Yes, but somehow, it seems something’s missing. I’m not even saying I dislike this incarnation of the Doctor, actually, I welcome the change from young/quirky to old/eccentric, but to me, some part of his nastiness just feels gratuitous, like the writers wanting to hit us over the head with how they’re subverting our expectations and being edgy and stuff. Doctor Who just really isn’t the sort of show that lends itself to a gritty reboot, at least for me.
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
Another point in this episode I thought was gratuitously callous was that the Doctor not merely abandoned Clara to decide between the life of a few billion people of Earth and the space hatchling, but that he left her to die—if they’d detonated the nukes, they’d be insta-fried*, while even with just the egg hatching, it’s difficult to see how she could have survived. Sure, in the latter case, he could have showed up just in time, as he did—but Clara didn’t know that; and if she’d decided otherwise, then well, good bye, Clara, I guess.
And if the Doctor just always knew that she’d reach the ‘right’ decision (against the unanimous wish of the whole population of the Earth, but clearly, she knew better), then this completely undercuts the plot point about him sort of ‘empowering’ humanity to make its own decisions. So either, he knowingly risked Clara’s death, or he let them play a terrifying game that was rigged to begin with, to prove a point or for whatever reason. Both, to me, just doesn’t seem very ‘Doctor’.
*And this opens up the even more disturbing possibility that Clara pushed the button not out of a grand sense of the importance of all life, or at least unique moon-dragons, if not so much billions of human beings, but simply out of self-preservation, figuring that they’d deal with the hatching thing later.
It reminds me a bit of Seven and Ace - he had a habit of putting her into dangerous or frightening situations and abandoning her to see what she’d do. Twelve definitely has an old-school Doctor feel about him - Ten and Eleven were far too gentle for that sort of thing, and Nine depended too much on Rose for it.
I really hate the underlying attitude here that was really evident in the Doctor’s actions - the attitude that things will just work out if we trust and wish really hard. It’s a common thing in entertainment like this, but it’s crap. If we consider this to be a kid show, then we’re teaching kids that we don’t have to make hard decisions. We can just keep on going like we are, and if we just BELIEVE strong enough, then everything will be OK. No problem has EVER been solved with that attitude. Climate change isn’t going to fix itself and just work out as long as we all try really hard to not do anything that makes anyone feel bad.
Bah. This episode really brought out my inner grump.
So far this season I have been really disappointed, this episode positively annoyed. They desperately need some fresh writers for the show
In defense of The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, IIRC neither the episode nor the Doctor said, “Yup. Satan.” It’s point was that there was a bid bad creature that, once locked away, became the basis of many other civilizations’ stories about and beliefs in an evil entity. The creature’s body and mind were stored separately in order to make escape virtually impossible.
The creature’s mind played mind games with the miners’ and Rose’s minds, and they jumped to conclusions about what was “speaking” to them based on whatever stories about Evil Incarnate they’d been taught about (indoctrinated with). (Something the Doctor tried to point out to them.)
I guess so many people said, “we want to see Capaldi’s Doctor pull a ‘Malcolm Tucker’!!!” SteMo decided to give the Doctor a right proper Malcolm Tuckering.
I think it’s hilarious, even when he’s a shit to Clara, but then again, I’m not normal.
I appreciate the info. However, how to define the term “natural born citizen” can lead to vicious court fights so I’m staying away from basing any fanwanking on that. 
I’m as fanboyish of the silly and whimsical as they come, but this one stunk to SciFi Channel Sharknado levels of stupid.
0.98 earth-mass suddenly appearing, then leaving, then getting a moon-mass egg laid behind? Without even the slightest technobabble attempt to mitigate the stupid? “…well, as an anti-matter embryonic mass, it phase-balanced the gravity through it’s anti-potential leaving us the same moon-egg as we began with!..” C’mon!
Does Clara, need I remind you she is the Impossible Girl and a savant-level genius, get progressively dumber each episode?
Can Pink just stop beating around the bush and tell Clara to get in the kitchen and be seen and not heard? I’ve read copies of The Watchtower with less sanctimonious judgement.
Since when has the Doctor been an angry dismissive ass towards kids? The Doctor loves kids, even the dim ones! So beyond out-of-character how the girl was treated.
The whole “woman’s decision to preserve the embryo” as preached to by a middle-aged white male, was a subtext worthy of a Kirk Cameron banana salute.
