Kill The Moon
(Season 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 4/10/2014, producer/showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Peter Harness, director: Paul Wilmshurst)
Rank: 287
Hey diddle diddle
Courtney's been to Lidl
And after that she went to the moon
It's nothing to brag on
But she helped hatch a dragon
In a story that made us all feel like a loon
There are some Dr Who episodes that are high stakes drama where saving the universe from a threat is seriously tense, others that are big set emotional pieces involving characters that we’ve come to know and love, others – even the ones involving aliens – are symbolic of what it means to be human and place you in a situation where you think about what you would do in a certain situation, others are just pure escapist entertainment. And then there are stories that try to be all four at once, which are generally the very best ones. For this to work, though, you have to be invested in the scenario on offer to think that it might happen – if not to us right not then to somebody real, at some point in their lives, in a possible foreseeable future. With all the will in the world you can’t sit down and watch ‘Kill The Moon’ and think ‘how would I react in a situation like this? And how will my heroes get ut of it?’ because you know the moon? That big thing hanging there in the sky? Earth's only satellite that's been there as long as the Human race? The thing that has been subjected to more rigorous scientific tests than any other celestial body that isn’t Earth? That's an egg that is. Laid by a moon dragon. That suddenly decides to hatch. This isn't in some distant planet or in some parallel dimension either, nor even the distant future, nor the distant past. It hatches in 2049, thirty-five years after broadcast (which in Dr Who terms is nothing). That isn’t being lunar. That’s just being loony.
Now, I’m not really as mad as these reviews make it
seem. I know that Dr Who is a fictional series that isn’t actually happening
(give or take the bits of fortune-telling that the show gets right from time to
time: watch ‘Inferno’s take on
fracking or Harold Saxon’s rise to be prime minister through lying and gassing
his opponents in ‘Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Timelords’ and shudder). I know
that there aren’t really timelords from a planet named Gallifrey wandering the
universe righting wrongs (I mean, frankly things would be a lot better than
they are right now). At the same time though one of Dr Who’s biggest selling
points as a franchise is that it could be happening: this isn’t some dumb noisy
American space flick about invading aliens who can’t possibly exist but a
universe teeming with such varied life that some of its guesses at least have
to be right. Had this been the moon of another planet, maybe even one of the
ones in our solar system we haven’t got to yet (Saturn has more than a few that
act…weird and unlike anything else we thought we knew about how planet
satellites work, especially ‘Hyperion’ which looks as if it’s been squashed and
squished and orbits in a unique way totally contradictory to how every other
planet satellite in our solar system works – I could totally believe a Hyperion
dragon laid that) then ‘d have been all for it. But our moon? That thing in the
sky humans have been gazing at for billions of years, the moon which someone
somewhere must always have been looking at every single second of every day
since human history began, which our best scientists have studied through
telescopes, that our astronauts have walked on jumped on and played golf on,
that have given us more samples to test in laboratories than any other
celestial body except the one we walk up and down on? All that
time and nobody's guessed. I mean, maybe you would have thought Apollo 11 would
have cracked it open by sticking a whacking great flag in the crust? Wouldn't
one of our scientists have noticed a heartbeat or the traces of an alien creature?
Wouldn’t this species have died out after such a long incubation period? (How
does the mum moon dragon even know to fly to its child at the end – where’s
that been lurking all our lives?) Even though the alien quickly lays another
moon (weird in itself) you would have thought this would have had some impact
on humanity in future episodes but no one ever mentions it before or since. Not
even the Cybermen who invaded a base in 2070 there but no one ever mentioned
needing an egg whisk! Or the Judoon who stomped all over the moon in ‘Smith and
Jones’ and aren’t exactly the sort of species who’d be careful round eggshell! Erm,
I don’t think so – this is the sort of one-off joke fans love laughing
at in annuals and cigarette cards, never mind on TV. At
first when the Doctor talks about alien life being on the moon we assume he’s
joking because it’s just too absurd, they couldn’t possibly write into the plot
something so obviously provably wrong as a moon being an egg would they? But
they really do – rarely in Dr Who have we ever had a plot so…so…scrambled!
I wouldn’t mind so much if they made a good story
anyway, despite the absurdity. After all, I don’t really believe that there’s a
planet full of lifesize spiders with supernatural powers (‘Planet Of The
Spiders’) either and I know for a fact that The Cybermen didn’t invade the
North Pole in 1986 like they said in ‘The Tenth Planet’ but I still really
enjoy those stories. And we haven’t had a base under siege story for ages: what
a great chance to see how Peter Capaldi’s Doctor differs to Patrick Troughton’s!
