#no that shit was not created by sperm and egg that fucker was made with special ingredients

[cosmoshakecs]

[the-desolated-quill]

Kill The Moon - Doctor Who blog (Is This The Worst Doctor Who Episode Ever?)

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet... then I envy you, you lucky bastard)

I... really... didn’t want to watch this one again. The first time I saw this back in 2014, it elicited a reaction out of me so violent that it would have made a Hell’s Angel blush. I HATED this episode with every fibre of my being and I’ve been dreading coming back to review this. I had to bribe myself with chocolate in order to get through it again and, even now as I’m typing this, I’m seething with rage. The very thought that my TV licence fee contributed to this pile of absolute garbage fucking disgusts me.

So... Kill The Moon.

Let’s start with the first immediate problem that jumps out. Courtney. What the fuck is she doing here? You could literally cut her out of the story entirely and it wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference. Actually no, I tell a lie. It would have made one difference. The episode would have been slightly less grating to watch. She’s so fucking annoying that I was hoping a gruesome death was on the cards for her. She’s constantly moaning about being bored or that she’s not special, which considering what an arrogant little bitch she’s been presented as over the course of this series, it probably wouldn’t hurt to have the Doctor take her down a peg or two. You certainly don’t want to encourage someone like that into believing they’re a special little snowflake because it’ll just reinforce their selfish behaviour, and I’m alarmed that that’s what her teacher Clara is trying to do. What the fuck?

So the TARDIS crew land on the Moon and meet three astronauts. One of them is played by Hermione Norris, who gives such a dull and lifeless performance that I’m almost impressed by it. The way she says her lines, she sounds as though she’s only just woken up. Mind you, if I was lumbered with a character this one dimensional, I wouldn’t put much energy into my performance neither. Also there are two other astronauts played by two other actors who do absolutely nothing. They’re all bland, boring characters and I’m sure they have names, but I can’t be arsed to remember them because that’s how fucking boring they are. I don’t give a single shit about any of them, partly because the writer Peter Harness has given me no reason to care about them, but mostly because I was too busy trying to make sense of Kill The Moon’s moronic morass of pseudoscience and dumbass non-logic.

So the Mexicans have made a lunar mining base on the Moon only to discover there are in fact no minerals on the Moon. At all. None whatsoever. Then once you’ve finished laughing at that stupidity, we’re then expected to believe that after years of technological innovation, everyone just stopped going into space. And apparently there’s no way to get to the mining base other than using an old space shuttle from a museum. So the Mexican company didn’t have any of its own ships it could send up in case something went wrong? None of the intermediate stages of spaceflight between a shuttle and a mining colony were available neither?

But wait! It gets worse!

The Moon is getting bigger. That’s bad. Tidal waves and floods and all that jazz. So what’s the solution? Nuke the fucker! Yeah! That will make everything better! Except doing so could potentially send chunks of radioactive Moon rock at the Earth and cause an apocalypse (assuming the rocks don’t just form back into a sphere shaped mass again because that’s how gravity fucking works). Also the Moon acts as a counterweight to the Earth. So if the Moon disappeared, the Earth’s orbit around the Sun would become more erratic and the planet would wobble uncontrollably on its axis, causing the seasons to fluctuate wildly. So blowing up the Moon could actually make things worse. Whoops!

And why is the Moon getting bigger? (Are you ready for this? You’re going to love this one?) The Moon is an egg!

Well no, wait, actually that makes perfect sense. Because we all know when a chicken lays an egg, the egg gets bigger and heavier as it incubates. OH WAIT! NO IT DOESN’T! THE EGG GETS LIGHTER! SO HOW THE FUCK DOES THE MOON GAIN AN EXTRA 1.3 BILLION TONNES IN WEIGHT? WHERE DID ALL THAT EXTRA MASS COME FROM? THIS IS UTTER BOLLOCKS!

