Why would we want to kill our moon? Doctor Who was bound to think of a reason at some point, so we’ve arrived. And while the episode delivers some tour de force performances, it’s startlingly difficult to parse out where the center of the episode lies.
Recap
The Doctor has upset Clara’s student Courtney by telling her that she’s not special, and Clara demands that he fix it. He tells Courtney that she can be the first woman on the moon and takes them to 2049, where a shuttle is landing with nuclear explosives. The moon has gained mass, ruining Earth tides and drowning cities. Three astronauts have been sent there, led by Captain Lundvik, to destroy whatever might be the cause.
There were Mexican astronauts who came before them to look for minerals, but Earth lost contact with them. It turns out they were killed, though they don’t know by what. Upon further investigation, they find carnivorous spider-like creatures. One kills Lundvik’s crew, and almost gets Courtney, but she sprays it with cleaner and it dies. This leads them to realize that the creatures are essentially germs. The Doctor goes exploring below the crust of the moon and comes back with the discovery: the moon is not a planet, it’s an egg. There’s an alien life form about to hatch inside it. (How that life form would have suddenly increased in mass by thousands of tons over the course of six months, when it’s been growing for millions of years, is never addressed.) They now have a choice; blow up the alien and kill it so it never hatches, or let it live knowing it might destroy the Earth by accident or design.
Then the Doctor leaves, giving the choice up to Lundvik, Clara, and Courtney. Clara sends a message to Earth and puts it to a vote. The Earth votes to kill the alien. Lundvik is just about to press the button to detonate the bombs, but Clara and Courtney stop her. The Doctor takes them down to the planet to see the birth of the alien, saying that humanity starts going to the stars again because they witness this miraculous event. The alien lays another egg in the moon’s place, so no one is harmed. He leaves Lundvik to continue her astronaut career, and takes Clara and Courtney home.
Once there, Clara has a horrible row with the Doctor, telling him that what he did was no supportive or kind or clever. She doesn’t understand why he left them there to make that decision—one that she feels the need to point out, she almost got wrong. She tells him to leave and not come back. Danny finds her and realizes his fears came true; the Doctor went too far. He tells her that she’s not ready to let go, though, because she’s too angry. He tells her to leave the Doctor when she’s calm.
Commentary
Here’s the thing—this episode contains many of the same themes we find in three previous New Who episodes: “The Fires of Pompeii,” “The Waters of Mars,” and “The Best Below.” But it mishmashes them to an extent that it becomes difficult to see what the episode is aiming for as an overall rumination. Is it about renewing a desire for exploration? Friends letting you down? Whether the Doctor lording his expertise over everyone prevents his companions from truly participating in their adventures? About the importance of allowing three women to make a decision on behalf of the whole planet?
There are unfortunately too many questions left unanswered to make this episode the powerhouse it deserves to be. Did the Doctor actually know what was going to happen to the moon? Was he truly trying to help Courtney realize her potential, or was that incidental? While it is refreshing to find some true moral ambiguity on Who, it’s not treated with the distinction it requires. I’m going to try to unpack some of the aspects that stuck out to me, but there’s a lot more going on here.
One of the core themes of the episode is clearly a reaction to the dismantling of NASA’s space program. (Timely, considering that NASA has recently announced its intent to send astronauts to the International Space Station in a few years time.) The suggestion is that space travel has dwindled in the mid-21st century, that humanity has looked to the stars and found only terror. Captain Lundvik says so herself, that she started full of awe and came to realize that our thin shell of atmosphere was all that separated us from oblivion. Her explorative spirit has diminished in face of the unknown. She is jaded and frightened and sees no hope for humanity, though she still intends to protect it.
The decision that Lundvik, Clara, and Courtney are required to make would be more in keeping with this theme had the Doctor deigned to give them even a scrap of information. If he had told them the choice to kill the alien was theirs, while giving his best estimation of what might happen (since he is the resident expert on alien life), then the three women have to decide based on this exact dilemma: the choice between fear or wonder. Hiding away or foraging on. Huddling in the dark or looking to the stars. It would have been a beautiful finale.
But the Doctor doesn’t want to give anything away, so he leaves them without a hypothesis. As a result, the decision hinges on something more primal than that—to kill a new life form before it has begun, or let it live and take a chance that humans will die due to the loss of the moon. Clara wants to be fair, so she puts it to a vote. Turn on your lights to keep the creature alive. Turn them off, and we’ll kill it. (Let’s just ignore the fact that half the planet is asleep while this happens, and also that for the majority of the lights to go out, it’s likely a government shutting off a power grid rather than individuals deciding for themselves.) Humanity elects to kill the creature—yet still, Courtney and Clara say no.
(I have a lot of other thoughts where Courtney is concerned, but that might have to split off into a whole other piece. Her inclusion and treatment said some very specific things about the overall Whovian narrative.)
So here we have another distinct theme that comes up often in Doctor Who—the Doctor is always making decisions for people. He does it because he has the most knowledge in the room, and also just because he wants to most of the time. Because he feels entitled to, just as Danny said in the previous episode. It’s one of the show’s most uncomfortable underpinnings, the fact that the Doctor always appears to be a white man, and spends his days flouncing about making galactic choices without anyone’s say-so but his own. It’s distinctly Imperialistic.
In “The Beast Below,” Amy stopped him from making the wrong choice because she had amassed her own set of facts, and correctly believed that she knew more than the Time Lord did in that moment. She saves the Star Whale. In “The Fire of Pompeii,” Donna takes the ultimate decision away from the Doctor by figuring that she has the benefit of his expertise, but is more qualified (as a card-carrying human) to make the choice on our behalf. In “The Waters of Mars,” the Doctor takes things into his own hands, and is dressed down superbly by Adelaide for having the gaul to put himself above the laws of the universe.
Here, the Doctor is essentially washing his hands of the scenario, trusting his companion to do what he thinks is right in his utter absence. Interestingly, Clara and Courtney both do what the Doctor would have likely done (not in every scenario, but definitely in this one); they go against the wishes of all of humanity to give that creature a chance at life. And it’s an uplifting choice… but it’s also a disturbing one. Because we’re not quite sure if Clara does this because she believes it’s right, or because she knows it’s what the Doctor would want.
Which then undermines the true point of this escapade; the Doctor is clearly trying to prove Danny Pink wrong. Danny insisted in “The Caretaker” that he’s an aristocrat, that he’s good at getting people to do what he wants by being smart and pompous and “knowing” he’s better. Unlike Rory (who took the Doctor to task for getting people to impress him), Danny puts it in far more hurtful terms—you do this because you’re a commander. And we are your soldiers. The Doctor is obviously trying to prove the opposite in this episode. Here, the choice is yours. I will literally have nothing to do with it! You have the basics, now go nuts!
But it doesn’t really pay off, does it? Especially because we never find out what he knew here. Was time really in flux? Was he counting on Courtney to side with Clara? Did he know that the moon would be back in the form of another egg? (Pretty hard to buy, that one, but something had to prevent the Earth from going wonky.) If we had more of a sense of his knowledge, then the purpose of this test—because it was undoubtedly a test for both him and his companion—would come more clear. It seems as though the Doctor is trying to learn from past mistakes; he doesn’t handle this situation the way he has handled any similar ones previously. But it doesn’t work out in his favor. In fact, it has the exact opposite effect he is intending: he alienates his companion.
It’s the best scene of the episode, one of the best written scenes of the entire season by far, and Jenna Coleman gives her all. We’ve never seen a companion lay into the Doctor this way. He’s been called out and slapped and laughed at before, but no one has ever said in so many words: You abandoned me, you thought it was fun, and you are a terrible friend and a poor teacher. This is the ultimate intersection of the episode. The other aspects, though fascinating, are really just combating for our attention, which is why the whole experience comes off so muddy. We are here to watch this falling out, to watch a companion tell the Doctor that he’s been far beyond careless—he was cruel. And he thought he was doing her a favor.
Happily, Danny is there to lend a shoulder and give out hugs, but we still don’t know what this is going to mean for Clara and the Doctor. If this is part of a larger season arc, I’m all for it; it’s a place that Who is usually frightened to go, but the Twelfth Doctor is a prime candidate for this conversation. He’s dear, but he’s also a little mean. He’s caring, but goes callous more readily. This is exactly the sort of Doctor who could stand to learn a lesson about using people—and from a soldier, no less.
Emmet Asher-Perrin is so very impressed with Clara right now. She also thinks the Doctor should rethink that polka dot shirt. You can bug her on Twitter and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
I had a lot of issues with the larger narrative/theme of the episode (most of which are addressed above in a much more articulate fashion than I could have) but in some ways what bothered me most was the even-for-Doctor-Who absolutely nonsensical “science” behind the Moon being an egg & gaining mass &c. It’s like they weren’t even trying.
I’ve commented about this elsewhere, but basically this was “Doctor Who” — The Anti-Abortion Episode.
When you think about it, much of what doesn’t make sense about the episode can be directly attributed to the various story elements being rigged in such a way as to produce an anti-abortion message. Like, for starters: when it is learned that the moon is an egg (and don’t get me started an THAT), the female astronaut’s first thought is to kill it, rather than to find out more about it, or to ask the Doctor to help investigate it (she had had no problem believing his story of who he was at the beginning, which was in itself sloppy, yet now suddenly who he is is not a variable — another sign she’s a cipher, a character of convenience for the writer). So the plot jumps straight to the “let’s kill it” question because that’s where the plot wants to go, not because it makes sense.
And then, the first response of Clara and Courtney is “What? Kill a living thing??” even though letting it live would mean potentially killing every human on Earth. It is not reasonable or in-character for either Clara or Courtney to get all wound up about what is plainly a utilitarian decision. The whole “No! We can’t kill a fetus!” drama is completely forced and unconvincing from the outset, yet the whole episode somehow is supposed to pivot on it.
Moreover, the nominal “villain” of the piece, the female astronaut who is the only one basically unfazed by the decision to kill the creature, is explicitly identified as a childless woman. (She chose to be an astronaut rather than a mom! Ew, gross!)
