“We Have To Decide Together.” – Doctor Who Recap

Posted by Kim

Doctor Who Series 8, Episode 7

“Kill the Moon”

“Mid-21st Century human kind starts creeping off into the stars, spreads it’s way through the galaxies, the very edges of the universe, and it endures until the end of time. And it does all this because one day in the year 2049 when it had stopped thinking of going to the stars something occurred that made it look up, not down. It looked out there into the blackness and saw something beautiful, something wonderful, that for once it didn’t want to destroy. And in that one moment the whole course of history was changed.  Not bad for a girl from Coal Hill School and her Teacher.”  — The Doctor

I don’t know how to do this, dear readers.  I don’t know how to do this without jumping headfirst into the political firestorm or stepping into the massive pile of shit that is waiting for me.  So I am just going to say it. *Takes a Deep Breath* “Kill The Moon”, an episode that started out as a moody thriller complete with scary space spiders, is a not so thinly veiled commentary on abortion and a woman’s right to choose.

*RUNS AWAY*

As soon as the episode ended, I stared at my open draft of notes in horror.  Was this REALLY what I thought it was?  Or was I just being super sensitive in regards to Women’s Issues on Doctor Who after a long week debating whether or not actions in “The Caretaker” were sexist or misogynistic?  I saw that some responses on Twitter echoed my thoughts, so I watched the episode again.  Yup.  The Doctor definitely says “It’s your moon, womankind, it’s YOUR choice,” so how can it be viewed as anything BUT a statement on abortion and that life wins at all cost? And then I felt icky.  Did the writers not realize what they were doing here?  There were many things I respected about the episode and the story Peter Harness was trying to tell.  I respected that while his motives may have been patronizing (more on that later) that the Doctor removed himself from this discussion and let three women decide the fate of the moon dragon.  But at the same time I felt like the episode was smacking me over the head with the metaphor by doing so.  I don’t have any real answers for this, which is why this recap terrifies me.

 

A friend compared the situation Clara and the Doctor face to one of the all time great episodes of ER, “Love’s Labor Lost”.  In that episode, Mark Greene is forced to choose between saving the life of a mother or the child she is trying to bring into the world.  It’s a horrible predicament and despite his best intentions and all of his medical expertise, everything goes wrong and the mother dies as he tries to save them both.  As the moon creature is obviously on the verge of hatching, therefore making it a late-term baby where abortion would not at all be a legal option, the metaphor applies ( in this case the “mother” is the planet earth, population billions and the “baby” is a mysterious space creature). But when the phrases “I’m not killing a baby” or “It’s just a baby” or “You can’t blame a baby for kicking” are repeated over and over in one scene and there’s a big button with the word ABORT over it (even though the “Abort” button will actually SAVE the life of the creature, as it disengages the bomb), it’s hard NOT to see it as a commentary on pro-life vs. pro-choice.  It’s nigh impossible to miss these overtones.  I really know what to do with them, but I would be remiss as a recapper (not to mention lacking integrity as a writer) to not point out that these do exist in the episode.

Let me make something clear.  Anyone who has watched Doctor Who in the past would know that the Doctor has ALWAYS valued life, so the fact that he falls on the side of letting the moon creature (which could possibly be the only one of its kind) live so it can “feel the sun on its back” is very in character.  For the Doctor, death is ALWAYS the last and unpalatable option.  Just look at his utter GLEE when he tells the room that the Moon is hatching (“That is utterly beautiful”) and then how his face falls the moment Lundvik asks how they can kill it.  It’s heartbreaking.  It’s also a great parallel to the Series 5 episode, “The Beast Below”, except there The Doctor is the one pondering the killing.  The difference there is he believes it is the most humane choice for the creature, while Lundvik’s first instinct is to do what she can to save the Earth, screw the cost of a life.   Sacrificing one life is okay if it saves billions.

LIZ: The creature you are looking at is called a Star Whale. Once, there were millions of them. They lived in the depths of space and, according to legend, guided the early space travellers through the asteroid belts. This one, as far as we are aware, is the last of its kind. And what we have done to it breaks my heart. The Earth was burning. Our sun had turned on us and every other nation had fled to the skies. Our children screamed as the skies grew hotter. And then it came, like a miracle. The last of the Star Whales. We trapped it, we built our ship around it, and we rode on its back to safety. If you wish our voyage to continue, then you must press the Forget button. Be again the heart of this nation, untainted. If not, press the other button. Your reign will end, the Star Whale will be released, and our ship will disintegrate. I hope I keep the strength to make the right decision.

AMY: I voted for this. Why would I do that?

DOCTOR: Because you knew if we stayed here, I’d be faced with an impossible choice. Humanity or the alien. You took it upon yourself to save me from that. And that was wrong. You don’t ever decide what I need to know.

AMY: I don’t even remember doing it.

DOCTOR: You did it. That’s what counts.

AMY: I’m, I’m sorry.

DOCTOR: Oh, I don’t care. When I’m done here, you’re going home.

AMY: Why? Because I made a mistake? One mistake? I don’t even remember doing it. Doctor!

