The End of Egg-sistence

How to deal with children: When you tell a child that she's not special and her feelings get hurt, do you...

1. Tell her she's special in order to make her feel better?
2. Scoff at her for being self-absorbed?
3. Put an end to the coddling culture of telling everyone that they're their own special snowflake?
4. Take her to the moon?

The Story

After the Doctor tells Clara's student, Courtney, that she's not special, he takes her to the moon rather than apologizing. The excess gravity has been causing issues for Earth, so our heroes quickly join up with three astronauts: Lundvik, and two dudes who get killed, but nobody cares.

The extra weight isn't the moon's only mystery: we also quickly find out that there are cobwebs and giant spiders. The spiders are big and scary, sense movement, and eat human flesh. They kill one of the boring guys, and are about to gnaw off Courtney's face, but she saves herself... with disinfectant!

Yes, Courtney squirts Windex at a giant spider, it works, and then she gloats about it despite having seen, less than a minute ago, a man die in front of her.

That works because the spiders aren't really spiders. They're bacteria - giant bacteria - living on a giant creature, because...

THE MOON IS AN EGG

The moon has spent the last hundred million years gestating a planet-sized bird, and now it's ready to hatch. Our heroes have a big decision to make: do they leave the creature be, with the risk that when it hatches, it will jettison pieces of the moon back to Earth, or possibly even fly down to the Earth and start eating its denizens, or worse?

Or do they kill the creature, guaranteeing (in a fashion) the planet's safety, but ensuring that this creature, whatever it is, will never see the light of day?

Good thing there are four of them there, and one of them is a 2000-year-old time-travelling alien who knows how these things tend to work.

"I just remembered. I left a.... turkey in the oven..."

Or... not. The Doctor declares that this decision is a major turning point for humanity, and so must be made without his interference, and leaves Clara, Courtney, and Lundvik to figure things out alone.

Contact with the ground is randomly established, and Clara uses the opportunity to send a poll down to the planet: "Use your lights, Earth. Lights on means life. Lights off means death."

Florida's a bunch of hippies

In the first unanimous vote the species has ever seen, every light on the surface of the Earth darkens. Humanity has cast its vote and spoken in a single voice.

KILL THE MOON

And so, in true democratic fashion, Clara ignores the vote and saves the moon-bird anyway. The Doctor returns, congratulations everyone on their wise decision, and takes everyone to the beach to watch the moon hatch harmlessly.

It needs wings to propell it through the... uh... air? What exactly is it flying in?

The Doctor leaves Lundvik on the shore, and sends a giddy Courtney back to school, but when it's time to part ways with Clara, she reveals that she is none too pleased with the Doctor's decisions that day.

"How dare you make us go out there, in front of other people, in those hideous orange spacesuits? The other astronauts got stylish light gray, and we were stuck with orange?"

By failing to give guidance in the kill-or-let-live decision, the Doctor has struck a nerve. Clara feels not respected, but patronized, and she has decided that she will not put up with it any longer. Thus, do her travels with the Doctor come to an end.

"Where did it all go wrong?"

The Review

Before I re-watched this episode for this post, I remembered hating it, and I planning on giving it an overwhelmingly negative review. So imagine my surprise when...

I actually kinda sorta liked it.

"It's beautiful. Like the hatching of a newborn creature that we saved from certain demise."

Well, not that much. It's not that Kill the Moon was a good episode. It's that I'd remembered it as a bad episode with no redeeming qualities, and it turned out to be a bad episode with some redeeming qualities.

So let's start with the meat of it - where this egg got scrambled.

Let's start with Ellis George, portraying Courtney.

She stole Kill the Moon... in the sense that now that she's taken it, nobody else can have it. I don't know who did a worse job, the actress, or the writer?

"One small thing for a thing. One enormous thing for a thingy thing."

Who in the world thought that it was a good idea to put that in the script?

Asking if it's a chicken? Calling it a "little baby"? Saying that having some stranger say that she's not special "kicked a big hole in her life"?

Gloating about the advertisement on the side of the disinfectant, just after she witnessed another human die, and was almost herself killed?

This episode brought to you by Tar-Disinfect: Kills 99% of all known germs!
Side effects may include bad acting, questionable moral judgment, and the possible destruction of the moon and all humankind.

Really?

Also, just going to put it out there. We Americans are becoming better and more inclusive when it comes to picking presidents. But the Constitution does have some requirements - I'd be shocked if we were able to elect a girl born in London into the Oval Office.

Tiny little details that a simple Wikipedia lookup would catch.

But Courtney's atrocious acting and scripting wasn't the real problem for this episode. The real problem was...