This episode reminds me a lot of “Prometheus,” in the sense that the characters (and the science) behave incoherently from one minute to the next because that’s what the story needs them to do — in this case, convey a plain anti-abortion message.
Really? Anti Abortion? I’m seriously rolling my eyes on this assertion. Good lord.
In terms of the crazy science… come on let’s look back on Who: Who has NEVER been Hard Sci fi. If you had a problem with the spiders, egg, etc. then what did you think about the TARDIS towing the entire planet Earth home to orbit?
This story, for me at least, is about two things: Humanity instead of the Doctor having ownership over decision over the entire planet and it’s inhabitants. And the second being: Is the Doctor manipulating everyone / events? Or is the Doctor truly being “hands off?”
The Doctor materializing right at the right moment.
The Doctor saying Courtney is “useless,” but decides to bring her to the moon as the “first female on the moon,” but the next question: Why 2049 instead of 2014? Wouldn’t 2014 have accomplished this without endangering her?
Goes to my 2nd point: “Is the Doctor manipulating or is he really handsoff?”
This was probably my least favorite episode of the season, though it’s not without its moments, and I can’t totally dislike anything that tells us we need to get back into space already and rediscover our tattered, near-dead sense of wonder as a species. Not even touching the moon science or the fact that nobody in stories set beyond 2049 ever mentioned that one time the moon hatched. It’s the morality of pretty much everyone involved that I’m having trouble wrapping my head around.
I thought the most interesting thing here was that the Doctor is put into a similar situation to the one he faced in “The Waters of Mars,” makes the opposite choice — not to make humanity’s decisions for them — and it goes just as badly. Given how things went before, I can’t exactly blame him for trying, though Twelve is abrasive enough about it that I also totally see where Clara’s coming from when she thinks it’s pretty much a jerk move to leave her and Courtney and Lundvik on the station without warning.
But, while I was pretty much in agreement with Clara’s verbal beatdown when I first watched the episode, the more I think about it, the more I think she was off-base. What happened here? The Doctor knew what was going on. He provided all relevant information: the spiders are bacteria, the moon is an egg containing a possibly unique life-form struggling to be born, killing it will stabilize the moon’s effects on the Earth, not killing it…may be catastrophic, or it may be something amazing. I’m honestly not sure what else he could’ve said here, beyond “Oh, if you don’t kill it, it also won’t destroy the Earth,” but whether he even knew this or not is ambiguous. Then he says “Aaaaand I’m out!” and leaves the decision in Clara’s, Courtney’s and Lundvik’s hands. Clara, in turn, passes on a (somewhat more ambiguous) version of the Doctor’s story to Earth and asks them to make the choice, then ignores the (wrong) decision made by humanity at large (or, as you pointed out, the parts of humanity in charge of the electrical grids) and pushes the button anyway. That’s a lot of stuff going on, and I’m not totally sure what to make of it. I think it was this line that made me ultimately decide that Clara was unjustified in calling the Doctor out:
“You walk on our Earth, you breathe our air, you call us friend when it’s your mood to do so, and you can damn well help us when we need it.”
Which sounds good at first, but could very easily be interpreted as something like:
“You walk on our Earth and breathe our air (neither of which would even exist without you saving it at every point in its history), we ask your advice and sometimes listen to it when it’s our mood to do so, and you can damn well hold our hand when we want it.”
It made me think of an interesting difference between Ten and Twelve. Ten had immeasurable compassion for humanity, but I think very little faith in it; Twelve, on the other hand, has strong faith in individual humans, but rarely shows compassion or empathy. I think that at this point, he’s saved the Earth so many times that yes, he does get to put humanity on the spot, take the training wheels off for once, and see if they’re still worth saving every other episode.
The Doctor’s been called out for good reason before (Adelaide being a sterling example), but in this case, after some thought, I can’t say I agree with Clara. It seemed a little like raking the teacher over the coals for not providing an answer sheet for a pop quiz. (One question, I guess, being whether the Doctor has any right to be the “teacher” in the first place.) And it still made me like Clara a lot more than I ever did in season 33, because a character who’s in the right all the time is a lot less interesting.
Anyway, that’s more than a wall of text, so…enough out of me.
I like this episode. The science is not very… sciency, but it was the moral dilemma that got me. Killing the Moon seemed so logical, yet I hoped against reason that the lights would stay on. Now I feel sad that they didn’t (even if it probably was government shutting off power grid). I wonder – if it really was up to people – all people, if there was more time to organize world-wide referendum – would they still vote to destroy the creature? It really was the choice between fear and wonder, and… I’ve already discussed it elsewhere and everyone there was like “yeah, I would totally turn off the light, sure,” and now I feel kind of alone in my idealistic, naive, foolish or whatewer certainity that I would definitelly let the light on.
@3 – I don’t quite agree. I think when the Doctor points out that it is the choice of these particular women – the dialog plainly recalled to this viewer the phrase, My Body, My Choice. The showmakers are plainly talking about abortion here.
That it’s not in the least apt to what’s going on, I agree with you. At best, this is a metaphor for a doctor deciding to terminate a pregnancy that’s endangering the mother’s life (and it doesn’t quite work there either.)
We handwave a LOT of what the TARDIS can do – it is literally the machine in this show’s constant Deus Ex Machina – but getting basic science wrong really is lazy even by this show’s standard’s.
My parents had an interesting experience whilst watching this.
At the very moment when Clara slammed the door to the TARDIS the power went out on the entire street. She must have been really upset with the Doctor to plunge a whole neighbourhood into darkness like that.
PS Obviously the moon was able to put on so much weight due to sub-space calories, much like the airborne calories that can affect so many of us.
@6 I just think that assertion is going a step too far for the intentions of the writer. But going on this, if folks are really going to press on to this, humanity (namely 3 women) are making the decision which is the point of being pro-choice. Choosing on your own. Again, at the end of the day, they themselves make that decision. Is this a statement on abortion? Or is this a statement on being pro-choice? I say it’s a statement on pro-choice and ultimately the finality of that decision proves positive on the pro-choice side.
Now if folks want to take this further on the Doctor? Well, IMHO, he’s an Alien… possibly manipualting events and people which to be fair does ask more questions on the abortion question you bring up in terms of this Time Lord, but again… he leaves intentionally for humanity to choose on their own.
Being pro-choice does not indicate a perspective on the morality of abortion. It’s about the issue of a woman can decide on her own on what to do with her body. Again, using this idea, this is *exactly* what happens in Kill the Moon.
@3: Any throwaway line to explain how the Moon had been gaining mass would have been good for Doctor Who (I can even except the spider bacteria). But not knowing where the mass was coming from meant that there was no reason to think killing the Moon would stop, let alone reverse the process. In these conditions, that decision can only be ill-informed (also, it’s so much different from what 2049 science can probably explain that it would be more interesting to study the creature, whatever damage it might cause). Also, I’m sure the TARDIS would have been able to take the Moon farther away and make the Moon gravitational influence weak enough again. Finally, it’s really hard to accept that a creature that stays in its egg for billions of years would lay an egg has big as it was only months prior, as soon as it hatches.
In the Adventures of Sarah-Jane, UNIT mentions having a Moon Base. 40 years later, still no woman has ever been there…
Listen, I get the science makes no sense in KtM. However, my point was is that Who has *very rarely ever* been hard sci-fi in it’s history. It’s usually the complete opposite: sci-fi fantasy. So, with this in mind, all I can say is that “I bought into it.” That’s my answer. I found the story, performances, and characters in the story so amazing that it helped me “buy into the fact that the science was absolutely ludicrous.” In other words, this type of “buying into the sci fi fantasy” happens to each and every one of us in all episodes of Who.
So, I can understand folks like yourself that just can’t get into this episode because of the loopy “science.” I’m just saying, that while you don’t buy it in KtM, you’ve bought into in other episodes. Maybe it was Journey’s End with the flying earth in tow of the TARDIS? Perhaps it’s Partners in Crime with little beings of adipose fat? Maybe it’s the last human on earth who is nothing more than a flat piece of skin tied to her brain? How about personality transferrence through breath?
All of these things (and there are so many more), you either buy into or not. Some of these I couldn’t: Towing the earth back home. Others I could: Fat little creatures made of adipose fat.
To my point, all of the times I couldn’t deal with the “science” (lack thereof), it’s *always* because I couldn’t stand the episode as a whole. It’s rarely ever because of the BS Doctor Who science.
“having the gaul”
It’s gall, related to bile, not the region or the people of Gaul.
@8 – as I said, I agree with you that it wasn’t an anti-abortion episode per se. My point was they were talking about abortion, I just didn’t understand what they were trying to say. On reflection, and upon reading your post, I think you’re right, if anything it was pro-choice. I’d have been just as happy if they hadn’t brought it up at all, personally.
And yes, I also agree that when the show is entertaining we don’t think as much about the implausibility. But I also think a show about time and space should have what seems like implausible aliens and future science that seems like magic to us. The more imaginative, the better. This is where willing suspension of disbelief comes in.
Being lazy with known physics doesn’t fall into this category. I really think it’s just lazy. Although I suppose I can’t complain if it has people talking about science.
I’m very divided on whether I enjoyed this episode or not. I was close to appreciating it even when I was rolling my eyes. (The Doctor’s, “It’s amniotic fluid!” line earned a “This show has jumped the shark,” from my daughter, watching with me. And I immediately guessed there would instantly be a new egg. But that actually ended up being my favorite part of the episode.
Also, thank you for another great review, Emmet Asher-Perrin. And you’re so right about that shirt! SO distracting.
I’ve already discussed it elsewhere and everyone there was like “yeah, I would totally turn off the light, sure,” and now I feel kind of alone in my idealistic, naive, foolish or whatewer certainity that I would definitelly let the light on.
@5. Nope! I’m right there with you, and while I would hope that humanity will someday be united in wonder, it seems they’re far more likely to be united in fear. I’m as sad as you are and I’d totally leave the light on.
I liked this episode because I was never quite sure where it was going, and in a show that has been around as long as Who, that is not an easy task. The fact that the new Doctor is difficult to predict made this episode work far better than it would have had this incarnation been around for a while. We had big complicated moral issues at play. Life and death of not only alien life, but the possible end of human life as we know it.
