Can MLP Handle Stories More Maturely than Doctor Who? (Spoiler: Yes.) "Kill the Moon," "Twilight's Kingdom," and Fantasy as Deontology

Since I just posted something for the first time, might as well keep it going, and this time actually include at least some pony.
But first, the real subject: Doctor Who, and last week’s episode, “Kill the Moon.” It . . . wasn’t very good, for some of the same reasons I didn’t care for “Twilight’s Kingdom,” on which see, for example, Bad Horse and Inquisitor M (okay, he's a bit harsher than I'd be). Interestingly though, I think that the weaknesses were more pronounced in “Kill the Moon,” which violated my expectations that something notionally targeted at an older audience would make more rather than less sense, and have more rather than less coherent morality than a children’s show—which I’m sad to say I still have, after four years of pony and the point Faust was trying to make that children’s TV can hold together, too. Spoilers ahead.
We start out with a fairly strong premise: the Doctor, Clara, and Plucky Teenage Girl show up on a ship heading to the moon in 2049, which it turns out is going there to blow it up because ten years prior there had been a super–high tide which had wreaked havoc on coastal cities and thrown every satellite out of the sky, and the last thing heard from a Mexican colony on the moon was that there were changes there that may have caused the tide. So first of all, it’s obvious we’re going to need to abandon any trace of scientific realism, and probably assume that most people outside of the main cast are really, really stupid, which is fine on its own, because that’s just what the show does. I can work with that. It’s later that we run into the major problems I have. It turns out that the moon is an egg for a gigantic creature, probably the only one of its kind, which is getting ready to hatch, hence the moon becoming many times as massive as it had been before and the changes in the tides. Okay, neat. The question becomes, should they still blow up the moon to save Earth and humanity?
And here’s the point where I see the big commonality between it and “Twilight’s Kingdom”: it’s roughly the same as the point where Twilight has to decide whether to give up her magic to Tirek in exchange for the release of her friends, plus Discord. Here, though, we start with the surviving member of the crew basically saying, “Well, this is a no-brainer. Let’s kill this sucker.” The human members of the TARDIS crew are more conflicted, but the Doctor is clearly pushing for leaving the creature be, delivering some exposition before going back to the TARDIS in a passive-aggressive huff, saying he can’t be involved and bamfing off. The information he gave was essentially that he didn’t know what happened here, but that it’ll be a defining moment for humanity, along with how even though they’d seen the moon further in the future, it could have been a hologram or any number of other things which could result in the appearance of it being there, despite either the egg hatching or the moon being exploded by a large chunk of humanity’s nuclear arsenal.
The crew member starts the countdown, but Clara makes a communications contact with Earth, and gives a message asking the people of Earth to decide what to do in the next half hour, and signal them by either turning off all the lights to blow up the moon or by leaving them on to do nothing. Leaving aside the obvious problems with the voting mechanism (the default probably should have been to blow up the moon, since that was the preexisting plan; this underrepresents less-developed areas with less lights; how can you get people together fast enough to make this call?; what about the people on the other side of the planet?; what if there’s a split decision?), the lights go out. This, of course, doesn’t matter at all because Clara makes the executive decision to abort the detonation. The Doctor shows back up, knowing what call she made, and brings them back to the surface of Earth where they watch the moon hatch and a creature fly off, leaving Earth save and a new egg behind, taking the moon’s place, much like how Twilight ended up surrendering her alicorn magic and Tirek happened to just leaver her and the rest alone, she happened to get her key from Discord, and the Tree-box happened to give them the rainbow power to defeat Tirek.
So, why do I think this worked better (not well, but still better) in “Twilight’s Kingdom”? It relates back to an idea expressed in Bad Horse’s blog post about fantasy worlds: in one definition, a fantasy world is one where the physical (scientific, magical, whatever) rules of the world are such that they carry out the moral rules of the world. And there, FIM has a big leg up on Doctor Who. FIM’s morality-that-shapes-reality is spelled out in the title, and has been established as a cornerstone of the series’s mythology from the beginning: friendship is magic. If you stick by your friends, and especially come together with others in new friendships or reforge old ones that had been damaged in some way, things will work out so that your temporal problem will be defeated, probably by rainbow laser beams.
