SPOILERS AHEAD
World-Building: Shoddy
Characterization: Out of Character on the important bits
Plot: Shoddy
Ok, this episode wasn't completely terrible, I was kind of entertained for the first half and I overlooked the issues I had with it, but then it just became too difficult to suspend my disbelief and also to care.
My biggest gripe with this episode is that I really couldn't care less about any of the characters in this episode including the hatching creature and the billions of people on earth - I certainly didn't care for the grumpy astronaut or even Courtney Woods... If the whole crux of the episode was the moral dilemma of killing the creature vs letting humanity suffer then they should have actually showed us the stakes. Yes, the astonaut said that the earth was suffering, but why couldn't they show some shots of like, crazy tides or people running and screaming on earth or whatever? How hard would it have been?
The other big issue is that they once again skipped all the important character development. After last episode I thought Courtney Woods was going to be amazing. She was just a random kid. All her attitude was gone in the TARDIS. Why couldn't they SHOW her stealing the Doctor's psychic paper and using it at school? How hard would that actually have been? Now weight that against the levels of awesome that would have provided for all characters involved. Also, why and how did Danny just decide he didn't care to check out the TARDIS or try to travel with Clara and would just continue with life as normal? Because as a very curious human being I just can't buy that. Especially if he loves Clara as much as they're trying to tell us he does - why would he just let her go off on these mad adventures without trying to come along and help? It makes no sense.
With no proper character development and no real stakes presented to us it's no wonder I had such a hard time buying all the nonsense-science that was flying in my face out of the screen. The first thing was the spiders. How were they there? How did they survive on the moon? Where did they come from? Why had no one ever noticed that spiders live up there? Didn't the astronauts from the Mexican group have any of communicating with the earth? Didn't they have any way of leaving a message for any who would come looking? Didn't they have an escape mechanism?
That's not the worst of it, though. I didn't even really care about the stupidity of the whole "the moon is gaining mass" thing and the questions of where the heck that mass would come from... what I want to know is how the creature could have laid an egg larger than itself right after hatching! Baby chickens don't automatically lay eggs mere minutes after they're born, let alone eggs that are bigger than themselves... any half-baked explanation would have been better than nothing.
The references to previous episodes here were very annoying, because the previous episodes it kept reminding us of were both MUCH better than this one. The first visual reference I kept getting was a connection to the Waters of Mars episode with Tennant. A much better acted and more emotionally well-developed episode with much, much higher stakes! I suspect they used the same sets. Because this review came a bit late I did peek at some other reviews and comments before writing it and I read an argument that the Doctor learned from Waters of Mars that he really shouldn't interfere and that he doesn't have the right to be the "Time Lord Victorious" - which is all well and good, but then why didn't they make stronger references to that, show us a bit of the Doctor's inner conflict on the issue (after all, someone like him would have a very hard time not meddling!) or even just give some visual reference to it.
The other reference is to that stupid star-whale episode where humanity made the terrible decision and then realized that they had got it all wrong - that they had created a problem and a conflict where none would have existed - the star whale would have been glad to help them without being tortured! I wasn't a huge fan of that episode at the time, but man does it seem deep compared to this meaningless plotline!
In the end, if you're capable of maintaining your suspensions of disbelief you may be able to enjoy this episode, otherwise, watch it and join the rest of us who are sitting here waiting for Moffat to leave already.
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