My favorite part of the episode was the story of Courtney. Clara wanted the Doctor to call Courtney special. What I liked about the resolution is that the Doctor didn’t just call her special, in the ‘give every kid a trophy’ sense that is all too common these days, he gave Courtney a chance to really BECOME special, to be involved in a big life and death event that influenced the course of history, and in this case, influenced it for the better. And ditto for Clara. He gave her a chance to be not just a ‘soldier’ as Danny had suggested previously, but to make command decisions for herself and the whole human race. But Clara was so angry about the Doctor’s seeming callousness that she forgot it was her wish for the Doctor to call Courtney special that kicked everything off.
The science is easy to hand-wave away. The zygote needed massive amounts of energy to hatch, and the final stage of zygote formation was powered by a white hole, drawing in energy and mass from a black hole somewhere else in the universe. See? Easy peasy.
It was nice to see that the spacesuits stored on the Tardis have not changed, even though Doctor incarnations have come and gone. At first I was kind of irritated at a space shuttle landing on the moon being unrealistic, but that was explained pretty logically–they grabbed the only vehicle they had at hand and pressed it into a service for which it was not intended. Which indicates that the astronauts were on a suicide mission, which explains some of their attitudes.
The scene with Clara telling off the Doctor was excellent, and well acted. This Doctor truly did not understand where she was coming from. Some of the empathy and insight of previous incarnations is gone. And Clara’s interaction with Danny was well done as well, and flowed nicely from the interactions of the previous weeks.
All in all, I liked it very much. A thoughtful and serious episode.
And we go from a rather serious episode to the Orient Express in space episode, which looks to be another lighthearted episode like the recent Robin Hood episode. Looks like fun.
If he ever would have said, “It’s an egg! And the embryo is drawing mass from another dimension/black hole/white hole/etc.!” I would’ve been fine with it. I also would’ve been happier with a better explanation of why the Moon came back instantly. Ah, well.
Personally, I was rather impressed they actually came up with a reason, no matter how flimsy, that the Moon had Earth-normal gravity as a way to explain away the fact that they were filming on Earth so they wouldn’t have to spend the whole episode doing simulated-low-gravity wirework.
Previous eras of Who might not have bothered.
@14 maxfieldgardner: Thank you, I really needed to hear that! :)
I thought it was interesting that the singularity and uniqueness of the creature within the egg was portrayed as being a major factor in Clara’s decision. I initially expected the moon to be an eggsack full of spiders. Would that have cause things to play out differently?
I don’t know if I “agree” with the conclusions drawn by the episode but it was certainly entertaining and I enjoyed it. Personally, I thought Clara’s decision to stop the bomb came from a belief that if she saved the “beast” the Doctor might return. Stopping the bomb would save Courtney’s life as well as her own, if only temporarily, so in Clara’s mind she didn’t have a choice.
Am I the only one who wants to know what happens to this magical moon dragon, though? Are we just supposed to ignore/forget about it?!
I preferred to see the episode and the Doctor’s apparent callousness as a Father/Daughter story. For me, the “Space Dad” Doctor is showing “daughter” Clara that: “I won’t always be here for you. Sooner or later, you will have to make decisions for yourself and by yourself”. From this point of view, Clara’s mouthing off against the Doc was understandable: “You abandoned me, Dad, when I needed you so I am going to kick you out of my life and never talk to you again”. The episode might have been better if the Doctor had then said: “Grow up, Clara”.
Ha, also: How did that giant egg come out of that tiny (relatively tiny…and apparently asexual) dragon? That’s gotta hurt. Kind-of bummed the camera cut away while it was being laid. They could’ve at least given us a reaction shot of Courtney making an “ewww” face.
Actually I’m realizing that’s my biggest disappointment with this episode: not enough moon-space-dragon! How can they introduce this amazing creature and then not show us any of it? We had a moon space dragon, but all we got to spend time with were some spider germs.
Something else that intrigues me is the total lack of Clara from the in-our-next-episode trailer. Did they just pick scenes she wasn’t in, or is the Doctor going to adventure alone for a bit until she cools off?
What I found most unbelievable was the part about my country (Mexico) sending miners to the moon in 35 years…
Robo @@@@@ 22
Clara either isn’t in next week or she is in but they kept her out of the trailer to keep us in suspence, given this week’s ending.
If she is in the next episode, given how this one finished, it makes good sense not to show her in the trailer.
@23 It was nice to see another country get a chance to go to the Moon for once! They said it was privately funded, so maybe SpaceX or one of those outfits that is currently pursuing space exploration efforts moved to Mexico to get away from US government interference.
I’m wondering what the Doctor would have done if, after he left Clara, he’d discovered that the Space Chicken really did pose a deadly threat to Earth. Obviously Clara wouldn’t have had that information, so she’d have cancelled the detonation, just as she did in the broadcast episode. At which point the Doctor would have returned, congratulated her on making the right choice, and then had to kill the Space Chicken himself to prevent the death of billions. That might have been amusing.
@9: Not only that, but that SJA episode also said Liz Shaw was on the UNIT Moonbase. I guess the Doctor’s gotten forgetful in his old age.
@17: Yeah, it was refreshing to see a story actually use the presence of Earth gravity on the “Moon” as a story point rather than just ignoring it or handwaving it away. It was a clever way to deal with that inevitable production reality, no matter how wonky the science.
What bugged me more was why the Doctor assumed it was the only creature of its kind in the universe. Doesn’t the egg imply an egg-layer? He has no reason to believe the rest of the species has gone extinct.
Also: Why would its parent have laid its egg in orbit of an inhabited planet if not to provide a handy food supply when it hatched? By all rights, it should’ve flown straight to Earth and devoured us all.
(By the way, I’ve asked this elsewhere, but is anyone else having problems with Tor.com loading very slowly? I couldn’t even get the edit window to open except by setting my browser to author mode, and then my message wouldn’t load — it just came out as “T”. Fortunately I finally got a working edit box — I hope — when I hit “Edit.”)
The episode was Swiftian satire.
One of the problems was that the science was so bad it was distracting. The Doctor noticing Earth normal gravity was great, but when he followed it up with “we should be floating” on the surface of the moon (as if the moon had no gravity instead of lower gravity) I couldn’t stand it. The Doctor is not so stupid that he could possibly say that. It was so clearly (needlessly) stupid writing that it took me completely out of the episode. I understand having to suspend disbelief to enjoy programs like Doctor Who, but that doesn’t excuse such simple, basic errors that no reasonable script writer should ever include (and that no one else involved in the production apparantly caught). It ruined the episode for me.
@29: Doctor Who has always had ridiculously bad science, even back in ’63 when it was supposed to be educational. It’s a fantasy show rather than an actual science fiction show. Sure, the ridiculousness was pretty egregious here, but hardly for the first time. It’s not even the first time this season — remember the Godzilla-sized T. rex in the premiere?
It seems a lot of people are determined to see some political message in this episode.
Fine. Let’s go ahead and say “Kill the Moon” was some sort of “pro-choice” episode. If that’s the case, then it certainly wasn’t “pro-choice neutral.” In other words, the episode affirmatively and unapologetically stated that one choice was superior to the other — in this case, decision to choose life.
Therefore, it would be more accurate to say that the episode was not merely pro-choice, but pro-choose life. It was the decision to choose life that led to a brighter future for humanity. As the Doctor says at the end of the episode:
If one wants to read a pro-choice political message into “Kill the Moon,” one must acknowledge that the episode takes a affirmative stance on a particular choice that proved to be the superior one — the decision to choose life.
Which, I’m not ashamed to say, I find rather refreshing.
Anyone else notice the “Let’s Kill Hitler” reference? :)
If the science is so bad that it jolts me, Little Miss English Major, out of the story, then no amount of justification can be made for it. Even I know that an egg can’t gain weight because it is a closed system.
The moon gaining weight was an egregiously bad science explanation for the presence of gravity.
The worldbuilding was as stupid as “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship,” in other words, typical Moffatt with a silly big concept and lazy execution. Toss in a few big emotional scenes and have people run around a lot and hope no one notices the incompetence on the writers’ parts.
This Doctor keeps proving he doesn’t really understand humans, and he’s emotionally distant. We get that this already so can this Doctor start gaining enough understanding to stop being such a jerk, or will he disappear as fast as Colin Baker’s Doctor?
A group of my geeky buddies of many years and I were discussing this episode today, and one mentioned Clara’s great line about slapping the Doctor into his next regeneration. It was voted one of the best companion lines of all times.
One of the core themes of the episode is clearly a reaction to the dismantling of NASA’s space program.
When did that happen?
In “The Hungry Earth”, the Doctor tries to get the earthlings to come to a decision. In that one, one of the humans murders a Silurian and the committe fails. For the first time, this Doctor created committe makes the right decision.
IMHO, the Doctor did not know what would happen. The little deep inhale on the shore was the Doctor accepting the flood of new memories generated by their choice. “The Waters of Mars” managed that transition better but we can’t have two episodes showing news headlines.
I found it fascinating that Clara can act as the Doctor’s conscience with little effect, but acting as the conscience of Earth absolutely floors her. And as much I love Danny Pink, in this case the Doctor was right. Clara didn’t need training wheels. Danny’s wrong to want her to put them back on.
Yes, the science of the story was extremely flaky – even for Doctor Who. The moral story was superior. It gets a pass from me.
The abortion metaphor occurred to me. However, folks from GB on other sites have said that abortion isn’t an issue in GB. Unless this particular writer has an issue with abortion, I suspect that our American eyes are seeing an analogy where there isn’t one.
I bought Series 8 late (i.e., atthe inflated iTunes price of $30 for SD). Had I not purchased the series, I believe I would have given up on Doctor Who by now! Someone let me know when Moffat steps down, and if the BBC decides to even continue this program. Then I might consider watching it again!
And since #32 mentioned “Let’s Kill Hitler”, I noticed the new rule on the Tardis — no hanky-panky. Because the last occurence of hanky-panky produced River Song no doubt.
