Daily Archives: April 5, 2015

I hate this episode : “Kill The Moon”, Doctor Who

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Recently, Daily/Nightly taking the week off had led to my roomie Joe and I have watching the first Peter Capaldi season of Doctor Who on DVD. And for the most part, it’s been good.

I like Capaldi as Doctor Who. He makes make the Doctor seem natural and easy. And he successfully projects both sides of the Doctor, the crusader for good and the insensitive jackass. The Doctor has always had problems with his people skills, some Doctors more than others, but Capaldi seems able to give us a fuller, richer picture of the Doctor, warts and all.

Mostly, it’s the eyebrows.

But recently, I watched an episode called Kill The Moon and it made me so goddamned mad that I just have to rant about it.

Here’s the scenario : Doctor Who and his current companion Clara have ended up on the Moon in 2045. They discover that, for some reason, the moon has gotten heavier, and that’s causing all kind of problems down on Earth, what with the tides and stuff.

Honestly, the Moon’s effects go way deeper than the tides. There’s evidence that it is the way the moon’s gravity tugs on the molten core of the Earth that both keeps it molten and causes the Earth to have a magnetic field to protect us from all the space nastiness out there like the solar wind.

But hey, since when does a science fiction show care about science?

Anyhow, it turns out that the Moon has put on weight because it is actually the egg of a gigantic space creature, and soon, the egg will hatch, destroying the Moon in the process, and killing all of humanity from the tidal effects and the giant pieces of Moon that will come hurtling towards us and hit with the force of a billion Tunguska impacts

Throughout the episode, they take pains to establish that the human race has not colonized space yet, so that is the sum total of humanity down there on Earth. And in the cold opening, they show Clara earnestly asking all of humanity to help her make an important decision that will effect all humanity forever.

Because you see, as it turns out, Clara and one other human (yet another of an endless series of Resting Bitch Face actresses on the show) have the means to kill this creature before it dooms all of humanity.

And the big question is : should they?

Seriously. That’s the question. Gee, should we save the human race by killing this thing? Gee, that’s a toughie.

Wait, no it isn’t. it’s the easiest fucking question ever. Kill the thing! Sure, it means the taking of an innocent life, but the people down on Earth are just as innocent and there are a hell of a lot more of them.

But no, the Doctor leaves the decision up to Clara and RBF woman, and they manage to patch into every single TV on Earth to ask that humanity vote by turning their lights off if they want to live and leaving them on if they want the creature to live instead of them for some reason.

Because you can see that kind of thing from the Moon. Probably.

Understandably, humanity votes to live. And it really seems like they are going to do the right thing and kill the star beast before it can doom humanity, but at the very last second, Clara ignores democracy and lets the thing live.

And what do you suppose happens next? Why, humanity is doomed and Clara kills herself for being the stupidest person ever.

Just kidding. Via what is literally the largest deus ex machina ever, it turns out the very lovely space creature leaves behind an egg that is identical to our Moon from before all this bullshit, and somehow, this means everything is okay and that Clara did the right thing.

Except she really, really, really didn’t. All evidence from all sources told her that saving the creature meant dooming all of humanity, and the fact that it magically (and stupidly) happened to work out doesn’t change the fact that she made the wrong choice, in fact, the wrongest choice ever.

As if to mock me, they even had RBF woman repeatedly saying something like “morality isn’t always about being nice!”.

Exactly! The episode should have been the perfect object lesson for that. But people cannot accept that truth, and so the entire universe of Doctor Who has to bend over backward so far it can kiss its navel just to protect people from the logical consequences of their refusal to get their hands dirty.

What Clara did was doom humanity rather than do something that made her feel icky. It was an entirely selfish decision : her moral comfort over the fate of every single human being alive and the continued existence of the human race.

It doesn’t get much more selfish than that.

Not to mention the extraordinary stupidity of the idea that a newborn creature can have the entire mass of the egg it came out of inside it already. Just imagine a baby chick laying an egg identical to the one it just came out of, the egg that by the most basic of all logic has to be bigger than the thing which is going to hatch out of.

Plus, there was two minutes of episode or so where there WAS NO MOON. You know, the very thing that was going to doom humanity. Apparently, universal doom politely waited for two minutes so we could get our act together.

And there’s still huge chunks of our former Moon headed straight for Earth.

It’s as bad as that episode of Torchwood where they blew up some scientists who were on the verge out inventing the cure for everything (alien tech was involved) just because the scientists’ methods involved kidnapping innocent people and doing involuntary and painful science to them.

I swear, these episodes are designed to piss me off. They are like a giant middle finger to utilitarianism and the truths it contains. Sometimes the right choice doesn’t feel right. It goes against our basic, day to day sense of morality. Most of the time, “don’t do bad things, only do nice things” works as a functional morality.

