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I have a lot to do today. But I could not help taking a few minutes of my time to talk about how very much I hate “Kill The Moon.”
“Time Heist” was entertaining, even though I knew who “The Architect” was long before the Doctor did. “The Caretaker” was angry-making, since Twelve all of a sudden turned into Clara’s jealous ex-boyfriend/controlling father and spent the whole episode being a racist jackass (I know he’s supposed to hate Danny because he’s a soldier, but when you deliberately refuse to retain the information that the Black man you’re talking to works with his brain and not with his body, that’s racism, and that’s the first time I’ve seen anyone write the Doctor that way), but there were some nice moments, especially how happy Twelve was for the brief time when he thought that Clara was dating the Eleven clone.
My rage over “Kill the Moon” is of an entirely different order of magnitude. Let me give you the bullet points.
* The premise is just…lunatic. But so many Doctor Who premises are lunatic, we’ll let that pass.
* The entire episode is about how choice is bad. Choice is particularly bad when women are making it and it’s extra special super bad when women are making it with regard to unborn babies.
If that plot is not a piece of not-very-coded pro-life propaganda, then why are all the male astronauts killed before the final choice has to be made? Why are the three women left to make this choice shown an image of the dragon on the Doctor’s magic ultrasound, the same way that women who go to “crisis pregnancy centers” run by pro-life evangelicals are shown ultrasounds of their fetuses in order to convince them not to abort? Why is the Doctor’s decision to do what women are always telling pro-life politicians to do–leave it up to us, you non-womb-having jackasses, you will never have to make this choice or live with the consequences–presented as the worst thing the Doctor has ever done to a companion? Why are we informed that the woman leading the kill-the-moon team has no children? Why is it beaten into us with a sledgehammer that there is only one ‘right’ choice and it was not to kill the baby?
* This episode is not only anti-choice, it’s anti-democracy.
Clara decides, not unreasonably, that this decision is too big to be made by three people, two of whom aren’t even from that time period, and decides to bring the whole world in on this. Hard to see how that would actually work, but we’re in an episode where the moon is an egg, so again, let that pass. She contacts the people of the world. And the ENTIRE PLANET makes the wrong decision. And then Clara ignores what the entire planet wanted, because obviously the entire planet was wrong. Sort of the same way that the pro-life movement ignores the millions of women who think the right to choose is important to preserve, because obviously they’re all wrong.
* Then, the episode tries to tell us that the Doctor’s attempt to respect Clara’s autonomy was in fact a form of abandonment, and that she really would have preferred for him to tell her what to do, and the fact that he refused to tell her what to do is such a personal betrayal that she’s leaving him.
This is what I hate. Not that a companion finally raked the Doctor over the coals over what he did to her. That certainly ought to happen more often than it does. It’s the content of the argument that pisses me off.
When Ten fucked up, it was by *preventing* humans from choosing their own fates. That’s how Ten fucks it up with Donna in “Journey’s End,” and that’s how he fucked it up for Adelaide in “Waters of Mars.” In fact, from Twelve’s point of view, this situation was probably mostly about trying to avoid repeating the mistakes he now realizes he made in “Waters of Mars.” “Waters of Mars” was, after all, another one of those points of time that he wasn’t supposed to fuck around with; and he fucked around with it; and the consequences were terrible for the humans involved. So it’s no wonder that he’s confused by Clara’s turning on him in the TARDIS afterward. He gave her the autonomy he should have given Donna and Adelaide, but now all of a sudden it’s the wrong thing to do.
But why was that the wrong thing to do? Only because this episode wants it to be. It’s not clear, after all, how much the Doctor was actually keeping from Clara. He must be aware that in the future there’s still a moon, but since (whether they detonate the charges or not) it can’t possibly be the *same* moon, that doesn’t mean he necessarily knows the outcome of this particular decision. We’ve seen plenty of situations where the Doctor is really not sure what the consequences of his actions will be, and they don’t all have to involve special gray areas in the time vortex. What he tells her is that that he didn’t KNOW what was going to happen, but that he figured that it was an egg and not a bomb and it would all be OK. Clara presumably knows that eggs are not bombs; and in fact when she talks the astronaut through what happens when the moon hatches they both basically come around to the idea that there’s a good chance the earth will survive; the astronaut just doesn’t want to take it, and neither does the rest of the planet. Besides, Clara fucking knows what the Doctor would do if it were up to him: he’d let the egg hatch. He makes that quite clear. It’s even clearer to the viewers, because Ten drowned all the little Raknos babies when a similar situation happened in “Runaway Bride,” and we know he later came to regret it; so once again, this would offer Twelve the opportunity to repair Ten’s mistakes.
So Clara knows what the options probably are and she knows what choice the Doctor would make if it were left up to him. So why is she so pissed off at his removing himself from the decision making process? Because she doesn’t want the responsibility. Which means that this episode is not only telling us that women shouldn’t choose, but that they don’t LIKE choosing, and that men have a DUTY to insert themselves into a woman’s decision about her pregnancy, because NOT doing that is abandonment and betrayal.
So when Ten is being a problem, it’s because he’s decided that he knows best. When Twelve is a problem, it’s because he’s pretending that he doesn’t know best when really, obviously, he does. Can you see why I miss the RTD era?