Space over kids

October 2022 – a short sequel to 2019’s post on Kill The Moon.

“Second-hand space shuttle, third-hand astronauts.”

“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.”

At one point the Doctor flippantly makes, by any metric, a poor argument against blowing up the Space-Dragon-Chicken: “you might have some very difficult conversations to have with your kids”. Given that the apparent alternative is risking the deaths of said kids, difficult conversations aren’t that scary a prospect. (Some people think difficult conversations with kids should be shut down at all cost, but they tend to be the sort who don’t respect kids’ autonomy at all…I digress.)

Undaunted by this prospect, Lundvik fires back, “I don’t have any kids.” Except this isn’t so much a rebuke to the Doctor’s point, as to his crude assumption that she’d feel threatened by the thought of kids being upset at something done for their own safety. And we know she’s taking kids’ safety into consideration from what she asks Clara later:

“OK, you imagine you’ve got children down there on Earth now, right? Grandchildren, maybe. You want that thing to get out? Kill them all? You want today to be the day life on Earth stopped because you couldn’t make an unfair decision?”

Following that line of logic, however, if Lundvik had kids then surely she’d be more eager to destroy the creature than she already is, not less. Kids represent a degree of personal investment in the Earth. Far from a softening force that would magically make her more defensive of the dragon-chicken, having children can be the exact opposite. Many adults would, and do, happily kill anyone and anything in the name of protecting kids.
So what’s the true significance of her having no kids?

A glaring answer to this question – and a marker of this story’s actual themes – lie in what she’s done with her life instead. She’s an astronaut in a world where astronauts no longer exist.

Did Witch’s Familiar really ruin the Daleks?

Back on my Dalek bullshit again…

This discourse refuses to die, so we need to get the heart of it. During The Witch’s Familiar, Missy neutralises a Dalek patrolling the sewers, then wires Clara into its casing as the new operator. As both a demonstration and twisted experiment, she commands Clara to say some seemingly innocuous phrases, which don’t come out of the Dalek’s speakers the way Clara expected:

MISSY: Say ‘I love you’. Those exact words. Don’t ask me why, just say it.
CLARA: I love you.
DALEK: Exterminate.
MISSY: Say, ‘you are different from me’.
CLARA: You are different from me.
DALEK: Exterminate! Exterminate!

Trapped inside the Dalek, Clara finds it increasingly difficult to communicate when it really matters; later on in the story, she cries “I’m your friend!” and it emerges as “I am your enemy”. Everything she’s trying to say is being warped into things you’d expect a Dalek to say instead.

The problem – the accusation that here Moffat is ‘ruining’ the Daleks, ‘damaging the franchise’, etc. – stems from the assumption that this means the casing is the evil part of a Dalek, and the mutant inside the casing would actually be innocent (even friendly!) without this insidious censorship happening to them. The charge is that Moffat’s trying to make all of Dalek history out to have been the same kind of verbal miscommunication that we see happening to Clara. This would certainly neuter the concept of the Daleks quite a lot, making the mutants redundant and the casings equivalent to autonomous robots.

Bent Sent

On resolving the schism within the Capaldi era’s most famous duology.

Everything You Think You Know Is Lore (And Everything Will Change, Forever More (AGAIN))

Emergency post. [Originally uploaded February 29, 2020 – one day before the airing of Series 12’s finale]

The incumbent Doctor is reaching the climax of their second season in the role. Events set in motion by the Master have brought us to the cusp of discovering an enormous, world-shattering secret – one that promises not only to expose a shocking untold history capable of destroying the Time Lords themselves, but to retroactively recontextualise the entire journey of the show’s central character, answering the question of why this whole adventure truly started. Brand new information, divulged by the antagonist in the second half of a series-opening two-parter, has us asking fevered questions about a mysterious figure from the past and what their cryptic title could mean. A sudden return to Gallifrey at the end of the penultimate episode heralds a reveal that will surely rewrite the lore wholesale, and force us to forever view the Doctor and the Doctor Who apocrypha in a new light.

Kill The Moon is pro-abortion.

LUNDVIK: Oh, you want to talk about babies?. You’ve probably got babies down there now. You want to have babies? […] Okay. You imagine you’ve got children down there on Earth now, right? Grandchildren maybe. You want that thing to get out? Kill them all? You want today to be the day life on Earth stopped because you couldn’t make an unfair decision?

One of the most misunderstood stories in all of Doctor Who (though you can say this about multiple key Clara episodes), Kill the Moon has attracted a number of anti-abortion readings. CatholicVote.org has called it “the most pro-life Doctor Who ever”. I’m not here to point out why this interpretation is superficial and riddled with holes; others have done more than enough of that. Rather, I’m dissatisfied with the usual defences – I don’t think it goes far enough to say that KTM isn’t an anti-abortion episode, or even that it’s a pro-choice episode. I would like to argue that KTM is in fact a pro-abortion episode. Which is to say, it is actively opposed to the ideology of reproduction itself; to any sense of obligation where continuing the species is concerned.

Barn Trilogy (image grid)

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