On the other hand, it did pass the Bechdel Test.
Just been thinking about how I would have rejigged it to make it work, and if I’d been stuck with the egg idea, I would have just made an approaching comet or asteroid the egg: that way you have the dilemma of whether to destroy it or not to save Earth - let’s say the mission has been sent to an old lunar missile station to activate some old weapons and wipe it out - minus most of the the utterly, utterly stupid science.
[QUOTE=Penfeather]
It’s a shame that the mechanics of that episode were so monstrously stupid, because the Doctor refusing to make the choice for humanity and then clashing with Clara over it to the point where she tells him to fuck off was done brilliantly. If only they could have picked a more credible dilemma to menace to Earth with than the moon being a fucking egg that hatched a dragon that laid an egg that was - oh, fuck it.
[/QUOTE]
Can Sibling Penfeather get an “Amen!”? 
[QUOTE=Penfeather]
On the other hand, it did pass the Bechdel Test.
[/QUOTE]
Can Sibling Penfeather get another “Amen!”? 
[QUOTE=Penfeather]
Just been thinking about how I would have rejigged it to make it work, and if I’d been stuck with the egg idea, I would have just made an approaching comet or asteroid the egg: that way you have the dilemma of whether to destroy it or not to save Earth - let’s say the mission has been sent to an old lunar missile station to activate some old weapons and wipe it out - minus most of the the utterly, utterly stupid science.
[/QUOTE]
I like the way you’re thinking! :D:D
I liked the first half of the episode, and thought the second was dumb. However, what Danny said about you’re not done with someone as long as they still make you angry, I agree with about 95%. No one can “make” you angry; one chooses to respond with anger.
Anyway, something I learned and that ties in with what Danny said is, “The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference.” (If you’ve read George Orwell’s 1984, you’ll remember how Winston Smith ends up not caring what happened to the woman he once loved.)
{NOTE: spoiler for next episode.} Which conflicts with the advice Miss Pitt gives Clara in the next episode.
It annoys me because most of the issues with that episode are both glaringly obvious and trivially easy to fix: it had no good reason to be that stupid when with a little extra effort it could have been top-notch. What was the script editor doing?
YES! This too. The rest was so dumb, I’d forgotten my nerd-rage over this one.
That was explained. Mankind had stopped going into space. The shuttle was the only thing they had. They knew it was unsuitable, but there was nothing else.
But how did the Mexican miners get there? Shouldn’t there have been some proviso to get them back? It seems odd to say that ‘mankind has stopped going to space’ when there’s three people living on the moon… Was that addressed?
Of course not. The existence of a fairly sizable Mexican lunar base implies the existence of a launch program capable of taking people and significant amounts of supplies to and from the moon on a regular basis. Surely it would have been easier to use that rather than attempt to somehow turn a space shuttle - designed for use in low earth orbit and landing in an atmosphere on a prepared runway - into a lunar lander. Of course, that would have required their special effects team to actually create form scratch a model of a Mexican lunar lander, instead of taking the lazy route and just copying some already existing space shuttle model.
Nope, one mission, four people, ten years ago. Privately financed, not cost effective, nobody else was trying.
LUNDVIK: There was a mining survey, Mexicans. Something happened up here. Nobody knows what.
…
DOCTOR: How many people here?
LUNDVIK: Four. Minera Luna San Pedro. It was privately financed. They where doing a mineral survey up here.
DOCTOR: Messages? Mayday? SOS?
DUKE: Pretty much all the satellites had been whacked out of orbit. They managed to send back some screams.
DOCTOR: So then you came up here to rescue them with your bombs?
DUKE: Not quite.
LUNDVIK: They disappeared ten years ago.
DOCTOR: Nobody came?
LUNDVIK: There was no shuttle.
DOCTOR: You had one.
LUNDVIK: It was in a museum. They’d cut the back off it so kids could ride in it. We’d stopped going into space. Nobody cared.
LUNDVIK: I didn’t expect to survive anyway.
[QUOTE=Peter Morris]
{snip}
LUNDVIK: I didn’t expect to survive anyway.
[/QUOTE]
I got a strong Nightmare in Silver (S07E12) vibe from that line:
DOCTOR: Listen to me. I will get her back. Captain, a word please. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I take it your platoon doesn’t do much fighting.
