Kill The Moon

It might take you a while to kill me.

Kill the Moon was not a bad episode, but it suffered from a severe lack of focus. It couldn't seem to decide if it was going to be a scary episode or a philosophical episode.
Plot Summary

The episode opens with Clara confronting the Doctor about filling Courtney Woods' head with notions that she is special. Meeting both in the TARDIS, rather than giving in to Clara's demands to pull Courtney down, the Doctor proposes she become the first woman on the moon.

They land on a shuttle preparing to land on the moon in 2049 with multiple nuclear warheads. The Doctor immediately knows that something is wrong as the gravity is closer to Earth. The crew of three confront them but the Doctor's understanding of the situation causes them to take them with. In addition to solving the gravity issue, a Mexican mining survey team was destroyed ten years prior and the mission is to find out why.

The team enters the old Mexican station, although one crewman surveys the outside of the station. Inside, the station is covered in large cobwebs. Outside, the lone crewman is attacked and killed by a spider-like creature. The creature moves inside where they have managed to get the power back on and found the remains of one of the mining survey team. The spider attacks and kills a second crewman. The Doctor, Clara, and Commander Lundvik escape but Courtney is left in the room with the spider. It attacks her and Courtney grabs a bottle of cleaning fluid to hold it off. The spray kills the creature nearly instantly, much to everyone's surprise.

After the Doctor makes a couple of quick points of investigation, he announces that they have reached a significant point in humanity's history and he is unsure of what the ultimate outcome will be. They head back outside, finding the body of the first crewmember. The Doctor is attacked by a spider, but it retreats when hit by sunlight. The Doctor does another yo-yo test and fluid is released from under a rock. The Doctor jumps into a crevasse to investigate further, ordering them to get back to the shuttle and TARDIS. However, the shuttle falls into another crevasse following a moonquake, along with the TARDIS and Courtney as she is in the TARDIS.

The Doctor reemerges and the three return to the Mexican base where they make contact with Courtney in the TARDIS. The Doctor reveals that the moon is an egg and the creature inside will be hatching shortly. Commander Lundvik wants to kill it to save Earth while Courtney is adamant that it should live. Clara appeals to the Doctor who refuses to commit. He has Courtney recall the TARDIS to him and then leaves the three of them to decide what to do while he jumps forward. Lundivk arms the nuclear bombs while Clara sends a message back to Earth asking for them to vote: lights off for kill, lights on for hatch.

The bomb has a one hour countdown in which they watch and wait for the vote. Steady, the lights turn off on the planet and Lundvik prepares to detonate as the countdown approaches zero. However at the last second, Clara reaches over and hits the abort button. Just then, the TARDIS rematerializes and the Doctor grabs them off the moon. They materialize on Earth and watch the creature hatch. The moon disintegrates as the creature emerges, but it disappears in a fine powder. The creature circles for a bit and lays a new moon egg before flying off into space.

They leave Lundvik on Earth and then drop Courtney back off at school. After she leaves, Clara lashes out at the Doctor for abandoning them and being so patronizing to her. She storms out of the TARDIS and tells Danny everything that happened. She vows to never travel with the Doctor again but he tells her to wait until she wasn't angry to make that decision, then tell him that.

Analysis

This story is a hard one to get a grasp on. The very concept of the moon as an egg is one that is a little hard to swallow so you have to let go of that at first. That's not too hard as we've all gotten used to it over the years with sci-fi. But the first half of the episode is the haunted house monster movie with the spider/bacteria attacks while the second half turns into a philosophical debate on life with the slight bit of added tension about whether the women would be still on the moon when it either hatched or detonated the nuclear warheads. It is just such a shift in tone that it is hard to reconcile when watching it as a single episode. It might have worked better in episodic form like a classic series story.

Taking each section as a whole, the horror element was quite good. The spider-like bacteria were quite creepy and did a pretty good job of being scary. The setting was sufficiently creepy and little time was wasted in dispatching the red shirts. I think that could have been drawn out a little more as I didn't really understand why the third astronaut went wandering outside on the surface other than to be separated an dispatched in the horror trope of wandering off alone.

