July 10: "Kill the Moon"

Stuart Manning's poster for "Kill the Moon"
(from Doctor Who: Exclusive Kill the Moon
poster revealed)

There's a basic question at the heart of "Kill the Moon": is a story still good if you take a reasonable storyline and some tense direction and motivate it with the some of the most brain-meltingly stupid "science" ever committed to video?

Because the basic storyline is actually pretty good; something we thought was a lifeless celestial body is actually an egg that's finally starting to hatch, and it's potentially going to cause all sorts of havoc -- so, a decision has to be made: let the moon hatch or kill the thing inside?  There's nothing inherently wrong with that, and in fact it's a nice bold idea, making a moon a space egg.  There's also a lot of tense direction early on; the first half of this episode is properly scary, with lots of shadows and strange spider creatures lurking in the dark, ready to pounce and kill hapless astronauts and lunar miners, and the couple times they do are genuinely frightening.  Director Paul Wilmshurst does a good job of providing us with a tense atmosphere to inhabit, and the decision to film the lunar surface stuff on Lanzarote²⁵⁹ (which was Wilmshurst's idea) is a really good one -- these scenes really do look like a barren lunar surface.  And then we match this with the performances on display: Hermione Norris is face-punchingly frustrating as Lundvik, but that's exactly what she's designed to be, and Norris always makes it seem like her fatalistic approach is a part of her character.  Tony Osoba (ooh, another old Who veteran) and Phil Nice don't get much to do, but they're just as good with the little they get, playing people not really meant to be astronauts but making the best of a bad situation.  And Ellis George does a surprisingly good job as Courtney Woods, frequently acting like a teenager but not to the point where we just want to lock her in a cupboard and walk away (as opposed to, say, last series' Angie Maitland).  And Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman are frankly astonishing in that final scene together -- Clara looks incredibly hurt and betrayed and angry at the Doctor for being patronizing, while the Doctor genuinely doesn't understand what the problem was.  This gives us a taste of what it would actually be like to travel in time, to deal with these big decisions, and neither actor shirks from giving it their all.  On the basis of the performances alone, "Kill the Moon" succeeds.

The problem is the science (and we're using this term very loosely) that writer Peter Harness uses to move his plot along.  So the mass of the moon has increased, somehow -- this is so they can get away with everyone walking normally across Lanzarote without having to rig up a bunch of Kirby wires and harnesses, and it gives Capaldi the opportunity to take a gravity reading with a yo-yo, just like Tom Baker in The Ark in Space.  Fine.  But then we're later told that the mass of the moon is unstable, which is why Courtney starts to float while people in the next room remain rooted to the floor(!).  This is while they're under attack from single-celled organisms that nevertheless look like spiders -- complete with joints, teeth, and the ability to spin spiderwebs -- which seems like a bit of a stretch for prokaryotes.

The creature inside the Moon flies away. ("Kill the Moon") ©BBC

Then there's the big vote on whether or not to kill the moon with the bombs aboard the shuttle.  (Incidentally, this desperate team of astronauts from Earth had come equipped with one hundred nuclear bombs, despite not knowing what the problem with the moon was, other than that it's getting more massive.  So what exactly was the original plan?  Nuke it into submission somehow?  Hope they'd convert enough moon rocks into radiation to balance everything out?)  Clara broadcasts to the entire planet and asks them to vote: lights on, save the creature; lights off, kill it.  Except she only gives them 45 minutes, which means only half the planet gets a vote.  And we're looking at the night side, so an awful lot of these people are already asleep and have their lights off anyway -- so I guess they're voting for murder even if they don't know it.  Plus we see all the lights go out, which suggests less that the people of Earth (well, North America and western Europe) are unanimous in their desire to kill the moon and more that a small group of people have gone to all the power plants and turned them off.  That's democracy for you.

(And if we're nitpicking...  Hermione Norris, playing Lundvik, was 47 when they filmed this.  "Kill the Moon" is explicitly set in 2049, which suggests that Lundvik was 12 years old in 2014, when Courtney is from.  So why does Lundvik reminisce about her granny using Tumblr, as if it were some ancient thing instead of something around while she was the right age to be using it herself?  Oh, and we're told the mining team that went missing were Mexicans.  So one of the set dressers has put a smegging poncho over one of the chairs.)

Look, bad science isn't exactly a new thing for Doctor Who, but that doesn't automatically make it bad Doctor Who -- The Evil of the Daleks wants you to believe that you can build a time machine with 144 mirrors and some static electricity, and that's hardly a much maligned story.  No, the problem is that here the pseudo-scientific gobbledegook is just being used to get from point A to point B, and meanwhile "Kill the Moon" is taking itself so seriously.  It's a shame; the actors and the direction are doing a great job of making this suitably thrilling.  But if it wants us to take the rest of it so seriously then it can't keep flinging silly nonsense at us and expecting us to swallow it.  That's not clever, it's lazy.  Have a big idea about the moon being an egg by all means -- that's a great bold idea -- but if you're going to do so, be prepared to follow through and make it believable.  Don't just make things up based on half-remembered secondary school science classes and expect that that's good enough.  Because it's not, and it's frankly insulting to think that it would be.  This ruins "Kill the Moon" more than any dodgy acting or unconvincing set would have done.

(And I'm sure it's completely unintentional, but once you get the thought in your head that this is just an excuse to explain why the Moon doesn't quite look right in The Moonbase, it's really, really hard to shake that idea...)







²⁵⁹ Yep, the same place where they filmed Peter Davison's penultimate story Planet of Fire -- which is why the working title for "Kill the Moon" was, cheekily, "Return to Sarn".