Kill the Moon

Dear Gary—

They’re kidding with this one, right? Kill the Moon is a joke; they just want to see if the audience is paying attention. Right? They cannot be serious with this one. Please tell me, Gary, that they are not serious with this one.

I mean, the science is crap; but that’s only the start. If it were only that. Who knew after all these years that we had the makings of one giant omelet in our night’s sky? It might not be cheese, but that’s a lot of egg that could be feeding the world if we only thought to crack it open. I could accept this more easily, crap science aside, if we were not talking about our moon. This is yet again an instance where Doctor Who would have been much better served if it did not insist on being Earth-centric. In this case familiarity is breeding much contempt. It’s not just the many telescopes trained on the moon or the many moon rocks and samples that have been studied or the myriad of scientists who have made the moon their life’s work; it is that the Doctor himself has been to the moon many times, and many of those times have been after the year 2049, and he never noticed? He never realized that the moon of 2070 in the serial The Moonbase (and let’s not forget that Polly was on the moon long before Courtney) was different than our traditional moon? He never detected that the Sea of Tranquility, for instance, was missing? Or are we to believe that the egg this mythical creature lays is identical to the old one down to the last crevice and crater? And if the Doctor did know about the events that take place in our current story all along, he never mentioned the fact? Crap science aside, the Earth’s moon actually being an egg that hatches in 2049 is one giant secret that the Doctor Who universe has been keeping.

More likely this is one time when the Doctor’s “grey areas” claim is a flat out lie. Whichever it is, a secret or a lie, the Doctor comes out badly. Either he is exceedingly dim or exceedingly cruel.

Clara doesn’t fare much better.  She has charge of a troubled, self described “destructive influence” teen in Courtney, and rather than getting her the help she needs Clara exposes her to the Doctor. “I have a duty of care, okay? You know what that is?” Clara asks this far too late and never considers its portent in relation to her own actions. To be fair, the Doctor whisks the two off without Clara’s consent or foreknowledge; but really, Clara should have known better than to harangue the Doctor about his treatment of Courtney while they stand in the TARDIS. Who let Courtney into the TARDIS to begin with? Much less left her there unattended.

 Instead of worrying that the Doctor bruised Courtney’s fragile ego by telling her she’s not special, Clara should be concerned with Courtney’s pattern of self deprecation, unruliness, and irreverence. Rather than forcing a statement of ‘specialness’ out of the Doctor Clara should be looking for the root causes of Courtney’s self-destructive bent and getting her the counseling she sorely needs.

I’m sorry, Gary. I should be able to look past all of these glaring defects. I have many times. However, when the show deliberately steers the story to suit its purposes, both long term and short, without consideration of consistency or decency or credibility, I have to complain.

Perhaps I could overlook, too, if the adventure itself was more compelling. I’m irritated from the start that a bratty teen yet again inveigles her way onto the TARDIS (flashbacks of Nightmare in Silver). Courtney is more palatable than Angie, though, so that’s a plus, even if she does get bored while on the moon in the year 2049 when there is a mystery afoot—maybe she isn’t so special after all but just a typical self-absorbed kid—but I won’t continue down that road Gary.  (Oh how I miss Susan and her sprained ankles right about now. At least she was interested in what was going on around her.)

The dark, drab moonscape doesn’t help, either. Oh, it’s refreshing that they are not on Earth for a change (even if only as far as Earth’s moon). And the second-hand astronauts they run across, the deadly spiders, and the mystifying increase in the moon’s gravity (kudos to the yo-yo test and great call-back to Doctor Four) do provide a decent framework for a potentially engrossing story. But it all falls apart with the jaw-dropping inanity of the conceit.

I’m not even sure what to call this. It could be a beautiful and poetic creation myth of ancient lore; except it is disguising itself as a hard-hitting drama and morality play of contemporary sci-fi. To loosely interpret my dad’s saying, it just doesn’t rhyme.

“In the mid twenty-first century humankind starts creeping off into the stars, spreads its way through the galaxy to the very edges of the universe. And it endures till the end of time.” This was much better told in The Waters of Mars with the inspirational story of Adelaide Brooke. That prior story takes place a mere 10 years after our present—not a lot of time for the shambles of a space program (if you are to believe our present story) to get its act together to construct a viable base on Mars. So there’s that. Not to mention that Adelaide Brooke is light years ahead in her inspiration, and since she represents one of those Doctor Who magical fixed points that even the Daleks respect, it really doesn’t matter what occurs in the narrative at hand.