The philosophical discussion wasn't too bad either. I remember when this story first came out, there was a bit of a heated discussion on whether this was an allegory for an abortion debate. I didn't quite see that but when dealing with killing something before it's born, I can see how it could be read in that way. I did enjoy that there wasn't a grand send up of the qualities of humans in this section. The Earth (or about half of it) universally voted to kill the creature, giving into their fear of potential destruction. It's a cynical view of people that is probably closer to reality than is often portrayed in entertainment. Artists seem to want to believe that people are mostly good and forward thinking. In reality, we are very self absorbed and will typically put our own interests ahead of others. It's nice to see that in sci-fi once in a while.

This was also an homage heavy episode with at least four references to other episodes. The Doctor uses a yo-yo to test the gravity much as the Fourth Doctor did in several previous stories. The Doctor had Courtney put in a DVD to recall the TARDIS to him, going so far as to tell her to hold on to the console or she would be left behind. This is a direct pull from Blink, even explaining why Sally and Larry were left behind. There is a window breach on the moonbase that is sealed with a piece of metal, recalling the tea tray that sealed a similar breach in The Moonbase. In the final scene with the Doctor, he mentions Courtney eventually meeting a man named Blinovitch, calling back to several stories but most notably, Mawdryn Undead. There may have been one or two others but those are the ones that jumped out at me and were nice little touches.

Aside from the shift in tone mid-episode, one of the biggest things that didn't seem to work for me was Courtney's inclusion. I'm skeptical any time a child actor is pulled in just because I doubt they will have the chops to hang with the adult actors, especially when working on a short shooting schedule as this probably was. The actress wasn't bad, but there didn't feel like there was any particular reason why Courtney should be there at all. They tossed in some bit at the end where she would become President at the time of the hatching but that wasn't necessary to the plot. The only reasons I can think of for including her were to put someone else in peril (which could have been done by Clara easily) in the spider attack and to act as an opposite pole to Lundvik in being the strong advocate for the life of the creature. This left Clara as the middle who has the implied authority to ask for advice from Earth and then to ignore it and push the cancel button.

I can understand why an established character like Courtney would have been used since it would have saved time as character development would not have been needed like it would have for a fourth member of the shuttle crew. But I wish the position could have been given to someone with a bit more chops who also would have stayed in the moment. Courtney's argument was lessened because she couldn't help reverting back to the teenager she was. When Lundvik confronts Clara about having children and potentially killing the creature to preserve her possible descendants on the Earth, Courtney gets teasingly girlish, citing "Mr. Pink." Clara is forced to break the moment by telling Courtney to shut up while she advocates her position. Clara needed to be a third person operating between two poles, but I think it would have come across better if it had been an older person. Plus we could have dispensed with all the rest of the Courtney crud, including the hurt feelings about the Doctor not necessarily thinking that she was special at the beginning of the episode. It was a bit too "everyone gets a trophy" for me.

Then there is Clara's big blow up at the end. Some folks love it as they feel it was Clara standing up to the Doctor. Others hate it saying that it came out of nowhere and was a real left turn in Clara's character development. I'm more in the middle. It didn't help me in my opinion of Clara as a companion overall, but I understood exactly where Clara was coming from. To me, this was the Doctor taking a teenager and suddenly putting them behind the wheel of a car in a snowstorm. Clara emerged from the crisis just as the Doctor knew she would, but the crisis scared her and she lashed out at the Doctor, just as a scared teen would lash out at a parent that put them in a potentially dangerous situation.

And like I would at a teen lashing out, I thought Clara was being a baby. One can't always rely on the parent to make the decisions for you and this was well shown in the follow up episodes of Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline where Clara was first forced to make a decision between two bad choices and then to go so far and lie to people just to give them the hope to keep moving when she knew that survival was going to be limited. I can understand Clara being scared; she would have ben inhuman if she wasn't. But to lash out in anger like that just made her seem even less mature than she liked to pretend she was. To me, Clara's overall journey was one where the show and the Doctor seemed to advocate that she was something special, Doctor-like in many ways. But she is also repeatedly shown up as being less capable than certainly she thinks she is and this early temper tantrum was a notch in the favor that she was not completely up to the snuff that others seemed to think she was. I'm not sure I ever really got over that in my opinion regarding Clara.

So how to grade this. I have to downgrade it on several points including the acting of Courtney, the rushed horror set up and then the about face in tone. I think the best way to say it is that the story is less than the sum of it's parts. Individually, the elements work reasonably well. Together, they seem a bit of a rushed and jumbled mess. I liked it better than The Caretaker but not by much. Having seen it a couple of times, I'm not sure I'd feel any significant pull to watch it again in the near future.

Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5