Kill The Moon

Another week and another Who and another superb piece of everyone’s favourite family Science Fiction show – or at least the fiction bit. As much as I loved Kill The Moon I have to say it just stepped over the edge as far as the science/fantasy bridge was concerned. I may as well get that out of the way: I have no problem at all with a human looking alien flying around time and space in a Police box. I’m fine with bigger-on-the-inside and sonic screwdriver magic wands. I even don’t particularly have a problem with the soup dragon hatching out of a rather large planetoid. It’s just when things like the theory of evolution, laws of thermodynamics and general relativity are brushed aside I do have a great difficulty in suspending disbelief. However, I can forgive most of this simply because the strong moral and philosophical tone of Kill The Moon pays off so well it’s almost worth the Bad Science award.

I was musing last week as to what the next few episodes would look like as neither writer Peter Harness or director Paul Wilmshurst had worked on Doctor Who before. The result is quite unexpected as it reminded me strongly of mid-1970s Who, particularly the early Tom Baker story Ark In Space (which was the only episode of the original Who to have really scared me – and anyone else that watched it on a back and white TV). I think this was partly down to the shadowy, claustrophobic framing of the first half of the show. Filming in the Canary Islands was absolute genius as well. I went on holiday there around 20 years ago and ended picking that grey dust out of my clothes for weeks afterwards: as a lunar surface it added tremendously to the effect.

The two leads in this episode were tremendous. The Doctor’s behaviour has been increasingly weighing on Clara throughout this series and this week it reached breaking point. At times I felt Capaldi was drawing heavily on Tom Baker’s Doctor (particularly his early series) and at others he seemed to be channelling the First Doctor’s disinterest and manipulation of those around him. Whilst he is still ultimately the hero of the piece his alien offhandishness has actually started to become plain cruel. I think this is paying off massively on the dramatic stakes because whilst a typical Doctor Who story will always carry some kind of threat we always know that the Doctor will come up with a solution at the end of the episode and save the day. With this incarnation we are just not entirely sure that is going to happen and even though this story did have the happy ending it is not entirely clear that the Doctor could be trusted to make sure that happened.

The absolute star of the piece for me was Jenna Coleman’s Clara.  “Tell me what you knew, Doctor, or I'll smack you so hard you'll regenerate.” I think she would have done as well but that whole end of episode explosion was like a cork flying out of a bottle of Champaign that had been shaken for far, far too long. The character of Clara showed promise in the last series but never really took off but this series has been a revelation. Brave, frightened, intuitive, angry but ultimately articulate – I think that her all-too-human performance has acted as the perfect foil for the Doctor’s increasing other-worldliness. It actually reminded me of the Fourth Doctor’s relationship with Sarah-Jane Smith: in fact I could really imagine Liz Sladen being perfect in that scene.

No mention of Missy or the series arc this week. I re-watched the Nightmare in Silver episode last week and the Missy character was a completely different actress. The last we see of her is being grabbed by a disembodied cyberman’s hand. I think she is presumed dead but we don’t exactly see what happened to her – possibly some diabolical cyber-plot? It’s mummies next week – I wonder if the new guys have ever seen Pyramids Of Mars?