Kill the Moon

[daibhidc]

Well. That was certainly a thing that happened.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I'm the last person to complain that a Doctor Who story is ridiculous. On the other hand, that was ridiculous.

And it doesn't seem to know it's ridiculous, which is the problem. It wants to be the Big Serious Story About Issues, and is completely unaware its central premise is nonsense on stilts.

(Compare with, for example, "Robot of Sherwood", which very much owns the fact it's completely ridiculous. And IMO "Alien ship lands in Nottingham and the Sheriff uses it against Robin Hood" is less ridiculous than "The moon is a giant egg".)

I enjoyed bits of it: the spider-things were neat (until we got their origin, obviously a giant egg would be covered in giant microbes, that's just logic, right?); Courtney is growing on me (and I loved the Tumblr gag); and the final scene was pretty powerful (although, again, it would have had more weight if Clara wasn't reacting to a story that was complete bobbins). But overall, meh.

ETA: Oh, one other thing I liked: the idea that important events are actually unfixed points in time. Which makes more sense for a series about a proactive time traveller.

Next week: An episode that does know it's ridiculous. I'll probably enjoy that.

Comments

[rhiannon-s.livejournal.com]

It was like a crossover between Stephen Baxter's Moonseed (which used hard, hard-science to get a broadly similar plot) and all those wonderfully campy golden age of Sci-Fi novels, novellas, short stories and comic strips, which seemed to love the idea of planets being eggs. I think even one of the Star Trek novels did it. having said that, yeah, the spiders could have had a better origin and it should have been made more explicit that it wasn't the people of Earth voting, but the governments pulling the power grids offline. Its the sort of obvious thing when you know that is what has happened, but the script didn't make it clear.

I liked it overall, although I would say that as I'm ridiculously uncritical of Doctor Who, you have to get as bad as Fear Her, Love&Monsters, and Tinkerbell Jesus Doctor for me to give it a miss. I'd put it down as watchable if it is on, but not an episode you'd purposefully seek out.

[vatine]

I think this was the first episode of Doctor Who where I switched channels about ten minutes in, because something else seemed more interesting.

[julesjones]

Yes, my disbelief suspenders are in the repair shop after that episode, not least because the episode didn't know it was ridiculous. (Eggs magically acquire mass when about to hatch...)

At more than one point during the episode I was thinking, "This needs a Chris Boucher as script editor" -- because I've heard some of his stories about having to take a red pen to nonsense on stilts.

[daibhid-c.livejournal.com]

I'm also ridiculously uncritical of Doctor Who, and liked Love & Monsters, and can at least tolerate Tinkerbell Jesus Doctor, because they knew how daft they were. (Fear Her was another one that didn't.)

[cat63.livejournal.com]

And it doesn't seem to know it's ridiculous, which is the problem. It wants to be the Big Serious Story About Issues, and is completely unaware its central premise is nonsense on stilts.

Yes! That's it exactly! I was trying to work out in my head why the absolute lack of any shred of scientific believability bothers me more in this story than in so many others that are completely lacking in logic and sense and I think you've nailed it there. It's the po-facedness of it.

And the recycling - I mean Who has been going on so long that you have to forgive it for doing some things repeatedly, but this story seemed to be at least 60% composed of scraps of recent stories sewn together in a patchwork quilt. Even the astronaut woman seemed like a pale clone of the one from Waters of Mars....

I'm getting quite cross on behalf of Peter Capaldi, because he could be so bloody brilliant but they're giving him this sort of unmitigated crap to work with. That he's as good as he is is tribute to him and no credit to the script, methinks.