| Chapter The 171st, in which the Moon turns out to be a dragon egg. That's not a joke, by the way, that's really the plot. The Moon. Turns. Out. To. Be. A. Dragon. Egg. |
Plot:
The Doctor for some unfathomable reason decides to take Clara and Courtney, one of Clara's Coal Hill School pupils, on a trip in the TARDIS to make up for something he'd said previously that hurt Courtney's feelings. Their dangerous destination is the moon in the year 2049. They immediately come across three ageing astronauts, who've come to the moon with lots of nuclear bombs to investigate the reason why gravity and tides are going berserk and causing death and devastation on the Earth, then use the bombs to blow up that reason, whatever it is. Giant spider-like creatures attack, and two of the three astronauts are killed. The Doctor jumps into a huge crack in the moon's surface, and discovers that a creature is incubating in the centre; the moon turns out to be a space dragon's egg, and the spider-like creatures are space germs that live on the space dragon. Yes, really.
If the creature hatches, the pieces of shell flying out and / or the sudden absence of moon could cause an extinction event on Earth (unless by a lucky coincidence neither of them do, but that would be unbelievable, wouldn't it?!). So, a choice must be made: one innocent creature's life versus all the people of Earth. The Doctor insists that the humans make this choice themselves, and goes off in the TARDIS leaving them, which makes Clara very unhappy. She broadcasts to the Earth to get them to signal their choice, and they choose to blow up the creature. Clara disregards this, though, and aborts the imminent explosion. The Doctor turns up in the TARDIS, somewhat like a god in a machine, funny that, and whisks them off to the Earth to watch as the moon egg hatches. By a lucky coincidence, neither the pieces of shell flying out, nor the sudden absence of moon, causes any extinction event on Earth. The newly hatched creature lays another egg in exactly the same place as the old one, so Earth still has a moon. Yes, really.
Context:
Watched on a Sunday afternoon from the series 8 boxset blu-ray accompanied by all the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8); I still can't tempt the Better Half to join us. Based just on the cold open flash-forward of Clara explaining the central dilemma, all the children said almost as a chorus: "It's the trolley problem". This is because in the last year they have all watched and enjoyed (and for some of them re-watched over and over) all four series of The Good Place, which has given them a decent basic knowledge of moral philosophy. Thank you Michael Schur. As the story played out, they were all quite vocal; make of that what you will. During the early sequences, they had fun second-guessing the plot with comments such as "He's going die any second" and "Those pictures will be part of the plot"; that latter comment was from the 8-year old who was pleased with herself when said pictures (the photos on the desk in the abandoned Mexican mine area) were picked up by the Doctor a few minutes after she said it. There was a long discussion from the middle child about whether Courtney had the same phone as his elder brother, or just the same case. The eldest stayed the course, but in the second half was becoming increasingly agitated with the plot, and making comments starting "But...?" and "How...?" and "That doesn't make any sense" like every other viewer of Kill the Moon over the years.
First time round:
Watched after its BBC1 debut broadcast in October 2014, timeshifted to later but still on the same evening. This was the seventh episode of Peter Capaldi's first season as the Doctor. It's unusual, given the varied nature of the series, to enjoy six episodes on the trot with no reservations, but that was my feeling at the time. I've since reviewed quite a few of those six for the blog, and nit-picked a bit, but at the time I thought the series was in rude health, and that's not too far from the truth. Then there came Kill the Moon, though. Oh dear.
Reaction:
So, I mentioned immediately above that Doctor Who is a series that relies on variety of subject matter, tone and genre. It doesn't even limit itself always to sticking to one theme or approach in a single story either. Maybe it should, but it's just not made that way. Stories can start off comedic and take a turn to tragedy, or stories can comprise any number of sub-stories leapfrogging around genres and locales within one overall title. How well this works depends on many factors, and it is not without some risk. A story that doesn't blend all its different parts together well enough will look less like a single seamless whole and more like the story equivalent of a cut and shut motor - two (or more) sections artlessly welded together. This is a big part of the problem will Kill The Moon. The first section is fairly hard sci-fi, at least as close as Doctor Who gets (see Deeper Thoughts section below). We have a realistic depiction of organised space travel, with a team brought out of retirement to do an exploratory mission to the moon to solve a crisis. The fluctuations in gravity seem plausible. The sets for the spacecraft and base on the moon are good, and the filming and treatment of the footage in Lanzarote captures the moon's surface in the most realistic fashion imaginable. We move into creature feature horror territory very quickly, but this is the slightest of genre bumps, barely perceptible.