CAPTAIN: What do you expect?
CLARA: What?
CAPTAIN: We’re a punishment platoon. It’s why they sent us out here, so we can’t get into trouble.
{{shudder}}
But still. Did they shoot them up, drop them off, and then flew whatever ship they used into the sun? Why was there no possibility for a return trip?
I meant, getting the Mexican miners back. Seems odd to just shoot a couple of people to the moon and then collectively shrug their shoulders and maroon them.
Still, that’s a small nit to pick; as I said, the story just plain didn’t work for me, apart from all those little nigglings like conservation of mass and so on.
[QUOTE=Half Man Half Wit]
{snip} I meant, getting the Mexican miners back. Seems odd to just shoot a couple of people to the moon and then collectively shrug their shoulders and maroon them. {snip}
[/QUOTE]
ISTM the original plan would have been to pick up the miners at some point in the future. However, after the crazy transmissions, satellites collapsing(?), general chaos, and screams as the final transmission, the mining company figured, why spend a gazillion pesos (they’re still using pesos in 2049, right?) on a recovery mission? Treat it like a collapsed shaft where the bodies and equipment are inaccessible and find some other place to dig. Preferably one without all the spooky crazy. YMMV.
Presumably the Mexicans had a craft similar to the Apollo lunar lander. But contact was lost ten years ago, It’s presumed destroyed. Even if still serviceable, it’s still on the Moon, so they can’t use it to get there.
The stupid - it burns.
Never mind that they had to dig a Shuttle out of storage. Nevermind that the shuttle hatches aren’t actually like that. Nevermind that a Shuttle couldn’t get to the Moon without major overhaul, i.e. some sort of additional fuel storage akin to a second orange tank with SRBs.
There’s no way the Shuttle could safely land on the Moon, even with the Moon’s real gravity, let alone Earth-scale gravity. The reason the Shuttle could safely land on Earth is because of the atmosphere. There’s no atmosphere on the Moon.
Even if we pretend the lunar soil is soft enough to make a slide bed or something so you don’t have to have the wheels roll, you still cannot slow it down enough to slide to a stop. It’s going to impact the surface with a resounding thud, the kind that makes a small crater full of busted airplane bits.
Then you add in giant germs that look like spiders, and act like spiders, and even spin webs. Because that makes sense how?
And the whole fluctuating gravity thing - how does that work? The large space baby moving around inside the Moon made gravity turn off for a few seconds?
Okay, so you say you ignored the bad science for the personalities and the people interactions.
The human drama stuff was equally bad. “It’s time for humanity to decide for themselves.” Except the person who decides is Clara, all on her own. Clara, who is out of her own time and space, doesn’t belong there. She’s just as much an alien to that point as the Doctor.
Then there’s the time that humanity did decide for itself - you remember the first mention of Torchwood and blowing a space ship out of the sky? He didn’t like that very much.
Yes, Clara gives him a right chewing out for being and arsehole. Good on her. And then she goes home to Mr Pink, and he tells her she can’t decide mad, she has to calm down and then make her decision. Fair enough.
But uhg, the rest is stinkeroo.
That’s actually an excellent point: “It’s time for humanity to decide for itself, provided they agree with me”.
I’m glad I read about the bad science so that I could watch and not focus on that as much. I had a difference thought about Clara’s reaction to the Doctor.
His dad said The Doctor could never join the army if he was crying all the time and that he’d never join the Academy and be a Time Lord. I remember that every Gallifrean is eventually exposed to the Vortex and it has a huge effect. In the Master’s case, he went nuts. In The Doctor’s case I think he felt the responsibility of his potential role. Well, now The Doctor is questioning himself. Is he a good man? He’s been on Skaro as the Daleks were created and had a chance to destroy them all in a moment. But at what cost to the universe? He’s had to save planets, civilizations, and the universe. He’s had people die on his watch. Now Clara is around and cast in the role of his Conscience. Well, if she’s going to be that role, she needs to take on more than just waiting for The Doctor to fix every problem. She has to be worthy as a Conscience, and The Doctor has to trust her judgment. I think Clara came face-to-face with an enormous responsibility and became terrified. And the Doctor saw that her anger was a good step on the road to being a good conscience.