Which reminds me that the Doctor said that he and Clara went to dinner in Berlin. They weren’t at the dinner that River Song invaded to procure a wardrobe, were they?
The science was very bad this episode and it was distracting from the story (such as it was). The moon’s mass “issues” was bad enough, but there was no way that the space spiders could have been a single celled organism (for very good biological reasons) and the entire giant egg concept was just dumb.
I don’t care if they pull shenanigans with distant future and advanced tech ideas, up to a point, but this is 40 years in the future without any handwavey stuff to back it up, and these mistakes shouldn’t have made it through the first script pass.
And I’m conflicted about the character development stuff this season. On the one hand, I love that they’re doing much more with Clara then they have previously. And The Doctor is much more interesting then the end of 11’s run. But if the science is bad, the philosophy is suspect, and the drama is uneven (and borderline soap opera with Danny last week), then you have to wonder if they’re doing what they need to with the scripts. At least the actors are fun to watch!
Have to agree with the people here who said that the science was so bad that it completely spoiled the story for them. I like Doctor Who when it is full of whimsy. I like the full-on SF episodes. I particularly like the base under siege episodes. But mix them all together and you get a mess. And this was a complete mess.
Not only that, but the plot was incomprehensible too. Why take the bombs up to the moon when nobody knew why the mass had increased? What were they for?
I didn’t like this episode very much. However, though I found the methods used by the Doctor to be unnecessarily brusque (which seems to be a constant for Twelve), I agreed with him. Sometimes we have to choose for ourselves, even without all the information at hand, otherwise we’re just buying into the narrative that the Doctor is our sci-fi deity and will always come and save us. While the Doctor, since his early days as a world saver, has always been about humanity standing on its own feet, with him lending the occasional hand.
And it was clear that Clara, Courtney and the astronaut lady would not decide anything as long as he was there, because they were deferring to his supposed higher authority and experience. So he did the only thing he could to force them to decide for themselves. He left.
@2: That’s an excellent desription of the episode. I completely agree. This episode was a complete mess.
I think that part of the “bad science” was deliberate.
The show normally has fictional science, that makes little sense. And the Doctor usually supplies explanations that satisfy both the audience and the companion, in the form of technobabble.
But in this episode, the Doctor absented himself. No technobabble explanation available. This was unsettling to the audience, because it laid the inexplicable “science” bare.
And it reflected Clara’s reason for being upset. She is, as has been noted, a control freak. And while the Doctor nominally left her in control, he also left her ignorant, with neither himself nor the TARDIS available to answer techincal questions. And ignornace is not a position of control, or a position a control freak enjoys being in.
You can’t make good decisions without good information. And while it may be reasonable for the Doctor to leave the decision to Clara, it isn’t reasonable to expect her to come to a good decision while keeping her from having accurate information on the situation.
Sci-Fi History Lesson:
Jack Williamson: “Born of the Sun” published in 1934 ” the planets of the Solar system are actually eggs of space-dwelling dragon-like monsters that start hatching. Pluto first.” (links to “tvtropes.org”). A wonderful story I read in the collection “Before the Golden Age” and which I immediately flashed on when we heard that the Moon appeared to be preparing to hatch.
In the 1930’s the sci-fi was more about the glorious idea, and not whether the science was real. As Dr. Who should be…
@23 Re the “Mexican” moon base, I’m wondering if it was somehow a reference to the Second Doctor serial “The Enemy of the World,” which was set in the 21st century and involved a would-be world dictator from Mexico.
Also,I noticed the Doctor’s use of one of the Second Doctor’s signature catchphrases: “When I say ‘run,’ run!”
Aw, I loved this episode! Yeah, the science makes no sense at all, even with the handwavium, but to me that was an intrinsic part of the conflict between Clara and the Doctor. That you can insist all you like that what is happening is impossible, and it is, but it’s still happening, and it requires you to impose a moral judgment upon it. The Doctor experiences this time and time again and the whole episode is about him forcing Clara to do the same.
It’s easy to make civilization-changing decisions for bog monsters or the Ood, but what do you do when the impossible happens to your world? Something that I wish they had mentioned early on is that Clara and Courtney are probably down on Earth right then. Can you end your future, Clara? Can you risk ending your world for the impossible thing?
I also love that the episode commits to its consequences. There’s no happy ending for Clara. Either she kills the space dragon or she saves everyone and is still traumatized by what the Doctor put her through. That’s some powerful storytelling there and what makes it even better is that it happens while a space dragon poops us a new moon offscreen what the hell. This is what I watch the show for, really. Human drama amidst the impossible.
@36 – that makes sense, and explains why the choice the three women were givien wasn’t really even slightly analgous to the woman’s choice issue we Americans do seem to have.
The wording and delivery did seem loaded with some meaning, though – and it seemed significant that the “three ages of women” were present to make a choice which, yes, should probably have ended up with Earth becoming first breakfast. (Although I doubt we’d all of us together make even a half decent snack to such a monster.)
What an interesting ecology they’ve set up – spider people come and make planets, then space dragons with legged bacteria lay eggs around them.
I really just don’t buy that abortion isn’t a big deal anywhere in the Western world. Or, from what little I know of it, the rest of the world. And the episode is pretty plainly dealing with the metaphor.
I haven’t convinced myself yet exactly what it’s saying — I suspect that it’s trying to land somewhere in the safe middle ground, which would be kind of cowardly — but it reads as at least nominally pro-life to me right now, as executed. Neither of which possibility makes me feel great about Doctor Who.
I liked the episode a lot, not even needing to ignore the science because the ‘how’ did not matter at all for the acute problem.
To me the central point, of an innocent being versus humankind seems to be the quitessential conservationist question writ large.
Even if that’s true, I don’t see why that should bother someone who claims to be pro-choice. As has already been stated, the episode gives the choice over to the three women. So, if one is determined to view some abortion political message into this episode, then it is firmly pro-choice. For anyone who claims to be pro-choice, that should be enough — simply reaffirming the woman’s right to choose.
(It should be noted that the giant space dragon/chicken/whatever was on the verge of being born, so a more accurate analogy would be the abortion of a baby that is just about to be born. How many people who are pro-choice — and who are objecting to this episode on those grounds — would be okay with killing a baby that is nine months developed and on the verge of being born, just as the giant space dragon/chicken/whatever was?)
Again, if one is determined to view some political message into “Kill the Moon,” it’s simply that the episode goes a step further and presents a pro-choose life — which, if I’m not mistaken, presupposes the freedom to choose. That should not be objectionable to someone who calls themselves pro-choice, if words still mean anything.
@36: not sure where you’re getting your information from, but yes, abortion is very much an issue in the UK: an extremely emotive and divisive one. It just isn’t a *party political* issue, because (for various very valid reasons) the UK political parties have declined to make it into one. Instead it’s a religious and social issue.
@50: one doesn’t need to be ‘determined’ to read an abortion message into an episode where an older male character not only hands a decision over the life of an unborn creature over to three women, but actually has a line of dialogue pointing out that they’re women at the moment he does so. That’s… pretty direct.
The only question is, what was the writer trying to say? I’m leaning towards the idea that, in a ham-fisted way, he was trying to say that it’s important to make your own choice, but at the same time, as another commenter points out, he definitely suggests one choice is better than the other.
The episode isn’t *solely* an abortion metaphor. That’s part of the problem, I think: the episode was trying to do too many things. But it definitely is an abortion metaphor.
In regard to the science, I’m happy enough to ignore daft science if it’s there to make the story work. But the issue with this episode is that the bad science mostly appears to be there because of sloppy editing. Most of it could have been easily fixed without affecting the story at all. You wouldn’t even need a scientist: anyone with a high school education could have sorted these issues easily.
The problem with this episode is that it very much appears that nobody cared enough to give the script even a cursory check. That’s why we get a character a whole 35 years in the future, who must have been old enough to use a computer herself in 2014, saying that her granny used to use Tumblr.
Going to pick a little nit about the reference to The Fires of Pompeii. Admittedly it’s been a year or so since I watched that episode, but I don’t recall Donna taking the choice away from The Doctor. What I thought was beautiful, and what made me start to love Donna, was that The Doctor made the awful choice, but Donna shared the consequences. She pressed the button with him so that he wouldn’t have to carry that choice alone. It was a wonderfully human moment.
There is no contradiction between the episode being pro-choice (if indeed that were the intent) while favoring the choice of life. Despite the use of the “pro-life” label for the anti-abortion camp, there is nothing remotely “anti-life” about the pro-choice position. On the contrary, one of the main reasons for supporting the legality of abortion — and, I think, one of the reasons it was legalized in the first place — is that when it was illegal, that just drove it underground into disreputable clinics and ended up killing more mothers along with their babies. Nobody’s eager to see babies aborted; we just recognize that depriving women of that option does more harm than good — not only because outlawing it doesn’t actually prevent it, but because there are circumstances where being forced to keep a baby would endanger a woman’s life or ruin her future.
So pro-choice is not anti-life, not by a long shot. It’s fine if a woman chooses to keep her baby if that’s what she thinks is right, and nobody on either side of the abortion issue would object to that choice as long as she were free to make it. The only problem is when she’s forced by the state to make that choice even when it’s against her best interests.
If someone has commented on this already then forgive me for the reiteration. But the “abortion debate” aspect of this episode is clearly there in my opionion. (There is also a rather odd muddled discussion between the maid/mother/crone apsects of womanhood, which wasn’t well articulated.) I think this episode was most interesting however in that what is articulated is the double bind, ultimately no win situation, that men are placed in in any discussion of abortion. There is absolutely nothing the Doctor can do in this situation that will not be derided by Clara. She has so oppressively presumed to be his conscience time and time again to the point of becoming very free in her “teaching” of him; but she equally and without shame, insists that he knows the future despite his being explicitly clear to her that this is an unseeable point in time. So the Doctor can not win. If he says “kill it”, he advocates having a corpse hanging in the sky of “Mother Earth”; and if he says save it, he risks the death of all that “Mother Earth” has nutured before–he can not see this future anymore than Clara can. He leaves the field of debate, so he leaves the maid/mother/crone to make the decision–and is lost to Clara’s respect, esteem, and trust because of it. But isn’t this what all men are left with in the abortion debate? The truth is that men face this everyday–there is good reason for this, but also a failure of case by case, and profound fear on all sides. It really very sad, but absolutely real. The Doctor’s reaction is so completely human, but cloaked in the alien–I suspect that men feel this way in this situation all the time. It’s sad, especially, because at this point in time there really is no way for men to express any opinion in the abortion debate that has any validity at all. So here we see the Doctor, abandoned by someone he surely loves on the basis of her failure, and his to share responsibility in a situation in which whatever position he takes will fail based on future events he can not see.
