‘Doctor Who’ season 8, episode 7 review: Did Clara decide to kill the moon?

We have to admit that for a good percentage of this weekend’s “Doctor Who” episode, we had a hard time even watching it. We are not the biggest fan of spiders, especially of the giant and destructive variety. Therefore, we hoped for nothing more from “Kill the Moon” than that the spiders would go away.

Luckily, the second half of the episode turned up the action, and posed some pretty interesting questions: Would Clara go so far as to kill one creature to better the future of others? What probably made this all the more complicated was that this said creature was the Moon itself, built of eggshells and preparing to hatch into something that could destroy all.

Clara asked people of Earth to make a decision, and they seemingly chose to destroy it. However, at the end of the day Jenna Coleman’s character chose to take a different path, which showed her sense of morality and her decision to trust that there is always another way. There was almost a fairy-tale quality to what happened next; while the Moon eventually did hatch into some sort of dragon-like creature, it didn’t really harm anyone. Then, a new Moon was born in its place.

Throughout the episode, there really was not that much that happened beyond the incidents with the Moon itself. The big impact of this episode was how this story formed a giant fissure between the Doctor and Clara. She didn’t appreciate being constantly lied to about anything, and being kept in the dark to make a decision, just because he had faith that she would make the “right” choice about her own future. For once, Clara actually stood up for herself after being toyed with by the Doctor, and she felt that way on behalf of humanity.

So there we have it: The moment many may have been waiting for when it came to these two. Clara finally made a choice for her, and now, it comes down to whether or not the Doctor really wants to fix things. We’ll just have to wait and see on that. Grade: B+.

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Photo: BBC