Review: Doctor Who Season 8 Episode 7: Kill The Moon

I can barely hate-watch this show any more, so it's going to be pretty sparse on screen caps. My friend Jen described it as the worst episode of the revised series, and I'm not inclined to disagree.

In the cold open, Clara, with some terrible eyebrows

is telling someone that they need to weigh the survival of humanity against an innocent life.

As I've observed before, Doctor Who isn't really science fiction; like Star Wars, it's fantasy with the trappings of science fiction.  However, there is a difference between glossing over the details of the science in the interest of a good story, and just not giving a shit, trying to pass off bullshit and hoping your audience doesn't care.

Kill the Moon makes Robot of Sherwood look like a TED Talk by Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

This is the plot:

This is really the plot.

I'll say the one nice thing I like about this episode: Courtney Woods is a more interesting companion than we've have for the past eight years.

The Doctor uses a yo-yo to detect local gravity, but even that can't save it. Here's a bit of trivia that's more interesting than anything found in this episode, Kate Winslet's first role was in a Lovecraftian BBC series by RTD. It was called Dark Season and in her first appearance, she's using a yo-yo to test local gravity.

 

Sorry if I spoiled you, because that's about a billion times better than this episode. Also, the first arc is pretty much the same as School Reunion.

Blah blah, space egg, ridiculously fragile spider-shaped bacteria, oh noes, should we blow up the moon? So Clara asks everyone on the (dayside) Earth if we should blow up the moon, which will kill everyone anyway. 

This reminded me, but not in a good way, of the census taker Trevor Sigma from the Happiness Patrol. He went about performing his census by wandering around and asking everyone their name.It was ridiculous then, and it's even moreso now.

The peoples on the Earth say "Kill teh Moonz!" but Clara does not kill teh moonz! It hatches into a space dragon, lays an egg larger than itself that looks exactly like the moon, and then flies off for parts unknown.

In the denouement,  Clara rages at the Doctor, saying that he owes humanity, and he should be there to protect them. 

Clara is wrong, and the Doctor is wrong.

The Doctor says that he was trying to empower humanity by allowing them to make their own decisions, that it wasn't his decision to make. That, by itself, is correct.  I am hugely critical of the Christmas Invasion, where the Doctor dooms humanity to a dark age in a fit of spite. The best thing I  took from my time working in human services is the idea "As long as people retain the ability to make decisions, they retain the right to make bad decisions." You don't get to substitute your judgement for the relevant party, even if you think you know better.

The Doctor says he's allowing humanity to decide, but he withholds relevant information. That's a shitty thing to do. He should have informed her of the consequences, instead of making her stab in the dark. The Doctor is right in general, but wrong on this specific. He should have told her.