -- so she can choose between FORGET and ABDICATE. Get it? Because anarchy or some shit. But how ironic, because the ruling class makes the same decision time and again that the proletariat do, because ABDICATE apparently means the Starship crashes instantly and flies apart.