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.