dw 08x07: kill the moon
Well, this turned out to be a rather divisive episode. Me? I actually liked the episode a lot more than I thought I would. I loved that the Doctor stepped back because this was a choice humanity had to make on their own and he knew that. It’s a nice change from Ten and his highhandedness when it comes to letting people make their own choices, for example. It was a bit of what I saw in Twelve in Time Heist, and I appreciated seeing it again in this episode. However.
Clara was frustrating to me in this episode, and I’m speaking as someone who loves her. I think part of my issue is that it seems to me that they’re doing this arc of hers getting fed up with the Doctor too quickly. It’s like, they decided they needed this for her character before Jenna Coleman left, so they’re shoehorning it in left and right. And another part of the issue, for me, is that I’ve just finished the Big Finish Seventh Doctor trilogy Protect and Survive/Black and White/Gods and Monsters, and I can’t help but compare Clara with Hex’s distrust of the Doctor. And it just comes up flat.
Which isn’t fair, really, because Hex’s arc with the Doctor up until that point was one that stretched back eight years and seventeen 2-hour audios, but when Hex doubts the Doctor, you know it’s for good reason because of everything he’s gone through with him. Everything from his mother, to realizing that the Doctor being there doesn’t necessarily always make things better, to being cursed just as his name suggests. When Hex doubts that the Doctor will come for him and Ace during Protect and Survive, those are doubts that are earned through the Doctor’s actions towards and as observed by Hex, and the audience is fully aware of them.
With Clara on the other hand, her outburst doesn’t feel earned. It’s there for the sake of drama. I don’t see the set-up. How does Clara go from believing that the Doctor will always have her back in Deep Breath, to not knowing if he’s a good man but that he tries to be in Into the Dalek, to this? We know that there’s at least a year between those events and this one, so what happened? What has the Doctor done to make Clara lose her faith in him so completely? Yes, the events for this episode is a horrible one for Clara, but how is it the one that broke the camel’s back? The emotional follow-through from Deep Breath to Kill the Moon is lacking. Or is it that the events of The Caretaker and what Danny told her in the end planted doubts in her mind and she decided in Kill the Moon that those doubts were right? If that’s the case, it would have been better to have an episode in between to showcase some of those doubts. That, I think, would have made the impact of Clara’s speech much more. Instead, it seems like the Doctor fell down off his pedestal once and she’s going to judge him forever for that.
Clara was frustrating to me in this episode, and I’m speaking as someone who loves her. I think part of my issue is that it seems to me that they’re doing this arc of hers getting fed up with the Doctor too quickly. It’s like, they decided they needed this for her character before Jenna Coleman left, so they’re shoehorning it in left and right. And another part of the issue, for me, is that I’ve just finished the Big Finish Seventh Doctor trilogy Protect and Survive/Black and White/Gods and Monsters, and I can’t help but compare Clara with Hex’s distrust of the Doctor. And it just comes up flat.
Which isn’t fair, really, because Hex’s arc with the Doctor up until that point was one that stretched back eight years and seventeen 2-hour audios, but when Hex doubts the Doctor, you know it’s for good reason because of everything he’s gone through with him. Everything from his mother, to realizing that the Doctor being there doesn’t necessarily always make things better, to being cursed just as his name suggests. When Hex doubts that the Doctor will come for him and Ace during Protect and Survive, those are doubts that are earned through the Doctor’s actions towards and as observed by Hex, and the audience is fully aware of them.
With Clara on the other hand, her outburst doesn’t feel earned. It’s there for the sake of drama. I don’t see the set-up. How does Clara go from believing that the Doctor will always have her back in Deep Breath, to not knowing if he’s a good man but that he tries to be in Into the Dalek, to this? We know that there’s at least a year between those events and this one, so what happened? What has the Doctor done to make Clara lose her faith in him so completely? Yes, the events for this episode is a horrible one for Clara, but how is it the one that broke the camel’s back? The emotional follow-through from Deep Breath to Kill the Moon is lacking. Or is it that the events of The Caretaker and what Danny told her in the end planted doubts in her mind and she decided in Kill the Moon that those doubts were right? If that’s the case, it would have been better to have an episode in between to showcase some of those doubts. That, I think, would have made the impact of Clara’s speech much more. Instead, it seems like the Doctor fell down off his pedestal once and she’s going to judge him forever for that.