There was a lot of murmuring behind the scenes about how scary this story was
going to be (Moffat reportedly telling the writer to ‘Hinchcliffe the **** out
of it!’, in reference to the producer of what many regard as the most
frightening era of the series in the early Tom Baker years. Except…this isn’t
frightening at all. We don’t actually see the moon dragon do anything and there
are no invaders beyond a few insects, just morals that go on and on and on. You
see the other big problem that kills ‘Kill The Moon’ stone dead is how boring
it is. And it shouldn’t be: this is an expedition to the moon! We actually go
back there some day! And there’s a creature living there we know nothing about!
This should be…egg-citing! Only we don’t get that story – we get the one that
has the Doctor, Clara and Courtney (Clara’s annoying pupil from ‘The Caretaker’
that’s never ever counted as a companion in guidebooks despite travelling in
the Tardis more than Liz Shaw or the Brigadier because, well, it’s
embarrassing) walking across the surface very very slowly, then bickering with
the moonbase commanders (not a patch on the cosmopolitan ones in ‘The Moonbase’
from 1967) very very slowly then the Doctor polling off to let Clara, Courtney
and base commander Lundvik (an off-colour Hermione Norris) decide what to do,
very very slowly.
Now, I’m quite loony for the moon landings (and not just the famous one). I’ve sat through as much of the real footage as I can get my hands (a difficult task, given Nasa’s original tapes were wiped so all we have left is what was broadcast on the TV). I’ve watched interminable countdowns, flight checks, safety procedures and watched more collections of rock samples than I ever want to think about. Most of space travel and exploration isn’t heroic so much as sitting around waiting for something to happen and hoping it will. Yet throughout it all I was hooked: this is real history! Something man always dreamed of doing and never thought, until somewhere around the late 1950s, that he would never actually do and yet there we are, over-reaching our grasp, refusing to be locked into the sphere we were born on, trying to take out first steps out into space for real. And I was never as bored, at any point, as I was watching ‘Kill The Moon’. There’s no drama here, nothing to get a hold of, nothing really happening (unless you count more killer spiders, which are never explained – they’re just as unlikely as the moon being an egg after all – and aren’t in anyway creepy) unless you seriously want to become invested in whether a fictional dragon that can’t possibly exist and which has no personality lives or dies. Plus we had exactly the same plot with Amy in ‘The Beast Below’, when she made the wrong choice and ‘forgot’ about the space whale and made the 11th Doctor disappointed in her – and I was quite caught up in that one (and yes, I know whales travelling through space aren’t exactly scientifically likely either but, you know, it was the far future and it wasn’t in a bit of space we know about yet). Steven Moffat went on record at the time as saying how ‘intense and emotional’ this story was and how he loved it more than almost anything else he’d worked on. Which just goes to show what a fine sense of humour the showrunner has when he wants it.
That’s a shame because this episode looks utterly
amazing. I’ve seen Hollywood blockbusters with budgets in the quadzillions that
don’t look a hundredth as good as this does with BBC money. They filmed it in
Tenerife, on the recommendation of writer Peter Harness who’d been there on
family holidays – partly because he was enough of a Dr Who fan to know about
the location filming they did there for ‘Planet Of Fire’ (which doesn’t use the
location filming half as wel as this story does). Harness knew how much the
desert there looked like the moon, full of craters and sand and, by coincidence
more than design, it really is where NASA trained their astronauts during the
early 1970s because it most resembled the moon geographically. For a moment
there you seriously think they’ve got
the budget to send the Tardis up to the
real moon – even to a nut like me whose
seen all that moon footage from the 1960s and 1970s it’s never looked as good
or as ‘real’ as this. The sights of Peter Capaldi, in the orange spacesuit
David Tennant always used to wear, stomping up and down the lunar surface with
Clara feels so ‘right’ for his Doctor, in a way he never seemed quite at home
on Earth. They really make the most of it too, shooting this in the half-dark
(at some considerable expense) so that you really do get the feeling that we’re
on a fragile ball hanging in space with the night sky lighting up behind everything
(because Lanzarote has far less light pollution than Cardiff) and even going to
the trouble of adding a CGI Earth in the background of some scenes that’s one
of the best special effects in the series.
