Peter Harness sends the Doctor and Clara to the moon in the near future for his first Doctor Who debut.

The BBC’s hype machine plays a pivotal role in the marketing of Doctor Who. Generally, they get the exposure and excitement levels just right, but this time, I think they over did it. The episode was really sold as a full on horror story and one of the darkest adventures ever, and it didn’t help that various advance reviews were consistently rating the episode very high indeed. And the hype worked – I was fully expecting something similar to Silence in the Library, except with spiders. What transpired was something...odd, to say the least.

Kill the Moon has the Doctor, Clara and her student, Courtney, visit the Moon in 2049, just as a group of astronauts are planning to blow it up. But as they uncover the mystery behind the Moon’s mysterious gain in weight, another problem presents itself. Can they sacrifice one innocent creature to save the entire human race?

Much like Hide last year, Kill the Moon completely changed focus about halfway into its runtime, and much like Hide, it's detrimental to the episode as a whole. One moment we’re cowering in fear from the spider-bacteria, the next we’re wrapping our heads around the fact that the Moon’s an egg. If Harness had just kept to one of the two main ideas here, then the episode would most certainly have been better off. And to be honest, I wish he’d stuck with the spiders. Baser-under-siege stories are admittedly a cliché of sorts for Doctor Who, particularly in the Classic Series, but there’s no reason why a new writer couldn’t put a new spin on the genre. The makings for a fantastic horror story are all there – deserted base, disposable crew, scary monster, but they all ultimately go nowhere. The deserted base is just...there, the crew are killed off for essentially no reason, and the monsters completely disappear once the story has no need of them. Seriously, there are a few shots of them swarming towards the base, and then they disappear, never to be heard from again, not even during the 45 minutes Clara, Courtney and the astronaut girl have to wait before the bombs explode. It’s very bizarre, and it also means that I have to add another dud monster to my list.

In additional to structural errors, though, the episode also fails quite significantly on the scientific front. Granted, this is a science-fiction show where the main character is a 2000 year old face changing alien who travel in time, but that shouldn’t stop writers from complying with relatively simple laws of science. As it happens, the biggest scientific problem in this episode actually undermines it completely. Eggs don’t gain mass (they lose it to the organism inside), so tides on earth would not have been changed at all until the Moon Egg hatched. Thus, the entire point of the astronauts’ mission is rendered completely moot, and so is all the gloom and doom about Earth. Shoddy science is something that is usually tolerated in Doctor Who, and for good reason, but when an episode’s entire premise is based around it, that’s when it becomes unacceptable.

But even if the major scientific error is ignored, the episode still amounts to virtually nothing. A large part of the Kill the Moon revolves around exactly that: whether or not they should kill the Moon. Should they risk humanity dying or allow a giant space dragon to fly free. It’s a nice conflict, and there’s no easy answer to the dilemma, or at least it appears that way. In the end, it turns out all the difficult questions were pointless, because the creature lays another Moon almost immediately after it hatches. While this is ludicrous by itself, it has the added effect of removing any consequences the episode might have had for Planet Earth. It’s a contrivance and a cop out and ultimately exposes the big problem I have with the idea of the Moon being an egg: it’s too ambitious. I know what writer Peter Harness was trying to do, but his idea’s on too big a scale. No matter what option the characters go with – be it blowing up the Moon or letting it hatch, the end result would be one massive continuity error. As Clara pointed out, there is most certainly a Moon after 2049, and this is precisely why a literal new Moon had to be created at the end. This begs the question as to why the episode had to be about Earth’s Moon; the concept of a Moon being an egg would have worked fine literally anywhere else. Make it a Moon of Mars, or Jupiter, Venus, some other planet. Anywhere would have been a much better alternative.

But for all the criticising I’ve done, there is one somewhat redeeming feature – the argument between the Doctor and Clara. After several years of the Doctor rarely ever getting called out on his actions, it was very nice to see Clara totally flip out at him. And she’s perfectly justified to do so; after all, he did just abandon her and two others before returning at literally the last second. She could have died, and it would have been his fault. But for all its brilliance, I don’t think it’s enough to completely save the episode. While it definitely shows that there are some consequences (though how long they last is another question), I think people are going to remember the confrontation very vividly and rate the episode high as a result. This might be the reason for the incredibly positive advance reviews. A similar thing happened with The Almost People in 2011 – only the final two minutes or so were remembered, and the episode was acclaimed as a result. As it stands though, the Clara/Doctor face off was a minute or so of brilliance, but it was too little too late.

In conclusion, Kill the Moon is the weakest episode of Series 8 so far. Overhyped, with structural and scientific issues abound, it somehow manages to effectively render itself pointless. Coupled with forgettable characters (I can’t even remember the main astronaut’s name) and pointless monsters, the episode is nothing but a disappointment.

5/10