As a by the way: this has been the problem with the Clara character, she is so willing to consider the Doctor subject to her “teaching”, and he has been willing to accept this–it is uncomfortable because what is Clara afterall but a shard of time. As such she is valuable, certainly, but far from complete. Clara is the passing shine of a mirrorball, the Doctor is the Club.
Well…it’s not entirely that simple. The state does not grant full bodily autonomy to women in the matter or abortion; if it did, then abortion would be legal all the way up to the moment of delivery. The state recognizes a woman’s bodily autonomy, but also recognizes the legitimate state interest in protecting pre-natal life, and then attempts to balance those two interests. Thus, depriving a woman of that choice at a certain point is legitimate, as the certain law stands.
It’s one of the reasons why the idea that “Killing the Moon” as some abortion story is starting to grow on me, because the situation depicted is more analagous to a really late-term abortion — killing a baby just as it’s about to be born. Furthermore, the baby in question poses a threat to the life of the mother (in this case, Earth), and so we are faced with the choice of either killing a fully developed baby (which gives even most pro-choice advocates pause), or saving the baby and letting the mother possibly die.
The life of the mother is frequently cited as a reason for the moral justiability of abortion (for example, one might use the Doctrine of Double Effect for those cases in which a procedure meant to save the mother’s life unintentionally results in the death of the unborn child). But what “Killing the Moon” does is say that choosing life for the child in such a siutation may be the better choice, even if we can understand the reasons why a mother might choose otherwise in that same situation. That’s a particularly brave thing to say.
And, in the episode, it turns out that choosing the life of the baby space dragon/chicken/whatever was indeed the better choice, since it inspires humanity to once again reach for the stars. Good stuff.
I have never been a fan of Clara, though i did like her in her first appearance as souffle girl. She’s pretty and charming and has a kind of sad (though not as sad as they make it out to be) back story but that’s about it. And then there was the whole impossible girl thing which was never resolved in a satisfying way. BUT i like her more this season and most of all in this episode. Clara is a better character when she is not just there to offer unwavering and unconditional support the Doctor, but has other people to work with as well.
I haven’t really been that into any of the episodes this season. Nothing has grabbed me as particularly fun, exciting, or awe-inspiring. The moon is an egg had potential, but the fact that i could never suspend my disbelief stopped it cold. Yes, this show is not hard sci-fi, but let’s at least make a cursory nod towards dark matter, extra-dimensional mass conversions, or some other handwave.
I don’t particularly like Capaldi’s doctor in the way that i did Eccleston (always), Tennant (almost always), and Smith (hit or miss) but i gather from what he says in interviews that his doctor is intentionally going back to a more alien, less likeable persona. And i’m ok with that.
So i’m at this weird point of not liking the characters or the plots, but generally approving of the character arcs that are developing. I like the groundwork they’re laying. It’s not particularly fantastic on its own, but it will be interesting to see what fruit it bears in the future.
@46 TorChris: Nicely said, I completely agree.
I love that Courtney had a physics book in her bag, and used the psychic paper to buy anti-motion-sickness bands, and cleaning supplies should she get sick again. She’s very Rory, who spent the two years between when he last saw the Doctor in “The Eleventh Hour” and when he met the Doctor again in “Vampires of Venice” studying to be prepared to travel, should the Doctor show up again.
Courtney may be a disruptive influence, but she’s a smart one, and someone who is going out of her way to be responsible and prepared for meeting the Doctor again. Not too different from Clara telling the Doctor to come back tomorrow, and then being prepared with a packed bag. it’s no wonder that Clara likes Courtney, despite the disruption.
The abortion parallel is obvious, but not complete. They weren’t choosing whether to abort a human fetus, after all. This was an unknown, alien, possibly planet-eating, likely planet-killing, utterly enormous fetus, and the Earth wasn’t its mother even if the humans ended up with the choice. It was more similar to Indira’s choice to launch the missiles and kill the living dinosaurs in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, in order to prevent the earth being destroyed.
Half way through, I stopped and went back to watch the “Time Lord Victorious” scene in The Waters of Mars. I wanted to remember the details because I was pretty sure they were driving some of the Doctor’s actions. Eleven clearly took Adelaide’s words to heart, and tried not to be so imperious anymore (even if he was pretty bad at at that), but Twelve has become as arrogant as Ten ever was. Clara even brought up his apparent view of humans as unimportant, echoing Adelaide. And this makes me sad, because I liked it better when Ten told Wilf, “You look like giants.”
Clara had every reason to be angry. When she first joined him on the TARDIS, he told her, “There is one thing you need to know about traveling with me. We don’t walk away.” When she said she didn’t know who the Doctor was anymore, she was spot on.
@56: I think the reason I’m not too bothered by the change in the Moon’s mass is that inexplicable mass-changing is a pretty standard trope in a lot of sci-fantasy fiction. Case in point: the Incredible Hulk. Or any shapeshifter, really. In DS9: “Vortex,” Odo was able to turn into a drinking glass that was no heavier than the other glasses on the tray, yet later in the episode, the guest star told him “You’re heavier than you look” while he was in humanoid form. Ditto for any character that can shrink or grow — they almost always get lighter when they shrink and heavier when they grow. Then there are all those countless, countless stories about alien or mutated-human babies that grow to adulthood in a matter of hours or minutes without taking in any food as a source of biomass — this has been done in Fringe, Earth: Final Conflict, War of the Worlds: The Series, and countless others.
Then there’s disintegration. When someone or something is hit by a disintegrator beam and vanishes, where does the mass go? If they were instantly vaporized, then the vapor would have a vastly greater volume and the rapid expansion would cause a huge explosion. Instead, the mass just vanishes into nothing. On the flip side, there’s duplication, like Captain Kirk in “The Enemy Within,” or Jamie Madrox of the X-Men. The duplicate people’s mass just comes out of nowhere.
So it’s simply a fact of life in mass-media sci-fi that the conservation of mass does not exist. Mass can come out of nowhere or vanish into nothing without difficulty. It’s hard to find a sci-fi show, movie, or comic that doesn’t violate mass conservation, if the issue comes up at all.
To clarify, I feel like the idea of pro-choosing-life is a bit of rhetorical misdirection. Saying, “You have the choice, but you should totally choose this one thing,” is disingenuous to the entire point of the choice. It shouldn’t be made out to be the right choice, except insofar as it may just be the right choice for a particular mother. If we’re saying that it’s the right choice as a rule, well that’s just a wink-wink nudge-nudge way of saying it’s the only choice as a rule.
I do see now clearly the evidence that the analogy best seems to fit a late-late term pregnancy, but I can’t quite see why this would be done except to confound the message further. Although this may be an across the pond sort of problem. Where I am, late-term abortion is not one of the pressing issues in the abortion debate, which is stuck much more firmly in the primordial muck of whether or not women should even have legal rights over their own bodies.
Beyond which, if the Earth itself is the mother in this analogy, I’m not sure how a choice was given (except if we take the choice to have been humanity’s, as Earth’s spokespeople, in which case I don’t see how that choice was respected).
It all really is a bit of a mess.
In “Killing the Moon,” the message certainly seems to be that it was the right choice in this particular situation. One can easily imagine the episode ending in an entirely different way, with the Earth and all of humanity destroyed. Would Clara and Courtney’s decision to save the baby space dragon/chicken have been the “right” one in that case? If you’re a utilitarian, then perhaps no. But then that just begs the question against utilitarianism. So we must ask: is it moral to sacrifice the life of one (or a minority) for the majority?
Or, to paraphrase Spock, do the needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few, or the one? Is it moral to kill one to save the life of another? It may be, if the former is an aggressor against the latter. But what if the former is completely innocent and defenseless, and only poses a threat to the latter unintentionally? The space dragon/chicken would seem to fall into that category, meaning it is not an aggressor (who must have intent), and so would it be morally justifiable to kill it just to save ourselves?
In any case, the episode preserves this idea that we have the freedom to choose, and therefore it is pro-choice in that sense. But perhaps it’s apparent pro-choose life message only goes so far as to say: An apparent threat to my life is not necessarily a good reason to kill or destroy something. Maybe … just maybe, choosing to spare a life in the face of my own danger is the better choice.
People who practice non-violence, or who are pacifists, espouse a similar message.
But is it the right choice as a rule, as you ask? Well, one can certainly be a pacifist, while still acknowledging the reasons for war and the arguments for violence as legitimate within the confines of self-defense. Likewise, one can be pro-life, and even espouse that people should “choose life,” while still acknowledging the reasons for abortion and the arguments for abortion as legitimate within certain confines.
Perhaps “Killing the Moon” is doing something like that. Showing one posssibility — inspiring humanity to reach for the stars — as a consequence of making a particular choice that went beyond our immediate danger. Again, it could have ended differently. But it’s the possibility of something good beyond mere utilitarian concerns that drives this sort of thinking, among pro-choose-lifers and pacifists alike.
@61: “…if the Earth itself is the mother in this analogy…”
Okay, I think this is where the idea of this being an abortion metaphor breaks down. The Earth was not the mother. The mother was some other giant space dragon thingy that just left its egg in Earth orbit (and thereby drove the Silurians into hibernation, I suppose, but that’s another discussion). So nobody in this story was making the decision about their own baby. The space dragon belonged to the type of species that just lays eggs and abandons them. So it’s not really a parenting issue in any meaningful sense.
