Well. Where do we begin here? There's been a definite trend of the episodes being more than they appear to be from the trailers. Deep Breath was a dichotomy of an opener, with one half being about the Doctor and the other being about Clara. Listen went for existential horror before pulling its little trick near the end. Time Heist wasn't really a heist at all, when you look at it. From the trailers to Kill The Moon, one expected a spooky story on the moon with corridors, the blackness of space, and things lurking in the dark. We got that. For about 15 minutes. Then it became something else entirely, and ended with perhaps the best scene this series. Scratch that perhaps. I'll make the bold claim: it is the best scene of this series. We're getting ahead of ourselves.Courtney Woods is back. She's not as good as she was in The Caretaker. She is, however, the impetus for the episode. Clara complains that the Doctor said Courtney wasn't "special", so he decides to let her be the first woman on the moon and goes to 2049. A bit of a heavy-handed and child-friendly reason for an adventure, but it gets us to the moon in 2049 so there's that. Once we're there, the story goes into what most expected from the trailer; another Hinchcliffe-era style journey into horror. There's an abandoned Mexican moonbase with dead bodies, cobwebs, and something hissing in the void. It's reminiscent of Hinchcliffe's The Ark In Space (there are even a few callbacks to that story in this one!) and expectations continue as the show goes on. Expendable members of the shuttle crew get picked off by the creeping moon terrors, and it all feels very Ridley Scott's Alien. Except... there's something more going on here. The shuttle crew were sent up with a hundred nuclear weapons, and the Earth of 2049 is in dire need of help. The moon has increased in mass somehow, having normal Earth gravity. This has screwed up the tides on Earth, and if that wasn't enough of a problem... the moon is starting to crack.
Still, the expectations of horror are there. It is October now, after all. The nights are short, the air is cold, and the season of fear is upon us. Our first weird revelation; the monsters aren't scary space spiders. They're scary space bacteria. Doesn't explain why they spin cobwebs, but we're still in familiar territory here. This is just Doctor Who does Apollo 18. One must be careful, however. Doctor Who is not a constant, a solid planetoid that one can safely rest against. It's mercury, always changing and shifting on its own whims. Everything changes once we learn that there's amniotic fluid on the moon. The Doctor dives in, comes back out, and then he says it. The moon is an egg, and whatever's inside is hatching. The episode can still go to horror territory here. I was fully expecting something Lovecraftian, a cosmic incomprehensible horror bursting out of the moon and laying waste to the tiny small humans like a Thing That Should Not Be. Once the shuttle captain asks the question, though, we shift again.
"How do we kill it?"A morality play. We've seen this before. The Beast Below comes to mind. Of course, we know this ground. The Doctor won't let them nuke the moon baby. He's the Man Who'd Rather Not, he's got this and Clara will back him up after a fight with the captain. Courtney might get her defining moment and be central to it all too. Yeah, we're still in familiar territory here. Everything will be okay.
And then the Doctor shrugs his shoulders, says it's humanity's decision, and leaves. He just leaves Clara, the captain, and Courtney on the moon to make their choice. Kill the innocent unique moon creature and "save" the world? Let it live and risk the destruction of Earth? It's not his choice to make. It's not his planet and not his Moon. He swans off and leaves this one up to the three people on the moon base. It's a moral dilemma, and the choice needs to be made. We've gone from visceral horror to existential horror to moral quandry, and it's all been compounded by the Doctor completely abandoning the narrative. Still, Clara steps up to the plate. Though the Earth votes to kill the moon baby, she presses the cancel button at the last second. She makes her choice, and the Doctor comes back and shows them the consequence of that choice. Everything, of course, turns out fine. The moon baby hatches and promptly lays another moon egg. This has caused complaint, but that can be brushed aside. It doesn't matter how neat the resolution here is. It doesn't matter than a creature laying an egg as big as the one it just hatched out of is a logical wrangle. What matters is what happens next.
I've usually avoided talking about the episode's endings in these impression writeups. Here it's unavoidable, because the ending is the best part of this episode. The best part of this series of Doctor Who so far. Clara sends Courtney off and then just explodes into a tearful tirade against the Doctor. For abandoning her, for forcing her to make that choice. His reasoning was letting humanity make its own decision, but she takes it as a patronizing gesture. As if he sees humanity beneath him. He's a Time Lord, yes, but he has a fondness for Earth. He's lived on it, he's saved it countless times. To detach himself from it now is hypocritical. Jenna Coleman sells it so damn well. This is some of the best acting the show has seen. This is Clara, finally taking a stand against the Doctor and his callousness. Yes, he might be an alien, but he's interacted with humans for centuries. The "oh, I'm an alien, I don't know how to deal with humans" thing is wearing a bit thin. He should know by now. He should know, and he should care, and that is what makes Clara leave the TARDIS and tell the Doctor to go away. It's game-changing. It cements Clara as one of the best companions this show has seen. It elevates this entire episode to be one of the best so far.Well. Where do we go from here?
Next week: Mummy On The Orient Express. I suspect that this time we'll get exactly what it says on the tin, but I've been wrong before.
