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.