12.7: Kill the Moon
In which the moon is an egg.
Broadcast: October 2014
Watched: March 2022
“Do you really think I’m not special?” Another bit that feels like it’s scratching around a theme.
My first draft of a grand unified working theory about [writer] Peter Harness is that all his stories centre on these sweeping ethical dilemmas and have unusually few jokes in them. The main adjective for this one is “spiky”: hardly any characters, all but one of the guests massively underdeveloped. It’s also filmed in this sort of unsettling way. The moon is bright but cold; the monsters are genuinely creepy.
You can tell the dilemma is the key bit because we start in media res, then bounce back (“the man who normally helps, he’s gone” – oh, sod off). As with something like Waters of Mars, the “fixed point” stuff doesn’t quite convince, there’s not enough justification for why the Doctor would sod off in the middle of all this.
The bit that is quite clever though is the lack of pat resolutions. The Doctor says humanity has to choose for itself, then congratulates it on a decision that so far as we know is just Clara and Courtney. And the result is Clara is furious. That could feel messy and unfinished, but it actually feels like it might be the point.
The other thing that makes it work is the performances. The fact Hermione Norris is a bit ITV gives her a sort of weird gravitas – you buy that these people aren’t natural heroes, and her delivery of, “That’s what you do with aliens isn’t it? Blow them up?” and “How do we kill it?” are genuinely chilling. Coleman is as good as she’s ever been in the bit at the end when she tells the Doctor to go f*ck himself – this would have been a great, different companion exit story.
But the best stuff is all Capaldi: the bit where he just jumps into the hole, the delight at the moon being an egg, closing his eyes and narrating the future on the beach. Finally finds a way of playing alien that isn’t just “prick”.
It remains incredibly and admirably Doctor Who to do a what feels like a hard sci fi story that turns out to be about the serious ethical dilemma of the moon being a massive egg. Points for originality, at least.
Other things:
Is this a sort of Beast Below sequel? It’s about a giant space creature being born and all centres on whether or not to push a button.
LOL at the Doctor telling Courtney she’s not special. Love his new shirt in this one.
Hang on, she ends up as president? Do they change the constitution to allow non-Americans?
Lundvik starts explaining history as if she’ knows the Doctor’s not from 2049 weirdly quickly.
Every line major guest star Tony Osoba has: “Pretty much all the satellites had been whacked out of orbit. They managed to send back some screams.” “Not quite.” “I’ll get some power back on.” “ I don’t sound anything like that.” “That’s what I’m doing.” “Argh!”
Another line I’ve written down, just because: “I’ve never killed Hitler, and you wouldn’t expect me to kill Hitler”
Not sure what to make of the fact that all the people with power in this story, up to the US president, are women.
“Make sure you hang onto the console otherwise the TARDIS will leave you behind” – is this a Lance-style attempt to patch up continuity errors from Blink?
Humanity goes to the edge of the universe and the end of time is because Clara made the right choice. In the Doctor Who universe, Clara Oswald is a more important historic figure than Mohammed or Genghis Khan.
This is the second season running with a single episode with random children in the TARDIS... I wonder why.