Doctor Who

[Mogster]

There's outlandish, and then there's plain stupid. The show's set in our universe, or at least something close enough, and the moon is certainly not an egg. We've been there and checked.

Having an outlandish concept doesn't mean that anything goes and it's fine. So yeah, I can easily accept that the Doctor is an alien from Gallifrey who flies through time and space in a police box that' bigger on the inside, but not that the Moon is an egg.

[The Grand Pursuivant]

There's outlandish, and then there's plain stupid. The show's set in our universe, or at least something close enough, and the moon is certainly not an egg. We've been there and checked.

We went to the moon to check that it's not an egg?

[MrPogo]

I fell asleep about twenty minutes in and woke up just as the moon hatched. I was assuming it would have made more sense in the full context of the episode, but apparently not!

[scottcr]

I've obviously got Doctor Who fatigue now... I haven't watched a single episode of this series yet, even though I thought Peter Capaldi would be great at it.

[gone fishin]

This is hilarious.

If I wanted shitty physics, pretending to be entertainment, I'd watch a program with that twat keyboard player out of d.ream.

Instead this was entertaining. Utter bollocks, but enjoyable. Isn't that what dr who is supposed to be about?

[Mr Cochese]

He was in Dare for much longer than he was ever in D:Ream.

[Lag]

This is hilarious.

If I wanted shitty physics, pretending to be entertainment, I'd watch a program with that twat keyboard player out of d.ream.

Instead this was entertaining. Utter bollocks, but enjoyable. Isn't that what dr who is supposed to be about?

But some people didn't think it was enjoyable because it was utter bollocks.

[Dr Derek Doctors]

Yeah, the complete contempt for even basic science put me off, too. I'm usually happy to give Dr Who a free ride, but as well as the shonkiest physics ever (high tide *everywhere* at once?!) this was also bullshit earth-history retconning par excellence. Although the thing that rankled most was that it felt like a bait 'n' switch from what the episode was sold as (Aliens but with spiders) and what it was (Crap).

[Davros sock drawer]

There's a Doctor Who quiz on the Guardian website today.

http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/quiz/2014/oct/03/quiz-dr-seuss-or-dr-who

I got 10 out of 12.

Which one did Doctor Who say?

Neither. He's called 'The Doctor'!

But I got 11 regardless.

[Mr Cochese]

Doctor who?

[PopeSmokesDope]

I liked it and my son (aged 8) loved it.

This is what Doctor Who is about....

[Mr Cochese]

[PK]

How did they know what the other side of the Earth's decision was?

[Jamin]

Well the story was a godawful mess, but the effects were excellent. I can't help with feel that the "egg" idea/explanation was a horribly last minute idea that they just ran with. They could've had a moon episode and not make it feel so unbelievable (for Doctor Who!).

[dismembo]

How did they know what the other side of the Earth's decision was?

They didn't know. I thought the whole point of that bit was to get any kind of help making a decision that affects everyone on the planet. A way to not take the full responsibility of the weight of that decision.

[Mr Cochese]

No-one would have been listening to their transmission anyway, as they'd have been watching The X-Factor was on the other channel.

[Not Thread Owner]

He was in Dare

In where?

[zxcvbnm]

[Made of Ghosts]

Re: scientific inaccuracies. Can we not? Please? It's a kids' show about a man and his magic space cupboard. Internal logic is the only important thing really. (Having said that, I'm not sure why the Dettol wouldn't work in a vacuum.)

The episode was kinda messy and very poorly executed in places but I'm glad the show can still chuck moral grenades like that, and still have genuine emotional moments like Clara's exit.

[NEG]

But but, what hatched?

[Nick R]

I did not like this episode much.

I'd rank this series' episodes so far:

1. The Caretaker

2. Listen

3. Time Heist

4. Deep Breath

5. Robot of Sherwood

6. Into the Dalek

7. Kill the Moon

There were good bits in it: chief among them Clara's confrontation with the Doctor at the end of the episode.

But I'm afraid that the main reason I didn't like it much boils down to this:

"I can totally accept that this man in the sentient time-travelling telephone box can die and be reborn as someone almost completely different multiple times while waving his magic wand at the race of tentacle monsters in tiny tanks armed with egg-whisks and sink plungers while a bunch of living statues wait for their moment to eat you by sending you back through time where you might meet a potato-head alien clone and his lesbian lizard lady detective boss but the Moon being a giant egg???? Preposterous!"