The moon is an egg! It's been gaining weight from absolutely nowhere as it prepares to hatch! It is protected by bacteria that, for some reason, are shaped like spiders, and spin cobwebs, but are somehow still single-celled, and have the same intolerances as Earth-based bacteria. It hatches, lays another egg the same size as the original, and the moon's surface cosmic eggshell disintegrates harmlessly.

So I hope everyone who knows anything (about a thingy thing) will join me and my eldery lady friends in saying:

So the moon is gaining weight, is it? Where is that mass coming from? The Doctor has some throwaway lines establishing ways that it could happen, but it turns out that it's just a growing organism. But still, that growing alien bird thing has to get its energy from somewhere. And the only known source of radiation that the moon could be harvesting is radiation from the sun.

But just out curiosity, how long would that take?

Solar radiation falls on the moon at a rate of about 13,000 terawatts. Convert that into matter (that's the whole E = mc² thing that Einstein wrote about) and you get about one kilogram every seven seconds. Supposing that the lunar surface gravity in Kill the Moon was the same as Earth gravity, and that the radius of the moon hasn't changed at all, then the moon has increased its mass by about 370 septillion kg (for the record, that's about 5 times the current mass of the moon).

Yo-yo's: Delicate gravitational force sensors

For the moon to gain that much mass at the rate provided by the sun would take... multiply there... carry the one... 82 trillion years! In other words, a number so large I'm not even sure I wrote it down right. To put that into slightly more manageable numbers, to experience that amount of time, go back to the Big Bang, wait until now, then go back again to the Big Bang, wait again, and repeat the process 6 million times.

Not something that's likely to happen in 50 years.

A few other basic science nitpicks:

• "Prokaryotic unicellular life form with non-chromosomal DNA": That's not how cells, prokaryotes, chromosomes, or DNA work.
• Bacteria are really small, not because of how big we are, but because things can't get much bigger than your average germ cell without having multiple cells. Something with legs, and teeth, and the ability to spin thread cannot possibly be unicellular. Even if it's satisfying the ecological niche of bacteria, it would still have to be multicellular just to get that big.
• DNA is the specific chemicals that make up Earth-life's genetic material. Chromosomes are the way that DNA is organized. Chromosomes is how DNA works. It is conceivable to have an alien creature with chromosomes made up of some other genetic-encoding chemical - AKA chromosomal non-DNA. But non-chromosomal DNA makes literally no sense.
• "Kills 99% of all known germs": Even if disinfectant works against Earth-based germs, it works because it hijacks some chemical feature of the way the germs work on the inside. There is absolutely no reason to think that it would work against anything filling the same ecological niche.

This episode brought to you by Science Yo-yos!
2-in-1 gravity AND amniotic fluid detector!

• "High tide everywhere at once": Uhhhh.... no. A super-massive moon would cause extra high tides on the points closest and furthest from said extra-huge moon... and extra low tides everywhere else.
• Why would these spider creatures have evolved the ability to make cobwebs? Spiders on Earth do it to eat, and those who don't spin thread die of starvation and have no offspring. But there's no prey on the moon, at least none that we see. So what could have caused these creatures to develop that ability?
• Small birds do not typically trash their nests because they are reared in those nests as well as hatched. After they are able to fly on their own, they usually do destroy said nest. And other creatures that don't need their "nests" usually don't spare them. (See this type of wasp for a particularly gruesome example - not for the faint of heart).

The writers' science books were ravaged by a giant spider right before filming, so they had to wing it.

None of these errors is particularly difficult to notice. A simple Wikipedia search for any of these concepts unveils all of these problems.

Okay, fine. Forget the "Science" part of "Science Fiction". I want to highlight another slight problem - that of democracy.

So here's how democracy works. You ask seven billion people to choose between A and B. Seven billion people choose A. You do B.

THAT'S DEMOCRACY!

Okay, so first off. The vote was incredibly biased. Only half of the world could vote, since the daylight side's vote wouldn't be visible anyway. But the nighttime side is also going to be biased towards "don't kill". The lights were already on - street lights and such. In order to cast a "kill" vote, then a bunch of things need to happen:

• Someone needs to be awake
• They need to receive that transmission
• They have to believe that it's real, and not a hoax
• They have to decide to cast the "kill" vote
• Someone needs to go and turn off all street lights, residential lights, make sure there are no fires in remote areas, etc.
• All this needs to happen in 45 minutes.

That even one region large enough to see would be able to cast a "kill" vote is wildly implausible. But for the sake of the story, let's assume that the stakes were high enough that they went to the extra effort...

Pictured: A planet full of very motivated people.

ALL OF HUMANITY WAS SO MOTIVATED TO CAST A KILL VOTE, AND CLARA IGNORED IT.

Science interlude!

