Kill the Moon

This was different. There’s a lot of differences between this year’s Who and last year’s Who, but I don’t feel it’s ever been as stark as in ‘Kill the Moon’. Perhaps not since 'Midnight’ have we had a story that is so simple and focussed.

I appreciate it: it may not be quite as polished as Midnight was, but it’s still pretty good, and I’ll forgive it a lot of its fairy-tale physics for the simple fact that it seems spectacularly uninterested in it. Once again, it feels like the script has something to say, and that to me is worth a hundred vaguely scientifically plausible explanations. My rules for Doctor Who are these: stories must be internally consistent; things affecting the main cast must be consistent with other stories with the same main cast; telling me that the Doctor can’t visit Amy and Rory because they’re in the thirties is just fucking stupid.

I feel like I have a lot of unresolved issues with series seven.

I’m impressed at how well the kerfuffle follows on from Clara and Danny’s talk in the previous story. While it’s perhaps a shame that the moment he warned of happened in the very next story, I still applaud the threads being used to tie this season together: as a regular viewer, I’ve found them really rewarding, but I don’t think any of them are the sort of thing that would alienate a casual viewer.¹

Some people have pointed out that you could read this story as a pro-life treatise; this seems a bit of a stretch given the massive emphasis on the importance of making the decision. As you can read it in both ways (and many others), I reckon that saves it from being a much lesser story.

I felt sorry for the pointless old astronauts. One assumes they had red shirts on underneath their suits. The one from Cold Feet was excellent, though.