Kill the Moon, by Darren Mooney

I’m going to be blunt: Kill the Moon is not just my least favourite Peter Capaldi episode, it’s my least favourite episode of New Who since 2004. In case you have forgotten, the central plot point is that the Moon is not actually a ball of rock but a gigantic dragon’s egg, which hatches, and then the dragon flies off, first laying a new egg that has exactly the same size and appearance as the former Moon. This utter violation of basic astronomy threw me out of the story when I first watched it and threw me out again when I rewatched it for this post.

On top of that, the Doctor abandons Clara on the surface of the Moon to decide whether or not to blow it all up with nukes, in a move that is frankly both cruel and cowardly, and therefore goes against the fundamentals of the character. There are people out there who love this episode, but I find it an embarrassment close to Timelash levels. (Not quite Twin Dilemma levels, though, nothing can ever be that bad again.)

Darren Mooney has a different view, and in his Black Archive earnestly looks for the virtues of the story and claims to find them.

The first chapter, “‘Now We Can Do Something Interesting’: Kill the Moon as Self-Aware Television” argues that the story’s initial reception was very positive from critics (well, it wasn’t from me!) and that it is consciously re-shaping the show’s narrative as part of a master plan for the whole eighth series.

The second chapter, “The Moon’s an Egg’: Kill the Moon and the Tension between Science Fiction and Fantasy in Doctor Who”, argues that expectations of scientific rigour are misplaced as Doctor Who has never been a hard sf show, and references the Sad Puppies who emerged the following year as champions of hard sf. I think my record on the Puppies is reasonably clear, and I don’t think you have to be a raving traditionalist to find Kill the Moon‘s treatment of science offensively stupid..

The third chapter, “‘Second-hand Space Shuttle, Third-hand Astronauts’: The Curdling and Reignition of 60s Utopianism” looks at the cultural significance and interpretation of the historical Moon landings, especially in the Troughton era. Its second paragraph is:

Implicit in this observation is the idea that any expansion of humanity beyond the surface of the Earth will most likely treat the Moon as a stepping-stone. For much of its history, humanity was fascinated by the prospect of visiting the Moon. Stories about imagined lunar expeditions became tremendously popular during the 17th century, prompted by the research and theories of Galileo Galilei1. This fantasy of Moon exploration is inexorably tied into the history of SF as a genre. Released in 1902, Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) is frequently identified as the first SF film2.
1 Seed, David, ‘Moon on the Mind: Two Millennia of Lunar Literature’, Nature, 9 July 2019.
2 See, for example, Luokkala, Barry B, Exploring Science Through Science Fiction, p2.

The fourth chapter, “‘We Have to Decide Together’: Scepticism of Simple Majoritarianism in the Work of Peter Harness”, points out that all three of Harness’s Who stories undermine the concept of a democratic vote, and links this to other New Who themes.

The fifth chapter, “‘…First Woman on the Moon’: Gender in Kill the Moon“, briefly looks at the story’s reference to abortion (in my view a clumsily handled and poorly executed minor theme) and then at the way in which the story subverts the gender roles of Doctor and Clara (which I don’t think it really does).

The sixth and final chapter, “‘That’s What We Call a New Moon’: Kill the Moon as an Argument for Optimism”, cheers the themes of death and rebirth in the story, which as noted above I find crass and unconvincing.

I am sure that Darren Mooney is a perfectly reasonable person, and reading the book it’s clear that we are coming from similar directions in a lot of ways. I opened his book wondering if he could persuade me out of my view that this is the worst Doctor Who story of the last forty years; and he did not. But you can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)