Notice how the dark side of the planet is facing the moon? This is necessary in order for Clara to be able to see the planet's vote.

Okay, now check this out:

This is our heroes, leaving the space shuttle at the beginning of Kill the Moon. Notice how a bit more than half of the planet is lit? That's because of where the sun is with respect to the Earth and the moon.

So here's a geometry/astronomy question: What is the minimum time that needs to elapse between those two images?

Answer: Going from half illuminated to no illumination at all is one quarter of a lunar cycle. Since that cycle is a month long, a fourth of that is about one week

The way the episode is paced, it seems to take less than a day.

Also, can I just point out what a depressing and cynical worldview the writer must have had, to suggest that literally everyone on the planet voted to Kill the Moon, in only 45 minutes.

And her reaction was not "that's so pretty" or "how do we save the planet?", but "how do we kill it?".

How lonely a world must the person who wrote that live in.

Moving on... let's talk about the Doctor and his little rules.

This is a defining moment for humankind. But unlike usual, the Doctor is not allowed to help. Whatever unique knowledge or insight he can bring to the table must be left off the table.

Why is this? Not for some grand moral purpose, surely. Three people are about to make a decision that will impact a lot of innocent lives. If the creature's shell bombards the Earth, billions of innocent children die. If not, a baby has been murdered for no gain. These are stakes that require having all of the knowledge that you can possibly gain, in order to make the least harmful decision.

Okay, fine. So the Doctor is not allowed to provide guidance or influence at all, and he has to leave... but Clara is still there. Even if he's gone, many of his moral lessons are still there in Clara's form, and to a lesser extent, Courtney. By leaving her there, the Doctor is all but ensuring that he's still there.

Button-pressing by proxy!

"I knew you would make the right choice." That's because you made her who she is!

That's not a critique against Kill the Moon. Characters in fiction mess up all the time, just as normal people do in this strange place we call Reality. And in this episode, the Doctor, whatever it was he was trying to a accomplish, blew it.

"And out there... the grand sea of possibility!"

...in exactly the way I would imagine this Doctor blowing it.

And this will take us to what I think was Kill the Moon's strongest point.

Clara belches at the Doctor - true cinematic genius.

That confrontation at the end. The Doctor made a huge mistake, and he is being taken to task in true form. Clara has had enough of his arrogance, his belittling, his willingness to put people in danger to prove a point, and she tears him a new one. The tears, the rage. The Doctor was blindsided, as was, I would guess, the audience (I was, at least). Major kudos to Peter Capaldi for his acting, subdued though it was, since it made sense in the context. The Doctor barely had time to register what was going on before Clara was out the door and out of his life, for good, it seems.

But more points have to go to Clara for that scene. Jenna Louise Coleman nailed the confrontation. Acting is not an easy business (just ask Ellis George), and Coleman packed so much emotion into her performance without going over-the-top.

To be fair, Coleman usually performs well. But this scene was exceptional and deserves extra praise. Right, Jenna?

"I SAID CLEAR OFF"

But why? I said nice things!

I'll also point out two other things about Kill the Moon that were superbly done.

Firstly was the atmosphere... well... maybe not atmosphere... because moon... but the aura, the mood, near the beginning of the episode. The lonely march to the mining station, the spooky corridor filled with [scientifically nonsensical] cobwebs, even that moment when the spider attacked the astronaut. All I can say about those is - beautifully executed.

Moon cobwebs!

The other scene that deserves acclamation is the vote. Complete with fast-paced but tense music, the inexorably ticking clock overlaying the planet as it darkens. Clara's despair when Florida turns off. I must have watched that scene ten times while workng on this review, and I loved each viewng.

After fiascos like The Caretaker... and the weaker parts of this episode... it warms the heart to see scenes that show that there are people on this show who really know what they're doing, and no matter what they have to work with, can keep the entertainment value high.

And entertainment value's really what we're going for, isn't it?

Overall

Wow, look at all that stuff on the chalkboard!

Random context-free integrals and geometrically confused rectangles!

*cough* where was I?

Oh, right, so Kill The Moon. With its flagrant disregard for even the most basic and easily researched science, this episode was a slap in the face to any fan who cares even a bit for the "sci" part of "sci-fi". The moon gaining weight from the void with no explanation, the tides being high everywhere, the spiders being giant unicellular things that are still vulnerable to Windex. It's hard to enjoy a show that, at every stage, manages to remind you that its authors know nothing of the world their characters live in.

But while Kill The Moon was by no means eggs-cellent, it had enough redeeming qualities in the directing and post-processing, and the absolutely gorgeous lunar landscape, to save it from being a complete moon-strocity!

NEXT: MUMMY ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

He just wants to shake hands. Don't be so prejudiced - jeez!