AND NOW WHAT I THINK... NOW
(Spoilers below for stuff. You know, to cover my ass. I know one guy's reading this who hasn't seen Series 8 yet. Maybe two. Be wary, yo.)
Oh fuck. Kill The Moon, man. If there ever was a case of Doctor Who being pure unfettered Marmite, it's this goddamned episode. There's very little in-between here; either you adore this one to bits and consider it one of the best of Series 8, or you hate the shit out of it and only put it as the second worst episode of Series 8 because you hate that other one more. I mean, for God's sakes, Phil Sandifer stuck his flagpole down right after transmission and said it was the best episode of Doctor Who. Ever. I can only applaud the gusto that takes. I've been on a review show with two people who hated this episode, I've read shit hating on it, I've watched Diamanda Hagan. This one gets a bad rap, but is it a deserved rap? Well, to echo the Doctor in this one, that's not my call to make. At the end of the day, I'm an asshole with an opinion about British sci-fi shows. I sort of fall on the neutral spectrum of opinion on Kill The Moon. Yes, I know I just said it's either a love it or hate it affair, but let me go on. There are two things I really really love about Kill The Moon, one a lot more than the other. Both of them I praised in the old writeup. The first being the so-called "Hinchcliffing the shit out of it" that goes on in the first half. The justification for space spiders is a bit much, and we're going to cover that... but it's notable that the trailer for the episode played them up as the threat. We (or I, I guess) went into this one expecting space spiders and spooky business. They absolutely Hinchcliffed the shit out of us, only to pull the rug out from under us 20 minutes or so in. The other part I went over the roof for was Clara's passionate speech at the end. Like, wow. Absolutely didn't see that coming, but Jenna Coleman knocked that one outta the goddamned park. We weren't even sure if she would be back after that. I'm underselling just how good that scene is. I do stand by it being one of the best moments in all of Doctor Who, and I've seen a shitload of this show. Anything with something that good in it can't possibly be shit to me.
Unfortunately for Kill The Moon, not everyone shares that opinion. The big complaint I remember is that the physics/biology/chemistry/lord knows what else science in this episode doesn't make a single bit of logical sense. You know what? I'm gonna concede that. There isn't enough pavement for me to reliably fill in the hole of the giant space dragon laying an egg as big as the one it hatched from, save for my eyes thinking the new moon was smaller than the old one. Other than that, I've got nothing here. I concede that the science in this episode makes little to no sense, but I also... don't care? No disrespect meant to people who do care, mind, but Doctor Who to me is about seeing wild and weird things, having adventures, and seeing emotional moments. This episode had enough emotional moments and spooky space spiders for me to be satisfied. As for the moral quandry? I'm Switzerland here. It's been observed that there's a certain ambiguity to the whole "turn off your lights to kill the moon" vote. Not only is the vote null for anyone living in a time zone currently not visible from the moon, but they don't know for sure if people are actually voting or not. It could be 3 billion people unanimously agreeing to kill the moon, or it could be the power companies shutting off the lights on government orders, and making the choice for them. Perhaps Clara realized that, and that's why she ignored their vote and saved the space dragon. Perhaps she just didn't want to die, and was scared. I still think this is a good episode, mostly for all the shit I praised it for. There are worse episodes of Doctor Who, believe me. Still, I'm not out to change anyone's mind. I'm just explaining what I think. That Clara scene is really really good, yo. Either way...
...next time is a really really good episode. So either you're getting two good ones in a row, or washing the taste of that bad one out with a good one! We all win! In 66 seconds or less!
Wait. There's no mirror/reflection symbolism in Kill The Moon, BOOOOOO.
UPDATE: I got a response on Tumblr that says there is!
"Actually, yes there is mirror symbolism. The episode opens with the moon reflected in Clara's eye and closes with Clara being reflected in the window while looking at the moon."
So everything is okay again.
What I really did not like about this episode was that it felt like a painfully safe, painfully, for want of a better phrase "cisgender heterosexual white middle class male" attempt at doing a story that touches on abortion. Reminds me a lot, in fact of Star Trek TNG's 'The Child', with it's whole "Everyone is pressuring the woman to abort the pending Scary Space Baby, but she asserts that it is her absolute right to choose for herself, and she chooses not to." Not that, as I know a lot of people do, I read it as an anti-abortion screed, but rather that it's an attempt to be "clever" in that regard, and, well, Scalzi's law applies.
ReplyDeleteThere is one bit I really like though, which I don't think a lot of people have commented on, which is the bit at the end where they ask the Doctor about the consequences of their decision and, without any explanation, he quite obviously closes his eyes and sees the future, which I think is a very good way to realize the Doctor's vaguely defined time lord perceptions while leaving it exactly ambiguous enough as to what he can do
He totally pulled a Paul McGann up in there.
ReplyDeleteOne of the weirder bits of what-logic-is-this going on in the episode:
ReplyDeleteAs you mention, the story goes to great length in setting up Clara's vote -- the rules, all of the shots of her peeping earth and counting, and her eventual decision to countermand the vote. Okay. So.
She makes her choice, and the Doctor picks her up, and they all get off on Earth to see what happens to the moon.
And it's the middle of the day.