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.

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.

Series 5-10 (image grid)

Click for full size (6400 x 4320).

The Barn Trilogy one seems to have been enthusiastically received on Tumblr, so have this other, much larger, infinitely less shareable grid I made a while back for each Moffat series. I cheated and included specials where I felt it was warranted. (Kerblam Chibshow is still coming, be patient.)

Series 8 and Series 9 are the peak of NuWho

Originally posted to try and rile some people. It is more or less my real opinion, though.

[March 5, 2018]

Series 8 and Series 9 is the best two-season run of the post-2005 series and in the top 5 of the show overall. What Moffat, Minchin, Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman achieved in those two seasons – in the context of televised Doctor Who – is unbelievable. The thematic ambition of S8 alone is jaw-dropping even if you don’t factor where it led in S9. It takes a sheer brassness of balls to turn everyone’s favourite wacky kids’ adventure show into a slow-burning, obsessive character-study of addiction, lies, grief, and toxic power dynamics, driven by the sheer skill of the two lead performers, but they did it unapologetically. That is what it looks like to execute a single artistic vision and not even give a shit if it’s popular.
In 15 years S8-9 will be spoken of in the same breath as S25 and S26 with McCoy. The shit episodes like Forest of the Night will fade from memory like Battlefield and Silver Nemesis. We will talk about episodes like Listen, Heaven Sent, Witch’s Familiar, Mummy on the Orient Express, Face the Raven, Dark Water, the way we currently talk about Remembrance, Survival, Happiness Patrol, and Ghost Light. (Toss in Extremis and World Enough & Time/The Doctor Falls from S10 if you want to look at Capaldi’s run more generally.)

You’re welcome.

[May 27, 2018]

The Capaldi era, specifically Series 8 and 9, are a golden age of the revived series – and will be consensus viewed as one in under 10 years, similarly to Seasons 25-26 with Sylvester McCoy. The narrative and thematic ambition of them is only matched by Series 1 with Eccleston. Moffat’s partnership with Minchin, Capaldi and Coleman triggered a creative renaissance which threw out the tired conventions of NuWho in favour of an unprecedented focus on characterisation and deconstruction. Clara is the most fascinating and complex companion of the revived series, and the Twelfth Doctor is perhaps the greatest ever.

[June 26, 2018]

[Capaldi’s] third season is significantly weaker than his first two. S10’s structure completely falls apart in the middle and it only recovers for the finale, it’s running on less thought-through ideas/characters and bears the unpolishedness of a fatigued showrunner who had planned on quitting a year sooner.

By contrast, S8 and S9 will be viewed by future generations as NuWho’s equivalent of Classic 25-26, which is to say an unusually ambitious era grossly misunderstood by viewers at the time, containing some of the show’s richest ever storytelling and one of its finest lead actor duos.

[…]
Moffat should have been given Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman and Brian Minchin as collaborators from the beginning of his tenure, so we wouldn’t have had to wait through 4 years of fumbling to get to his best overall work on the show. Though it could be said that S8-9 were only possible because of the conceptual developments made beforehand during Smith’s run, so perhaps not even that.
Regardless, The Day of the Doctor through The Husbands of River Song is the peak of his tenure and a golden period that the show would be significantly worse without.

[NOTE ADDED IN POST: I was unfair to Battlefield, that’s not really a bad one.]