Doctor Who s8e7 - Kill The Moon

Morrus · Oct 1, 2014

Kill The Moon. Looks like it starts getting more serious an less rompy from here on in. From random rumours I've heard there's a "game changer" but I take that with a pinch of salt.

[video=youtube;leGP3JXSSxQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=leGP3JXSSxQ[/video]

[video=youtube;WWZM_LccgMg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWZM_LccgMg[/video]

Morrus · Oct 5, 2014

So I loved Capaldi in this. I loved the character stuff. I liked the spiders.

I struggled very much with the physics. I'm not a physicist, but it really sounded like nonsense to me.

MarkB · Oct 5, 2014

Pretty good, I thought. A few thoughts:

The main premise has to be taken with a large grain of salt.
The Doctor's ability to directly perceive (as opposed to merely research) future history is something new, I think.
The concept of time being fixed aside from a few "fuzzy, grey" bits is the reverse of how it's been portrayed previously in New Who.
I was expecting the Doctor to get mad (or at least miffed) at humanity for mostly voting to kill the creature, instead he takes Clara and Courtney's actions as being more representative, and it's Clara who ends up getting angry at him.
It looks like next week's episode will feature the Doctor finally getting round to sorting out that distress call he received back on Amy's wedding day. But will this be a Claraless episode?

Morrus · Oct 5, 2014

I think they're just avoiding repeating that "fixed point in time" line. That's all that grey stuff is.

Capaldi has been a dick the whole series so far. At this point, that's clearly deliberate: they want us uncomfortable with him. He's not friendly or charming. He's not a nice guy. We're not supposed to like him.

I might postulate that this is a misstep. But this episode confirmed my suspicions: it's deliberate and it's a plot element. The show acknowledges it and uses it. It's interesting.

The moon being an egg and we never noticed? Hmmmm.

Umbran · Oct 5, 2014

Morrus said:
So I loved Capaldi in this. I loved the character stuff. I liked the spiders.

I struggled very much with the physics. I'm not a physicist, but it really sounded like nonsense to me.

Oh, by the Powes that Be, that science was bad. Baaaaaad. And not in the "bad is good" way. As Wolfgang Pauli might have said, it was "not even wrong." Horrible. It made me trip over it every five minutes. Gah!

MarkB said:
[*] The Doctor's ability to directly perceive (as opposed to merely research) future history is something new, I think.

Well, he's been *in* the future. He should *remember* how it was.

[*] The concept of time being fixed aside from a few "fuzzy, grey" bits is the reverse of how it's been portrayed previously in New Who.

I agree with Morrus - this is just a variant of the "fixed points in time" concept. Once he's in one of those moments, the future becomes indeterminate, and his memory therefore does not hold the answer to what happens.

MarkB · Oct 5, 2014

Umbran said:
I agree with Morrus - this is just a variant of the "fixed points in time" concept. Once he's in one of those moments, the future becomes indeterminate, and his memory therefore does not hold the answer to what happens.

To some extent I can see that, but it falls some way short of the way it was described in early 9th-Doctor episodes, such as The Unquiet Dead, when the Doctor makes it clear to Rose that, just because they've both seen a 21st century in which the world is much as we know it, that doesn't mean it can't be invaded by genocidal phantasmal aliens in the 19th century.

Morrus · Oct 5, 2014

MarkB said:
To some extent I can see that, but it falls some way short of the way it was described in early 9th-Doctor episodes, such as The Unquiet Dead, when the Doctor makes it clear to Rose that, just because they've both seen a 21st century in which the world is much as we know it, that doesn't mean it can't be invaded by genocidal phantasmal aliens in the 19th century.

I took it as that being exactly what he was saying.

HobbitFan · Oct 5, 2014

Horrible episode. Just horrible.

Richards · Oct 5, 2014

Last week, I said "The Caretaker" was my least-favorite Capaldi episode to date, because of that crappy spider-legged goofy-robot. This week, I am forced to revise my opinion, because "Kill the Moon" had a plot so horrifically bad I'm forced to put it in the same category as the Star Trek Voyager episode with the alien race who start out as adults and grow younger as they age. Stupid, crappy, nonsensical concept!

So...the Moon is an egg. It takes hundreds on millions of years to hatch. The Doctor speculates that it may be a "one-of-a-kind" lifeform. (So who laid the egg?) And then it hatches, is born not only already pregnant (following the tribble life-cycle, I see), but so pregnant it's already able to lay its own egg...which is almost as big as the creature's original egg.

*Head explodes from nonsense overload*

I think I'm going to just quietly wait for the crack in the universe from the Matt Smith days to hit this whole episode and make it such that it never happened. Hey, if it can get rid of Cyber-Kings rampaging through Victorian London and Dalek and Cybermen invasions across the entire Earth, maybe it can remove this Moon-Egg idiocy as well.

All griping aside, I'm looking forward to next week's mummy episode. And I'm not convinced we've seen the last of Clara just yet, especially if there's someone behind the scenes making sure she and the Doctor stay together.

Johnathan

MarkB · Oct 5, 2014

Richards said:
So...the Moon is an egg. It takes hundreds on millions of years to hatch. The Doctor speculates that it may be a "one-of-a-kind" lifeform. (So who laid the egg?) And then it hatches, is born not only already pregnant (following the tribble life-cycle, I see), but so pregnant it's already able to lay its own egg...which is almost as big as the creature's original egg.

Not to mention that it just spontaneously gains mass, without having apparently ingested it from any outside source. Why is it such a difficult concept to understand that mass has to actually come from somewhere - it doesn't just spontaneously appear.