In contrast, Doctor Who doesn’t really have this kind of explicit moral force that shapes things, at least not in a way that’s ever acknowledged in the show or by the characters. Rather, there seems to be a more general rule that the Doctor is (almost) always right, and what he wants (in the new series) is (usually, or at least often) the thing that doesn’t involve making a conscious decision to kill (some kinds of) people on-screen as a means of accomplishing something. Daleks, Cybermen, and sentient-ish robots, among others, need not apply, but might get lucky if the script calls for it. The problem is, this requires making decisions on the basis of magical thinking, without acknowledging that the magic is there. And I think that that was most in evidence in this episode. A clear choice was presented: you kill the creature and save humankind, or you don’t, and just hope that things work out, despite all reason indicating that at best doing so would be catastrophic (there isn’t a moon anymore, with all the problems that would cause), and the average case scenario is the death of every human in existence. So you’re weighting the human race, plus everything else on Earth, against a creature that may or may not be intelligent. And it is quite a moral dilemma (if you feel like giving it that much credit).
Again though, we come back to the problem that it’s a dilemma without consequences. The people involved were making their decisions without knowing what would happen (I’ll come back to the Doctor in a bit), and against all sanity, letting the egg hatch worked out perfectly, not only leaving the status quo physically intact, but inspiring humanity to look back up to the stars and spread, leading it to travel all through the universe and live to its very end. Why did it work out? Well, as best I can tell, the same reason many Doctor Who episodes resolve the way they do: loose writing brings about a good ending regardless of the logical consequences of the decisions made.
Now, the Doctor’s standpoint is somewhat different; he has knowledge the others don’t, because he decided not to give it to them: time is in flux, but not as completely as he implied, because whatever decision they make, humanity will survive and return to space. They could decide to blow up Earth instead of the moon, and something would happen to make sure they still live to get people on Mars in a decade so that the fixed point in history that took place in “The Waters of Mars” would happen. So with that in mind, he wasn’t toying with the survival of the human race to make a moral point. He just left Clara, the crew member, and Spunky thinking that they were. All while insisting after the fact that he was not patronizing them, and implicitly (perhaps also explicitly) saying that it made them exceptionally important. And hey, improving a girl’s self-esteem is a worthy thing to do, I suppose, even if it involves lying to her, and if you look at it as an example of him testing Clara and Spunky Kid, then doing so with a setup where they can’t do major lasting damage is great. The troubling downside is that, by all indications, the Doctor believes that the answer in this case generalizes—why else, after all, do the test in the first place?—to circumstances where he doesn’t know that doing the morally satisfying thing will work out for the best. And, of course, that there’s nothing wrong with one unelected and unaccountable individual making a life and death decision for billions, after receiving a best guess of their will which turned out to be to the contrary, and furthermore overriding the person on location who at least had some form of legitimacy, having been selected to carry out a mission in the first place. Yeah.
I guess all I’m asking for is that if you’re going to make use of a setting where morality has tangible force, where doing the thing that the setting thinks of as morally appropriate is, in the end, rewarded, do something to set it up. Establish that your world runs on the magic of friendship. Show us that good and evil are recognizable things and how they affect people; demonstrate that starting on a path of mercy helps to preserve your soul from the corrupting power of the Ring; give us examples of how dealing with the forces of evil to gain power or wealth or longevity leaves you in its thrall. Let us see how the greater, deeper magic of a mother’s self-sacrificing love for her son physically protected and continues to protect him from the more mundane magic that is all evil understands. Let us see that that's the world we're working with. But for goodness’s sake, don’t just have doing the nice/right/morally satisfying choice always lead to things being for the best in the best of all possible worlds, regardless of what the physical circumstances are, without giving the audience some kind of mechanism by which that operates; and don’t have it apply except, of course, when it doesn’t. Be honest about the fact that the story you're telling is that kind of fantasy, rather than implying that some normal semblance of cause and effect apply.