{"id":1556,"date":"2014-10-10T15:45:39","date_gmt":"2014-10-10T15:45:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1556"},"modified":"2014-10-10T15:45:39","modified_gmt":"2014-10-10T15:45:39","slug":"so-what-did-i-think-of-kill-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2014\/10\/10\/so-what-did-i-think-of-kill-the-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"So… what did I think of Kill the Moon?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"killthemoon\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Newcomer Peter Harness begins his script in about the least promising way possible. The TARDIS \u2013 as well as not housing any hanky-panky \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

The arrival on the moon is visually stunning however. Really amazing. I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

We then meet the Space Shuttle crew \u2013 Captain NotNamedOnScreen and her cohorts Lt FirstToDie and Cpl DontKnowDontCare \u2013 who are here with loads of nukes because \u2013 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\u2019s hatching.<\/p>\n

Big problem with this episode #1:<\/strong> Pretty much all of the forgoing is utter bullshit from a scientific point of view.<\/p>\n

But\u2026 c\u2019mon #1:<\/strong> 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 \u201chard SF\u201d is one it visits very rarely. Even if you give the essentially magical powers of the TARDIS and regeneration a pass, that doesn\u2019t make past plotlines any more plausible. Just so we\u2019re clear \u2013 you can\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s good enough for me.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. \u201cKill the little girl first,\u201d is chilling enough \u2013 but his attitude to the humans here is nothing short of astonishing. Only the Fourth Doctor refusing to assist in the amputation of Winlett\u2019s infected arm in Seeds of Doom<\/em> even comes close.<\/p>\n

Big problem with this episode #2:<\/strong> It\u2019s an anti-abortion parable.<\/p>\n

But\u2026 c\u2019mon #2:<\/strong> No it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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 \u2013<\/p>\n

Big problem with this episode #3:<\/strong> A newly-hatched creature immediately laying a new egg that\u2019s bigger than it is\u2026<\/p>\n

But\u2026 c\u2019mon #3:<\/strong> See #1.<\/p>\n

And then Clara rips the Doctor a new arsehole.<\/p>\n

Jesus Christ!<\/p>\n

Possibly the rawest scene of the Moffat era, maybe in the show\u2019s entire history, this isn\u2019t the Doctor being a bit moody, this isn\u2019t a companion having a grump, this is a full on, balls-out, emotionally scarring show-down. No companion \u2013 no character \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

The whole story is quite an achievement and I can feel my fingers nudging towards the five star key. It isn\u2019t perfect, alas, and the biggest failing is the supporting characters. Hermione Norris grasps at\u00a0a few flimsy clues in the thin dialogue\u00a0and 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\u2019m still not absolutely convinced of the need for her to be here.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m 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 \u2013 and aware that the episode has Divided Fandom (no bad thing), I am all-in on Kill the Moon<\/em>. Five stars. My first since The Girl Who Waited<\/em>\u00a0I believe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Newcomer Peter Harness begins his script in about the least promising way possible. The TARDIS \u2013 as well as not housing any hanky-panky \u2013 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[18,19],"class_list":["post-1556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-doctor-who","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-p6","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1558,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556\/revisions\/1558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}