Why might this be? Well, these two genres have been fused together so often in films and TV that it's a standard. Real-life space exploration involves moving into dangerous unknown environments, so we expect it to look and feel like a horror movie to a certain extent. There are also handy analogues for the monsters, so they do not seem too outre. They are some kind of spider that can exist in a vacuum, but still can spin webs. That's fine, and easily mentally digestible, and the action's moving fast anyway, so as a viewer I'm not dwelling on this. Rapidly, though, the story changes again. They aren't spiders, they're macro germs on, as we later find out, a larger creature. This is more of a jolt to the viewer. If they're germs why make them look and act like spiders in the first place? Do germs spin webs? Courtney sprays one with some household disinfectant she's contrived to carry, and this kills it. After all, as she says, it's marketed to kill "ninety-nine percent of all known germs". But this isn't a known germ, it's a very unknown giant weird spider space germ. The effectiveness of spraying a bit of Flash with Bleach bathroom spray on it is a bit of a stretch. A minute later, sunlight kills the germs too; Clara explains this using the old adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant. But that's just a phrase, and not about cleaning your kitchen, but instead about openness and transparency. Did the giant weird spider space germs know of the phrase somehow? The protagonists just got lucky twice in a row with actions only tenuously connected to the established facts of the plot so far. This dodgy logic breaks the rules of horror, let alone hard sci-fi. Bad welding.
The plot continues its metamorphosis with another violent lurch. There's a giant creature in the centre of the moon, and it, and the germs living on it, have been growing for centuries, because the moon is an egg. We're now into the territory of fairy tale or fable, and it's horribly incompatible with what has come before. A creature embedded in the centre of the moon might have just about worked, but the whole moon is an egg and always has been?! It's a hard imaginative leap to make. The moon has been surveyed and studied, in both the real world and the ongoing fiction of Doctor Who, and there's never ever been even the slightest iota of evidence that it's been an egg all this time. Maybe if a fairy tale atmosphere had been evoked from the outset, instead of pretty much the exact opposite, it might be easier to accept. Maybe not, though, as it is by any measure a very silly idea. The standard line at this point from a certain mindset would be something like "You can believe an old dude flies around in a box, why can't you believe the moon's an egg?" So, why can't I? The dude, or lady, flying around in the box idea is well bedded in, it's part of the furniture. There's also a very good rule of thumb in fantastical writing that - unless you're going full-on surrealist no-rules, then the fewer mental leaps you make your audience go through, the easier it is to get their buy in. I'm already believing that a man in a box can travel through time, and that giant germs would act like spiders, and that there's a giant creature living inside the moon. Make me believe that the moon is an egg on top of all of that, and my head might explode.
This isn't the final section to be welded on to this jalopy, though. The next part of the narrative involves a moral quandary being played out on a global scale. A minute before, alien lifeforms were fair game to kill if it ensured the characters' survival; now, everything slows down and the characters talk about whether they have the right. They didn't think twice when they were wielding the disinfectant, the hypocrites. The Doctor leaves the rest of the cast alone to make the trolley problem decision. This action has no consequence to the plot, as he quickly comes back, and stops them having to face the immediate impact of their action. There's a brief detour when those on the moon try to hold the biggest ever referendum (this story was shown in 2014, before anyone realised quite what a bad idea referenda are). The people of Earth - well, only the one half of the globe facing the moon at that point, as my eldest child did not hesitate to point out - must turn their lights off if they want the creature to be killed, leave them on if not. Imagine if you needed to get some kip at this point: I was on Team Moon Dragon, honest, I just needed to turn in for an early shift tomorrow. Anyway, this has no consequences either, as Clara disregards the vote and saves the creature. The creature hatches and this has no consequences too (I'm seeing a pattern here). The fragments of shell evaporate seemingly, there's a few seconds without a moon at all which has no impact on Earth somehow, and then the dragon lays a new moon of exactly the same size in exactly the same place, like newborns tend not to do. What was the moral of the fable that Kill the Moon has turned into? Be nice and everything will work out with no cost or pain? Pardon my French, but that's a bit of a shit moral.