Yet the Doctor continues in his Nostradamustry: “And it does all that because one day in the year 2049, when it had stopped thinking about going to the stars, something occurred that made it look up, not down.”

The “something occurred” is something that would occur regardless of the Doctor or of Clara or of Courtney. Because if the trio hadn’t arrived at that momentous moment Captain Lundvik would have most certainly died along with her hapless crew and the creature would have hatched and laid its egg and that is the end of that. The Doctor choosing that particular time to materialize only muddies the outcome. He creates a false drama simply to appease Clara (which by the way backfires but more on that later).

“It looked out there into the blackness and it saw something beautiful, something wonderful, that for once it didn’t want to destroy.” Per my previous point, humanity never would have wanted to destroy the “something beautiful, something wonderful” if the Doctor had not interfered. For the most part, humanity looks up into the stars with wonder and hope and awe. It does not gaze up into the Milky Way and dream up schemes of mass destruction. Only the Doctor imagines that. And it is only due to the Doctor’s interference that humanity was ever given the choice.

Ah—the choice. Because, you see, the “it didn’t want to destroy” statement is false. The entire planet (well, actually only the half that faced the moon at the time—and how hilarious that the verdict comes in sports stadium wave-like fashion, as though they coordinated amongst themselves who would shut their lights off first and next and so on; and obviously every individual on the planet—at least on the side facing the moon at the time—has heard Clara’s broadcast; and let’s not think about all of the unoccupied buildings and advertising and such that wouldn’t be as easy as a flick of the switch to turn off—and let’s hope that Las Vegas wasn’t pointing towards the moon at the time) voted for the creature’s destruction. And rightly so. Any sane person would come to the same conclusion given the limited amount of information provided. Presented as it is, in a black or white scenario, there is no choice. The Earth’s future hangs in the balance and the only viable option provided is to destroy the creature (never mind that killing the embryo is no guarantee and will most likely result in status quo—which isn’t any great shakes what with tidal waves and such occurring as it is) since Earth is never given full disclosure. That’s on the Doctor.

Given the scenario in full disclosure, what the Earth should have done is to wait for the egg to hatch and for the new being to lay its egg, and then send every nuclear missile in Earth's arsenal to kill the living creature. Because a being as large as a moon is a menace to the entire universe.  Even if a vegetarian, the vegetation of the entire Earth would be but a day’s repast. How long would it take for this thing to lay waste to the galaxy? And that is only in its infancy. Who knows how big it will become as it reaches maturity? And then imagine if by some miracle that this entity doesn’t need any sustenance, what effect it would have on the gravitational fields of any planet or solar system it happens upon? This is not some miracle of life; this is a devastation of life.

“And in that one moment the whole course of history was changed.” See points above re: The Waters of Mars, not to mention that if this thing has really flown off to wreak untold harm there will be no more history to either change or stagnate (again see points above).

“Not bad for a girl from Coal Hill School and her teacher.” Really, Doctor? You did all of this just to make a point with Clara?

Lunkvik is the only one to get it right: “Look, when you’ve grown up a bit you’ll realize that everything doesn’t have to be nice. Some things are just bad.” Doctor Who, however, refuses to grow up. Doctor Who wants to make everything conveniently nice, despite the crap science. And so we get the serenity on the beach in the aftermath. No tidal waves. No monsoons. No storms. Not even a breeze. Nothing to indicate that anything has occurred in the sky as massive as what has gone down. (Tell me, has Disney taken stock in the BBC?)

Clara gets it right to tell the Doctor to “clear off.”  But you know, Gary, that Clara can’t commit to anything. Her moment of anger is for effect only.

It seems this whole exercise in giant butterfly science is simply to bring us to, “get back in your lonely, your lonely bloody TARDIS and you don’t come back.” For whatever reason that the season arc wants to bring us here.

Kill the Moon—Gary, in this one—and I have to say it—Doctor Who has laid an egg.