So… what did I think of Kill the Moon?
Posted on October 10th, 2014 in Culture | 7 Comments »
Newcomer Peter Harness begins his script in about the least promising way possible. The TARDIS – as well as not housing any hanky-panky – also ought not to be home to moppets. Moppets practically undid a Neil Gaiman script quite recently and I remain stubbornly uninterested on whatever tiresome journey of self-discovery Courtney Woods pleases to be on.
The arrival on the moon is visually stunning however. Really amazing. I’ve said before that the production values of modern Doctor Who are rarely an issue but this is another level. The location filming in Lanzarote, combined with some incredibly elegant pixel-shuffling from Milk, creates an incredible evocation of walking on our satellite. And I would have forgiven them for just ignoring the one-sixth gravity, but actually, the weight of the TARDIS crew turns out to be a plot point.
We then meet the Space Shuttle crew – Captain NotNamedOnScreen and her cohorts Lt FirstToDie and Cpl DontKnowDontCare – who are here with loads of nukes because – blowing up the moon is their last resort. The next twenty minutes is pretty standard run, jump and hide stuff. Some good jokes. Some good scares. Murray Gold, giving it some welly. And then, rather earlier than I expected, the truth is revealed. The moon is an egg. And it’s hatching.
Big problem with this episode #1: Pretty much all of the forgoing is utter bullshit from a scientific point of view.
But… c’mon #1: Basically, all the science in Doctor Who is bullshit. As an anthology show, Doctor Who can and does work in a lot of different genres, but “hard SF” is one it visits very rarely. Even if you give the essentially magical powers of the TARDIS and regeneration a pass, that doesn’t make past plotlines any more plausible. Just so we’re clear – you can’t power travel suits with static electricity, use mirrors to travel through time, maintain a corporeal body with the power of your will, alter the structure of the universe with maths, reassemble a shattered spaceship by gravity, grab a young American botanist with one of your branches if you’ve been turned into a tree, or expect a code-cracking computer to translate ancient languages either. No grand tradition of hard SF concepts has been traduced here, and the notion of the moon as an egg is beguiling, poetic, dramatic and visual. That’s good enough for me.
Building an entire episode around a moral dilemma is bold enough. Having the Doctor abandon Clara, Captain Cold Feet and Moppet to their own devices is incredible. Steven Moffat has talked about finding a Capaldi moment in each episode. Looking the Half Faced Man in the eye while pointing out that one of them is bound to kill the other springs to mind, so does he lack of concern with the fate of Ross in Into the Dalek. “Kill the little girl first,” is chilling enough – but his attitude to the humans here is nothing short of astonishing. Only the Fourth Doctor refusing to assist in the amputation of Winlett’s infected arm in Seeds of Doom even comes close.
Big problem with this episode #2: It’s an anti-abortion parable.
But… c’mon #2: No it isn’t.
Not enough for you? Okay, look of course, abortion flitted through my mind watching this episode, but I dismissed it almost as quickly. The debate here is about whether to murder an innocent creature which is already unequivocally alive. The fact that it is currently inside an egg-shell does not make this action an abortion. The abortion debate hinges on firstly the rights of the mother vs the rights of a zygote (there is no mother here) and secondly the difference between an undifferentiated ball of cells and a unique, viable life, capable of existing outside of its mother (evidently the moon-lizard-bat-thing has reached this point).
In the end, Clara flies in the face of the will of the people of Earth and pushes the big red do-the-right-thing button. We get an appropriately heart-string-tugging ending and –
Big problem with this episode #3: A newly-hatched creature immediately laying a new egg that’s bigger than it is…
But… c’mon #3: See #1.
And then Clara rips the Doctor a new arsehole.
Jesus Christ!
Possibly the rawest scene of the Moffat era, maybe in the show’s entire history, this isn’t the Doctor being a bit moody, this isn’t a companion having a grump, this is a full on, balls-out, emotionally scarring show-down. No companion – no character – has ever called the Doctor on his antics like this, and no incarnation of the Doctor has ever deserved it more. Finally, after a couple of very engaging false starts, the contemporary incarnation of Clara eventually gets something resembling a personality and Jenna Coleman finally gets a scene worthy of her talents.