There's now a final small section welded on to the end, of inter-personal conflict between the two regular cast members. There is finally a consequence to a character's actions, sort of, when Clara refuses to have anything more to do with the Doctor. She's back with him the following week, though, and then after that they keep travelling together. So, ultimately nothing had any consequence, it was just the story of two people having a row before they later made up. There's a couple of lines thrown in about Courtney becoming a more successful person because of this experience, but it's thrown away as a joke, and the character didn't have much to do with the rest of the story - she's in no way the protagonist. There's also a line in there about this being a significant moment for human space exploration, but it's again easy to miss, and it's hard to believe that the human race - just from having a lucky escape and seeing a dragon in the distance - is going to be in any way transformed. They will venture into the stars still wanting to kill anything different to them, which doesn't seem like something to celebrate. If the script had stuck to the early NASA horror story feel throughout, it would have been achievable but maybe a bit dull; if it had attempted to be a non-realistic fable from the off, it would have been braver but very hard to pull off. Trying to lump both together, and more, produces a script that no amount of efficient production (and a lot of the performances and effects work is of a very good standard) could save.
Connectivity:
Two 21st century one-part stories in a row whose titles begin with the letter 'K'. Both are in the first series of a new Doctor and both are the first produced Doctor Who stories of writers new to the series called Peter. In both Kill the Moon and Kerblam! the TARDIS team investigate a working area of a private company (the Mexican mining outfit's abandoned base in Kill The Moon).
Deeper Thoughts:
Rolling along with the tumbling tumblr feeds. Science fiction isn't a story genre, nor even a single genre at all. Not only is there no set structure or structures for how a story can play out, there isn't any checklist of elements for inclusion that one could reliably apply to existing works either. Back to the Future is very different to Alien or to Blade Runner or to Star Wars or to 2001: A Space Odyssey. There isn't anything but a very high-level description that could unite them all, and the scope for stories as yet unwritten is so vast as to be almost infinite. Doctor Who is a rare instance of an incredibly successful and long-running series that was conceived in a way all the writing textbooks would say is wrong: it wasn't a red hot burst of creativity for a single person or creative team with a vision, it was designed by committee. No artistic genius woke up one day with the idea of an alien travelling around space and time in a phone box; instead, it grew out of a brief from a commissioning executive. It was a fairly loose brief too, essentially science fiction for kids to go on after Grandstand. Because of the flexibility of the supra-genre, there was a lot of scope for what the series could be, and it's stayed that way, more or less, over the years. Doctor Who can be any type of science fiction: SF horror, hard sci-fi, space opera, science fantasy. It can run the vast gamut of genres from the start of Kill the Moon all the way through to the end of Kill The Moon.
It's fair to say, though, that Doctor Who more often than not shines at the softer, fantasy end of the spectrum. It could have turned out differently; one of the earliest pitches to meet that open brief was for "The Troubleshooters", which featured a three person scientific team based on Earth, an older professor and two heroic leads, one male one female, who would investigate and fix the problems nobody else was equipt to fix. No time travel, no Bug Eyed Monsters. This was softened in development, gradually turning the three into the Doctor, Ian and Barbara, and adding Susan as a kid that was needed "to get into trouble, make mistakes" as Sydney Newman, the commissioning exec in question, put it in his handwritten notes on that pitch document. The time travel was then added, but Sydney still wanted to exclude the Bug Eyed Monsters. That rule was broken about five weeks in, and the rest is history (and science). I've always thought The Troubleshooters sounded awful, and wouldn't have endured more than a year or two, but taste is a funny old thing. I realise now that one of my favourite shows, Star Cops, is pretty hard sci-fi, and not too dissimilar to that original pitch. It is after all a series about investigators that go where nobody else can go, and has a strict rule of no alien monsters, and certainly no time travel.
