Oh boy, this is gonna be fun.
The Doctor and Clara, and the student of Clara's who met the Doctor last week, Courtney Wood, are together in the TARDIS. The Doctor hurt Courtney's feelings by calling her not special, though I think that this is because he finds all humans equally special, and so special is normal, or "un-special" in his eyes when looking at humans, and we all know by now that this new Doctor is often insensitive without meaning to be. The end of this episode supports this view as well, but hang on, because we're just getting started. So, to placate Clara and Courtney, the Doctor offers to take them to the Moon, and allow Courtney to be the first woman to walk there. She eagerly agrees to this, and Clara comes along to help keep her safe.
They arrive, but they are not on the Moon, but on an old space shuttle about to land there, which is odd, because the year is 2049, when Earth really didn't have a space program. Oh, and there is the issue of the one hundred nuclear missiles in the shuttle's cargo hold. The shuttle crash lands on the Moon, and then the Doctor and his entourage are confronted by the crew of the shuttle: Lundvik, played by Hermione Norris, and three voiceless, personality-less redshirts who don't even last the next ten minutes. The Doctor gives one of his over the top introductory "I'm awesome" speeches while rather entertainingly hopping around like a monkey while playing with a yoyo (a nod to the fourth Doctor). I'll admit that I laughed a bit here, and even more so when Clara asked what he was doing in this really dry way, and he answered "gravity test" like it was obvious.
Of course this isn't just comedy, it presents us with the first plot point for this specific episode: the Moon's gravity is too high, which means that its mass has increased by a lot. This explains why the shuttle and its crew are here, and why they have weapons. On Earth things are in turmoil. The tides are drowning whole cities. Something has to change, and if that means that the Moon must die, then the Moon must die. This, however, will cause its own set of problems, so the Doctor decides to take a look around first and see if he can solve the problem without scattering moon chunks throughout Earth's atmosphere and possibly causing a new ice age (a possibility that is not mentioned once in the course of this episode).
So the Doctor, his companions, and the astronauts head out onto the Moon, to investigate an outpost on the surface where a group of Mexican scientists were doing scientific studies. It is mentioned at this point that they found no minerals under the surface of the moon whatsoever, which the Doctor finds unusual. They head into the outpost, where no one is alive, and find webs everywhere, and desiccated corpses strung up inside them. The group splits up, and suddenly the redshirts, surprise surprise, are killed by a dog-sized glowy red spider thing with nasty animalistic teeth. The spider is killed by a disinfectant spray, and the Doctor concludes that this spider thing is a bacteria.
No, that's not a joke, that's actually what he says.
Upon further investigation, the company learns that the Moon is breaking up, as if something is trying to come up from beneath the surface, where thousands of the *sigh* spider-bacteria are waiting. So of course the Doctor just recklessly jumps down into a chasm to look around, leaving the others alone, because that's something that he'd do. Thankfully he doesn't take too long returning and sharing his findings, which I think might be the worst bad science of the entire show.
Seriously, make sure you are sitting down for this, because it's a whopper: the Moon is an egg.
That's right, screw all of the extensive research that we've done on the Moon which pretty much proves that it is a part of the Earth which broke off while the Earth was still forming, or at least made of the same stuff. No, the Moon is an egg, and the reason why it is growing in mass and breaking up is because the thing inside it is growing and readying to hatch. The bacteria are simply the bacteria which live naturally on this thing's body. Now, suddenly, this is no longer a question of saving the Moon or saving the Earth, it is a question of saving the Earth at the expense of an innocent, unborn life.
And this is where the obvious abortion analogy becomes obvious. We have a situation where life is being thrown into an upheaval by the imminent birth of a new life, and we have Lundvik, Clara, and Courtney all here to offer up the various viewpoints on the topic of abortion. Lundvik will have to live on in this timeline, where her actions will either change everything, possibly for the worse, or return things to a semblance of normalcy (according to the Doctor killing the unborn space monster will even conveniently glue the Moon back together...somehow). Clara believes that any life, especially one which is completely blameless, and which could become anything at all, should be given a chance to exist. The alien might attack the Earth, or the pieces of Moon might crash on the surface of the Earth and kill everyone, but Clara doesn't care, because it is just as likely that things will be better after the baby is born. Courtney is a kid, looking at this situation from a kid's perspective.