But that doesn’t negate the truth that the moral choice is not always the one that makes you feel good. I would kill that fucking space creature in a heartbeat, and feel no regret. Being a morally and mentally intact person, I would actually feel pretty good about saving the entire human race. I wouldn’t like killing the creature and I would wish things could have been different, but I would not regret what I had done at all.

Because I would have done the right goddamned thing.

God, I hate that episode.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The Thief Of Afternoons

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I have been napping in the afternoon again.

This would not normally be noteworthy, but I recently had a good streak going of sleepless afternoons, and I was enjoying that. It was nice to be able to be up all day and sleep only at night. It felt right.

But no, I am back to sleeping in the afternoons. Sometimes it feels like I have no choice, like I am just too sleepy to do anything else and so naptime it is.

But other times, I feel like I chose it. I could have roused myself to a higher state of alertness, but I chose to do what was easier and go back to sleep. And I don’t like that.

I want to live, damn it. Not spend my days in suspended animation.

But I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. [1] There may be other factors involved. Today, for instance, is the day after I stayed up till 5 am watching videos with Le Gang, and so that might just have had an effect. Plus, it is always possible that there is something circadian going on due to the change of season and the longer days. Maybe I am still adjusting.

But as you wonderful readers know, I find it depressing to sleep so much. It steals my life away. I was doing well for a while with the whole needing to find something to do because I am not going to sleep thing, and it sucks to have backtracked.

It’s hardly fatal, though. I will get back on my feet again. And I will get my life moving.

Actually, I have already done that, in a way. Big announcement : I have applied to Kwantlen for that creative writing thing.

Sadly, there were no slots open until the Fall, so I won’t actually be starting school till September. And I am still not sure how long it will take. From what I can gather from the website, it can’t be more than a two semester program, and yet other places on the website say it’s a two year program.

If it really does take two years, that might be a dealbreaker. I am not getting any younger and I would prefer to be able to apply to VFS, certificate in hand, before 2017. By then, I will be 44, and by the time I was done the VFS program, I would be 45, and that would suck taint.

Most importantly, I would be worried about keeping my motivation to go to VFS for that long. I am the kind of guy who loses focus as easily as people lose umbrellas, and two years is an awfully long time relative to that.

So if it turns out that, somehow, taking one single semester course and two double semester courses takes two years, I will likely back out of the associates program and find something swifter.

I want to go to VFS and learn to write for film and television! Mostly television.

Oh, and I fucked up and won’t have meds for half of tomorrow. I thought I had enough of my non-psychoactive meds (Januvia, Metformin, Glyburide, Lipitor) to last me till Monday, but I was off by half a day.

And I absolutely cannot get these particular meds before Monday because only my local pharmacy, the Medicine Shoppe, has the relevant prescriptions on file.

So in the future, I will know that it is far better to have the prescription in my possession than to leave it on file with a pharmacy, or at least, not the Medicine Shoppe and their not being open on Sundays.

Like the Asian dudes who work there need time off for church on Sunday. [2]

What else… oh, I got an email from the Stand Up For Mental Health people saying they would be taking in new students in May and asking if I was still interested.

And at first I didn’t know, because I didn’t know when I would be starting at Kwantlen. But now that I know I won’t be starting til the fall, hell yeah I’m interested!

Something to teach mental health patients to do standup comedy so we can use standup comedy for better mental health? That sounds like it was made for me!

Now, obviously, I already can do comedy. I’m a funny dude. And learning to write material for standup will be only slightly different, in the grand scheme of things, than the skit writing I have done in the past. And I could probably figure out the basics of how to do standup just from all the standup comedy I have seen over the years.

The real benefit will be that it will force me to get out of the apartment, get my ass to a certain place at a certain time, and most importantly, deal with meeting and getting along with a group of strangers with whom I may have nothing in common except for the comedy thing.

That’s the real challenge for me. I may well have to do the sort of free form socializing that I fear the most. There might be group work. There might be pairing off. There might be any number of social pitfalls that I haven’t even thought of. It will not be a safe thing to do.

And that’s just what I need. Risk… but not too much of it. After all, these people all have mental health issues, and I am guessing the slight majority of them will be fellow depressives[3], so I will have that much in common with them. And it will be all/mostly about comedy, and that’s a subject I am extremely comfortable with.

Perhaps TOO comfortable. (dramatic STING!)

I guess that’s the local update. Hopefully I will come up with something else to write about tomorrow.

After all, even the most self-involved neurotic gets tired of talking about themselves now and then!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. I mean, I am… hut I shouldn’t be.↵
  2. Yes, pedants, I know there are plenty of Asian Christians, so calm down and take your meds.↵
  3. There’s so many of us. What’s with that?↵