After all, the script made a point of having the Doctor say — without having any way he could possibly have known for sure — that the space dragon was the only creature of its kind in all the universe. Which makes it a metaphor for conservation and extinction, for the question of whether humans have the right to wipe out whole species for our convenience. It seems more likely to me that that was the intended allegory.
I can see in retrospect how people saw implications of the abortion debate in this episode, but I missed them the first time through. I was thinking more in terms of endanged species and environmental stewardship in evaluating their decision. After all, this was not a human life they were considering, and it was not at all clear whether or not this creature was even sentient.
What I did not miss was the Maiden/Mother/Crone troika that the Doctor left to make the decision. I don’t know if it is a deliberate choice or just a concept that people are naturally drawn to in storytelling, but that neo-pagan “Triple Goddess” image shows up all over the place. I was even watching Castle last week, as the three women in his life sat around and worried about him while he was missing and apparently kidnapped, and thought to myself, “Oh my God, look at that, it’s maiden/mother/crone.”
And as I stated earlier, the episode started with Clara demanding that the Doctor call Courtney “special.” Instead of lip service, though, the Doctor gave Courtney a chance to BE special, with a capital S, and she rose to the occasion. To me, that was the emotional heart of the issue.
I meant that the Earth is the mother by analogy, not the actual mother of the egg, since if we’re talking a late-term situation the Earth is what’s threatened by the birth.
However, this all brings up a bigger problem with the episode: That the commentary can’t quite decide what it is. As an abortion episode, it’s gnarled with inconsistency. As a conservation episode, it’s gnarled with abortion imagery.
What I’ll do at this point, though, is just think about it. Maybe with thought my discomfort will fade. Maybe the opposite. But either way I just need to go over it a few more times with myself.
@62 JM1001: I agree, nicely said, couldn’t put it better myself (seriously, my english is not that good, so I didn’t even try).
I didn’t notice the maiden/mother/crone thing, but another mythological idea occured to me: the Moon (or god/godess associated with it) in most mythologies symbolizes inspiration, dreams, poetry and such things. It is most interesting that the choice was between utilitarian – to kill the Moon and idealistic – to let it live, even if it could pose a thread. The fact the Moon lived inspired people from that moment on forever – had they killed it, they would probably never leave Earth. Or dream.
I didn’t see a maiden/mother/crone thing going on. Hermione Norris strikes me as closer to “mother” age than “crone” age, and for that matter Clara and Courtney seem too young for the other two parts as well. I think of “maiden” as meaning a young, unmarried or virginal woman, not a schoolgirl. So it’s more like child/maiden/mother if anything. But maybe I’m being too literal.
@67 Didn’t they call Courtney a teenager? I thought she seemed 13/14 went we first met her, but I guess maybe she is 16/17? Is the school a high school (or whatever the UK equivalent is)? The kids seemed junior high age, but I am closer to 30 than I am to high school, so maybe they just seem young because I am getting older.
Not to beat this into the ground or anything….but Courtney says specifically that she is 15. As for the definition of maiden/mother/crone–here goes: A maiden is a young, fertile (I’m trying to be delicate here), unmarried woman and yes virginal. I think that we are likely safe in assuming that Courtney fits this bill. A mother is a woman who is caring for children, yes usually her own but I think Clara’s being a teacher qualifies her, particularly so because she does explicitly state that she wants children of her own. A crone is a woman either past child bearing, or who’s children are now adults, or barren either by nature or by choice. The astronaut makes clear that she falls into this catagory. But again, as much as we have the necessary trio–the discussion between them is really sort of muddled and empty, so it’s a clear plot point but poorly excecuted and so not very helpful; which is too bad because it could have been interesting.
But the question that I have rattling around is: where does the Doctor go? Again I’m not sure it matters but it seems like it should.
@69: All right, granted. I just find it a little incongruous, if not impolite, to refer to the 47-year-old Hermione Norris as a “crone,” which implies an ancient, decrepit hag.
I meant no disparagement to Ms. Norris by using the ‘crone’ term, but in the neo-pagan imagery, it refers to someone who is past childbearing age, whose role has shifted from nurturing to dispensing wisdom. And the character she was portraying fit that mold. In neo-pagan imagery, crones are not considered “decrepit hags,” instead they are respected as elder sources of wisdom. Our society today packs a lot of baggage, and even predjudice, into the term crone.
And, to push the image further, the Triple Goddesses are said by some to be the three aspects of the Moon Goddess, so yes, I agree with @66, and think the fact that the moon was involved brings in yet another level of mythological imagery here.
Also, Emily, I am looking forward to your piece on Courtney.
@71: I agree that it is a problem that “crones” are characterized in a disparaging way by modern connotation, and certainly understand that @70 could be offended by applying the term to an obviously vital and attractive woman. But she is a woman of a “certain age” as opposed to the dewey Clara, and the innocent Courtney. If we substituted “wise woman” for “crone” it would be less offensive perhaps and closer to the meaning of the archetypal construct. It would also give in to the “language game” of modern life that is so infuriating, actually confounding of communication rather than supporting of communication, as the “language game” professes to be. Afterall not every “crone” is wise, anymore than any “elder” (generally male usage) is wise. Both the crone and the elder are given credit and honor for their experience in the archetype and appropriately so; but as often as not in literature (and life) experience can lead to wisdom as easily as it can to prejudice, and if such characters are very well drawn, their experience leads to both. This is why such constructs are old, beautiful and useful as literary motifs–they quickly model the ambivalence of human experience without having to plot out every experience as if it were binary.
@73: It’s not so much that I was offended as that it never would’ve occurred to me to apply the word “crone” to a woman who’s just slightly older than myself, so I didn’t see the mythic resonance.
I think that it can be safely said that this episode is not a metaphor about abortion. In the UK this is really not a political issue. It is a private one. I would be somewhat surprised if a series like Doctor Who would step into these waters. I suspect that it is only with US eyes can the ‘obvious’ parallels be seen. I may, however, be wrong, it has been known but in this case I really think I’m right.
I also agree that the ‘maiden, mother, crone’ metaphor is absent as well, not least that there are no belief systems in which a 47 year old woman would be described as such. You’re reading too much into this people.
It would be interesting to ask the writer of the episode just what imagery was intended or not intended in this episode. There certainly are a lot of things that might have been on his mind when he was putting together the script. Perhaps a future issue of Doctor Who magazine will delve into this.
@75: Actually I have to disagree. Remember, average life expectancy was shorter in the past and health care was worse. Late 40s wasn’t exactly ancient, — there were always people who made it to the Biblical “threescore years and ten” (70) or more — but in a lot of cultures it would’ve been seen as a fairly advanced age. Also, as others have said, “crone” originally just meant a post-menopausal woman, past childbearing years and into the age when she’d be a source of wisdom and experience.
@75: no, sorry. I’m from the UK, have lived here for all my 42 years, and to my eyes – and to many other UK people’s eyes, in my experience – there is simply no way to avoid seeing an abortion parallel in an episode where three female characters are explicitly asked to decide on whether an unborn creature lives or dies. This is not a US culture issue. This is about the contents of the script, not the contents of our heads.
It is literally incredible that the writer could not have been, at the very least, aware of the likelihood that this would be seen as an abortion parallel. He’s writing about the fate of an unborn creature.
And I think the evidence is that he knows what he’s doing. Consider his choices in the script. First, to make the shuttle captain a female character; second, to have a male character deliberately leave the decision to the women; and third, to give that character a line of dialogue where he specifically points out that the people he’s leaving in charge represent ‘womankind’.
If the writer really didn’t intend an abortion parallel, he’s managed to write a very obvious one by accident, which would make him a very unlucky idiot. I don’t think it was meant to be solely an abortion discussion, but the writer has to have realised what he was doing.
I really don’t see the abortion parallel. Well, yes if you’re looking hard for one, but I believe this is not what the episode was about. An egg here represents something unknown – the decision here is between certainity (if we kill it, it can’t hurt us whatever it is) and uncertainty (if it hatches, it might destroy us. Or not. Do we take a chance?)
I think it is about how to treat aliens – and anything strange and different – with open mind and hope and optimism, not fear.
And the women? Well, there wasn’t a woman on the moon yet – and not likely to be in nearest future – so maybe the writer wanted to show us how that would look – not one, but three women on the moon! Just for fun!
I think that Courtney is the moral eenter of the episode: she makes the right choices, repeatedly. And I think that one of the most significant choices she makes is: “No, I’d rather call you ‘Miss'”, where she declines Clara’s offer of friendship to keep their student-teacher dynamic intact. Clara not seeing the Doctor in the same student-teacher terms may be the cause of her own emotional distress (which is not to say that the Doctor might not have a lot of shortcomings as a teacher, stabilizer references notwithstanding). Still, “Slap you into your next regeneration” is a great line, no matter what the genesis.
The episode raises questions that are directly relevant to the moral justifiability of abortion, so at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what the writer’s intentions were. And that’s okay, because that’s the nature of engaging in moral philosophy via fiction. Telling a story that ends on a note of hope that perhaps there is something good beyond mere utilitarian concerns, even in the face of my own danger, is relevant to all sorts of moral questions: The environment and conservation, war and peace, violence and non-violence — and, yes, abortion.
The idea that it’s not always morally justified to kill something is a theme that’s explored in those aforementioned contexts in fiction all the time, and without much protest. But when that question is applied to abortion — and the message is “Perhaps no” — then people become very uncomfortable, as though suggesting that abortion (like any other ethical choice) is not always morally justified is somehow blasphemous. Thus “Kill the Moon” becomes an “anti-abortion” episode, to hear many reviewers tell it.
But someone who suggests that the use of violence isn’t always morally justified is not necessarily “anti-war.” Likewise, someone who suggests that abortion isn’t always morally justified isn’t necessarily “anti-abortion.”
Or maybe just the possibility of something good beyond a mere utilitarianism.
Doctor Who‘s “Kill the Moon” could be an imperfect exploration of these questions. A better one might be the House episode “Fetal Position.”
