Reviews Series / Doctor Who

I wasn't too fond of it either, not just for the possible allegory. Maybe it's my hate for bugs/bug-aliens but I really wasn't buying the whole 'oh it's such an innocent creature, let's do nothing' because of all the murderous big-bacteria roaming about. Plus another annoying kid companion shoehorned into the story... after how crap the kid companions in 'Nightmare in Silver' were I had hoped the writers would learn their lesson...

This is a contender for worst New Who story. The only thing saving it is the conversation with Clara and the Doctor at the end was really good.

The science crosses the thin line between 'Doctor Who' and 'stupid'. Single celled organisms with legs and eyes and webbing who are clearly spiders and die to bacteria? Eggs gaining mass. Completely nonsense sci-fi that is way more significant but gets ignored (like the world disarming their nuclear weapons or every single country shutting down their space programs). And worst of all, if you're going to make an episode about the moon blowing up then you need to have the science of the moon blowing up right, it's fine to use hokey science fiction most of the time, but if the whole conceit of the episode is a real world thing happening, then do some research. Don't tell us that if the moon disappears it becomes 'high tide, all over the earth at the same time', does the water levitate or something?

And the moral dilemma... Is one non sentient creatures life worth millions of human lives? That doesn't make sense in any world.

The only way it could have possibly worked is if they established it would cause no damage from the tide/eggshell etc. So it was just a question of 'it might kill us, should we kill it before it gets the chance?'. Then you could argue that if humanity was so desperate for it's survival that it would kill anything that might be hostile, and if it was living suspicious and hostile to everything, then maybe it is better to take a few risks on something good rather than live like that. The Doctor would certainly agree, the Doctor annihlated his own race when they started valuing their own survival above everything else (and then went back on that decision as too extreme)

But the episode wasn't even close to talking about that. And it's hard to believe the writer could have put in more than 5 minutes thought

I generally wasn't fond of it around the point the germs were established as dying to household disinfectant, which is a pity because I did think the segments before that were quite well shot and tense (definitely think bringing Courtney back was a mistake though).

My take on the entire abortion debacle is that it is a stretch to compare, yes, but the scriptwriter was clearly trying, hence everyone except Lundvik referring to the creature as a baby, the amniotic fluid and the fact that all three people left to debate it are women. I definitely read abortion subtext into the episode and it wasn't exactly subtle. The problem is it's a utilitarian needs of the many debate being sprinkled with abortion trappings, which is ill-advised at best and insulting at worse, because the two situations won't fit neatly. Hence the debate over what the episode was actually trying to say.

The 'science' was insultingly bad though, I was staring in disbelief when Courtney said it had laid a new egg because I just couldn't believe the writer had resorted to such nonsense.

Also this episode was what finally got me to pin down my stance on 12 - I think Capaldi is an absolutely fantastic actor and I couldn't praise his performance more (as an aside, Jenna Coleman too), but I can't stand how he was being written this week. He came across as so condescending and insulting to humanity (I would have found his Patrick Stewart Speech touching except he had to throw in the bit about the alien being something humans didn't want to destroy for once), and the bit where he just shoves off and leaves them to it rubbed me the wrong way. I know it's Alternative Character Interpretation that he knew what would happen all along and hid it for a Secret Test of Character, but I seriously found myself thinking he was being a colossal dick the entire time. And I get that the point is that 12 is more abrasive than say 11 or 10, but there's abrasive and then there's being an unlikable jerkass. I was on Clara's side in the ending bit just because the Doctor this week was being unreasonable and has been unreasonable previously - the hatred of soldiers rubs me the wrong way too, it's like the entire writing team just forgot that 3's entire run was spent alongside UNIT and he had no problem at all, and while 10 was mocking to soldiers like Colonel Mace, it was always light-hearted, not the contempt 12 has.

This season has just been bad in general for me, with the only decent standouts being Robot of Sherwood and all of Listen except the last ten minutes (in which Moffat reverts to writing Clara as a Mary Sue). Kill the Moon is definitely one of the worst episodes of Who I've ever seen though, it's at insultingly bad level in my opinion just for the blatantly nonsense science and preachy moral (whether you think it's abortion or not, the episode was ridiculously unsubtle).

What's bugging me more and more is how easy it would have been to make it better if they had put the smallest amount of thought into this. Forget the spiders being single-celled organisms, just make them parasites like ticks, and disinfectant is toxic to them. Get rid of the sound in space. Wouldn't it be scarier to be hunted by giant spiders which were completely silent, unable to hear anything except your own panicked breathing? Instead of making the whole moon an egg, just say the infant is ~100km long, growing beneath the surface, still capable of wreaking havoc on earth and instantly removing the problems of shell fragments and weather changes since >99% of the moon is still there, and avoiding the stupid new egg.

But nope, full moron ahead.

But they fail at it because they never make the case properly for killing the thing. They never question whether Clara actually did make the right decision (lots and lots of people wouldn't agree. Literally the entire world didn't.) And because they never adequately voice that side, apart from a grumpy astronaut who ineffectually says 'you're being stupid' every now and then, it means the episode absolutely fluffs the weight of what Clara did and what she went through, even if they acknowledge it after the fact with the Doctor conversation. You've got to make it feel difficult for the audience, otherwise it comes off like a Deus Ex Machina that Clara should never have worried about, because thats just the way the Doctor Who universe works.