Even the moon dragon, seen in the distance so they don’t need too much
detail, looks more believable than you’d think - a sort of cross between
Elliott in ‘Pete’s Dragon’, Falkor in ‘The Neverending Story’ and the Night
Fury from ‘How To Train Your Dragon’ (in case you haven’t guessed I’m quite
potty about dragons too so this story should be right up my street). How unusual then: a Dr Who story saved, to a
certain extent, by the effects and let down by the writing!
Except that’s what annoys me most of all about this
story: Harkness is a great writer and more than that a great Dr Who writer. He
knows and understands this series better than pretty much any of Moffat’s ‘new’
writers and indeed had been submitting scripts to the series off and on since
2011, as well as some excellent work on such series as ‘The Forgotten Fallen’
(an excellent drama from 2009 about people’s denial and slowness to act over
the Spanish flu epidemic, which would have changed our current timeline since
covid completely had more people watched it and heeded it’s warnings), ‘Wallander’
and the better of the M R James ‘Ghost Stories For Christmas’. He’ll go on to
write the Zygon two parter, a story with as good a claim as many to being not
just the best 12th Doctor story but the most Dr Whoy 12th
Dr Who story. There are little ideas in this story, throwaway lines, that hint
at how good this story could be: I love Lundvik’s comment that it took so long
to go back to the moon because ‘people were always looking down at their
i-phones refusing to look up’ and that humanity stopped being curious. There’s
a great speech, by Danny Pink of all people, comforting an irate Clara that
gets his character in one scene better than any other writer: he tells Clara
that he recognises the look of conflict on her face because he had it himself
in his army days when he was made to something he hated and it made him fall
out of love with the job, but that Clara hasn’t reached the decision to leave
yet because she’s ‘angry’ – and anytime you’re still angry about something is
when you still care. There are a couple of really great funny lines too: Clara’s
comment to NASA asking who the hell she is because nobody else has been on the
moon for decades that she’s on a ‘school trip’ and Courtney uploading her moon
pics to Tumblr, then still a fairly new and hip social media app used almost
exclusively by youngsters, with Lundvik’s comment ‘oh my Granny used to do
that! (it’s exactly the same joke as the one about space travel in ‘Seeds Of
Death’ being old hat, at the same time we were landing on the moon: time moves
on fast in this series). Clara telling the Doctor to tell her the truth ‘or I’ll
slap you so hard you’ll regenerate!’ is also the sort of clever joke you’re
amazed nobody in this series ever made before. It’s typical of this story,
though, that what I think was probably the best scene of all ended up on the
cutting room floor in favour of more walking across the moon slowly and
debating back and forth: Courtney suffers ‘moon fever’ common to many
astronauts when she looks back at home and asks Lundvik what it’s like going
back to a broken Earth after being up in space because ‘It changes stuff yeah?
Like – that down there is everything. Every moment of my life, my mum and dad’s
life, every moment that led up to me being who I am and like I can hold it in
my hand’. A few more limes like that, about what it really means to see the
Earth as the fragile ball of life it really is, and I’d have adored this story;
it says it all that this long speech was cut in favour of the single word
‘wow’. As if that’s going to cut it quite the same way. The best joke got cut
too: by 2049 everything is owned by the conglomerate ‘Amagoogle’!
