season 11 of dw is kind of mincing it’s morals so far i think.

in ‘the woman who fell to earth’, the villain kills about 6 people. he’s trying to kill one randomly selected person. that random person tries to push the Bad Guy Alien off a crane, and the doctor scolds him for trying to kill. nobody should take a life, that’s very clear. the doctor then tricks him into killing himself with his own bombs things. i guess there’s the plausible deniability that he pressed the button himself, but that’s if you ignore that it was the doctor’s one plan to stop him. they asked nicely to get him to leave the planet, and then, there was no backup plan except for that plausible deniability murder. which they had to have been planning for nearly half the episode, since before the data transfer.

in ‘the ghost monument’, episode 2, we get reintroduced to why the doctor never carries a gun. but the scene is about surviving the killer robots. the message here isn’t about Not Taking A Life, it’s just. guns are bad, even as a tool, even in a situation with no life to be taken. t isn’t about the importance of life at all. i get that self defence isn’t a real excuse for murder, but, they’re robots. the show was very clear that these were robots. i kind of just wish the doctor would be honest and say ‘guns don’t work on this show for plot reasons’, because that’s what really happens. or even something like ‘guns aren’t effective here’ because it wasn’t about morality here. no one could argue that ryan is a bad person for trying to protect everyone from killer robots, but that’s kind of what the doctor tried to do.

and later in the episode, the set of Bad Guy Aliens this time are killed in a gas explosion that the doctor planned out. it gave us a clear Life Is Sacred message in front of the mindless drones, and then pulled out on that message for the evil ribbon things, who seemed to be pretty alive. they could talk, and they seemed very intelligent. did their lives matter? did they not count because they were engineered to be evil? and is using a gun really worse than burning something to death? it’s kind of assumed the ribbon things are irredeemable, that they must die, but we aren’t told that in any words at all. which in itself is strange, because already this season we’ve heard so much about the importance of not taking a life, except now it’s okay when the doctor forgets to mention it.

it really feels like so far the message that All Life Is Important has a clock set on it, to run out in the last few minutes of the episode. because the Bad Guy Alien still has to die to wrap up everything neatly. that’s been the only resolution these episodes have had yet.

i’m of course not saying that any previous doctor had a totally consistent sense of morality. and the show has never been consistent with the rule of ’never carrying a gun’, which was only really invented for the 10th doctor. but, i don’t think it’s been so glaring to me before that the doctor was saying one thing and doing another. or even saying and doing things that don’t make sense in the narrative at all. it’s like the show is telling us it’s about Always Finding Another Way, and then killing the bad guys anyway.