In "Kill the Moon" we follow the Doctor, Clara, and her student Courtney to the Moon in the year 2049. There is something wrong with the Moon, something big, something that's making the tides of Earth go haywire, and has strengthened the Moon's own gravity to the point it's as good as equal to Earth's. What exactly is it that's happened?
It's hard to discuss this episode without giving away the major reveals of it, so I'm not even going to try. If you haven't watched the episode, and you don't know what's going to happen, stop reading. I'll give you a few sentences worth of fluff so you don't accidentally see the next sentence and end up being spoiled. Are you gone now? You should be. It turns out, the Moon isn't a moon. It's the egg of a giant, celestial being, and it's about to hatch. This brings an important ethical question to the table, do they kill it to ensure life on Earth continues on? Or do they risk it in favour of not instantly killing what might be the most amazing life form in the universe? The initial plan was to blow pieces of the Moon off, decreasing its mass and hopefully causing its effects on Earth to stabilise.
Although there are a lot of fluff and uninteresting bits in this episode leading up to the reveal of the egg (giant germ spiders, the Moon not containing any minerals, and more) this is a really great episode. The Doctor gets his regenerational definition in terms of how he deals with humans, each regeneration deals in their own way, albeit mostly just minor differences between them. This Doctor likes to let the humans decide a lot. He won't let his own interference mess with the decisions that will lay humanity on its path for the next several millennia, he wants us to decide for ourselves, set our own paths. But in doing so he loses Clara. She's all of a sudden slung into making history altering decisions, she's literally hovering her finger above the button that will change it all, and she despises the Doctor for it. He's always been there for her, and when she needs him the most he's gone. It's a nice exploration of what might be to come. The first moment where Clara realises that the Doctor won't always be there, that he won't always be nice to her, or necessarily do what is best for humanity. And she can't handle it.
Overall this is a good episode, but perhaps not an overly rememberable one. The goofy b-film plot of the first half, with a deserted Moon base overrun by alien bugs, doesn't quite set the viewer up for what they're going to get. It seems like it will be just another monster-of-the-week story, when it really isn't. They should've spent more time on the egg, revealed that early and made the rest of the story deal with them dealing with it. It would've been a lot more interesting.
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