@81: As I’ve said, pro-choice does not mean pro-abortion. It means pro-choice. That’s not a euphemism, it’s an accurate description of the position. Nobody wants abortion to be mandatory. Keeping the baby is perfectly fine, if it’s the mother’s choice, if she believes it’s medically safe and won’t ruin her life. But she needs to have the option to choose otherwise, and to be able to get it done legally and safely if she does deem it necessary. It’s not anyone else’s place to judge — or legislate — what choice she makes, one way or the other. What matters is that the choice is hers, not the state’s.
But that’s not the isssue “Kill the Moon” is addressing. It’s addressing the question of the moral justifiability of Action X, not the legal permissibility of Action X.
We can certainly understand a woman’s reasons for choosing Action X, while still judging that action to be morally unjustifiable. And, indeed, in the episode, Captain Lundvik’s desire to “abort” the baby space dragon/chicken are perfectly understandable, and rational. She just turns out to be completely wrong, and sparing the life of the creature was the right choice — the one that inspires humankind to spread across the stars. Since I’m on the subject of House (that other infamous Doctor), I will quote him:
We don’t judge Captain Lundvik herself for the choice she makes, but we can judge it to be the wrong choice, even if we understand her reasons. “Kill the Moon” isn’t interested in talking about political issues of whether or not the state should intervene in this or that choice; it’s interested in exploring the question of the moral justifiability of that choice, and how a person can be completely and totally wrong, even when they have perfectly understandable and rational reasons for choosing the way they did.
@83: The problem is your statement that “people become very uncomfortable, as though suggesting that abortion (like any other ethical choice) is not always morally justified is somehow blasphemous.” What you’re implying there is that those “people” actually want abortions to happen every time and are offended if they don’t happen. And that’s a complete misrepresentation of the pro-choice position. Nobody wants abortions that don’t have to happen. Just about every pro-choice person I’ve ever spoken to on the issue would prefer it if an abortion didn’t happen — but we recognize that there are cases where it’s a necessary evil, and we recognize that it’s not our place to impose our preferences on another person. So no pro-choice person would be bothered if a woman made a free and informed choice to keep her baby. On the contrary — I think what most pro-choice people would want is the universal availability of sex education and contraception, so that women can make informed choices and avoid unwanted pregnancies in the first place, in which case there’d be no need for abortions. What we aspire to as an ideal is a world in which all pregnancies are planned and wanted, rendering abortion effectively a non-issue.
So that’s what I’m saying. You’re assuming that the pro-choice side is taking a moral stance on abortion opposite to that taken by the pro-life side. That’s incorrect. What’s really going on is that they’re taking moral stances on different issues. The pro-life side is saying it’s not moral to have an abortion. The pro-choice side is saying that it’s not moral for the state or the church to take away a woman’s right to make that moral choice for herself.
And because the two sides are actually having two different moral conversations, there’s a tendency to talk past each other and misunderstand each other’s intent. I was once very disturbed and upset when I learned that a college friend of mine was sympathetic to a pro-life group advocating on campus, because I was used to thinking of “pro-life” as meaning the attempt to outlaw abortion and take away women’s right to choose. But it turned out she was approaching it from more of a moral perspective, wanting to encourage women to choose life rather than wanting to outlaw the opposite choice. And that’s something I couldn’t disapprove of, because of course I’d prefer it if abortions didn’t happen. And she certainly had no objection to birth control and planned pregnancy; indeed, she used birth control herself (and no doubt still does, since she’s tiny, and after her very difficult first pregnancy she decided to adopt the rest of her children). So I learned that there wasn’t that much distance between our positions. Nobody sees abortion as a good thing; people just have different points of view about how to cope with it, whether it’s a necessary evil in some cases, and whether it’s any of our business in the first place.
Moderator here. It looks like this discussion is becoming increasingly heated and, at the same time, less focused on the actual Dr. Who episode. Let’s move away from discussing this issue so the thread doesn’t spin completely off-topic. Thanks!
Really? I think people have been pretty respectful compared to other places I’ve seen discussing this episode. In any case, I’ve tried to keep my own comments strictly within the context of the moral questions the episode itself raises (rather than talking about what the state should do, or whether abortion should be legal, or whatever).
There does seem to be a strange knee-jerk reaction against the episode by some who, while not necessarily wanting abortions to happen, seem irrationally opposed to the episode merely posing the possibility that choosing the life of the creature (over the usual utilitarian concerns) turned out to be the right choice. And, therefore, label this episode “anti-abortion” on those grounds alone (I won’t link to them here).
But anyway, I just went back to the episode and watched the scene when Captain Lundvik tries to convince Clara and Courtney to kill the space dragon/chicken, and again, her reasons are perfectly rational and understandable. In her place, I might think the same thing. Again, that’s the nature of engaging in moral philosophy (and fiction is certainly a legitimate medium for that). Even if we understand a person’s reasons for some action — like I can understand Captain Lundvik’s reasons for her choice — one can legitimately judge the morality of that choice. And one can legitimately say that there is a right or wrong answer, even if we don’t know (or even can’t know) what that answer is (paging Doctor House).
That’s all “Kill the Moon” is doing, and yet many people (not you, of course) are pushing back against it as just being “anti-abortion,” which oversimplifies what is actually an interesting and complicated, even if imperfect, meditation on how we morally justify our actions, what presuppositions we bring to those justifications, and how we can end up being completely wrong, even when our justifications are perfectly rational and understandable.
Doctor Who has always been a show that’s hopeful of something beyond Mr. Spock’s dictum of the “needs of the many over the needs of the few,” or my life over this other life, or me over you. We don’t blame Spock for his choice, and we may even understand it, but Who has always been hopeful that maybe … just maybe, choosing the few, or the other, or the one, rather than myself, has the potential give us something more.
I don’t know if “Kill the Moon” succeeded on those fronts, but asking those deeply moral questions in the context of abortion imagery is actually very fascinating, regardless of your political view on the issue.
@86 – Respectful, yes, but increasingly off-topic and on a subject that tends to get people quite riled up. Because of this, we’d like to ask again to move this discussion in a different direction – focusing on the episode/show and not on abortion as an issue. Further off-topic posts may be deleted per Tor.com’s moderation policy.
Fair enough, Stefan.
Moral philosophy is actually an interest of mine, and “Kill the Moon” is the kind thing that scratches that itch, so perhaps I can get carried away. :)
I was going for “conciliatory” rather than “heated,” but yeah, I have drifted off-topic. No more of that.
By chance, at the library yesterday I just happened across the restored/animated version of the Second Doctor story “The Moonbase,” which is set on the Moon 21 years after this episode. So the Doctor presumably should’ve known that the Moon would still be there after 2049. But then again, he forgot about Liz Shaw on the UNIT Moonbase, so who knows how forgetful he’s gotten?
But that raises another problem, doesn’t it? A 21-year-old space dragon egg would presumably have a much smoother shell than one that had been enduring asteroid impacts for 100 million years. So the Moon we saw in “The Moonbase” should’ve been a lot less cratered. Unless the eggs are hatched looking cratered as some sort of protective camouflage. Except that raises the rather alarming question of what would feed on space-dragon eggs the size of dwarf planets…
@89 I have given up on trying to make sense of the continuity on Doctor Who. Events on past shows only bear upon the current show if it serves the plot. Just as ‘fixed points in time’ only occur when the plot requires them.
@90: Yeah, any attempt to discuss continuity on DW should be pursued with tongue firmly in cheek. This is a series where the first season stressed that history could not be rewritten, not one line, and then in the second season they were trying to prevent the Meddling Monk from altering the history of the Battle of Hastings.
Except that raises the rather alarming question of what would feed on space-dragon eggs the size of dwarf planets…
@89: That is fascinating idea, I love it!
One thing I noticed and I don’t think it’s been discussed here: at the end, when Doctor mentioned something about Courtney becoming a president of the US, he also mentioned a name: Blinovitch. Clara didn’t let him finish the sentence, so, I’m not sure: did Doctor mean Courtney actually “met some bloke called Blinovitch”, or has it something to do with famous “Blinovitch limitation effect” – which is “scientific” term for crossing your own timeline?
@92: Yes, I believe he did say she met Blinovitch.
In the end the choice was between killing a baby of an alien species or wait and see what would happen, with the possibility that it would be disastrous for people on Earth. I’m really glad that in the end the creature lived, nobody died and humanity was inspired and all that.. But as I see it, with the information they had, they shouldn’t have risked it. As the astronaut said, what of the babies on Earth? Of course it would be great if this kind of decision never had to be made.. Some infinities are larger than others. The creature was an infinity of possibilities, innocence, life.. On Earth there were lots of infinities.
@27: Regeneration must have swiss cheesed the Doctor’s brain worse than we thought. Or maybe he doesn’t count “Smith and Jones” as putting a woman on the Moon, either because the Judoon abducted the population (and structure) of the hospital (and so the women in the hospital didn’t CHOOSE to go to the Moon) or because none of the women in the hospital actually set foot outside the hospital.
Or he remembers, Rule 1 applies, and he’s lying to Courtney that she’ll be the first woman on the moon to cheer her up and satisfy Clara.
In general I liked this episode though I fully understand the issues with the tissue thin fantasy (let alone science) justifications.
As for the abortion debate — it certainly didn’t occur to me at the time, though in retrospect there are definite threads there. However as consumers of media, we always bring our own self to the table along with the work. It doesn’t matter if it was intended, the themes can be said to be there, and discussion can proceed apace.
I thought it was rather interesting that the trio at the end had age differences. It put me in mind of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. As the eldest, Lundvik/Atropos was ready to cut the thread of the alien’s life. Courtney as Clotho is pretty murky at best. Clara as Lachesis measured out more thread apparently.
Whether that was intended or not, I couldn’t say either, but I thought it was interesting. The bit with spider germs was pretty much just filler. They could have spent an entire episode on the final 15 minutes.
Where do I start with my dislike, let me count the ways:
1. “You won’t shoot me, I’m an incredibly super intelligent alien.” Well it turns out they didn’t have weapons, only nuclear bombs. I would have probably shot the Doctor simply for saying that. Twelve is a super-pompous alien. The intelligence is not always evident.
2. As someone else said – if the creature is devouring the Moon’s minerals, the total mass should still stay the same – a chicken’s egg does not get heavier as the egg gets closer to hatching.