It's not an episode where you can take the easy route, yet the writers took the easy route every single time. There wasn't a line in that show that anyone spent more than a minute thinking about.

Would this be considered somewhat of a literal Space Whale Aesop? It's meant to be abortion dressed up as this stupid sci-fi situation, with all the variables messed up so it's abortion but not really. It's essentially that debate stripped down to its base components and applied to a fictional creature with higher stakes for all of Earth, all to squeeze in a "life of one vs lives of many" debate which is dressed as a more controversial topic.

I haven't seen this episode, so honestly I have no right to claim that I am an authority on what went on in it, but from what I've heard about it - what a goddamned crock of shit. I've seen the skullfuck that was Listen (spoopy scary doctor who) so I honestly don't doubt the mishandling of this episode.

Also - if this does count as a Space Whale Aesop, would this count as the second literal such aesop in Moffat's tenure? I'm pretty sure the exact same debate came up in the second or third episode of Matt Smith's first episode, with the actual space whale being electrocuted for the benefit of the people. It seems like they're similar - and I'm not saying that the debates are similar, because as mentioned I have not seen this episode, but I think they sound similar - in that it's "harm the space creature for humanity's benefit or keep it alive and risk it fucking up humanity's shit". Am I right in my guess, or way off?

And lastly - you know what? I don't mind Doctor Who being silly. The older episodes had tons of Narm and cheese - they didn't have much choice but to work with what they had, and they reacted to puppets and blown-up condoms as full-blown threats. Cheese and meh writing are written into the history of Doctor Who, for sure. But it feels so cheap to see characters spouting pseudo-intellectual debate about space-abortion when we've had time rifts, a Dalek vs Cyberman war in the streets of London, The Doctor learning from and being enriched by the companions in his life - getting in freaking swordfights with invading aliens - only to come back to "The moon is hatching!" and "The Doctor is trapped in a town named Christmas for 300 years!!". There was an attempt to humanize The Doctor - and for the last 4 years, he's been written as the myth again. It's frustrating.

"and I'm not saying that the debates are similar, because as mentioned I have not seen this episode, but I think they sound similar - in that it's "harm the space creature for humanity's benefit or keep it alive and risk it fucking up humanity's shit". Am I right in my guess, or way off?"

Similar enough. The episode boils down to 'kill the moon abomination before it hatches, or let it hatch and hope to god it doesn't wreck our shit any worse' and the one with the actual space whale was 'keep torturing the super monster or let it go in the vain hope that it won't destroy all of the people aboard it.'

Just once I want the 'let's let it live' option to bite them in the ass.

To me this episode is one of the reasons I think the series should go back to doing multi-part serials where they can build up and explain more, rather than trying to crowbar everything into one episode and then finishing with a reference to another 'oooh super scary overarching story, oooooh.' I doubt the story would have been much better, but at least then there's the chance they could've been rid of the insane 'logic' used throughout.

It's almost directly inspired from the previous Space Whale episode. A lot of the episodes this season have been Expy's (Enough that I'm wondering if Moffat suddenly institued a Fleeting Demographic Rule)

But I didn't get the impression this was much of an episode about abortion at all. They weren't talking about any of the typical abortion themes, there was no 'but this is a life', no-one tried to make the argument that it wasn't already alive, including the person who was there to present the otherside of the argument. There wasn't a huge focus on the potential things it could do. Instead the Doctor was going on about just how cool it is that there's an alien who lays planet sized eggs.

The key point was meant to be that this alien was potentially the last of it's species and less about the potential it had.

So whilst there are definitely abortion aspects, nothing stuck out to make it different from the Space Whale episode which was 100% definitely not about abortion. It's just about the lengths humanity will go to survive and deciding if its better to kill and destroy things than risk human life. I wouldn't be surprised if abortion was in the authors mind as one of the possible themes, but even if it was entirely what they wanted to do, they screwed up the episode so badly it's barely even recognisable.

I mean the _first_ thing we here is the 'needs of the many' business. Which isn't at all related. People aren't choosing between having an abortion or all the people around them dropping dead. Lots of prolifers support abortions rather than having someone drop dead.

@Mr Mallard, I disagree, I think Doctor Who does silly and serious excellently. Since it's very inception it's swung between incredibly silly episodes and episodes exploring very important themes. Thats kind of what the show was created to do almost. And it's been great. It's just they really really messed up this particular episode. There's all sorts of things you've got to be careful with regarding when and how to be silly and when to be serious, but this episode didn't do any of that.

I also don't mind a grumpy Doctor (although if they're going to end an episode like this, they need to go the full way for the next 3-4 episodes), but this episode went too far one way without showing the charm. I don't even mind him leaving them, because that was great drama. It was the fact that he refused to tell the little girl she was special at the start of the episode. You need to show his kind nature before making him do something seriously bad, this just makes him look petty