In fact that’s the other real problem with this
story: nobody reacts normally. This is one of those stories where, to save
time, the Doctor and Clara swan in and – after mere seconds – are accepted
without question while the people at the base explain the plot to them, at
length, even though if they’re who they say they are they should both already
know it. I get it: we need to learn this stuff at speed and it’s not like this
is the only Dr Who story that suffers from it. But we’re on the moon! Where
nobody has been for seventy-five years! Shouldn’t the astronauts be at least a
little more surprised at two strangers walking up to say hi, given that they’re
on the most isolated inhabited place in the solar system? (Give or take whether
the Ice Warriors are asleep on Mars in this era or not). Their reaction to finding
spiders and dragons on the moon, too, is one of ‘oh gosh, look at that’ not ‘my
God, I’ve trained for this my whole life and I never knew, that’s amazing!’ I mean,
these must be the least curious explorers ever – and I would have thought that
curiosity, of discovering something hitherto unknown and getting excited about
it, was quite a prerequisite or else why explore at all? Clara’s more used to
weird things happening so it’s not as much of a surprise that she doesn’t skip
a beat at such discoveries, even on the moon. And yet equally she’s been in
life or death decisions where she’s asked to make quick decisions before and
never resented the Doctor for it, while her own character arc has been all about
wanting control and learning to act like the Doctor, independently. And yet she
suddenly goes to pieces when the Doctor drops her in it and asks her to make a
decision on behalf of her species – and then really resents him for it, to the
point of tears. This is Clara we’re talking about here, someone who loves
control so much she doesn’t dare let anyone see her in pain or vulnerable or
even let them in to what she’s really thinking, ever (I mean, that was the
whole point of her originally, so we at home could be fooled into thinking she
really did have some impossible secret, rather than the secret being a future decision
to rescue her friend in ‘Name Of The Doctor’). What with this and ‘Forest’ she
must also be a candidate for the least responsible teacher ever: it’s the
Doctor who cares for Courtney’s safety enough to get her out of trouble, but
Clara never gives it a thought – admittedly I know more than a few teachers
just like this, but think back to Ian and Barbara and how they risked their
life for Susan over and over again even before they properly knew her because
it was their duty of care, and weep. This is what’s wrong with schools in 2014:
it’s not the pupils its some of the teachers. Then again the Doctor’s never
acted quite like this before, basically disappearing in a huff to let humans sort
this stuff out. It’s far more in character for him to stand at the back o shot,
harrumphing and pretending not to be involved while secretly giving notes – he’s
quite the control freak too, there’s no way he’d just leave Clara to make such
a decision all by herself.
Courtney is the worst though and continues the feeling
I had watching ‘The Caretaker’ and
later ‘In The Forest Of The Night’, that
nobody in the Dr Who production team in 2014 had ever met anyone under thirty. Courtney
doesn’t act like any real teenager ever would and the joke is that she doesn’t
learn anything from this story (or indeed, is ever seen again – even in ‘Forest’
where it would have been easy to write her in); she’s only there to be the
punchline for jokes. Something big happens/ Courtney doesn’t see it, she was
too busy on her phone. Shown the miraculous inside of the Tardis that is
dimensionally transcendental? She gets travel sick. Angry at the world and
rebelling against her teachers at every move (and, it’s hinted, being quite a
bully on the school playground) she nevertheless goes to pieces because the
Doctor says she isn’t ‘special’ (when what he actually says, in fun, is that ‘only
special people are allowed past this point’ on the Tardis doors): I know
bullies are secretly thin-skinned and act tough out of bluster, but good grief –
she’d be even more likely to put a front on when the teachers are around, not
admit that one hurt her feelings. This isn’t funny, it’s being rude to your
core audience of teenagers and making out that all their generation are
weak-kneed pansies who won’t exist for five seconds in the real universe and
need to toughen up and aren’t they silly with their complaints and objections
and over-sensitivity and i-phones? I’m not even part of this generation (I’m a
curmudgeonly millennial, the official and yet alarmingly accurate description
of my age) and even I’m offended on their behalf. Once again, no wonder Dr Who
never found a new audience in this era – it was being made by people laughing
at them. It’s the trouble with a lot of Moffat scripts –you only have to look
at his execrable drama on at the moment ‘Douglas Is Cancelled’, starring Alex
Kingston, Karen Gillan and Hugh Bonneville, and the way the teenage daughter is
portrayed to see that he still thinks like this and hasn’t learned anything. There’s
nothing clever about any of this either, it’s just lazy writing, a cheap joke
because it’s easier than writing a proper person. For all that happens in the script,
for all of the twist at the end that Courtney is special because she helped
save the moon dragon (along with Lundvik and, umm, her English teacher) Courtney
need not be here. Apparently there was originally a lengthy sub-plot about
Courtney discovering that she grows up to be an astronaut named Blinovitch
(yes, like the Dr Who ‘rule’ that you can’t meet your past self) who ended up
re-written as Lundvik, inspired from a life of detention and dead-end jobs to
work hard and become the astronaut she once met. Which would have at least
given Courtney some extra character. Only Moffat thought that sub-plot was ‘interfering’
with the one about Clara so had it taken out – maybe that’s why the pacing for
this story feels so all over the place and why the ending takes an eternity?
Honestly, there was more than enough room in this story for both.
