I'm so happy.
I'm so, SO happy!
That was wonderful, joyous, delightful, emotional meta glory. I cried. That's the SECOND TIME Doctor Who has made me cry this season, and that's frankly setting dangerous new precedents.
Ok, so I have Thoughts as usual, but they're vague, waffly, as-yet-unformed Thoughts, because it's 1 o'clock the morning after the episode aired and they haven't had time to properly percolate yet. But I figure if I put them here it will at least get them out of my head, and allow me to think about other things. So:
Oh Clara, my Clara! As much as I *loved* the life that old!Clara had dreamed for herself, I'm so very glad that she is still young, that the Doctor did not accidentally miss 62 years of her life (as he did with Reinette, whose episode was referenced back in Deep Breath - what beautiful foreshadowing!). Clara and Twelve have grown so much together, and slot together so perfectly now that I can't wait to see more of their adventures together. They have both come such a long way. Yet they are both still recognisably the characters we met in their respective first episodes.
Clara, for example - I love all the little character notes that have got more developed but remained so constant. Her complete breakdown under the table as the Dream Crab was coming for her was wrenching and perfect. Clara has always been good - very, very good - at conquering her fear when faced with an enemy she can actually, well, face. She is so often 'more scared than she lets on' but is pretty good at controlling that fear when there's someone to talk at - the Cybermen in Death in Heaven, the Half Face Man in Deep Breath, the evil sun in Rings of Akhaten and Skaldak in Cold War. She is much *less* good with nebulous nasties - the possibility of a ghost in Hide, the potential monster in Listen, Skaldak once he's escaped from his armour and could be lurking anywhere on the submarine ready to trap her - Clara needs to be able to face her fears, literally, to best deal with them. And this is important for…meta reasons I will get onto later. Clara and faces is an important theme.
As for Darling Twelve…well, I know some people have struggled to warm to him, and he definitely hasn't made it easy. But Listen showed the truth about why is is as he is, and I think this episode reinforced it: he's just so frightened. He's at his most abrasive when he knows something is wrong, but doesn't know how to deal with it - see his abrupt 'bye' departure after he thinks they've all woken up the first time. He can still feel that 'ice cream headache', and so some part of him KNOWS there is still something wrong at that point, but he hasn't figured out what it is yet. Then he DOES figure it out, but has no idea how to deal with it, and he rushes back in and pretends to have 'deleted' everyone's name because they're probably all about to die now anyway. The post-Time War Doctor, as we have CONSTANTLY seen, is a little ball of trauma and rage and fear etc etc, and he deals with it in different ways. Nine was volatile, simmering, all this anger and grief just below the surface of his leather jacket, hidden by a veneer of ridiculousness and big grins, but very much there. Ten pushed it deeper inside, him and dealt with it by pretending to be human. But he very much needed his human friends to ground and steady him - without them, it all came bubbling back up in an explosion of self-denial and self-righteous anger. The Time Lord Victorious. Most recently, Eleventy repressed it deeper still, down beneath a childlike exterior, but it came out when he was very angry or under great pressure.
Twelve, however, has dealt with the Time War to some extent - he now knows he DIDN'T blow up his planet, and he has somewhat reconciled the War Doctor as part of himself. BUT Gallifrey is still missing, and there's the question of what state it will be in if and when he finds it, and if they will even welcome him back. Not to mention the trauma of the 900 years on Trenzalore which lead to his regeneration. Way back in the day, Ten gave a whole speech about how if you live long enough you get 'tired of losing everyone you love. Tired of watching everything turn to dust'. That was when he was a mere 900-and-something years old. He's waaaaay older now, and has lost so much more. Imagine spending 900 years in one place, watching children grow up, loving them, and seeing them die, generation after generation? Normally the Doctor would move on, literally move away, meet totally different unrelated people, and have new adventures that would allow his old friends to sleep peacefully in his memory (and whilst he's seen a LOT of death, very few of his actual companions DIED in his company, before Amy and Rory and River.) That was not possible on Trenzalore, so it's no wonder this next regeneration is so afraid, and manifests it in a deliberately rude, abrasive exterior which does not encourage closeness. He will only hold Clara's hand (<3). He professes to 'delete' people the moment they are safe and out of sight (we KNOW this is not true). He pretends to forget people's names, he insults them - perhaps then they are less likely to get close, to ask to come with him, less likely to leave him again. He knows now that he is nobody's 'boyfriend' (as his Tenth and Eleventh incarnations sometimes let themselves believe) and he is tired of loving people and losing them. He is like the grief-stricken and brooding Eleven on his cloud in The Snowmen, pushing people away. But he doesn't have Eleven's natural optimism to buoy him up - he's tired, from nearly 1000 years fighting a war. Nevertheless, we know, because this episode told us, that subconsciously the Doctor wants to be Santa Claus. He only lets himself relax into that role right at the end, when he believes Clara and everyone else is safe - and oh my god his JOY at flying the sleigh was the most beautiful thing ever - and then again when Clara agrees to travel with him, and they go skipping off to the Tardis. THAT, I really believe, is who Twelve is on the inside. It's who he would like to be. It's the version that slips out, just a little, through the cracks in the ice when he's overwhelmed with wonder or happiness ('the moon's an egg!', his little dance in Flatline, his 'robbing a bank, robbing a whoooole bank!' glee in Time Heist) but most of the time he's afraid and covers it up with rudeness.
