Doctor Who: Kill the Moon (8x07)

Yeah! You go, Clara! Thank you, thank you, thank you for saying that! I was so annoyed with the Doctor in this episode. And I was hoping, praying, that Clara would call him out on his crap. And not just in the generic, "I'm your sassy put-you-in-your-place companion" way that Moffat does so well. In a real way. In a way that would actually chastise the Doctor and get him to realize his mistake. Yesss!

Okay, I'm obviously getting ahead of myself. Let's go back and look at the plot. 

Courtney Woods, the curious girl from last week's episode, is upset because the Doctor apparently told her that she's not special. She insists on coming on a trip to the TARDIS. The Doctor won't tell her that she's special, but he does agree to take her to the moon!

When they arrive, they end up on a Space Shuttle, in the year 2049, heading for the moon in order to destroy it with nuclear bombs. Apparently, the moon has gone a bit wacky lately, which has been messing with the tides and causing a lot of mayhem and destruction on Earth. Some of the crew are killed by giant spider-like things, until it's just Clara, the Doctor, Courtney Woods, and a woman named Lundvik.

The Doctor goes down into a crevasse to investigate, and discovers that the moon is actually an egg, with a creature living inside, about ready to hatch. He then leaves in the TARDIS, abandoning Lundvik, Clara, and Courtney to make a terrible decision - should they kill the baby creature to save the planet, or should they let it hatch, not knowing what's going to happen?

Clara manages to get a message to Earth, asking them to vote on what to do: if people turn off their lights, they're voting to kill the moon. If they keep their lights on, they're voting to let it hatch. The earth goes dark. However, even though the earth has made its decision, Clara and Lundvik both stop the nuclear devices from going off. The Doctor appears at this moment to pick them up, having had faith that they would make the right decision. He uses the TARDIS to bring them down to earth, where they watch the moon hatch and fly off, leaving another egg (the same size as the moon) in its place.

The Doctor explains that this event, in 2049, is what made Earth's citizens keen to explore space and spread out throughout the universe. Lundvik says goodbye, and the Doctor takes Courtney home, and then drops Clara off at the school. But Clara has some words to say to the Doctor: she's very unhappy with him. She says he was being condescending by leaving the choice up to her - that he made her feel scared and foolish. He says he was respecting her, by giving her the choice. She tells him to leave her alone and go off in the TARDIS by himself. She storms out. At school, she tells Danny that she's done with the Doctor, but Danny knows that Clara's not done yet. He tells her that if the Doctor still has the power to make her angry, she's not really done.

My complaints are mostly small ones. The special effects of the moon hatching were really silly. I was just not at all impressed with the way that looked. And, what, the creature is born and just instantly hatches a new egg that looks exactly the same in the exact same place? What? It was hard for me to swallow that. I wanted a better explanation.

I also thought the dialogue at the start of the episode was a bit sloppy. Clara starts things off by telling the Doctor that it was wrong of him to tell Courtney she wasn't special. I don't know about the rest of you, but I was just waiting for more of an explanation. When did the Doctor say this? What was the context? It was a bit of an awkward way to start off the conflict of the episode, in my opinion.

However, for the most part, things worked really well. I like that we got Courtney back for another episode - I wasn't expecting that, and I enjoyed her a lot. She's an interesting character, because she's an example of someone who doesn't really take to the life, if you know what I mean. Part way through the episode, she's insisting that she wants to go home. And hell, I would be too! But at the same time, she shows real resilience and bravery, coming back to help by the end.

The dilemma placed in front of these characters is a really intriguing one. An alien baby vs. the planet Earth. At first, it seems an easy choice... all of Earth, vs. some unknown creature? But then you think about it - nobody knows what the egg hatching is going to do. It might end up being harmless - and indeed it was. And even if it hadn't been harmless, would it have been right to kill it? Natural disasters kill people every year - it's tragic, but it doesn't mean the world has ceased to exist. It's a lot more complex of a question that we often get on Doctor Who. Or at least, more complex than anything we've had in a long while.

I must make a small shout-out to all the ladies in this episode. Once again, we had an entire story dominated by women - the only male character of any importance was the Doctor himself. I always find that refreshing, especially given the fact that Courtney and Lundvik could have easily been cast as men, but they weren't. Lundvik was a fairly interesting character, even if there wasn't a lot of time to develop her. She was trying to be stoic and do what was best for the greater good, but in the end, she pushed the button to stop the bombs just like Clara did. She couldn't bring herself to take an innocent life.

I was a big fan of the moments when Clara, Lundvik, and Courtney tried to logic their way into a solution. They tried to reason out, scientifically, what might happen when the egg hatched. It was a bit heartbreaking to watch them sort it all out, because you can tell that they're all panicked, and you can also tell how ridiculous it all is: Clara was right, none of them are qualified for this.

My favorite scene in the episode was definitely the final one with Clara and the Doctor, as you could probably tell from my freak-out at the start of the review. This newest version of the Doctor is darker and crueler than ever before, and it was about time that someone put him in his place. Jenna Coleman killed it with the acting in this scene. Clara is angry with the Doctor - that's clear enough. But she's also sad, and confused, and she feels betrayed and unsure and all sorts of other things. Coleman did an excellent job portraying the complexities of Clara's emotions in this scene. And Peter Capaldi's performance was extraordinarily subtle and well done as well. The Doctor thinks so highly of himself, in a way, that things like the future of the planet Earth can seem like nothing more than a fun puzzle to solve - a teaching opportunity for a couple of silly little humans. But Clara is quick to set him straight about that. We'll have to see how he takes it.

The final scene between Danny and Clara was also interesting. It revealed some things about Danny that I think will end up being very important - clearly, something pretty bad happened that caused him to stop being a soldier. We already knew that, to an extent, but now we're getting more information than ever before. And his wisdom about the Doctor is really refreshing, because it shows that the Doctor, while he might be complex and confusing and inhuman, is still ultimately understandable.

I think I'll leave it there. Now that we're over halfway through this season, I'm getting more and more tied in to where all of this is going. How are we going to wrap up this first season for Capaldi?

9/10