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Kill The Moon finds Clara and the annoying Courtney Woods, from last week’s dreadful The Caretaker, stuck on the moon, with The Doctor having long gone. Oh, and the year is 2049.
Oh course, that’s a flash-forward, and then we go back to the present day where The Doctor, after telling Courtney she’s “not special” (huh?), causing her to – off-camera – use his psychic paper as fake ID, buy alcopops and vomit all over the TARDIS, he promises to make her the first woman on the moon, and they end up on a spaceship about to land on said small rock, where Cold Feet‘s Hermione Norris and her cohorts have a load of nuclear bombs, but to what purpose?
Some astronauts were up there about ten years earlier and never came back, but all they know is that they heard screams. Either way, they came back to blow it up. Quite handy, given that it’s going to fall apart anyway. However, they do find one of the crew cocooned in a wall, rather like as happened in Alien, 35 years ago. But why?
As the Doctor observes, “They want to know how you were put together, or maybe… how you tasted. Chicken, probably.”
And why is gravity normal on the moon instead of 1/6th of the Earth’s gravity? “The moon has put on weight”, he adds.
Killer Spiders are the answer. And there’s loads of them.
Well, not quite – the moon isn’t a planet offshoot, it’s an egg, and after 100 million years, today’s the day it’s going to hatch!
The weird thing is that, despite the fact that whatever is inside is killing people and will eventually destroy the Earth, Courtney and Clara are more concerned about the ‘unborn baby’ inside the moon. What the hell?? Who cares! Just blow it up! Kill the moon!
So, this episode boils down to a moral dilemma, and since the Doctor has an affinity to the Earth but not the moon, he doesn’t care either way and is abstaining from the vote, and buggers off, leaving the rest of them to it.
There’s less room for comedy in this episode, understandably, but there’s still a nice quip from Clara when she mentions how the school secretary hates her because she think she bought her a packet of incontinence pad brand “TENA Lady” for her ‘Secret Santa’ present. And earlier, when The Doctor states: “When I say run, run!”, Hermione asks, “Who made you boss?”. He replies: “Well, *you* say run, then!”
However, this is still the kind of story we’ve seen a million times before and so there’s no tension as a result, even if there’s some nice CGI with a load of spiders running across this little piece of rock, just outside of the Earth, since you know Clara and Courtney are unlikely to die. There’s a nice few lines from Capaldi about how mankind’s existence pads out in the next century or so, and an emotional scene between the two leads, but Kill The Moon still left me as cold as the temperature up there.
And, yes, I’ve just referred to Hermione Norris’ character as Hermione Norris because no-one ever calls her by her character’s name, Lundvik.
Next week: Female musician Foxes is joined by comedian Frank Skinner aboard the Orient Express. She is well fit. Frank Skinner, less so.
Go to page 2 for a load of screenshots from the episode.
Score: 5/10
Director: Paul Wilmshurst
Producer: Peter Bennett
Screenplay: Peter Harness
Music: Murray Gold
Cast:
The Doctor: Peter Capaldi
Clara Oswald: Jenna Coleman
Danny Pink: Samuel Anderson
Courtney Woods: Ellis George
Lundvik: Hermione Norris
Duke: Tony Osoba
Henry: Phil Nice
McKean: Christopher Dane
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.
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