Pondering (ha!) more overnight has lead me to more overt parallels in this episode. But first, a theory:
I think we are in for a New Gallifrey, come the 50th Anniversary. All these symbols - eggs (which explode), lights (which flicker), christmas - these are symbols of creation and destruction, death and rebirth. They are symbols of regeneration. They could be pointing to the departure of the Ponds, or to the advent of the next Companion, but they could be pointing further afield. We know Moffat likes to play long games. You can't kill an idea. If something can be remembered it can be brought back. "The idea became flesh" (a biblical allusion made in the prequel to 7.3) - to (completely irrelevantly) quote one of my favourite plays, 'Translations' by Brian Friel, "Name a thing and - bang! - it leaps into existence!'. I think Gallifrey is coming back. Maybe not Old Gallifrey - because that's happened once before already, and let's face it the Doctor wasn't actually too happy about that. But somehow we're going to get a Gallifrey with a clean slate, I think. The Doctor is erasing his name from the universe, he's going back to how it all began, all those years ago, when he was stolen by a magic box and ran away. I think he's going to give his 11th regeneration to help bring Gallifrey back, just as he gave his 8th regeneration to destroy it. I'm therefore hoping this doesn't happen for a while, because NO MATT STAY FOREVER PLEASE. Ahem.
Moving on to less speculative meta:
In 7.3, the Gunslinger is a mirror for Oswin. This much is pretty clear - everyone in that episode is a mirror for everyone else (which I would have enjoyed even more if they hadn't actually pointed it out in the dialogue). But more interestingly, the Gunslinger and Oswin are mirrors for River and Rory - specifically, River/Mels the 'bespoke psychopath' and Rory the Last Centurion. All four characters are human beings who are turned into robot (or robot-like, ie. brainwashed) killing machines BUT ultimately embrace their humanity, and prove that they are more than what they have been made into. They choose what they are. Rory and the Gunslinger become guards, standing watch over something they once endangered, but have now sworn to protect. River and Oswin subvert their prisons (their boxes, to return to one of my *favourite* themes from last season - an egg is a kind of box...) and use them as a source of power: Oswin hacks into her Dalek nature and uses it to destroy the Asylum and wipe the Daleks' memories of the Doctor. River uses her Stormcage cell as a convenient base in between time-travelling jaunts, and in so doing manages to safeguard the secret of the Doctor's death.
Both River and Rory first kill, then marry the one they love. Love and hate and life and death - as I said yesterday, these not the binary opposites, especially in the Doctor's wibbly-wobbly universe. River and Rory both have memories of being someone else - a plastic robot, a would-be-killer - and these are now an irremovable part of them. But they have chosen to be other than what they were created for: they have chosen to embrace their humanity.
This will also be Amy's choice. Not her 'humanity', perhaps, as she's always had that - but her 'humanness'. The travelling is starting to feel like running away, she says in the series trailer. We know she is going to be leaving at the end of this series, and although we don't yet know how, I have very high hopes that it is going to be on her terms. Unlike Rose or Donna - or even Martha, whose decision to leave was motivated more by self-preservation than anything else - I hope Amy will make positive decision to stay and live life in the right order, on Earth, and she will enjoy being a human with a regular human life.
Until now, she has been - like Queen Nefertiti - the 'Lady of the Two Lands'; the Crack in time and space has run through Amy's life like the Nile, dividing her ordinary human world from her space adventures, dividing her memories and her many lives ("does it ever bother you that your life doesn't make any sense?") Her 'two lands' are presented as diametrically opposed. "Goodbye Leadworth, hello everywhere" - how do you reconcile that? Of course you can't. But in this next episode, which I am INORDINATELY excited about, we will see those two worlds reconciled, as the Doctor comes to live with the Ponds (for a year?! God, I hope so!) I have no idea how it will be handled, or how it will turn out, but it is the first indication since the Tardis landed at their wedding that 'real life' and 'Tardis life' can co-exist happily, and don't have to be opposites. Amy will choose which of her two lives she wants to live to the full, but that doesn't mean completely giving the other one up completely - she will still have her memories, and everything she's learnt. So much of who she is comes from her life with her raggedy doctor - the two little children who used to dress up as the raggedy man have now become like him, and they will stay this way whether or not they are travelling in time and space.