3. How could any creature lay another massive egg immediately upon hatching?
4. How come the new Moon looks identical to the old one including the impact craters? It should be smooth as an egg and it should be ovoid, not spherical.
5. Clara WAS WRONG!!!! But he did likely put Clara in that position because of Pink telling him he was Lording it over everyone. Clara WAS STILL WRONG!!!!
6. Why can the girl still text in the future? Previous Docotrs had to modify companions’ phones.
7. This episode was soooooo wrong, but it is indeed typical Moffatt over conceptualization/underachivement.
I just watched a moonrise – it was full moon yesterday, so today is pretty egg-shaped actually – and watching it while imagining it’s an egg is so amazing! ;)
Also I tried to picture the hatching scene at night – shining moon breaking into pieces like a gigantic fireworks, and the creature, shining even more than the full moon, the big wings reflecting more sunlight – the night on Earth becoming lighter, almost bright as day when the new egg is laid, then growing darker again when the shining creature floats away… (the day was probably easier for the special effects… but I would really like to see this).
@34 James Davis Nicoll
It may have been more accurate to call it the dismantling of the NASA Shuttle program and (for the immediate future) the ceasing of US launches of humans.
In July of 2011, the last of the remaining Shuttles finished its final mission. The surviving vehicles were decommissioned and sent to various museums to be display pieces. Judging from what we saw in the episode (an unmarked, Shuttle-like vehicle) it looks like the idea was that some Earth organization took a museum piece and ‘fixed it up’ for a one-way flight.
Since the final Shuttle flight, we have depended on Russian rockets to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station. (Love or hate “Big Bang Theory”, what they showed in getting Wollowitz and his crew to/from there was fairly accurate). But because of international tensions (and perhaps other reasons as well), NASA is looking into US-based ways to get back in the human transport game.
@97: Actually a lot of reptile and bird species do lay spherical eggs. And the reason many species’ eggs are ovoid is to keep them from rolling too far from the nest, which is obviously not an issue in outer space. Not to mention that any object as massive as the Moon, regardless of its origins, would be pulled into a sphere by its own gravity. It would have to be made of impossibly strong materials to avoid becoming a sphere even if it had started out in another shape.
Regarding cell phones, wouldn’t the moon give an excellent line of sight to anywhere on earth? Back in the days before Clarke came up with the geosynchronous orbit communications satellite idea, I think I remember folks were talking about putting comms stations on the moon.
Despite that, though, I suppose a normal cell phone still probably wouldn’t have enough signal strength. But in an episode where we were expected to stretch our minds enough to accept the giant leap of the moon being a gravity warping egg about to hatch, we can certainly accept the small step of a cell phone working over long distances.
@101: But Courtney was in the future, posting photos on her site in the present. Remember, Lundvik said “My gran used to post things on Tumblr,” implying it isn’t around anymore. So somehow Courtney’s phone has been jiggery-pokeried to allow cross-temporal communication. Maybe that’s something the TARDIS now facilitates automatically.
@102: I don’t think Courtney posted the photos in the present. Tumblr might be still there in the future, only it is an obsolete thing only nostalgic grannys use. I wonder if Courtney knew that and was sending it there – well, for her future self to see, or if she didn’t realize that. I just don’t know how to explain the signal. Maybe Tardis helped her (because she thought posting Doctor’s photos on the internet is cool)?
@103: But would Courtney’s account still be active with the same passwords after 35 years? Seriously, how many online sites/businesses would you expect to remain around for 35 years? They generally get replaced by something more sophisticated within a decade or so.
This episode was such a mess. All sorts of things had no internal consistency nor logic, even according to the rules of the fantasy Dr. Who world. Others have mentioned the moon gaining mass for no reason–has someone invisible been feeding it?–and how an individual can’t turn out all the lights in a city. Then there’s no air on the moon–even if it is an egg–so how can there be super large bacteria hanging around? And what’s up with a baby hatching from an egg and immediately laying another egg as large as itself? How is that biologically possible? For me, the final straw was Courtney becoming a U.S. President. She is BRITISH. The President has to have been born in the United States by law. And Captain L is also British, so she can’t restart the NASA space program as the Doctor suggests. If Peter Harness had written this as a short story instead, it would have been rejected from every sci-fi/fantasy magazine in existence, or at least severely edited.
@104: Maybe Courtney suspected her future self to keep the account and password. And the rapid changes in internet may slow down in the future. (Or, you know, the writer didn’t think it through…)
@105: I’ve already read these objections several time in this discussion, so I had time to think about them.
1) Rules of Doctor Who world? I know we all got used to Tardis being bigger on the inside and all sorts of paradoxes of timetravelling, so seriously, why does this episode bother everybody so much?
2) Moon is an egg of completely unknown alien species, so… what if it’s not like eggs of Earth animals, what if it is feeding – from another dimension maybe. Maybe the “little baby moondragon” in the egg creates a wormhole (like an umbilical cord) connected to whatever it eats.
3) Individual can’t turn out the ligts. It was the governments. Which I think justifies the fact Clara choose to ignore their vote.
4) You’re right about the bacteria. They shouldn’t be able to survive on the surface. But hey, alien bacteria! What do we know about them, right? Maybe they have some exo-skeleton that works basically as a spacesuit!
5) There are some species being born already with eggs inside (some insect? fleas and such?) I just remember that very vaguely from school. So – it is possible. And the new moon looked a bit smaller. Maybe it was hollow, like a gigantic baloon, and the creature inside very small, and it would “put on weigt” eventually.
6) Courtney as a president – Doctor did mention it was some bizarre coincidence, and from him that means something.
Anything in sci-fi can be explained, if you try hard enough. My only problem with this episode was thad I had to do all the explaining for myself, so it would make sense in my head. Sometimes I wish the Doctor Who episodes to be longer, like in the classic series – more time to do the details right.
Actually lots of bacteria can survive in the vacuum of space. Bacteria sometimes get wafted up into the upper atmosphere by air currents and can sometimes be accelerated into orbital space by the magnetic field; and in the early evolution of life on Earth, frequent bombardment would’ve often flung microbes into orbit on ejecta from impact events. So bacteria have long had an evolutionary incentive to adapt to vacuum and radiation.
Of course, they generally survive by going dormant rather than staying active. But then, they generally don’t look like spiders either.
@103 @104 There are ham radio operators today who still communicate via HF radio using Morse Code. Maybe in the future, there will be ham operators who will be keeping things like Twitter and Facebook alive, not willing to let go of the old technology. ;-)
I’ve made this comment elsewhere, but this is my take. A lot of people have thought it shabby that the Doctor didn’t give Clara all the information she “needed.” But I would argue here that all of this “vital information” wasn’t necessary. This point in history was pivotal, not because it decided whether humanity would survive, but who they
would be when they did. The only way to make that choice was to make it blind. Clara set the tone for the rest of humanity’s future because she
chose to do the right thing without having all the information. She
chose to make the morally right choice, but most importantly, she chose to hope. This is why humanity goes back out into the stars and why they endure until the end of time. It is why the Doctor didn’t tell her anything, and why he made her make the choice by herself. The Doctor, as much as he loves our planet and he loves us, is not human. This was not something he could, or should, do for humanity.
@109: I’ve made very similar comment elsewhere, so I couldn’t agree more. This choice between fear and hope is what makes me love this thing enormously, despite the little things that make the thing a bit more thingy than a thing should be… ;)
I remain quite unconvinced by this episode. Certainly there are some glaring mistakes. One I don’t particularly like is that the full moon is seen after the TARDIS lands by the sea, and while the moon is in one direction, the light from the sun is from the right of screen, about 90 degrees to the moon, not at around 180 degrees as it should be. Silly mistake and sloppy production. I do hope to warm more to this current Doctor, but Clara is good enough reason to watch. Fascinating eyes.
@109: Beautifully said.
Sort of like the Doctor, I have been around for a long time, I have seen a lot. October 1980 “The Super Friends” had a short segment called “Man in the Moon” where a huge creature hatched from it’s core. It has been done in fiction before. Doctor Who has NEVER been “scientifically correct” … “The Time of the Angels” … enough said. Rules never apply.
This is one of the love/hate episodes where you either applaud it for being campy and different and unque or you boo and hiss forgiving it because you know good episodes out weigh the poor ones. I tend to watch Doctor Who with a very open mind and NEVER question the fantasy of his science.
@113: Actually there were a couple of times in the early seasons when DW did try to be scientifically plausible. It was originally conceived in ’63 as an educational program teaching science and history, although it did a more authentic job with the history side than the science side, and didn’t always do too well with the history either. But then, a few years in, they hired Kit Pedler (co-creator of the Cybermen with Gerry Davis) as a science advisor to bring more hard science to the show. Look at a story like Pedler and Davis’s “The Moonbase,” which I mentioned above, and you’ll find its science actually holds up pretty well, at least compared to the modern stuff.
@113: there’s a difference between ‘Doctor Who has never been scientifically correct’ and ‘this episode look like the writer couldn’t be bothered to read his own script’.
When you start an episode by saying that the moon’s increase in mass is causing disasters on Earth, you can’t then blithely pass off all the stuff at the end – stuff that wilfully ignores exactly the same laws of physics you just took advantage of to create drama.
Suspension of disbelief is a fragile thing. This episode simply didn’t seem to care about it.
I really haven’t been able to watch much of this season, I don’t like Capaldi as Doctor though I will say it isn’t about his performance which is perfectly fine. The final exchange between Clara and the Doctor is so idiotic. It really was nothing more than her mistaking him for an actual god and then being upset that said god didn’t perform a particular magic trick on queue. He should have just reminded her that he isn’t a god, and he isn’t her slave either. He isn’t there to make all of the hard decisions for her or the rest of humanity.
I realize this is very late but I read on another site about “The Waters of Mars” the following, “Mars was landed on in 2041, with Adelaide Brooke as part of the crew. ” Adelaide Brooke is the female leader of the Mars expedition. So Courtney is not the first woman on the moon. Of course, that future history conflicts with the future history told in this story…
@117: Err, Mars is not the Moon.