In a Doctor Who episode, I can accept that the Moon's a giant egg, and even (at a push) that its growth could have increased its gravity since the Apollo landings... but that upon hatching it instantly lays another Eggmoon* exactly the same size?

* I am the Eggmoon. Goo goo g'joob.

I can accept that the decline of humanity's space programme/nuclear disarmament would limit Earth's response to any threat from space... but that the astronauts that they send up would be THAT utterly useless? These guys achieved the remarkable feat of making Prometheus's mission specialists look sensible!

I mean: I know that Doctor Who is not Hard SF, nor should it be. And, for example, something I love as much as the idea that the Weeping Angels' behaviour can be explained by saying that they're "quantum locked" isn't that much more nonsensical than the stuff in this episode. But at least when you give us a few explanatory words of buzzword-technobabble like that, it's enough to pre-emptively prevent me nit-picking it and make me more likely to accept it: "OK, the writer is aware of the problems with this, but they're acknowledging them and doing something to make it a bit plausible. Now we can have fun with it!" Without any of that, it's possible I'll think: "This is just stupid! I REFUSE TO HAVE FUN WITH THIS!"

But I could've forgiven all the scientific nit-picks in the world that if the threat from the parasite spider scenes was at all tense or exciting, or if there were any really funny, memorable jokes in the episode. Unfortunately there weren't.

I've enjoyed reading the comments about it over at Phil Sandifer's blog - even though I'm completely perplexed at the idea that people could consider it the best episode of this series, let alone ever! Lots of people seem to have enjoyed it primarily because of the big Moral Debate it involves, and its interpretation as an abortion metaphor.

Here are a few of the critical comments from that blog's commenters that explain better than I can why this episode's scientific implausibility is only bothersome because it contains more important storytelling problems:

I can usually let bad science slip through but when the opening mystery is "Why/ how is the moon gaining mass?" it's important to note that anyone with a vague understanding of conservation of mass would realise that this question never actually got answered.

On reflection, I can't agree that this is the best Who episode ever, or even close.

My problem is that it is made up of lots of bits tat work perfectly well in themselves, but don't ever cohere.

This isn't the classic case of Doctor Who mashing a couple of genres together to see what happens. It's more like someone took a few different drafts of the same script, each of which dealt with the story in a slightly different way, and random,y cut them all together to create one continuous story.

For example:

I was delighted by the starting premise that the Moon has somehow gained enough mass to make its surface gravity similar to the Earth's. What a splendid way to get away with doing a Moon story without lots of special effects and stunt work to get the 1/6 gravity effect!

I was also delighted by the audacity of the idea the Moon is really an alien egg. What a spectacular and surprising way to subvert a familiar part of the world! I mean, "The millennium Wheel is really an Auton transmitter" has nothing on that!

But they don't go together. The first idea sets up the mystery - where did all that extra mass come from? - and this mystery is thoroughly emphasised in the first act, with the Doctor making a big physical show of it and even calculating the quantitative scale of the mystery. So the expectation is that this mystery will somehow be answered in the course of the story. But it isn't. Instead, we take a sharp turn into the Moon being an egg, and forget all about the question we spent so much time establishing at the start.

Similarly, there is the problem of the two ticking clocks. OK, on the one hand the space-spiders are pretty extraneous, while on the other hand there's nothing wrong with a gratuitous scary monster in Doctor Who. But when we get into the final act, we have the horde of space spiders racing towards our heroes, and the lunar surface breaking up. Both of these threaten to kill our heroes before they can complete their mission. But you only need one ticking clock, not two, and indeed the scary space spiders just seem to get forgotten about. Both of these elements are fine on their own, but they don't fit together very well.

And lastly there's the big debate at the end. I thought Clara's idea of consulting humanity by using the lights visible from the Moon was delightful and unexpected. (Yes, it's hardly perfect - she can only poll about a quarter of the globe, conveniently the quarter that contains the most Doctor Who viewers, and as BerserkerRL says it's likely governments would hijack the process, but the best she could really do in a few minutes.) But then that whole issue of democratic decision-making gets forgotten about. That's not to say Clara should have decided differently in the end, but the story made a big song and dance about this and then immediately forgot about it as if everyone concerned had been mindwiped. Much like the Tom Bombadil episode in the Lord of the Rings, you can cut it out completely and the rest of the story is unaffected.