The whole story is quite an achievement and I can feel my fingers nudging towards the five star key. It isn’t perfect, alas, and the biggest failing is the supporting characters. Hermione Norris grasps at a few flimsy clues in the thin dialogue and manages to carve out something resembling a human. Phil Nice and Tony Osoba do good work, but the script is far too eager to bump them off and so they never get a chance to register. Ellis George grates a little less this time round, but I’m still not absolutely convinced of the need for her to be here.
And I’m assuming the production team will remember that all this has happened and that life on board the Orient Express in Space (why?) on Saturday will in some way reflect this and not show the Doctor and Clara as pals again (I note no Coleman in the trailer). So, on that basis – and aware that the episode has Divided Fandom (no bad thing), I am all-in on Kill the Moon. Five stars. My first since The Girl Who Waited I believe.
Tags: doctor who, reviews
7 Responses
Oh My God! You’re out of your mind. You’re giving all of those issues a pass? If they didn’t mean for this ep to cast an anti-abortion message then they failed dismally. Of course there’s a mother. It’s earth. Abort the moon so that the earth can survive. And then the emotional few (Clara) overrides the desires of the mother and force it to go to term.
To say that the difference between a fully formed bat dragon and a zygote as a crucial difference is to misunderstand where anti-abortionists tend to come from. They rarely differentiate between development stages. It’s all about potential.
“It’s your choice”?
“For what it’s worth I think you made the right decision”?
This wasn’t a fleeting notion. This was a conceit that I tried to cast off but was constantly reminded of throughout the episode.
Also, just because the science sucks in previous episodes is no reason that it’s not awful when it does it here.
I thought that this episode was a very, poor cousin to ‘The Beast Below’.
The sheer stupidity of the live moon concept, not just undermining reality, or even the weak tea science we can expect from what is a science fantasy “anthology” program, including previous moon based continuity, or just the impossibility of living things gaining mass without consuming anything. (even assuming that weak tea could serve a finite improbability generator), just made me want to hurl objects at the telly. The humanity’s last hope is third rate astronauts because the better ones were sent off to Michael Bay’s Armageddon? or to crew the Prometheus? this wasn’t even stupid science, it was the beggaring of belief. I hate this episode, it makes Delta and the Bannermen look like Shakespeare,….
…. with the key exception that the nonsensical majority of it is merely a set up for that exceptional glorious argument, chock full of Clara’s anger meeting the Doc’s arrogance, you quite rightly praise this. and it would redeem the rest, but why not just write a set up worthy of this fine conclusion?
Sorry to vent all that vitriol, but the other key problem with the episode is that it sets humanity a test which it somehow manages to fail unanimously (cynical or unbelievable? or to be more pedantic, the half of humanity in the dark that get to vote). Why would the Doctor care to spend his life supporting a species that would fail such a test so miserably? The situation saved only by the arbitrary choice of a few. Great that the episode ostensibly is centred on a moral question, but they suck all the nuance out, so that it becomes just a prop for Clara’s tirade.
And on that note, how did they turn out all the streetlights and automatic lights? It seems that the people who ran the power stations and industries had a larger vote than those who lived in caravans.
Oh my god. I’ve become that person on the Internet.
I was wondering about all those people who were just in the middle of watching the latest box of Game of Thrones, why did they turn their lights off? It’s the Scottish referendum all over again.
I think part of the point is that humanity didn’t pass the test. As the Doctor says in his closing monologue, humans had cast their eyes downward and had forgotten that the stars were out there and that space flight was a worthwhile enterprise. The spectacle of the moon-egg-lizard-bat-dragon in the sky opened their eyes again and propelled them to the stars. It made (us) them better.
Quite apart from anything else, having Clara just accede to a popular vote is poor storytelling because it deprives our leading character of agency. But I think the vote and having it go the wrong way is a necessary part of the story of humans rediscovering the stars, because it shows how insular we had become.
[…] I don’t require perfection for five stars, if enough elements are strong enough. I will defend Kill the Moon to the death. Does that mean I don’t think that the science is total and utter garbage that […]