Kill the Moon

Kill the Moon would have sat very snugly in series seven. That’s the series, in case you’ve forgotten, which saw showrunner Big Stevie Moff Moff (I get bored just calling him Moffat and I’m running low on relatively sensible abbreviations) using his movie poster approach. That was basically “Come up with a title and think of a plot to fit it.”

That approach didn’t work wonders in series seven, something even most of the exec’s troupe of devotees seem to agree with. Which makes it quite surprising that he’s returned to the approach here, considering his desire to be constantly popular with the majority of the show’s fans. He did at least slot it away in the middle of the season, and he also had nuts ‘n’ bolts writer Peter Harness have a fair chunk of the episode revolve around a moral quandary. Oh, and some science. But we’ll get to the science.

The moral quandary was a nice idea, being something the revived series hasn’t actually done that much of, but it didn’t pan out in practice. They went for something too overblown and clichéd: kill an apparently unique, new-born life form to save the human race, or sacrifice the human race for said life form. It’s the sort of thing routinely trotted out in films, TV and novels and has reached the point where it just can’t have the effect authors want (hence referring to it as a cliché). Not only has the moral quandary been done to death in recent years but it’s also been done better within Doctor Who. Genesis of the Daleks did it far better than Kill the Moon, and Genesis didn’t even do it especially well. It worked thanks to a combination of Tom Baker giving a particularly enthusiastic performance (the first season euphoria working to the show’s advantage) and involving the Daleks. There’s a reason it overshadows practically the same situation having appeared five years earlier in (Doctor Who and) The Silurians. Also, neither of these stories dwelt on the predicament, in each it was a few minutes out of a larger story enjoyable because they well told, not because of moral pontificating. 

But what really set this episode apart as a failure was its distracting use of science. I’m not going to argue in favour of the Bidmead approach, with everything adhering to reality and being explained painstakingly so that kids learn something. The show works fine in its current entertainment format. But when science forms such an integral and heavily referenced part of the plot it should at least be easy to follow, make sense in relation to itself, and not seem contradictory. Kill the Moon did not achieve this.

At the beginning of the episode we were told the moon had become too heavy and started adversely affecting Earth’s tides. The cause of this weight gain was initially said to be a species of microbe-spiders. Later it was revealed to be the previously mentioned utterly unique-baby monster. I suppose it could be both, but that seems needlessly confusing and a bit like sloppy writing designed just to get a scary monster into things in the first twenty minutes of the episode. That the baby grew from seemingly nothing inside of thirty-five years seems questionable too.

Someone desperate to defend the episode who knows their science could probably explain that. My point remains that it seems too convoluted for a forty-five minute family TV show, but fine, let people explain it. The really infuriating bit is the ending. And here I’m not talking about the moon dragon giving birth to an egg several times larger than itself (although it does seem pretty incredible that something could give birth to something so large into perfect orbit around a planet). The biology of this wasn’t even speculated on, so I think it can just be chalked up as a curious in-universe mystery. It’s not like it’s the first time the show has dealt with deceptive sizes: the lead character flies around in something deceptively sized.

What makes no sense is that people were concerned about whether or not to kill the dragon baby at all. Whether it was a baby nuzzling its way out of the moon or a corpse sitting inside its rocky egg, it would weigh exactly the same. Whether it was living or dead it would have exactly the same effect on the Earth’s tides. Burrowing its way out of the moon wouldn’t have helped Earth, no, but then neither would have blowing the moon to pieces with nuclear weapons. Both options would have led to the same conclusion if we’re going to apply a basic understanding of science to the plot. Even the new moon wouldn’t have been the immediate tide-fixer it was presented as.

It’s a shame the episode was so unclear on its science, how to explain it, and how to link it to the plot. The central idea was solid enough. The moon being an egg that hatches into a dragon is the sort of idea I can imagine being tried in the Hinchcliffe or Cartmel eras (to limited success, natch). Creepy, deserted space bases aren’t overly familiar to the show (or at least the reincarnated version of the show). The space spiders were an interesting idea with a suitably eerie design. Splitting the three things up would have allowed each a chance to be developed into something understandable and satisfying. Instead too many ideas were included, resulting in a dodgy plot and nothing reaching its potential.

Also: the episode lost marks for the Doctor not referencing the Racnoss or the Eight Legs.