And it just gets even stupider when you take this baby creature into account. How does killing the creature solve the problem of the tidal waves? The reason the tidal waves are occurring is because of the increased mass of the Moon. If you kill the creature, that mass doesn’t magically go away. You’ve still got a dead creature orbiting the planet. The mass is still there. Even if you were to accept the possibility that the nukes would blow the creature to smithereens, it’s more likely that the bits of luna rock and alien guts would form back into a sphere under its own gravity, thus causing more problems for the Earth.

Now yes I know this is Doctor Who. It’s never exactly been scientifically accurate and if I were to go through all the bad science in Doctor Who stories, we’d be here all day. However in order to maintain our suspension of disbelief, the science doesn’t necessarily need to be accurate, but it does need to make sense under the show’s own internal logic. This... doesn’t! The science in Kill The Moon is so stupid and so nonsensical that it actually takes you completely out of the story. It’s hard to be scared of the alien spiders once you find out they’re prokaryotic (just... huh?!) and it’s hard to take the Doctor seriously when he’s spouting unscientific bullshit that is objectively wrong. And all the stuff I’ve been saying, this isn’t some obscure stuff that only a Stephen Hawking or an Albert Einstein would know. You can literally GOOGLE this crap! There’s simply no excuse for such shoddy science. So either Peter Harness is lazy as fuck and couldn’t be bothered to do basic research before putting pen to paper or he’s a complete and utter idiot. And that would be one thing if all that results in just a stupid story, but it’s another thing entirely when the writer brings that same laziness/stupidity to the table when tackling sensitive, real world issues.

As I watched Kill The Moon, with Clara and um... the spacewoman debating whether to kill the creature or not, the penny dropped with a horrible clang. Yes, Doctor Who is going to talk to us about abortion. Now of course this isn't the first time the show has tackled difficult subject matters and there’s no reason why a show whose audience is predominantly children shouldn’t be allowed to discuss and explore sensitive subjects. It all depends on how it’s done. Abortion is a tricky one because there are essentially two parts to the pro-choice/pro-life debate. The first is that of the woman’s autonomy, to which the answer should obviously be yes. A woman should absolutely have the right to decide what she does with her own body. The second part is where things get murky. The rights of the foetus. Namely, is abortion murder? That all depends when life officially begins, except nobody can agree when that is. Is it at the point of conception? During the first trimester? The second? When the embryo takes on a human shape? When the woman actually gives birth to the child? And that in turn raises a whole new set of questions. Let’s say that life officially begins during the second trimester. Does that mean the embryo still has rights during the first trimester just because it’s going to be alive? What about sperm and egg cells? Does that make condoms immoral just because those sperm could fertilise an egg and could create life? So what does this mean then? Are the pro-life group campaigning for the right to life or the right to potentially have life? Is ‘potentially’ too broad a definition and is it in fact restricting a woman’s autonomy? Which brings us to the ultimate question. Whose life is more important? The mother’s or the foetus’? What if giving birth to the baby harms or kills the mother? What if other factors prevent the mother from giving a baby the quality of care it deserves? Whose life takes precedent?

Now I’m not going to tell you my views on abortion because, frankly, they’re irrelevant to this. I’m merely demonstrating how complicated this debate truly is. These are questions with no clear right or wrong answer and there’s probably never going to be a clear, definitive answer. A lot of it really comes down to your own personal morality. So if you’re going to write a story about abortion... well... don’t. That would be my advice because you’re bound to piss somebody off no matter what you do. But if you still persist, you need to do your fucking homework before you start and make sure you handle the subject with tact and discretion.

With this in mind, how does Kill The Moon go about doing this?

The Doctor discovers the existence of the creature under the Moon’s surface and remarks upon how beautiful it is, to which Hermione Norris’ character responds by asking how do they kill it while a sinister music cue plays over the scene.

Wow. Subtle.