Amy has not been turned into a robot killing machine, but she has been through more physical transformations than any other companion - she was almost a dalek, almost a vampire-space-fish, almost an Angel, she was a ganger and an old woman and a wooden doll and a worshipper of the Minotaur, she was the tesselector, she was an orphan and not an orphan, dead and alive again, pregnant and not pregnant at the same time, married to a plastic roman, mother to her best mate and mother-in-law to her imaginary friend - like Oswin and like the Gunslinger, she didn't choose how her new life began, but she will choose how it ends. When the war is over, the war machine still has a role to play. When the waiting and the travelling's over, the 'Girl Who Waited', the girl who travelled amongst the stars will still have a role. It's Amy's choice.
Tuesday 18 September 2012
Monday 17 September 2012
Thoughts post-A Town Called Mercy
Oh look, I have a blog. Let me attempt to write down my thoughts about the next Doctor Who companion in a vaguely coherent manner...
Ok, so - I am really, REALLY hoping that Oswin is the next companion. I mean, actually Oswin, Dalek Oswin, not some mysteriously-similar-looking relative. Because here's the thing: the doctor takes ordinary people and turns them into weapons. He doesn't *mean* to, of course, and mostly they are more confident and badass at the end of it. But still - it happens all the time, it is one of his biggest fears, one of the things he feels most guilty about, and one of the things at least one (possibly more?) of his worst enemies has accused him of.
In A Town Called Mercy, Jex is carefully designed to be a mirror for the Doctor - besides the whole killing/healing/running/bringing death in his wake parallels, he has also taken ordinary people and absolutely LITERALLY turned them into weapons. As Sherlock would say: so far, so obvious.
SO - what if the Doctor's next companion is a weapon who he turns into an ordinary person? "Give me a Dalek any day", he says - what if what he gets is Oswin, a woman who in a very real sense "carries her prison with her". What if he reverses his usual polarity and makes her NOT a weapon? This doesn't have to mean he literally de-Daleks her. But perhaps he helps her come to terms with being a Dalek, and helps her to more permanently overcome the killer instincts that lie dormant in her Dalek shell.
Speaking of shells - all these references to eggs and Christmas and lightbulbs - they're all very glaring symbols of rebirth, new beginnings, the advent of a saviour, etc. At Christmas this year, the Doctor may get something that wasn't on his Christmas list - a weapon - and help her to be reborn as a person. And in so doing, he is also reborn, just as the 'monstrous' Gunslinger became an Angel.
Of course, we've already seen him do this to some extent with River, who is another parallel to the most recent episode. The 'Ultimate Weapon' who became his wife. Which makes Jex a rather wonderful parallel for Madame Kovarian, who also took a person and turned her into a weapon, with the aim of wiping out a perceived source of evil in the universe. Of course, we *know* the Doctor, we know he's not the evil 'Predator', etc etc that his enemies see him as. But this does not change the fact that an awful lot of problems in the universe have stemmed from his existence - "we have grown stronger in fear of you", said the Dalek, echoing River's "all this, my love, in fear of you". 'Doctor' means 'warrior' in the language of the Gamma Forest. We are not meant to sympathise with Kovarian at all, but we are encouraged to do so with Jex - just as we are meant to applaud the Doctor's decision not to kill Jex, but conversely we also applaud Amy's decision to leave Kovarian to her fate. "This is not how we roll, Doctor", said Amy - but it was, for her, just once. What a confusing message.
But perhaps that's ok. Perhaps there is not supposed to be a definitive answer on this. Right and wrong are not always so black and white, as Jex himself points out in the episode. "Humans, you're so linear" - the Doctor is anything but. Especially the Eleventh Doctor. He is wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, he is a cheat, a thief, a trickster, an escapist. Boundaries are not relevant (see - kissing all the Ponds!), which is why it is so hard for him to know what to do when he tries to force Jex over the physical demarcation line between good and evil, life and death, guilt and innocence, Mercy and the great desert beyond. Such lines are meaningless, and he should not try to pretend they really exist.