And then the Doctor leaves. He says that only humans can make this choice, since this is obviously a point in time that is in flux, and that Earth is a planet which belongs to the humans. He offers no opinion of his own. He doesn't assure Clara that he's sure that she'll make the right choice. He doesn't even make assurances that he'll come back for Clara if they decide the detonate the weapons and save her life. He just backs off and says "hey, this is your responsibility, not mine". This leaves us with three women who are clearly supposed to represent the various viewpoints battling within the psyche of one woman who is contemplating the procedure. Lundvik is the part of this hypothetical woman who just wants her life to continue as close to normal as possible. Clara is the woman's ethics wondering if this is something that she can, in good conscience, even do. Courtney is the potential child who might result from the woman allowing the child to be born despite the turmoil that it will cause.
So they debate, and they debate, and they all make some good points. They even ask the people of Earth for advice (this is the message that we saw Clara sending at the start), and the people of Earth all seem to want them to take the safe route and do it. In the end, however, Clara wins the debate, not by convincing anyone, but by cancelling the detonation timer at the last moment.
The Doctor returns and takes all three woman to the surface of the Earth, with a good vantage point of the hatching. The giant alien, which has wings for some reason, emerges, the pieces of the Moon disintegrate from no reason, and then the alien is even magically able to lay a new, full size Moon, right in the old one's same stable orbit, before it flies away without even checking us out. The Doctor says that this moment is the reason why humans start going into space again, ending up all over the universe in the far future. Everything seems in order as the Doctor returns Clara and Courtney home, which brings us to literally the only scene in this episode that I have no fault with whatsoever.
Clara is pissed. She yells and cusses and tells the Doctor off for just abandoning her there on the Moon to make a decision that he could have helped with. While this exchange is entirely in character, and really probably should have come a couple weeks ago with the way the Doctor has been acting lately, after the undertones throughout the previous few scenes, it comes off as the metaphorical woman yelling at her boyfriend for knocking her up and then leaving her alone to decide what to do about the baby. I appreciate the exchange between these two characters who we have gotten to know over the course of their time on the show, but almost I can't look past the fact that it only half feels like them talking. What allows me to overlook it is that this is literally the best character moment that we have gotten for the Doctor this season, and for Clara ever.
The scene is brilliantly handled and acted by both parties. Clara rants and raves and cries, and the Doctor is completely baffled. Of course he would come back for her. He left her to decide because he trusts her as much as he trusts himself, and he knew that she's do the right thing. He didn't mean to make her feel abandoned, he just forgot that sometimes leaving someone you trust to make a difficult decision on your stead can feel like abandonment. Clara gives less than no shits, though, and she storms off of the TARDIS and tells the Doctor not to come back for her again. Clara talks to Danny, and he compares Clara's sudden anger toward the Doctor to the moment that he realized that he didn't like being in the army anymore. And that's it, that's the episode. We are left wondering if the Doctor and Clara will make up, and there is a real possibility that they won't before Clara leaves the show after next episode. It is a moving end which leaves you on the edge of your seat wondering.
I don't want anyone to think that I hate this episode or something, I just want you to understand that everyone else out there seems to be in love with it, and I simply don't feel the same way. There was a lot good with this episode. The visuals were pretty great. The locations were gorgeous. The acting was amongst the best of the entire show. I don't dislike Clara, but that's mostly because I like Jenna Coleman. This episode made me like Clara for Clara. I knew that the Doctor would, of course, come back for her, but I still felt for her when he left. Hermione Norris was also great, with a dry wit that was a good contrast to Jenna's heavy emotional delivery. Capaldi was good, showing that subtlety that is becoming characteristic of this incarnation of the title character.