‘Kill The Moon’ still feels kind of empty, which is
why so many people have treated it like an egg, with something below the shell
to be cracked open. There was a thought that went round soon after broadcast, spread
by people who think too much about these things (people…just like me!) that ‘Kill
The Moon’ was a coded message about the abortion laws. This was a big topic of
debate in 2014, when Donald Trump had just started talking about running for American
presidential office for the first time and a shaky second term for Obama,
hampered by a congress who didn’t seem to agree with him on anything, made it
seem like the Republicans actually had a shot of winning. One of their big
burning issues was overturning the Roe v Wade law from 1973, which effectively made
abortion of foetuses legal up to 328 weeks old (a rule that was finally
overturned in 2022). The decision, on whether to terminate an egg and blow it
up with missiles before it hatches, seemed very familiar to those of us who’d
been watching the news and the debates on both sides – about whether something should
be allowed to live, even without an obvious parent to be with it and even when
it could be ‘dangerous’ during the birth process. Notably it’s an agonising
decision made by three women alone, with the Doctor (who’d not yet been a woman
himself, remember, at least on screen) leaving them to it and not interfering
(because of a woman’s rights to their own body), one that Clara finally makes
during a sort-of referendum (a clever sequence with Earth turning off their
lights or leaving them on so she can see from the moon) and then making a
choice based on emotion despite the evidence and official data and everyone
telling her to ‘kill’ it. A slam dunk for the pro-life lobby you’d think –
except the writer was horrified and said the idea had never ever occurred to
him, or anyone else making this story. Even when the director Paul Wilmshurst
asked to speak to the writer about his ‘metaphors’ Harness protested there weren’t
any, that this really was just a trip to the moon. Let me reiterate: this is
rare. Sometimes I wonder if these writers are really as clever as me and fans
like me make out, or whether they’re just good at leaving enough ambiguity for
us to read what we want to into these stories. As far as I know, though, no
writer ever came out and said ‘that theory’s wrong’ – sometimes they’ll nod and
say yes and take all the credit, more often they’ll give an ambiguous answer
that they might have done and it’s alright for us to see it that way if we want
but they couldn’t possibly comment, more often than not they just ignore
everything everyone says about anything. Except in this case. So no, ‘Kill The
Moon’ is categorically not about abortion. It really is just a story about a
dragon hatching from an egg.
That’s a shame because, honestly, what else is there
to go on? ‘Kill The Moon’ is the silliest and most unlikely of stories, one
that ignores practically all science in order to tell a story that really isn’t
that interesting and which features two small jumpscares interrupted by a
quarter hour of bickering and half n hour of pontificating, an adventure so
hard to get a handle on that it runs through your hands like yolk. It’s not
all bad; indeed it’s something of a
curate’s moon egg, given that the Tenerife night shoot looks so good and there
are some really good, clever lines scattered through the eggshell. Even so,
that’s not enough to make this good or even passable: truly it feels like the
yolk’s on us for watching this rubbish (and especially on me for reviewing it
at length) when really it’s just a B-movie with dumb characters acting weird
and some dragons and spiders because why the hell not? It’s only Dr Who. And
that, right there, is the phrase that always ushers in the worst eras for the
show, that signify that the people making this are no longer trying to write
art (or good drama, or political statements, or creative stories), they’re just
trying to see what daft nonsense they can get away with. Sometimes Dr Who isn’t
all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes it really is just a story about a dragon
laying an egg and nothing more. And we’ve just wasted 45 minutes of your life
watching it. And I’ve just wasted
another four hours writing about it. Usually writing these reviews leaves me
feeling good, as if I’ve connected into something that’s bigger than me and
made me feel better about the human race, as if I’ve just had some greater
understanding of life. Not this one though, it just makes me feel really
depressed. It feels as if all of us have somehow been left with egg on our
faces after this story.
+ SUNNY SIDE
UP:
The Doctor uses a yoyo to detect the gravity readings on the moon, just like
the 4th Doctor always used to (in ‘The
Ark In Space’ most obviously). He even uses the same yoyo he digs out of a
back pocket (or as close as), after Capaldi insisted they get this right
because he remembered it so well. It’s a great, very Dr Whoy scene of the
ordinary and extraordinary hitting each other head on. Capaldi who’d never
played with a yoyo in his life, had to get ‘extra coaching’ from his daughter’s
boyfriend to make sure he got it right!
Previous ‘The
Caretaker’
next ‘Mummy On The Orient Express’
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