His prison is his guilt, which ultimately stems from his love of the universe and the people in it ("you care so much...") - and thus he carries his prison with him - as do Amy, Rory, River, Oswin, everyone - and it is also the thing that sets him free. The boundaries between his prison and his freedom are blurred. (Interestingly, Toby Whithouse's last episode was The God Complex, which is intricately associated in my mind with the Vienna Teng song 'Augustine' - "lead me now/I understand/Faith is both a prison and an open hand" - clearly this is a theme of his.) Which is why when he tries to act like the Tesselector, the "Judgement Death Machine" and push Jex over the line, he doesn't know what to do. Unlike Ten, who was always so confident in his actions, even when they were wrong, Eleven has grown enough to recognise the inherent uncertainty of things. Perhaps he has also grown enough to de-weaponise a Dalek, as Rose once did. We will see.
Ok, so - I am really, REALLY hoping that Oswin is the next companion. I mean, actually Oswin, Dalek Oswin, not some mysteriously-similar-looking relative. Because here's the thing: the doctor takes ordinary people and turns them into weapons. He doesn't *mean* to, of course, and mostly they are more confident and badass at the end of it. But still - it happens all the time, it is one of his biggest fears, one of the things he feels most guilty about, and one of the things at least one (possibly more?) of his worst enemies has accused him of.
In A Town Called Mercy, Jex is carefully designed to be a mirror for the Doctor - besides the whole killing/healing/running/bringing death in his wake parallels, he has also taken ordinary people and absolutely LITERALLY turned them into weapons. As Sherlock would say: so far, so obvious.
SO - what if the Doctor's next companion is a weapon who he turns into an ordinary person? "Give me a Dalek any day", he says - what if what he gets is Oswin, a woman who in a very real sense "carries her prison with her". What if he reverses his usual polarity and makes her NOT a weapon? This doesn't have to mean he literally de-Daleks her. But perhaps he helps her come to terms with being a Dalek, and helps her to more permanently overcome the killer instincts that lie dormant in her Dalek shell.
Speaking of shells - all these references to eggs and Christmas and lightbulbs - they're all very glaring symbols of rebirth, new beginnings, the advent of a saviour, etc. At Christmas this year, the Doctor may get something that wasn't on his Christmas list - a weapon - and help her to be reborn as a person. And in so doing, he is also reborn, just as the 'monstrous' Gunslinger became an Angel.
Of course, we've already seen him do this to some extent with River, who is another parallel to the most recent episode. The 'Ultimate Weapon' who became his wife. Which makes Jex a rather wonderful parallel for Madame Kovarian, who also took a person and turned her into a weapon, with the aim of wiping out a perceived source of evil in the universe. Of course, we *know* the Doctor, we know he's not the evil 'Predator', etc etc that his enemies see him as. But this does not change the fact that an awful lot of problems in the universe have stemmed from his existence - "we have grown stronger in fear of you", said the Dalek, echoing River's "all this, my love, in fear of you". 'Doctor' means 'warrior' in the language of the Gamma Forest. We are not meant to sympathise with Kovarian at all, but we are encouraged to do so with Jex - just as we are meant to applaud the Doctor's decision not to kill Jex, but conversely we also applaud Amy's decision to leave Kovarian to her fate. "This is not how we roll, Doctor", said Amy - but it was, for her, just once. What a confusing message.
But perhaps that's ok. Perhaps there is not supposed to be a definitive answer on this. Right and wrong are not always so black and white, as Jex himself points out in the episode. "Humans, you're so linear" - the Doctor is anything but. Especially the Eleventh Doctor. He is wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, he is a cheat, a thief, a trickster, an escapist. Boundaries are not relevant (see - kissing all the Ponds!), which is why it is so hard for him to know what to do when he tries to force Jex over the physical demarcation line between good and evil, life and death, guilt and innocence, Mercy and the great desert beyond. Such lines are meaningless, and he should not try to pretend they really exist.
His prison is his guilt, which ultimately stems from his love of the universe and the people in it ("you care so much...") - and thus he carries his prison with him - as do Amy, Rory, River, Oswin, everyone - and it is also the thing that sets him free. The boundaries between his prison and his freedom are blurred. (Interestingly, Toby Whithouse's last episode was The God Complex, which is intricately associated in my mind with the Vienna Teng song 'Augustine' - "lead me now/I understand/Faith is both a prison and an open hand" - clearly this is a theme of his.) Which is why when he tries to act like the Tesselector, the "Judgement Death Machine" and push Jex over the line, he doesn't know what to do. Unlike Ten, who was always so confident in his actions, even when they were wrong, Eleven has grown enough to recognise the inherent uncertainty of things. Perhaps he has also grown enough to de-weaponise a Dalek, as Rose once did. We will see.
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