The Companion Piece is back again, with our brave team ready to don their fetching orange space-suits and venture out into the hostile alien atmosphere of Doctor Who. This week there’s something very wrong with the Moon, an infestation of very large spiders, and one very important decision to make – should we Kill the Moon?
There are spoilers from the start, so stop reading now unless you’ve seen this week’s provocatively titled episode.
So, with that warning out of the way, lets start with the absolute biggest spoiler of them all. Apparently the Moon is an egg. Um… how do we feel about that?



Yup, that’s two bits of stupid science already. This week’s gonna be a tough one. But it’s not the first dumb science in this show, and it certainly won’t be the last!
My main problem was that it’s an inherently silly idea, but the episode tried to play it deadly serious, and I just didn’t buy it.





And the “kills 99% of germs” part.
And there’s another thing. Courtney “Disruptive Influence” Woods was an extremely comedic character last week, yet they’ve shoved her into an episode like this where she had no chance to be funny. She felt wasted.

True, it felt like the Doctor was trying to teach her a very valuable lesson. She was there as a plot device, a little like Clara all last season.
Hopefully next time she’ll have her funny side back on.
We seem to be getting more and more of a good reason why Clara may leave.
She’s certainly going through a few rough patches with the Doctor.

But he does keep a lot of secrets, and I can see how that would drive you crazy. It did seem a little too much and a little too out-of-nowhere though.
But it was fantastically acted, and that may have made it the best part of the episode for me.

I think she was in a way. Compared to Matt Smith’s incarnation, Doctor Capaldi is a lot more uncomfortable around humans.
I agree that it was wonderfully acted and I felt for her. I’d have hated to have been stranded there.
I don’t know about the rest, though. It shows that her relationship with the Doctor has become strained since the regeneration, certainly being left there on their own would have been the last straw. Especially when you consider what’s happened over the last few episodes.


She has, but then last week for example she felt again like she was being kept in the dark. Don’t forget their argument over Mr Pink as well.
All adds to the tension, methinks.


It was kinda good to see The Doctor leave it to Clara and the humans to make the decision this time, though, instead of doing it himself.
The thing is, he could’ve just gone forward a bit in time and, if they made the wrong decision, come back in time to stop them.
Heck, he could have just left and disarmed the nuclear warheads physically…
Can’t cross his own timestream. But, yikes, lets not get into a mechanics-of-timetravel discussion about a programme that changes its rules every other week!
As for letting humanity decide for themselves – isn’t introducing two hand-picked humans who shouldn’t ever have been there in the first place kind of cheating?
Things would have gone completely differently if the Doctor never passed through, whether he “directly interfered” or not. He still changed the outcome.
I guess you could call it cheating, yet it felt like the Doctor really wanted to teach them a lesson. Perhaps building up for a later event.
He knew more than he was letting on. That’s for sure.




And Capaldi almost in tears talking about it. Great stuff.
…except that he said it while looking at a space-dragon that they shouldn’t have been able to see in the daytime laying an identical new moon-egg offscreen to explain the continuity. The stupid stuff really distracted me from the good stuff in this one.
I can totally see that. Although I can’t remember if that day in history had even been mentioned before (that the moon “hatched”).
I feel like it could have been, but it might have been just a throwaway comment.




No, I picked up on that as well. Although that was the least problematic thing for me.
What is it with “antibodies” this season…






It felt like they were only there to give the Doctor a reason to vanish for two minutes and discover that the Moon was an egg.
I’d actually have much rather watched the Doctor crawling around inside the Moon and making that discovery but, again, glossed over really quickly.



Well, it might have been a bit too similar to The Satan Pit, I suppose. Especially since they were wearing the same space-suits!
Nice callback, I thought.




Yep. Noticed that too!
It also means that the Timelords must be immortal but choose not to be.

Crazy theory time: Does the Doctor now being immortal have anything to do with the sudden appearance of a mysterious “afterlife” where people kinda regenerate when they die?
Did the Timelords break death?


Ok, final topic. I’m a little worried about bringing this up, because I’m fairly certain I’m going to stick my foot in my mouth. But I feel like we need to cover it anyway…
Do we think this episode was about abortion?

It did seem like man wasn’t afraid to kill an unborn alien just to prevent egg shells from falling the skies even worse then what happened to the dinosaurs.

See, that’s weird to me, because after the Doctor left “womankind” alone to decide the fate of an unhatched creature, it seemed like a really intentional message, and it coloured the whole episode for me.
Coupled with all the “tell Courtney she’s special” stuff, and how “unique” and “beautiful” everyone kept saying the creature was, it just left a really unpleasant taste in my mouth.
I understand that I’m possibly reading into it in a weird and unintentional way, but the episode honestly seemed to scream this message at me.

I can see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think they had that intention in mind. I could be wrong though.
It’s really weird to have that analogy in there. Doctor Who has never really tackled a message like abortion in that way before…
Would that mean that the Doctor is pro-choice (because he left the decision for others)?
That moment certainly felt that way, but the rest of the episode can’t seem to make up its mind.
It could be read as Clara making her own choice instead of letting society dictate it to her (pro-choice) – or it could be read as Clara making the decision for everyone else against their wishes, saving the “baby” (and they did call it that) at any cost and regardless of the risks (pro-life).
To me it felt more like the second one, but maybe they were going for the first.
This episode did leave me out in the cold – which is interesting because I usually like the difficult moral quandaries (it was the reason I was actually willing to give the “darker” Doctor a go). But I think, in general, it was the science aspect that put me off.
I feel like the Doctor does need to start developing a bit more too – we need to see him thaw. Because all the best characters start off with flaws and they grow over the series, and the Doctor shouldn’t be an exception.

I quite enjoyed the episode, it wasn’t the strongest. Yet it had an interesting twist and we got to see the Doctor and Clara’s relationship hit even rockier ground. It was wonderfully acted.
I would have liked to have seen more of the spiders and what the Doctor saw for himself down the hole, though.
This episode was a difficult one for me. There’s stuff in here that I honestly loved – the hopeful and inspiring message about space-exploration chief among them, but also the really strong acting and the powerful atmosphere and design. But the serious tone never really matched up with the ludicrous premise or the incredibly rushed nature of the story.
Maybe I still could have enjoyed it despite that, but the whole episode was eventually eclipsed for me by its very loud and very unfortunate subtext. The message, however you read it, was so overpowering that I honestly can’t judge the episode on its own merits now, and that sucks.
There’s a moment near the end, where Clara is yelling at the Doctor and he’s just utterly confused and doesn’t know what to think. And that’s how I felt about Kill the Moon.
What about you, readers? Did you pick up on any weird messages, or are we reading too much into things? Did you enjoy this one, or was the dodgy science too much? Let us know, as always, via the comments below, on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, or by switching your lights on and off so we can see them from space.
That’s it from The Companion Piece, but we’ll be back next week when, judging from the trailers, there seems to be a suspicious absence of Clara. How will Capaldi manage in his first solo adventure? Find out, here, when he faces a Mummy on the Orient Express!