This week, The Doctor and Clara take a short trip in time and a very short trip in space to our humble Moon.
Only, on this Moon which appears to be gaining weight and disintegration, there is deerted base overrun with giant spiders *COUGH* Dead Space *COUGH* Apollo 18 *COUGH* I enjoyed this one mostly, it had some great moments. Good old-fashioned scary Who but devolves into sappiness towards the end.
What did we think of this one? My questions for the room…
Are we now seeing a Doctor with less tolerance for humanity’s stupidity, hinted at in Smith’s era early on? I loved this bit where he left them to make the decision. The delicious sort of “tough love” that makes The Doctor so compelling as a character sometimes.
Will Clara be the first companion to leave under a cloud? We’ve seen friction building for weeks but tonight we had a full-on falling out and a storming out.
But of course, anything else you want to talk about in relation to this episode or the series then feel free to put it out there.
I felt this was an episode I could really get behind, at last. Of course, I was still playing ‘spot all the familiar plot lines’ – The Beast Below, Waters of Mars, etc. – but I couldn’t help feeling the show was showing some maturity by the end by having the big falling out between Clara and the Doctor. Sure, there was the usual ‘look how great the human race’ is but this time with the twist that they weren’t, it was just Clara. I thought the Doctor was going to rant about how the horrible, blood lusting human race was going to infect the stars but he seemed remarkably positive. I guess because he knows that this event turned them around. Still, it was a solid episode for me. My only noticed flaw was the fact that there is no way a teacher could be a Doctor’s companion and still get all the marking done.
Maturity, definitely. The addition of Courtney had me worried it was muscling in on Sarah Jane Adventures territory but even the teenager was more than tolerable.
Haha,. well you know with the TARDIS you could stay up all night to mark, still get eight hours sleep and still get back in time to watch Eastenders.
I still haven’t been through all the doctors, but I like how the alien-ness of the Doctor is being stressed with Capaldi. He isn’t the acerbic, scientist type that people initially thought he was. He just has a different way of working out moral issues. He doesn’t see how Courtney might need to be told that she is special. That is alien to him.
He is indeed far more alien, that’s something they started with Smith by adding a degree of social ineptitude – that aspect has definitely amplified here.
I enjoyed the story, but the science gaffs in this one were enormous, even for a TV show with time-travel.
The episode started out stating Clara was on the Dark-side of the moon, but they could see the Earth out the window and it was day-light – so in what way was it the Dark-side at all?
Why did the moon get heavier? Where did the mass come from; because eggs don’t get heavier before they hatch? Why did the giant bacteria look like spiders and make webs?
Do they not have a science advisor at the BBC anymore, or do they just not care about the Sci in scifi?
Story-wise the show worked for me though, the Doctor leaving was perhaps unnecessary, and I doubt the nukes would have done much to a being as large as a moon, but the idea that he had to step away was good, as was the idea that something about the moon had destabilised and the astronauts had to be sent. The Mexican base and the silly bacteria spiders were unnecessary to the story, the extra astronauts could have been wiped out with the unstable surface alone; leaving the astronaut, teacher, and teenager to make the decision (although in the old days the Doctor would never have risked hopping off in the TARDIS, as he didn’t have anyway getting back again, with the broken navigation system, but then that wouldn’t have tipped Clara over the edge so nicely).
God yes, it felt far more like the dodgy science of ST:TNG but without the technobabble (thank God).
Definitely agree, they are shedding some of the conceptual stuff that Moffat flirted with a few times during Smith’s reign, but then that’s probably due to complaints of being too complex for children – fan boys and fan girls, can’t please all of them!
On the issue of him leaving, wasn’t that because he was aware that it was a fixed point in time? I think he hinted at the beginning that the year was pivotal to humanity. Now we know that FPITs cannot be accessed, but if he was meant to be there in order to create it, that could have fuelled the realisation that it wasn’t his decision to make? Does that sound credible?
I think in the past he would have not risked the TARDIS not getting back, and hung around, very obviously (and vocally) not helping them decide. I’m not sure when he repaired the navigation system of the TARDIS, but Capaldi seems much more in control of it than any previous incarnation. He can actually drop Clara back at the time she left and not miss by a year, or a half-billion light years. I’m not sure though if that’s just lazy writers forgetting the TARDIS is meant to be broken, or whether he has fixed some of the problems (at least the ones he didn’t like- the Chameleon circuit is obviously still broken because he likes being in a police box).
I can’t think of any ST:TNG with science this bad (not even with Q in it), you’d have to go back to original trek to break the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of mass this fully. As for the not at all dark-side of the moon, I guess they thought it sounded cool, but had no idea what it meant.
I don’t need the science to be perfect, I’d just like it to not be moronic, especially when the science didn’t hinder or effect the real plot a jot.