This is the reason behind my intense dislike towards this episode. Not only does it make the same mistake most New Who stories make by stripping the moral complexity out of morally complex situations and spoon-feeding the answer to the audience, it also becomes offensively dangerous when you factor the abortion metaphor into the equation. The episode takes a hardline pro-life stance, portraying the pro-choice side as irrational baby killers, even going so far as to have the Earth (or half of the Earth at any rate. The other half not visible to the Moon doesn’t get a say apparently) vote whether to kill the creature or not, and then have Clara go against their unanimous decision to kill it and stop the nukes for no reason other than babies are good. (I feel I should point out there was nothing to suggest the creature wouldn’t have swooped down and devoured humanity the moment it had hatched. The fact that it didn’t only shows how grotesquely lucky Clara was with her rash decision). There’s no effort to actually have an intelligent discussion about this. The decision is made right from the start with the irrational baby killers merely being an obstacle in the righteous pro-lifer’s path. Not only is it biased to an insulting degree, it’s also intellectually dishonest. If the only way you can support your argument is by demonising the other side, all it proves is that your argument doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

Oh, let’s talk about Clara because she really fucking pissed me off. I was amazed by the number of people who were angry over the Doctor’s decision to leave and not intervene in the decision because that was the only thing about the episode I actually liked. You may call bullshit considering the number of times the Doctor has interfered in human affairs, but as far as I’m concerned, he made the right choice here. He recognised how complex and difficult the decision was and he also recognised that it wasn’t his place to make that decision for them. Like he said, it’s not his home. It’s not his moon. It’s not his choice. Which is what makes Clara’s temper tantrum at the end all the more egregious. For starters it’s a bit rich her chastising the Doctor for leaving them when she was prepared to do the same thing less than 10 minutes before. Also what is she actually complaining about? That the Doctor paid her and the rest of the human race enough respect to make the choice for themselves? Doesn’t really make sense when you put it like that, does it? Clara basically comes across like a spoilt child, moaning and shrieking at the Doctor because he was no longer at her beck and call and she actually had to think and act for herself for a change. And rather than have the Doctor just tell her to grow the fuck up (or better yet, give her a sharp dropkick out of the TARDIS and find a companion who’s actually likeable and well developed), the episode clearly expects you to be on Clara’s side and tut-tut at the Doctor disapprovingly even though he hasn’t actually done anything wrong. Clara is basically upset because she had to think for herself, and that worries me.

Kill The Moon is not just bad. It isn’t even terrible. In fact I’d go as far to say that it’s one of the most despicable things I’ve ever come across. It’s not just because of the shit story or the bullshit scientific inaccuracies. It’s because of how cack handed and irresponsible Peter Harness is when it comes to the central theme. The very thought that this episode could give kids a skewed, biased and utterly warped view of abortion thanks to a writer who is either too stupid or too lazy to do proper research into the subject makes me sick to my fucking stomach. Also Steven Moffat can go fuck himself too. Oh yeah, I’m not letting him off the hook. He’s the showrunner. He’s the one who looked over this script and went ‘yep. I see nothing problematic about this whatsoever.’

This is the episode that made me stop watching Doctor Who. I felt so sickened and so insulted by what I had just watched that I actually flung up my hands and went ‘fuck it! I don’t want to watch this show anymore!’ It hurt to do it. I love Doctor Who, but I couldn’t continue to watch fucking morons like Moffat and Harness grind it into the dirt. So I left, vowing never to return until Moff-Face was shown the fucking door. And this Christmas, I’m finally going to get my wish.

Which leaves me in an interesting position going forward with my reviews. Beyond this episode, I legitimately have no idea what’s going to happen. I know a few tidbits of information from what I’ve seen on Tumblr. For instance, I know that Missy is the Master (that didn’t come as much of a surprise. I mean really, who the fuck else could she have been?), I know that the Doctor returns to Gallifrey at some point and I think Clara ends up dying at the end of Series 9 (couldn’t have happened to a more deserving companion as far as I’m concerned). Beyond that, I genuinely have no idea what’s in store for me from here. But at least I’ll be safe in the knowledge that no episode can possibly be as bad as Kill The fucking Moon.