Let’s pretend I’ve sent you on a blind date with the human equivalent of Kill the Moon. (We can choose any gender that takes your fancy, but for this example, let’s say the walking, talking embodiment of this story is a he). He walks in the room, and he’s all you could ever want: handsome, fit, well dressed and with, as Steven Moffat would say, the smile of a bastard. Hoo boy, you might think. This is going to be fun.

We’ll check in later to see how it goes.

*****

One site I refer to frequently is Chrissie’s Transcript Site. It’s packed with painstaking transcripts of every Doctor Who episode and some other show called Star Trek, which I’ve never heard of.

It’s of ongoing use to me to jog my memory of the episodes I cover in this blog, and every so often, there’s a sly little comment hidden within, just to spice things up a bit. Here’s how Chrissie ends her recounting of Kill the Moon, quietly pointing out a final piece de resistance of implausibility, in this already deeply unlikely story.

Clara goes home with her shopping and pours herself a glass of red wine, then looks out of the window at the impossibly big full moon with exactly the same crater markings as the old one.

I love that sentence’s quiet disdain. It captures a widespread frustration with Kill the Moon, that its fantastical idea of the Moon being an egg housing a giant but hitherto undetected creature, is just too unbelievable to maintain credulity. But if we’re going to get anything out of this taut, nervy adventure, we have to put aside the shakiness of its premise.

Because scientific inaccuracy is a pretty weak stick with which to flog a Doctor Who story. I mean, if this is where you want to start criticising Doctor Who, where do you end? Steven Moffat, on an episode of Whovians in 2016, bemoaned people who complained that the show got “some of the science wrong.” (“Some of the science wrong!” he groaned, no doubt thinking of a certain time machine disguised as a police box, bigger on the inside.) And it’s absolutely fair enough to want a Doctor Who story to build a coherent world with some level of internal logic, but to insist too strictly on plausibility would be to rob the series of the imaginative elements that are such a part of its appeal.

And so it is with Kill the Moon, which dares to imagine a moon baby with giant spiders crawling all over it and a world which, when faced with annihilation, sends a second hand space shuttle with a third rate crew to deal with it.

It may be far-fetched, but it’s a work whose inventiveness matches its ambition. And it’s directed with energy and tension to ensure that it’s a heart thumping ride. It does so much right, that it’s hard to condemn it just because it doesn’t know the difference between mass and weight. So let’s put that aside and concentrate on three things it’s trying to do and one it’s not trying to do, but somehow utterly does.

Firstly, it’s trying to be a gloomy sci-fi thriller. This it does well, largely thanks to director Paul Wilmshurst wringing all the scares he can out of dark rooms and leaping spiders but also to writer Peter Harness, who finds new ways of heaping trouble upon trouble. It reaches an apex of unfortunate incidents when the shuttle falls down a ravine with the TARDIS and junior companion Courtney (Ellis George) on board. There’s something unnerving too about the high contrast, monochromatic lunar exterior which means you really do feel that our heroes are in a hostile environment…. Or that they’ve walked on to a more convincing version of The Moonbase.

At about the two thirds mark, the focus suddenly shifts, and the story starts on its second objective: to present a compelling moral dilemma. One of Doctor Who’s recurring images since The Day of the Doctor has been of women threatening to blow things up, and as usual, the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) is around to pontificate a bit. But here, he abruptly sods off, claiming that whether or not to blow up the moonchild is a decision the humans have to make for themselves. With the Doctor gone, the pace drops off, and we’re asked to buy into the debate between Clara (Jenna Coleman) and Ludvik (Hermione Norris). Debates about killing big animals being another Moffat-era motif.

The kill or let live debate helps justify the absurdity of the “big baby thing in the moon” plot. But much as the episode’s first section heaped action upon action, the next act seems to want to build on the unlikeliness of the premise. Because now, Clara wants to put this moral dilemma to an Earth bound vote, convincing people to signal their choice by turning on their lights. Not only does it seem unlikely that everyone on Earth would go for this on short notice – to listen to this random stranger who has mysteriously turned up on the moon – but it’s a vote which only counts people for whom it’s night on Earth. Truth be told, this bugs me more than the moon being an egg.  As our friend Chrissie, in another of her quiet moments of candour, says, “The only visible artificial lights are of course Europe and the Americas. Africa, Asia and Australia don’t get a vote in this.”

So the night owls of planet Earth are put to a test of their compassion, which they fail. Only Clara’s intervention saves little Moonpie from being blown up. The Doctor deigns to return and describe how it’s all going to work out fine because the creature’s benign. It lays another moon and in doing so re-ignites humanity’s appetite for space travel. But with this morality play over, we come to the third of the story’s big ideas: the bust up between Clara and the Doctor.

It’s this closing move which is the most plausible in the whole story. That Clara would finally get sick of the Doctor’s bullshit and call him out seems right on. Because frankly, the Doctor’s been an utter dick this episode. When Clara accuses him of being patronising and disrespectful, it’s hard not to agree with her on each count. Actually, if we’re scratching around for likeable characters in Kill the Moon, we’re in trouble. Between piggish ol’ Doctor, hard nail Ludvik and obnoxious teen Courtney, there’s a real charisma vacuum on this ersatz satellite.

Then on top of all the tall tales, switches of focus and friendships being ruined… there’s an anti-abortion message bubbling under the surface. Harness has said it’s unintentional, but you might think that between him, showrunner Steven Moffat, the script editor, the producer and the director, someone must have twigged and decided to let it go through. Once noticed, it’s hard not to see it; the Doctor, Clara and Courtney all refer to the creature as a baby (thanks again, Chrissie), it hatches from an egg and the correct moral action, as presented, is to let the creature be born. As unintentional allegories go, it’s as blatant as they come and a rare example of Doctor Who coming down strongly on one side of a contentious moral debate.

So what do we end up with? A story that doesn’t know what mass is, forgets that only half the world is dark at any one time, fails to give us a likeable hero to root for and subconsciously comes out as pro-choice. And then ends with a brand new replacement moon that looks just like the old one.

*****

So how’s that date going?

Well, it turns out after talking to that dreamboat of a date for about 45 minutes, you’ve discovered he’s a bit stupid, he’s full of tall tales and just to top things off, he’s a bit of a moraliser. But damn, he looks great. That’s your Kill the Moon, right there.

LINK TO The Hand of Fear: emotional companion farewells.

NEXT TIME… did I mention it also travels in time? We start the adventure of a lifetime with Rose.