DOCTOR: Yeah, I know. You’re only human.

LIZ: What are you doing?

DOCTOR: The worst thing I’ll ever do. I’m going to pass a massive electrical charge through the Star Whale’s brain. Should knock out all its higher functions, leave it a vegetable. The ship will still fly, but the whale won’t feel it.

AMY: That’ll be like killing it.

DOCTOR: Look, three options. One, I let the Star Whale continue in unendurable agony for hundreds more years. Two, I kill everyone on this ship. Three, I murder a beautiful, innocent creature as painlessly as I can. And then I find a new name, because I won’t be the Doctor any more.

— “The Beast Below”

I just wish “Kill the Moon” had stayed the path of “This creature is possibly the only one of its kind, we have to save it” rather than “It’s an innocent BABY, we can’t kill it.”  The metaphor of choosing life or choosing death would still be there, but the audience wouldn’t be clubbed over the head with it by a two by four, which is what it felt like.

And so, due in part to Lundvik’s callous reaction to the creature, The Doctor removes himself from this discussion, much to Clara’s horror.  “What ever happens to the moon hasn’t been decided yet,” The Doctor proclaims.  “It’s going to be decided here and now.”  The Doctor’s disappointment in the very human instinct to protect oneself at all cost is only one of the reasons that he walks out and leaves the choice to the actual humans in the room (“The Earth’s not my home, it’s not my Moon.”)…the other, in my opinion, is the remembrance of what happened the last time he made a choice for the Earth, wearing the exact orange spacesuit he is wearing at that moment.  The Doctor remembers what happened on Mars.  He remembers what happened the last time he decided he knew better than humans.  The Time Lord Victorious happened.

I genuinely believe The Doctor’s intentions in regards to his behavior were good ones…they just came out the wrong way.  To him, it was stepping back and letting humanity decide it’s fate, trusting that Clara, who has proved to make the right choices under pressure in the past, would let her innate goodness guide her.  To Clara, however, it was her best friend abandoning her when she needed him the most.  Jenna Coleman is SO on point this entire episode.  The one tear that slides down her face as she makes a final enraged plea to the Doctor as he walks to the TARDIS is perfection.  While The Doctor knew he could count on Clara to make the right call, what he didn’t count on was the emotional toll it would take on his companion.

“You want this to be the day life on earth ended because you couldn’t make an unfair decision?”

What the debate between Lundvik and Clara comes down to is the choice between what your heart tells you and what the logical decision is.  Clara Oswald has always been a character driven by her heart and I think that is what the Doctor was relying on when he walked out on her (“I knew you would always make the best choice.” {meaning LIFE.  Subtlety is not this episode’s forte}).  When you remove emotion from the situation, obviously the choice is clear…sacrifice one life for billions.  However, from the minute Clara is shown the egg, she sees the creature as an innocent baby, and thus her emotions are involved.  This is not a “life begins at conception” debate (THANK GOD BECAUSE WRITING ABOUT THIS IS HARD ENOUGH ALREADY) as the moon dragon is fully grown and on the verge of hatching.  The fact that it’s alive cannot be denied.

So Clara is being assaulted by emotions from that end while Lundvik plays on her OWN desire to have children.  “Do you want to have babies?”  Clara, tears in her eyes, says that she does (I did have a giggle at Courtney drawling “Mr. Pink” in that moment).  2049 is not that far in the future, Lundvik points out.  It’s entirely possible that 60-something Clara is down on that planet right now surrounded by grandbabies saying “No!” and “Stop that!” (BONUS POINTS to the commenter who gets that reference).  Is 2014 Clara willing to risk killing her children for the life of one Alien?  She’s damned if she does and she’s damned if she doesn’t.  Either way she is responsible for ending a life.  But which is worse…ending the life that’s right in front of her or the potential of the life that she has on Earth in 2049? It is a choice that Clara refuses to make alone, so she sends the plea out to the Earth.  Because the natural human instinct is to preserve itself, the Earth answers back that they should kill the creature.  Clara reluctantly goes along with it.  It is the logical choice after all.

At the last-minute, however, Clara lets her heart win over logic, and she lunges for the “abort” button.  As soon as she does that, the Doctor appears and scoops the three of them up and takes them to a beach to observe the result of their choice.  The moon hatches, revealing a beautiful creature.  The moon, being eggshell and not rock, disintegrates, sparing the Earth from disaster.  Mankind, as The Doctor says in the speech I quoted at the beginning of this post, is forever changed by this event, pushed into further exploring the stars.  And the creature immediately lays another moon egg that will take hundreds of thousands of years to hatch, ensuring the future of the Earth.  Everybody lives!

Right?