So there were plenty of good bits in this episode, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

*[And then in a later comment in the thread:]*

It's not so much the science as such, it's that Act 1 sets up a different Act 3 than the one broadcast, and Act 3 follows on from a different Act 1 than the one broadcast.

Nope. Sorry. I've seen review after ecstatic review. And I'm just not agreeing with any of them.

There are ELEMENTS of this that are as staggering and as wonderful as almost every reviewer is telling me. There are certain scenes that are superb. But a great story is more than a few great scenes strung together. A great story is pacing and thematic coherence and emotional investment.

In the last few years, a recurring problem with some Who episodes is that the show tries to shove too much into a 45-minute timeframe, with the result that things don't have time to build. This was one of those episodes, and in this case it was a crying shame because the POTENTIAL here was amazing. I think I could really find myself engrossed by a future earth crisis where we have to over our insular disinterest in space. An abandoned base under attack by scary creatures? Classic Who right there. A huge moral dilemma about killing would make for juicy drama. And a companion finally exploding at a particularly difficult incarnation of The Doctor was electrifying.

But that's 4 powerful ideas all trying to jam themselves into the space of a single-episode story. It's too many. It was inevitable that some of them were going to end up feeling short-changed. I found myself barely caring about the state of the Earth because I never saw it. All I saw was the planet spontaneously engaging in Earth Hour and saving some electricity. And the creatures, instead of being an escalating threat, had to get their killing of non-essential characters out of the way as quickly as possible to leave us time for the individual drama.

But my favourite comments from there are these two:

Ridiculous nitpick - Hermione Norris is 47 years old. Meaning her character was born in 2002 and is 12 this year. For the most part, the grandmothers of today's 12 year olds don't post on Tumblr, do they?

During the Doctor's big "2049 is the year humans start leaving Earth to branch out into the stars" speech at the end, I kept hoping it would turn out that this was because after 2049 people needed to leave Earth since now the tides were all wonky and bits of what used to be the moon kept hitting the planet. Partially because this would add some bite to the decision to let the moon egg hatch, rather than the rather consequence-free ending where the space dragon thingy just wanders off and happily leaves a new moon behind. But mainly because "humans colonize space after moon explodes" is the backstory to Cowboy Bebop.

[Ravern]

This is surely just another reflection that people watch Doctor Who for fundamentally different reasons. For me, the two brilliant monologues (The Doctor removing the stabilisers, Clara leaving) and the genuinely introspective look at the relationship between him and humans made it well worth it. The last five minutes hit me almost out of nowhere and yet still made sense. In another episode, it might have carried on as usual, but it showed why that is completely bizarre.

I also really liked the multiple bait-and-switch with the in media res opening - firstly that it leads you into thinking that the schoolgirl is the innocent, and then that The Doctor's absence is due to him jumping down that giant pit rather than just deciding to leave.

[Ravern]

The internal logic side of thing doesn't particularly bother me. I think it's like The Twilight Zone in that respect - the internal logic is unimportant. Instead, it's the touches, the character moments, the reflective themes that are significant.

[kensei]

I generally agree. But then they made the moon a fucking egg.

[Death's Head]

I've enjoyed reading the comments about it over at Phil Sandifer's blog - even though I'm completely perplexed at the idea that people could consider it the best episode of this series, let alone ever! Lots of people seem to have enjoyed it primarily because of the big Moral Debate it involves, and its interpretation as an abortion metaphor.

I'm glad someone else reads Phil Sandifer - he's great, isn't he? Jack Graham is pretty frigging good as well.

[Comrade]

I liked that there was that whole theme about how sad it was that the space programme had declined and no one cared about or had any way to get into space any more.

Except that a bunch of Mexicans were hanging about on the Moon prospecting for minerals. How did they get there then?

[SeanR]

Has it really been 7 episodes already?

[NEG]

I get the feeling a full blown season is doing well for them, may we never see half-seasons again.

[NecroMorrius]

What's big and small at the same time? A big egg

[Harsin]

Except that a bunch of Mexicans were hanging about on the Moon prospecting for minerals. How did they get there then?

Just in case you missed the dialogue stating they were Mexicans, the BBC helpfully put some ponchos and a cactus in their space base.