DOCTOR WHO - Kill The Moon Review - Warped Factor - Words in the Key of Geek.

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DOCTOR WHO - Kill The Moon Review

Christopher Morley takes his protein pills and puts his helmet on to bring you his review of Kill The Moon.


Don a spacesuit & come with us as we look back over Peter Capaldi & The Fall & Rise Of The Spiders From The Moon! Or rather, should that be Kill The Moon? We were promised that this would be the moment at which the relationship between Clara & the man who fell to ( prehistoric/Victorian) Earth wouldn't be quite the same, after the Doctor made a choice. A choice that would prove to be most unlike him & possibly ring the ch-ch-changes for both their futures......

You could forgive him a moment of nostalgia as he looked around to find a teacher & a girl young enough to be his granddaughter alongside him in the TARDIS. Courtney Woods is turning out to be about as different from Susan as its possible to be, though! He's upset her quite a bit after telling her she's not special- she must have something going for her, though, as she'd eventually worked out the big police-box shaped secret of time travel behind the man she thought was Coal Hill School caretaker John Smith. As something of a reward he took her on her first trip into space!


It didn't entirely agree with her though, & so she's brought along some tablets for her next one. Our three travellers are off to the Moon in the far future (2049) & as it turns out the great orb in the sky that tells us when its night-time isn't quite what we all thought it was. Its an egg! And there's a crew of astronauts about to bomb it. The Doctor by this point is probably longing for the days when he had a brush & had to do battle with nothing more sinister than a puddle, even finding time to whistle while he worked.



After being discovered by three of these bomb- happy astronauts ( Lundvik, Duke & Henry) after materialising on their base, he's about to find out that the Moon, or at least the people on it, could have quite a dark side.

The Doctor has form here of course. As a younger man with a natty Paul McCartney hairdo & a recorder, he'd visited The Moonbase. Turns out the one he finds himself in now is infested with a species he'd last encountered after leaving his Second incarnation behind, too. One of the spiders kills Henry after he has a poke around a cave near the base- which anyone could tell you is a bad idea in such situations!


Understandably Courtney's nervous & wants to go home...but not before having a say in the future of the Moon itself. The future population of Earth is quite rightly in two minds over wanting to destroy it & the Doctor's no help at all. In something of a reversal of his usual attitude towards such matters, he opts not to come up with a brilliant solution to the problem. He's already worked out the gravity using a familiar method- a yo-yo, as he had during his Fourth incarnation in the likes of The Ark In Space.


That's helpful, then. After telling Courtney how to bring 'Sexy' to him ( she'd run to it after her bout of nerves), he leaves the humans to it. His Ninth self had initially done the same during Aliens Of London before coming back to sort things out after all! His newest incarnation is at pains to stress his belief that only humans can decide the future of their own planet before going- at which point you begin to wonder how his preceding one, who Harness had originally written Kill The Moon for, might have dealt with the issue.

With Clara, Courtney & Lundvik now the only three people around to make the decision, they put it to a vote. Lights off for ' kill whatever's in there' & lights left on for ' give it a chance'. The actual winner is ' kill it' but at the last second Clara overrides the decision, stopping Lundvik from using a detonator.


Conveniently at this point the Doctor nips back just in the nick of time to take everyone back to Earth, watch the Moon disintegrate as a result of ' hatching' & see whatever was in that egg fly off. And he gets to make the kind of big speech that only a Time Lord can get away with while he's at it.“The mid 21st century. Humankind starts creeping off into the stars. It spreads its way through the galaxy to the very edges of the universe and it endures to the end of time. And it does all that because one day in the year 2049, when it had stopped thinking about going to the stars, something occurred that made it look up, not down. It looked out there into the blackness and it saw something beautiful, something wonderful that, for once, it didn’t want to destroy. And in that one moment the whole course of history was changed. Not bad for a girl from Coal Hill School and her teacher.”

Clara's still angry with him though. What he saw as a show of faith in leaving her behind to help make such a massive decision, she sees as an act of desertion- his earlier words “I’m sorry, Clara. I can’t help you. The Earth isn’t my home. The Moon isn’t my moon…” probably still ringing in her ears. But then there's the real stinger. 'Kill it or let it live. I can’t make this decision for you.” Then just to really rub salt into the wound he adds in “It’s time to take the stabilisers off your bike.” Little wonder then that she's so set on leaving him behind at the conclusion of their latest travels.

Will she, though? For the Doctor at least, its now time to go after a Mummy On The Orient Express!




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