OOOH! And maybe that’s why she was able to travel back into the Doctor’s childhood! It left a toehold!

I could JUST ABOUT accept Clara as an unremarkable Gallifreyan, but not as a Time Lady. To be honest, the more I think about Clara being on Gallifrey (including wherever the young first Doctor was), the more it makes me uncomfortable.

1) So the Moon gained a staggering amount of mass in a short period of time because the creature inside is growing? That doesn’t makes sense. Chicks grow inside their eggs, but the egg doesn’t get heavier (in fact, it gets lighter due to evaporation). They just convert egg mass into chicken mass. So the extra mass had to have come from somewhere. Surely there weren’t enough “spider bacteria” to make a difference.

Interesting explanation for the lunar mascons, though. (Would’ve loved to have heard that term used! Alas. Too technical, I suppose.) That’s short for “mass concentrations”. The Moon is very lumpy, which is a major navigational problem for spacecraft orbiting near it. The idea of those mascons shifting as the creature inside moves is very intriguing. Also not unique; Stephen Baxter’s Doctor Who novel “Wheel of Ice” features something similar, on the fictional Saturnian moonlet Mnemosyne. (Except it’s not a giant egg. It’s a sentient spaceship that an icy moonlet accreted around, a la the colony ship in “Underworld”.)

2) How do they have gravity on board Shuttle before landing? After landing, yeah, and it’s a clever and sneaky way of both providing the dramatic tension of the story and also doing away with attempting to simulate 1/6 G. That was never explained. While in freefall, they should not have gravity. (If landing on Earth, they would, but that’s because at that point they’d be flying, not freefalling.)

3) Normally, Shuttle can’t reach the Moon. Just too far. But under the circumstances, I think we can accept a whopping huge megarocket was built to loft it. Not sure why anybody would bother — and I cringed at the idea that the back half had been cut off so they could give rides to kids at the museum. The actual Orbiters are required to be preserved in as authentic a condition as possible, and I wouldn’t expect that to be overridden as quickly as 2049. The Apollo capsules have sat in museums unmolested for longer than that already. And don’t suggest it’s Buran; it’s obviously not, and anyway the one spaceworthy Buran isn’t in a museum. It was scrapped after a roof collapse crushed it beyond repair.

4) I liked the realism of showing the remaining atmosphere inside the modified shuttle venting through the pressure relief valves along the side of the payload bay. Somebody looked up what those black things are, obviously. ;-)

5) The bellyflop landing on the Moon was probably the best one could expect a modified Orbiter to do, but certainly wouldn’t be that tidy. They came to a stop in perhaps 500 feet. The real Orbiter requires 15,000 feet of runway, and that’s after it’s used the atmosphere (not available on the Moon) to decelerate from a mere low Earth orbit speed. A translunar approach would be a hell of a lot faster. They’d pretty much all die.

6) Talking of atmosphere not available, I loved how the disinfectant didn’t work on the Moon because of vacuum! It had likely already boiled away. (I’m unclear how it survived the trip to the Mexican base in Courtney’s pack, though.)

7) Of course, that doesn’t explain why they could hear the spiders scuttling around while on EVA. In space, no one can hear you scuttle….

8) Lastly, my personal pet peeve. The armored upper torsos of the astronaut suits were good, but it only highlighted what’s always bugged me about the suits from “Impossible Planet” — they don’t inflate. They’re walking around in unpressurized suits. They’d all lose consciousness in seconds. (Okay, maybe Time Lord biology protects the Doctor from vacuum — it did in “Four to Doomsday” — but that wouldn’t save Clara or Courtney.) Obviously, that’s a near-universal problem with spacesuits in the movies and on TV. ;-)