#bc twelve is too cruel and “godly” and not the Doctor

[khruschevshoe]

The Beast Below & Kill The Moon as Foils

The interesting thing to me about The Beast Below and Kill the Moon as episodes is that they operate on a very similar concept: there is a living (very BIG) thing that functions as the only thing that keeps large swathes of humanity safe/alive and they both end with a bit of a cop-out where that Thing stays right where it is but how the themes of those episodes are WILDLY different based on how the Doctor&Companiok interactions play out.

The Beast Below is an exploration of how the Doctor does what is necessary, what he thinks is right and kindest to the most number of people, but that sometimes he is wrong, incredibly wrong, and that it is very essential for him to listen to his companions, to give them a choice, and also that at the end of the day, the Doctor is the Star Whale, he is lonely and pained and kind, that this is the ethos of the show: the Doctor is kind but he really needs to be stopped and reminded of it sometimes (really great parallels with the end of the Runaway Bride/Fires of Pompeii, in a way).

But Kill the Moon is all about how the Doctor is right. How he will always be right. That he knows better than his companions, that he always holds all the cards, that he is cruel to teenage girls and tells them they're not special and knew all along what was going to happen but didn't tell his companion just to see what she would do, but her decision didn't matter at the end of the day, not to him, not to the problem at hand, because the Doctor knows everything and is right and God, disregarding the other major problems with this episode it just leaves a sour taste in my mouth in comparison to the Beast Below. That in this episode, the Doctor is not a god that needs to be reminded of his humanity but a god that is cruel and all-knowing and somehow right in that. I've talked about how the Beast Below embodies the ethos of Doctor Who to me; Kill the Moon, at least in how the Doctor acts, feels like the opposite.

#clara oswald #twelfth doctor #amy pond #eleventh doctor #the beast below #doctor who #meta #listen it's abt getting that Doctor & companion dynamic right #and it's so weird to me that in a season all about Clara becoming more like the Doctor we get this one where she functionally has no agency #kill the moon #clara oswin oswald #I think that is why i like season 9/10 twelfth eoctor so much more than eight #tho i do enjoy dark water/death in heaven to an EXTENT #bc twelve is too cruel and “godly” and not the Doctor #you have to balance cruelty and kindness in the Doctor #the runaway bride #fires of pompeii