For this season, I’m struggling. Great actors for The Doctor and Clara, with unbelievably shitty character development. The dullest of the Tennant/Martha episodes were light years better than this.
Wow. Finally got to watch it. This was an astonishingly bad episode. I can overlook a lot of bad science from Doctor Who, but this episode was just too nonsensical and forced from start to finish. Just awful, Ed Wood could make a more coherent plot. But even ignoring the dozens of reasons why this didn’t make sense, the plot itself was just so cheap and the false moral choice so forced and hackneyed, I can’t see how anyone would think this was a good episode.
You know, we’re all Whovians here. Not liking the episode (hell, thinking the episode is a big ol’ steaming pile of TARDIS turds) is one thing, but can we maybe tone down the insults?
Different people like different things, and some of us enjoy good character development even when it’s wrapped in bad science. It kept me entertained for an hour, I learned some new things about the Doctor and Clara and Courtney…works for me.
The silliest part of the science? Hard to say, but I’ve got a candidate. They said that the Moon’s mass increased by 1.6 billion tonnes.
Assuming that they are talking about metric tonnes (1000 kg) and British billions ( twelve zeros) then the Moon’s mass is 73,500,000 billion tonnes. Increasing that number by 1.6 would not be noticed.
Really bad episode, yeah.
Except…I *really *liked the Doctor’s ultimatum, “It’s time humanity chose for itself.” And Clara’s response to it afterward. I don’t think the Doctor was wrong to insist that they make their own decision, but of course (since this new Doctor is really fundamentally *bad *at understanding people) he went about it rather badly. At the same time, I also totally agree with Clara’s reaction.
Everything else in this episode was rubbish.
Did the people in Asia (the majority of population of Earth) not get a vote?
Also, everything else.
This fallacy is a pet peeve of mine, and it’s often used toward sci-fi/fantasy in general. I wish there was a name for it, but I can’t seem to google one up. Just because a story has fantastical elements, doesn’t mean anything goes. We accept that Doctor Who involves an alien with a time machine. That’s the premise. But he’s an alien in a time machine in a universe that’s supposed to be our universe. You can’t just throw any old thing in and say a wizard did it, especially when the fundamental forces of the universe are thrown to the wayside with nary an attempt at explanation. The TARDIS breaks a few of the laws of physics, sure, but it’s a machine designed to do just that, so it doesn’t really matter how it does it. We assume the time lord engineers worked it out somehow.
There’s a big jump from there to an alien that breaks multiple laws of physics and biology because it just does.
A better writer could have written a perfectly good story about the moon being an alien egg that didn’t require completely disregarding very basic science to do it. (We’re not talking quantum mechanics here, just the same science the average farmer knows. A freshly laid egg and an egg about to hatch weigh the same. A chicken has to grow bigger than its own egg before laying a new one the same size. This barely even qualifies as science.)
You don’t even have to get that Star Trek-ish. Just a line about “momma moon” being in an alternate dimension or something. Maybe she pumps the egg full of mass from elsewhere, and then lays another one. IDK, Just some sort of acknowlegment that the premise doesn’t make sense.
You won’t, because there’s no such thing as The Doctor’s Daughter. It never existed, just like Star Trek V.
Here’s the thing: in almost any science fiction story, I would agree with you. For example, I mostly disliked Pixar’s “Up” because it introduced intelligent talking dogs halfway through, after establishing that other animals acted normally. Talking animal stories are fine, but you have to stick with your set up.
Doctor Who’s set up is that, from a science standpoint, anything can happen. It has a LONG tradition of giving science the middle finger. Even if I stick with the new series, and human biology - How did a human woman and a cat-man give birth to a basket of (normal) kittens? How does a woman’s consciousness live in a stretched piece of skin, or a thin slab of concrete? How do humans send psychic power to someone by shouting their name? How do humans mate with giant wasp creatures and produce offspring? How are humans cloned with full military knowledge in place? How can a human conscious live on in a telecommunications system for minutes after that person has died?
Why is “How does a creature lay an egg its size seconds after birth?” so different? I’m not saying it’s not stupid, I’m saying its a small, stupid part of a decent episode of a show with plenty of established stupid, and it wasn’t really the point of the story anyway.
Just solved it - the creature in the moon is bigger on the inside. That follows established Doctor Who rules.