Kill the Moon: Who Was Right? Thoughts & Your Vote
Guest contributor Richard Forbes offers some thoughts. Plus poll results with who you sided with.
The Dispute
Kill the Moon provided many dilemmas for our beloved main characters – the title character, the Doctor was faced with a terrible choice of whether to intervene or not, while humanity and, by extension, Clara and Courtney were faced with the awful decision of whether to destroy the moon (and an innocent life) or let an innocent hatchling threaten all of human civilization.
For Clara, her decision to stop the detonation was an act of compassion that would soon be rewarded, while for the Doctor, his decision to abandon Clara and Courtney, would leave them with a terrible decision to make and threaten his friendship with Clara altogether.
In the Doctor’s mind, his decision to leave Clara was justified, while in Clara’s mind, it was a cruel, callous thing to do – uncharacteristic of the Doctor. Some of us when we saw the final “argument” scene in Kill the Moon may have instantly sympathized with one side or another – I know I did. The fear here is, however, that we might rush to judgement without fully understanding where the other character is “coming from”. Before deciding who is “right”, we first need to explore either side’s perspective on the matter more deeply – fortunately, that’s what DWTV is for!
The Doctor’s Perspective
Christmas Day, 2005. After watching helplessly as the Sycorax ignited into a fireball in the sky, the Doctor scorned the British Prime Minister and sought her political demise. The Prime Minister would defend her actions as “National Defense” – decrying the Doctor as an “alien threat” for threatening to intervene. The question of whether the Doctor was asserting himself too much as a paternalistic, moral authority– even nannying humanity – would resurface throughout the Tenth Doctor’s era, while the Monarch would create Torchwood in Tooth and Claw in response to these concerns, Torchwood too (under Yvonne Hartman) would clash heads with the Doctor on similar lines in Army of Ghosts / Doomsday.
In Kill the Moon, the Doctor does what has always been the most difficult thing for him to do: not interfering. He suggests to Clara that this is “him” maturing – letting humanity decide its fate for itself, even if he feels that the choice is an unwise one. For example, throughout Kill the Moon we are led to think that the Doctor is simply callous and uncaring in regards to Courtney, especially as he expects her to carry through a very dangerous, serious crisis. On the contrary, it might simply be that the Doctor believes he is showing the ultimate sign of respect to Courtney by not judging her on what she is and isn’t capable of doing – later too, Courtney would ask to return to the action.
Letting humanity to decide its fate for itself may – in the Doctor’s mind – be an offer of respect that he felt he owed to humanity.
Clara’s Perspective
When Clara and the Doctor first began their adventures in The Rings of Akhaten, the Doctor would tell her there was one thing that she needed to know (apart from the blue box and the two hearts): “we don’t walk away”. How then was she supposed to react when the Doctor told her in Kill the Moon, “we don’t do anything” and abandoned her to make a final decision without his help? the Doctor’s behaviour here comes not only as a major disappointment to Clara, but as an embarrassment as well – given Lundvik’s “prat” comment went unchallenged.
For someone who she knows can do better, it must be utterly frustrating for Clara to see others (even her own boyfriend) think of the Doctor as a cold-hearted leader…
Clara: Underneath it all, he isn’t really like that.
Psi: It’s very obvious that you’ve been with him for a while.
Clara: Why?
Psi: Because you are really good at the excuses.
Leaving Clara to decide the whole fate of humanity must have been, not only unexpected, but utterly terrifying for her – nobody deserves to have to make such an impossible decision. By leaving her, the Doctor was escaping responsibility for the decision and not living up to his own promise to be neither cruel nor cowardly, but moreover, he was not being a good friend to Clara, because friends don’t simply leave friends on their own when they need their help. There were many times where the Doctor has asked for Clara’s help and guidance – The Day of the Doctor comes to mind – and never would Clara have considered responding, “it’s your planet, not mine.”
Who’s Right?
If Deep Breath was about accepting the Doctor, the future of Clara’s relationship, I believe, will focus on taking more care in understanding the Doctor.
As a friend she was too hasty in judging the Doctor’s behavior as cold and selfish and, although the Doctor himself is not the kind of person to start such a dialogue, she could take a more pro-active approach in trying to understand why he would leave her in such a manner.
She has watched the Doctor stand face to face with an entire sun to lecture it and fight for thousands of years to save a village he hardly knew – could she really think that it would be “easy” for the Doctor, The Man Who Stayed For Christmas, Her Best Friend, to just leave her like that in a bind and not take the initiative to save an innocent creature and Earth too? I suspect that leaving Clara in Kill The Moon might have been one of the hardest decisions that the Doctor has ever made in his life – the wrong decision, mind you, but a hard one nonetheless and she could have made more of an effort to understand why it was he chose to flee the decision.
The Doctor is no less wrong here – leaving Clara on her own placed her in a terrible situation where she had to decide for the rest of humanity whether to kill an innocent creature or threaten the whole of human civilization. That’s not a decision that he would want to make, thus he was very wrong in deferring it to Clara and expecting her to make it for him and everyone else. Plus, he did all of this in a rude and nasty manner which showed little empathy towards Clara, Courtney, Lundvik or “womankind”.
This is not the least of the Doctor’s problems though – although he might like to think as though his behaviour was the result of his ethics ‘maturing’ since “The Christmas Invasion” or “The Beast Below” … to the contrary, his beliefs have unravelled in doubt and self-hatred (a Post-Trenzalore development no doubt) and the outcome has been ruinous. the Doctor has been operating on a warped sense of what is right. Bearing in mind that not all of the “mistakes” that he lamented in Deep Breath were in fact mistakes, it may take the compassionate, sensible voice of a friend to remind him of who the Doctor is. the Doctor might not be a “warrior” or a “hero”, but he is never cruel or cowardly and he is most definitely a good man.
It never matter whether millions of earthlings turned their lights off to condemn an innocent creature to its death, because it was never their decision to make anymore than it was Clara’s or the Doctor’s even. No matter how popular some courses of action may be, there are lines which should never be crossed. Minorities, like the Moon’s “baby”, have rights which are non-negotiable. Lundvik chastises Clara for not being able to make an “unfair decision” but Clara is absolutely justified in refusing to choose an unfair course of action in the face of relative uncertainty. the Doctor’s intervention here would not be based on paternalism since paternalism implies that you are denying others the chance to decide what they ought to decide for themselves. The only individual with a genuine right to decide the course of action in Kill the Moon was never in the room: the Moon itself! That is what the Doctor is – that is what the Doctor has always been: a voice for those with no voice, be it the oppressed or the weak.
Nobody consulted the Moon or the Sycorax on whether they wished to be burnt from the sky, nor did anyone from “Ood Operations” consult the Ood about their enslavement – same goes for the humanity under the Dalek occupation. the Doctor has always been there to get it “right” even when it is seemingly impossible to get it “right”, but during this story… he wasn’t.
Fortunately, this won’t be the last moral dilemma that the Doctor faces and when the next dilemma comes, I hope he listens to his friend and companion’s advice once again.
Even when the Doctor has not believed in himself, Clara has – and I reckon our supposedly “callous” Doctor needs her support more than ever before.
Who you chose…
Last week Doctor Who TV asked you to pick a side by voting in our poll. This was a close vote as you might expect, but in the end 56.17% chose to back the Doctor.
Lights on or off?
We also placed you in Earth’s shoes and asked you to vote on the dilemma of whether to leave the lights on or off. This was an even closer one, but in the end 52.81% chose to leave the lights on, thus letting the creature live.
