Doctor Who Recap: Kill the Moon

By Edwin Davies

October 14, 2014

It's like a David Bowie video.

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Despite having one of the silliest titles in recent memory and a premise which, at least initially, seems uninspiring, "Kill the Moon" wound up being one of the most compelling and confrontational episodes that Doctor Who has produced. What looked at first to be a fairly blatant Aliens rip-off (a comparison that wasn't helped by BBC America airing commercials for Alien: Isolation during the breaks) shifted on a dime to become a provocative chamber piece and morality play, then shifted again at the last second to question the very nature of The Doctor himself. If nothing else, it made for a surprising 45 minutes.

Now, about that premise: Having met and got along swimmingly with Courtney Wood (Ellis George), one of Clara's more troublesome students, last week, going so far as to take her into space in the TARDIS (an experience that left her feeling more than a little queasy), The Doctor decides to take her on another expedition. This is a set-up that the show has done several times before; someone from a Companion’s life discovers who The Doctor is, so they have to be included in at least one of their adventures. The writers even used nearly the exact same set-up for the Neil Gaiman-penned "Nightmare in Silver", which also saw The Doctor and Clara take a child (well, children) in her care on an adventure that features space insects.

That familiarity is what makes the episode seem so unpromising, even if it has a few interesting wrinkles. They go to the moon in the year 2049, only to discover that a crew of astronauts led by Lundvik (Hermione Norris) are already there ahead of them, and that the moon's gravity has become almost Earth-like. The moon has been putting on weight, and Lundvik's team have been sent up to investigate what is causing such marked shifts in the moon's composition, as well as to discover the fate of a group of Mexican astronauts who vanished ten years earlier. Unsurprisingly, things did not go well for the Mexican crew, and they only go slightly better for Lundvik's.




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It's here that the episode most strongly shows the influence of Aliens on its storytelling, since not only do they find some of the lost astronauts effectively cocooned in an abandoned building, but the creatures that killed them are giant spider-like creatures that are only just legally distinct enough not to be called Facehuggers. Most of this year's Doctor Who episodes have worn their influences on their sleeve, but by the time it reaches the scene where Courtney is trapped in a small room with one of the creatures and The Doctor is frantically trying to break through the glass to help her, "Kill the Moon" might as well be wearing a Ripley and Newt T-shirt.

That's not to say that the first half of the episode wasn't interesting. The cold open, in which Clara is shown making an impassioned plea to the people of Earth to make a choice between "An innocent life versus the future of all mankind" made for a bold start, and even if the Aliens-derived scares were distractingly obvious, they were undeniably effective. Much like last week's episode, this one made good use of shadows to hide the limitations of the budget; its monsters were only partially glimpsed, and were all the creepier for it. The limited number of characters - a number that depreciated rapidly as the creatures started picking people off - also helped create a really claustrophobic vibe even before death started stalking them. The opening half of the episode was dark, creepy and mysterious, and if it had continued in that vein it would have made for another strong episode.


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