Fixing Kill The Moon

This could get interesting....

Just bin the fucking script and forget it ever happened....

You can't mend Kill The Moon!

Indrid Mercury wrote:Just bin the fucking script and forget it ever happened....

Actually, come to think of it, not much happened in it that proved to be of actual consequence in the long run. A big deal was made of Clara being done with the Doctor, and yet the next story they're back travelling together like nothing happened anyway.

It turned out to be quite a pointless bit of sound and fury.

It looked nice. That's about all I can say for it.

I seem to remember Hermione Norris impressing - but that was the only good thing about it.

Keep the first half - i.e., Doctor lands, base is under seige, the spidery bits.

But bin the second half i.e., when we find out the earth is actually an egg and Clara holds a global referendum on her I-Phone to decide what to do. Rather, just let things kick off with the Spiders attacking the earth base. Thousands of spders laying siege to the base, full scale war, lots of death and destruction.

I think some school kid tagged along in FatMoff's version. Well write her out.

Perhaps everyone on the base dies. No survivors at the end just the Doctor and Clara walking across the moonscape towards the Tardis. If the kid is still hanging around at this point the Doctor could shoot her in the face with the blaster and walk on. The Doctor could make some poignant comment as they walk which sums up the desperation of the encounter and the sadness of the lives lost.

Another option would be to write out the spiders and make it a Cyberman story. Okay accusations of plagiarising Moonbase could be made but that woudn't bother me. Moonbase was 50 years ago.

You can't fix what already broke

How could one fix this bollocks? Just forget its existence- the fact that the Doctor and Clara completely ignore the events of this story going forward gives this story no reason to exist, and quite rightly too.

The best sci-fi and fantasy ideas like classic Who, the 1st MiB and the original Matrix all have a kind of alternate logic & plausibility to them that drives the imagination - whereas even the daftest child would never look at the moon and think it might actually be a fucking egg!

And for me that's the fundamental difference between old and Nu Who.

Don't write it in the first place.

I would at least attempt a fix this way.

Courtney is a big problem with the story, because she feels like she's only there for the sake of propagandizing about the need to be new age and sensitive with the youth, even when they're being complete sociopaths.

So I would *try* and contrive some other reason for her to be brought along than the whole "you said I wasn't special, you destroyed me when you said that". Because nothing about it feels genuine. I kept thinking she was going to reveal it was a bit of a pity-play to get her own selfish way, and when I realized it wasn't, I felt stupid for crediting the writers better, and it's horrible to see the Doctor having to be lectured by the young people about being a nicer curmudgeon.

(It reminds me a bit of the early Blair years where there were some real namby-pamby proposal to discourage youth delinquents by offering them free Robbie Williams concert tickets if they behave for a while. I remember Angus Deayton on HIGNFY calling it 'Operation Youwin')

For instance why couldn't it simply be that she wants to prove she's made of tougher steel after vomiting in the Tardis last time? It could be a nice comment on the youthful follies of thinking one has to be seen as macho all the time.

I would cut out the lines of dialogue every time a crewman dies telling us they had some family back home or something to make us belatedly care. They just stick out as really ham-fisted.

Going back to Courtney, I would not have her take Clara's side about sparing the baby. It just seems more realistic all round that she'd definitely be more in the 'kill the thing, whatever it is!' camp. Partly because it's the Gamer mindset, and partly because there's just no way I see that Courtney has any reason to care. It's an alien creature, and she's been told it's a threat to Earth. I don't think she would understand it any other way.

The only reason I see she says "it's a baby" is to at once show that Courtney isn't all bad (or has been made 'better' by travelloing with the Doctor), and to tell us to care about the baby's fate and to effectively shame all the characters who don't. It really is the worst of New Who's 'from the mouth of babes' moments.

Remove it, and the story might've at least felt more authentic. Also it would give Clara more than one member of the opposition camp to have to justify herself against.

The Doctor's adolescent strop where he ditches Clara just to prove a point just never made sense to me and felt too forced. I would have the Doctor instead decide that they both have to leave and must have no part in influencing the decision the astronauts make, for causality's sake (maybe pointing out that the very act of Clara arguing for the baby to live might embitter the mission commander to double down even more on doing the opposite).

Somehow it could happen that Clara refuses to leave (or Courtney does) and.... oh who am I kidding? I can't get the Doctor's choice to leave without Clara to make any sense at all.

The only possible way I can see it working is if Clara is about to leave with him and either runs back out just as he sets the Tardis in flight, or she reaches for some kind of time ring or teleporter device that lands her back on the moon (and the Doctor somehow ends up struggling to correct his flight to get her back).

I would at least try some kind of damage limitation for explaining why the shell of the moon doesn't collide with Earth.

Possibilities:
- The creature flies away with the bulk of the moon still attached to it below its neckline/it's own gravitational mass keeps the shell pieces relatively in its orbit as it moves, and away from Earth's.
- The creature fully eats the shell pieces before they can hit Earth.

That's all I've got really.

Also, Capaldi really needs to lose some of the adolescent swagger in his final scene with Clara.

There's no fixing Kill the Moon. Could use the script to line my cat box ...