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Doctor Who 8x07, "Kill the Moon"
Everything I've said before about new Who's fake-out ethical dilemmas and avoidance of consequences? Consider it said again.
I think I may be done with Who (for the second time in the space of two seasons), at least for a while. There was almost nothing in this episode I liked, and I don't enjoy hatewatching.
All the "but it's just a baby" and "it's innocent!" stuff raised my hackles. It's exactly the rhetoric of the US anti-abortion movement. Now, I realize DW is a British show and that women's right to control their own bodies is much less under threat in Britain, but I have a hard time believing that such close echoes are accidental. Especially when the moral argument, ultimately, is that the right to be born (or hatched) outweighs everything else, in fact outweighs the right of billions of already-born people to continue living.
Plus, we're told that all those already-born people, with their sentient minds, their cultures and arts and histories, were supposed to be willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of a creature that might not even have been sentient itself. For all anybody knew, the moon-egg thing could have been a giant space cockroach! Surely that's taking non-violence a little far.
The skience in this episode also bugged me, although normally I don't care. But how the hell does an egg gain mass??? And how does it gain huge amounts of mass in 30 years? Because in Clara's time there was no indication that the moon was getting heavier.
More importantly, there's the emotional incoherence. The Doctor leaving made no sense to me; more than anything I think it's a sign that Moffat and co. have no clue how to write for Capaldi, how to write a Doctor who isn't gooily in love with earth and humans. They want to make Twelve edgy but they keep overshooting and ending up at "asshole," and on the rare occasions when they try to make him nice, he ends up almost indistinguishable from Eleven. Clara's anger was more understandable, but it still felt contrived to me, especially since she pretty clearly isn't leaving yet, not with all the hints that Danny Pink is the mystery at the center of this season's arc.
Next week's trailer left me cold. Orient Express in space, with zombies? In other words, the Titanic episode, with the added gimmick of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its zillion imitators. I think I have better things I could do with that hour.
I think I may be done with Who (for the second time in the space of two seasons), at least for a while. There was almost nothing in this episode I liked, and I don't enjoy hatewatching.
All the "but it's just a baby" and "it's innocent!" stuff raised my hackles. It's exactly the rhetoric of the US anti-abortion movement. Now, I realize DW is a British show and that women's right to control their own bodies is much less under threat in Britain, but I have a hard time believing that such close echoes are accidental. Especially when the moral argument, ultimately, is that the right to be born (or hatched) outweighs everything else, in fact outweighs the right of billions of already-born people to continue living.
Plus, we're told that all those already-born people, with their sentient minds, their cultures and arts and histories, were supposed to be willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of a creature that might not even have been sentient itself. For all anybody knew, the moon-egg thing could have been a giant space cockroach! Surely that's taking non-violence a little far.
The skience in this episode also bugged me, although normally I don't care. But how the hell does an egg gain mass??? And how does it gain huge amounts of mass in 30 years? Because in Clara's time there was no indication that the moon was getting heavier.
More importantly, there's the emotional incoherence. The Doctor leaving made no sense to me; more than anything I think it's a sign that Moffat and co. have no clue how to write for Capaldi, how to write a Doctor who isn't gooily in love with earth and humans. They want to make Twelve edgy but they keep overshooting and ending up at "asshole," and on the rare occasions when they try to make him nice, he ends up almost indistinguishable from Eleven. Clara's anger was more understandable, but it still felt contrived to me, especially since she pretty clearly isn't leaving yet, not with all the hints that Danny Pink is the mystery at the center of this season's arc.
Next week's trailer left me cold. Orient Express in space, with zombies? In other words, the Titanic episode, with the added gimmick of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its zillion imitators. I think I have better things I could do with that hour.
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I feel sorry for Peter Capaldi, who could do great things with the character if he had good writing to work with. I hope he lasts long enough to get someone other than Moffat as showrunner.
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http://doctorwhoworldwide.com/2014/09/01/steven-moffat-to-be-replaced-by-anthony-horowitz-for-series-9-rumour/
Not sure if it has much substance. But that's typical with DW rumors.
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