Star Cops, though, has an unfortunate plot hole at its centre. This was not caused by the writers, mind you. The lead character Nathan Spring was written to be a whizz kid, in his early thirties at the most, promoted above anyone else in the force because of his precocious brilliance. The producers, though, decided to cast David Calder, who was over 40 at the time of filming. They were right to do so, too, as Calder is simply brilliant in the role. But it causes some anomalies, as there was not time to catch and rewrite all the details of the scripts. Nathan harbours a dark secret, that his tech salesman father was a crook that he himself ended up investigating, fumbling the case because of inexperience but ultimately having to arrest his old man. Based on evidence given on screen, this was at the beginning of Spring's career, but based on dialogue elsewhere, the company his Dad worked for, Recondite, which was destroyed by these shocking events, only folded two years before the events of the series. The change of age of the actor cast has left a ten or so year gap unaccounted. The explanation that Watts offers in his book is that the damage having been done, it took the company ten years of decline before it finally closed. This is a good stab, but is unfortunately undermined by Nathan's possession of a Recondite prototype, Box, a cross between a copy of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Siri, given to him by his father. Box is treated as a technological marvel by everyone in the series, so it can't logically be ten year old technology. Therefore, it must have been obtained more recently by Nathan's father, somehow given to him by a contact from the company, despite that company being in decline and despite Nathan's father having been sacked for industrial espionage many years before. He then gives it as a gift to his son despite that son being the person who busted hum for industrial espionage in the first place.
In another coincidental echo, Kill The Moon's dates don't add up either. It's perhaps the one unifying factor of the otherwise sprawling and difficult to categorise science fiction canon, that stories will make mistakes about the future, and gloss over the exact progression of events in future history. The Coal Hill characters are from the year 2014, visiting the moon in 2049, 35 years after their time. Ten years before that in 2039, 25 years on from Clara and Courtney's present, the four-person Mexican mining survey sends back something of an SOS. It takes ten years for the rescue team to go to the moon, as there is no longer any space programme, only very few aged astronauts remaining, and the only shuttle in existence had to be rebuilt as it was being used as a museum attraction. This throws up the anomaly of how the Mexicans got to the moon. They can't have been there for decades just for a mining survey that didn't find anything to mine, so presumably they travelled up after the major decline in Space travel. We're told it was privately financed, and presumably that was a one-off as there aren't any private outfits available for the rescue mission. So when did NASA become a museum piece?
Based on the actor Hermione Norris's age, Lundvik is 47-ish in 2049, so around 12 years old back in Clara's time. Based on the average age of astronauts, her training must have happened around 2030 to 2035. So, the complete collapse of a space programme, and dying out of all astronauts to the point where the bumbling three-person team we see on the moon is the only remaining option, has happened in 5 - 10 years. This seems too compressed a period to me. Maybe it's the same underlying cause as Star Cops, a casting decision, this time casting Lundvik too young. But there's also a line about Lundvik's granny using tumblr, which seems a generation or two out: based on the approximate age of the character, even if a little older than the person cast, it is most likely that she herself would have been using Tumblr than anyone older. Sure, Lundvik's granny in 2014 could have been an early-adopting silver surfer, but why conjure up a less likely character just for a throwaway line. My feeling is that instead the action in an earlier draft was set in a later year then 2049, but it was hastily pulled forward, perhaps to up the stakes by making it more likely that an older Clara and Courtney are alive on the future Earth that's threatened with destruction. Or maybe, given the mess that the script is overall, it's just a mistake. To summarise, then: watch Star Cops instead of this.
In Summary:
Over egged.
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