Kill the Moon: Courtney, a Shuttle Full of Bombs and a Doomed Moon Base

Clara and student Courtney Woods send the world a video message from the Moon in 2049, giving everyone on Earth 45 minutes to choose between humankind and an innocent life. That’s a hell of a way to open an episode, and it throws you straight into a question that the rest of the hour has to answer, before you’ve had a chance to work out how they got there.

Back at Coal Hill School in the present day, Courtney is acting out following the Doctor’s rejection of her in The Caretaker, and he agrees to make her the first woman on the Moon to prove she’s “special”. It’s a very Doctor way of apologising, which is to say he doesn’t quite apologise at all and just goes and does something enormous instead. The TARDIS lands on a Moon shuttle full of nuclear bombs in 2049, and that’s where it all starts to go wrong.

Courtney, a Shuttle Full of Bombs and a Very Big Egg

The Doctor, Clara and Courtney meet Captain Lundvik and two “third-rate astronauts”, sent on a mission to destroy the Moon as high tides engulf the Earth. Nobody up there is a hero, they’re just the crew that was available and expendable, and the episode makes a decent amount of that as the shuttle’s mission slowly turns into something nobody signed up for. The mood on board is tense and tired and a bit grubby, which suits a story where the whole planet is waiting on a handful of people who didn’t want the job.

On a Mexican Moon base they discover the Moon’s mass has increased drastically and that the colonists have been entombed in spiderwebs. The other astronauts are killed by spider-like aliens, and Courtney narrowly avoids death by spraying one with disinfectant, which is exactly the sort of silly, small-scale answer that makes this episode fun to watch even when the premise is falling apart around it. The Doctor works out that they’re in fact germs, and that the Moon is a 100-million-year-old egg ready to hatch.

Lundvik is a good example of the incidental characters I mean. She’s the captain of a mission that nobody on Earth really wants her to complete, she’s been told to blow up the Moon, and you can see her carrying that around the whole time. Courtney, meanwhile, is a teenager who asked for something special and is now standing on the Moon watching people die, and the episode lets her be frightened and funny in the same scene without making a fuss about it.

Then he does the thing that lights the fuse for the rest of the story, which is that he leaves Clara, Courtney and Lundvik to decide its fate. Clara asks the Earth to vote with lights, and then she stops Lundvik activating the bomb. The egg hatches, another drops in its place, and the Earth is stabilised. Angered by all of it, Clara leaves the Doctor, and that’s where the hour ends, which isn’t a place I expected a monster-of-the-week story to take us.

A Fairytale Concept With a Solid Script

Despite having a concept that sounds like a hastily improvised fairytale, the episode is far more solidly and straightforwardly written than many in this season. It’s paced well, with the right balance of suspense and explanation, and the portrayals of the characters are convincing, no matter how incidental they seem. Nobody’s there just to deliver the plot, even the two doomed astronauts, and I think that’s why the first half holds your attention as well as it does.

It’s just a shame that there wasn’t a more plausible science-fiction idea to hang the strong script on, instead of the “makeitupasyougoalongeum” that Terry Pratchett claims has taken over Doctor Who. The Moon is an egg, the spiders are germs, and the egg lays another egg the second it hatches. Den of Geek’s review from the week it aired is worth a look if you want a second opinion on how the episode holds together. It’s also disappointing that we have to end on yet another dialogue-heavy scene between the Doctor and Clara.

The pacing is what keeps the weaker ideas from sinking it. The episode moves from the shuttle to the base to the spiders to the vote without stopping to explain itself, so you’re always a step behind the next problem rather than ahead of it, and that’s a big part of why the script feels so much more solid than the concept. When it does stop, it’s for a character moment, usually between Clara and Courtney, and those scenes are written well enough that I didn’t mind the pause.

Tumblr, Time Travel and a Strong Sense of Déjà Vu

There’s an interesting spin on the idea of a story set in the near future, with Lundvik reminiscing about Tumblr and the advances of the Mexican space program. Writer Peter Harness also addresses Doctor Who‘s long-standing “elephant in the room” when it comes to time travel, reminding viewers (and hopefully other writers on the series) that the future is also someone else’s past. It’s a small idea but a good one, and it gives the 2049 setting a bit of texture that most near-future stories don’t bother with.

But there’s a strong sense of déjà vu here, and not just because of the orange spacesuits. The storyline is alarmingly similar to The Waters of Mars, another story about the Doctor, a base with a deadline and a future that might or might not be set in stone, and the Doctor’s monologues about time are as portentous as ever. If you’ve seen that one you’ll spot the shape of this one pretty early.

To be fair, being similar to The Waters of Mars isn’t the same as being a copy, and the Moon story has its own twist in the egg and the vote. But the questions are the same ones, whether the Doctor should be steering events, whether the future can be changed, and who gets a say. Here he walks away and lets Clara, Courtney and Lundvik decide, which is a different answer from the one he gave on Mars, and I did like seeing him step back for once.

Clara, Courtney and the Walkout

“Kill the Moon” deserves credit for developing the relationships of the characters without sacrificing plot, as was the case with “The Caretaker”. Clara’s contempt for the Doctor’s condescension and recklessness builds over the episode as events unravel, and Courtney was a great vehicle for bringing those feelings to the fore. Courtney is so intelligently written and played so credibly that it’s a real shame she gets written out at the end of the episode with a garbled bit of explanation. At times, Courtney feels like a more compelling companion for the Doctor than Clara, which should be cause for concern.

Harness does a great job suggesting the Doctor’s manipulative, elitist tendencies without them contaminating his function as the hero. In fact, he gets the balance so perfectly that Clara’s walkout seems a disproportionate reaction, and (especially in light of their quick reconciliation) there for the sake of melodrama. Once again, Danny is an observer with a couple of token appearances by phone, which seem only to underline his irrelevance as a recurring character. The separation of Clara and the Doctor in the final third anticipates the way that the two will rarely feature together in the rest of the season, and if you want to see where this episode sits in Whoniverse history, that’s a good place to start.

Clara’s side of the ending deserves a bit more room. She’s the one who spends the episode being told to make the decision, she makes it on behalf of everyone watching with the lights, and then she finds out the Doctor knew more than he let on. I can see why she’d be furious, even if I think the walkout is bigger than the situation needed, and it’s a good reason for the two of them to spend so much of the rest of the season apart.

There’s very little negative to say about the storytelling in “Kill the Moon”. The episode is coherent, well-structured and character is held in perfect balance with plot, and it’s the most successful the season has been so far at combining a self-contained storyline with the season arc. It is, however, one of those Doctor Who episodes you shouldn’t look at too closely in terms of content. There’s a lot of fantasy disguised as hard science, and there’s nothing new to add to past explorations of “undecided” events of the near future, but the Doctor’s character comes over strongly, and for the most part in relation to events instead of clunky dialogue about his morality. Courtney is an excellent addition to the cast, and her presence stops the adversarial dynamic between the Doctor and Clara getting out of hand, at least until the final scene. Overall, not bad for unadulterated scientific nonsense.

Was Clara right to walk out on the Doctor, or did she overreact after the vote? Tell me in the comments.