All in all, the episode was, from a writing, cinematic, and dramatic standpoint, really solid. The abortion analogy was a little off-putting and heavy-handed, and I honestly wonder if the other reviewers out there and praising this episode as a way of overcompensating for the fact that they aren't willing to touch the episode's undertones with a twenty foot pole. Well, I'm not that kind of critic. I'm not going to go on about my views on abortion, but I am going to call the script out on being really heavy handed not just with the undertones regarding abortion, but the writer's obvious view that abortion is wrong. Lundvik, at the end, even thanks Clara for stopping her from making a huge mistake, leaving no ambiguity at all. There is also the issue that this is an episode which was supposed to give female characters a chance to take the lead. Making the story an analogy for abortion I think was disrespectful and only served to place a stigma on females, saying "hey, this is an issue that those strange and exotic women folk have, let's write about it". But hey, I'm not a woman, so maybe I'm wrong.
I will also call this episode out on a few other things. Who is a show which has never really taken science 100% seriously, but it has always gotten away with this by keeping the science far enough from home that the viewers could suspend disbelief. Here it is just silly, contradicting real world science and the established science of the show alike. For example:
-The reason for destroying the Moon keeps changing. First it is simply because the mass is increasing and this threatens Earth, and no thought is given to any kind of fallout from the method of destruction, but later it is suddenly because the hatching of the creature will cause the Moon to break up and the pieces could crash to Earth. What did you guys think that your nukes were gonna do, ask the Moon nicely to go back to its original mass? No, they were gonna break it up and possibly cause the pieces to crash to Earth.
-If something has been growing in the Moon, why is its mass only now increasing? Shouldn't it have been increasing subtly over time, at a rate that we would have noticed before?
-How can the alien lay a new Moon-egg that is precisely the size and mass of the old Moon, right in the same orbit? There are literally an infinite number of points up there where the new egg could have been laid, and the new Moon should be much less massive than the old one, which would also cause huge climate changes to the planet and kill millions, if not billions, of people.
-Seriously, spider-bacteria which even spin webs like spiders? Really? REALLY?! This is crap science at its worst. Bacteria are a form of life which doesn't scale. They are as small as they are because that is how they can exist. Just because a creature is larger than another creature, that doesn't mean that its cellular structure is at a larger scale, because cells don't scale either, and that's what bacteria are: cellular organisms. I'm not kidding, this has replaced the science in the Star Trek: Voyager episode Threshold for the worst science on TV ever, at least as far as I'm concerned.
-How does killing the alien fix the Moon? Seriously, we are given a one-line reason in the episode but it is so stupid that I thought the Doctor had to be joking, and I still do. Please, someone who worked on this episode get in touch with me and tell me why.
-If this is the point when humanity chose to spread out through the stars and become the various Bountiful Human Empires that we have heard so much about in the show before, why is this a moment in flux and not a fixed point in time? Seriously, re-watch The Waters of Mars and just try not to wonder this same thing.
-Just because the giant spider-bacteria are somehow technically bacteria, that doesn't mean that disinfectant spray would hurt them at all, as they are clearly nothing like microscopic bacteria, at all, structurally.
-Why do they have teeth if they are frackin' bacteria? Seriously, this is really bugging me guys. Does this show not have a scientific advisor at all?
-Why does the space dwelling alien have wings?
-Seriously, spider-bacteria? Really?!
And after a few calming breaths, we're moving on, even though I am pretty sure I'm missing a few nitpicks. To put this over-long review to bed, I'm gonna close up quick and say that I give this episode a 4 out of 10. Yeah, I get it, there is some good character stuff here, the acting is pleasantly very strong, and the visuals are pretty great especially on the shots of space and the monsters (which I'll admit looked good, even if I don't like them personally), but between the awful science and the heavy-handed ethical undertones and heavy metaphor, which completely took me out of the story, it just isn't an episode for me. In fact giving it a 4 is, in my opinion, generous. The only thing which elevates it in my eyes is the interactions between the Doctor and Clara and then Clara and Danny at the end, and I'll admit that I'm curious where this plot thread goes.
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