The Doctor’s almost immediate appearance when Clara hit the “Abort” button proves that The Doctor was never TRULY far away.  In fact, he probably just turned on the TARDIS invisibility shields.  But it ALSO shows that The Doctor knew more than he let on and THAT is what is the most offensive to Clara and what sets off her meltdown at the end of the episode (After my first watch, I just kept saying “God DAMN” over and over again for at least 20 minutes).  Like I said earlier, The Doctor didn’t count on the emotional impact that he would leave on Clara when he left her alone to make this choice.  Essentially, The Doctor threw her into the deep end and she nearly drowned.  Clara thinks of them as a team and this episode throws the inequality of their relationship into sharp relief.  It’s very clear that The Doctor needs Clara.  He’s introduced her as “His Carer” in “Into the Dalek”, saying that she cares so he doesn’t have to.  He comes and gets her whenever he needs to make a big decision.  He relies on her emotional instincts.  He needs his hand held and he needs her support and that doesn’t make him weak…but when CLARA needs the support, he says “Nope, it’s time to take off the training wheels!  BYE!”.  It’s terrible. Lest we forget, it is Clara Fucking Oswald who stood with the Doctors as they were about to destroy Gallifrey.  It was CLARA who told them to stop and think about what they were doing.  It was CLARA who urged them to find another way.

DOCTOR:  He’s right. There isn’t another way. There never was. Either I destroy my own people or let the universe burn.
CLARA:  Look at you. The three of you. The warrior, the hero, and you.
DOCTOR:  And what am I?
CLARA:  Have you really forgotten?
DOCTOR:  Yes. Maybe, yes.
CLARA:  We’ve got enough warriors. Any old idiot can be a hero.
DOCTOR:  Then what do I do?
CLARA:  What you’ve always done. Be a doctor.

So it’s fine for The Doctor to accept Clara’s support when he is facing the choice of whether to destroy his planet, but when Clara is faced with the same choice, he abandons her.  No matter HOW GOOD his intentions were, the fact is he STILL abandoned her.  He still left her with the fate of humanity on her tiny shoulders without all the information.  He still could have been there, silently offering his support, the way Clara has done so many times before…but he decided it was time to take off the training wheels?

Since when did Clara Fucking Oswald, the Impossible Girl, the girl who was born to SAVE the Doctor, have training wheels?

Clara: Do you know what, shut up, I am so sick of listening to you.

Doctor: No well, I didn’t do it for Courtney. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Do you think I’m lying?

Clara: I don’t know. I dunno but if you didn’t do it for her, I mean… Do you know what – it was, it was cheap. It was pathetic. No, no, it was patronising. That was you – patting us on the back saying “well your big enough to go to the shops now by yourself now, go on toddle along.

Doctor: No, no. That was me allowing you to make a choice about your own future. That was me respecting you.

Clara: Oh my god really, was it? Well respected is not how I feel.  i nearly got it wrong. that was you, my friend, making me scared. making me feel like a bloody idiot.

Doctor: Language.

Clara: Don’t you ever tell me to mind my language, don’t you ever tell me to take the stabilizers off my bike and don’t you dare lump me in with all the rest of all the little humans that you think are so tiny and silly and predictable. You walk our earth, Doctor. You breathe our air. You make us your friend, then that is YOUR moon too and you can damn well help us when we need it.

Clara’s rage here is totally valid.  The Doctor has lost all sense of empathy.  Where is the Doctor who once said “This planet, these people are PRECIOUS to me”?  I understand that Moffat and company wanted to make this Doctor darker and more alien.  But making him darker does NOT mean taking away his love of Planet Earth.  Clara is right, after all.  He spends much of his time on Earth, he’s made a habit of having humans as his companions…why does this regeneration seem to forget that?  I’m having a hard time coming to grips with the Doctor’s behavior in this episode, because like I said, He believes he did right.  And you can see in his face when Clara storms out of the TARDIS that he knows he has fucked up.  He just doesn’t know WHY and that’s the problem.  There is clearly a disconnect as far as communication here and it’s mainly because The Doctor just isn’t THINKING or taking Clara’s feelings into account.

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”  –David Copperfield (Quoted on Clara’s Classroom Wipe Board)

Many people have called this series “The Year of Clara” and I completely agree with that.  More so than any companion in NuWho, the series has focused on the companion and made her journey the driving factor.  The quote from David Copperfield on her classroom wipe board (as I’ve learned from Community, ALWAYS pay attention to what’s on the board) is incredibly fitting.  It is shown in “Robot of Sherwood” that the Doctor is Clara’s hero and the subsequent episodes have gone on to break down this image.  I think Clara is on the journey of learning that she is the hero of her own life, it just sucks that The Doctor has to be torn down in order to do that.

Lastly, I will say that I loved the scene with Danny and Clara at the end.  After Danny came off incredibly patronizing last week, I loved how he just sat and listened.  He didn’t say “I told you so.” (even though you can see he WANTED to) he just cautioned Clara to wait until she’s calmed down to really evaluate it.  It’s an incredibly astute thing for him to say (because yes, you know you are DONE with someone when you just don’t care anymore) and it was just what Clara needed in that moment.  Four for you, Danny Pink.  And I hope we find out about your really bad day soon.

And that’s our episode.  Next week, we take a trip on the Orient Express IN SPACE.  The promos were cleverly cut not to show Clara at all, so how will the Doctor convince her to take this trip with him?  Leave your thoughts on that and the episode in the comments.