Er. Anyway, that got rather more headcanon-y than meta there. I'll get on with the meta now, and as usual it's about EYES.
"We've been seen." The episode begins with Clara waking up as Santa crash lands on her rooftop, but her involvement in the story doesn't begin until one of the elves says that line - 'we've been seen'. Until that point, until Clara *sees* them, it doesn't matter what Santa and his elves are doing because as far as everyone else is concerned, they don't exist. They only conclusively start to 'exist' (as it were, in an episode all about dreams) when Clara SEES them. And so, here we are again. Right back to EVERYTHING I have previously said in two separate meta essays about seeing and existing in Doctor Who. And it also sets up everything that is to come in the rest of the episode.
"They can't see you until you see them". "They can hone in on their own image in someone else's brain...Third party perception" In a similar vein to the Weeping Angels and the Silence, here we have monsters that aren't monsters until you see them. Clara and the Doctor spent the past season becoming co-dependent to an EXTREME level, to the extent that Clara almost *became* the Doctor, and the Doctor was never sure of who or what he was unless Clara was there to witness him (again, see Listen). They looked into each other's eyes and souls and became each other, even looked THROUGH each others eyes via 'hacked optic nerves' (a phrase Moffat clearly likes - seriously, between Deep Breath, Flatline and Last Christmas I think Twelve must have said 'optic nerve' more than all the other Doctors put together) and the season ended with Clara's eyes replacing the Doctor's in the credits, in the most meta showrunning move to ever meta. At the end of Death in Heaven, Clara takes her eyes off the Doctor, as they part ways seemingly forever. And when she does…well, it's like she blinked. The next thing she - and we the audience - know is that her whole life has disappeared. On a Doylist level, Clara really DOESN'T exist without the Doctor - no Doctor Who, no Clara. Unless she were to get her own spinoff, if the show were to be cancelled, she would be cancelled too. We know nothing of what she has been doing between the end of Death in Heaven and the start of Last Christmas because the show wasn't on air. But this is true for all the companions - what makes this specific to Clara is that she has ALSO lost her whole life - 62 years pass in a dream, not really lived, because the Doctor wasn't there to see them.
At the end of Last Christmas…Clara needs to see herself in the mirror. She can't see herself through the Doctor, because she realises that the Doctor doesn't - can't - see her as she really is. Just as The God Complex showed us that Eleven always saw Amy as little Amelia Pond, Clara will always be 'his' Clara to the Doctor and even when she is 90 years old he still sees her with the face he knows. To be seen is to exist in the Doctor Who 'verse. That much has been made very clear. Just see me. If your friends don't see you, then who are you really? BUT. Perhaps we are now coming to explore the flip side of that? That you can't ONLY be seen through the eyes of others, or you can only ever be the person they want to see. "There is an alien organism wrapped around your face, keeping you warm and happy whilst it eats you"…this is….a rather extreme take on what the Doctor has done to Clara's life, but apt nonetheless? (And after all, as the Doctor actually SAYS in the episode because Moffat is a trolling troll, the Dream Crabs are ACTUAL "METAPHORICAL CONSTRUCTS") In order to be 'real' you simply can't see everything through the eyes/dreams of an alien metaphorical construct, you also need to see and recognise yourself. And Clara DOES, twice, in this episode when she examines herself in the mirror. I have no idea where Season 9 will be headed, and I'm giddily excited at the prospect of another season with my Clara and Twelve, but I hope that Gallifrey will be involved (hey, we are STILL getting glaring references to Christmas, Eggs and Lighbulbs, so I'm still clinging to that one!), and I hope that Clara and Twelve will continue to grow as a partnership and as individuals. I hope that Clara's transformation into the Doctor reached its apotheosis in Death in Heaven and we will now start to see her regain herself from her addiction to the Doctor, or perhaps reach a place (GALLIFREY) where her addiction can properly become her 'real life' and not a dangerous distraction from the ordinary.
A related theme to all of this is that of dreams v reality. The whole episode is a riff on Inception, dreams within dreams within dreams, stacked like Russian dolls, or perhaps like Clara's fragmented 'impossible' lives. The Dream Crabs 'alter perception', causing everyone to question 'is this real?' - a phrase that has cropped up many, many times in Clara's run. She's been surrounded by perception filters and altered versions of reality ever since Asylum. 'Does this look real to you?'. Clara's whole journey so far has been a quest for the 'real'. Who and what is 'real'? Does 'real' mean 'ordinary', and if so, does she really want it? From Oswin the Dalek who dreamed she was still a girl, to Victorian Clara, the barmaid who got herself a job as a governess, to our Clara, who rejected reality outright and demanded to go to hell to rescue her boyfriend, Ms Oswald has always been multiple. So what is 'real', and how important is it in Doctor Who? In a world with a time travelling police box, as the Doctor points out in this episode, reality is not easy to distinguish from unreality. The whole scene with Danny got me thinking about that lovely quote from the last Harry Potter book - 'Of course this is happening inside your head, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?'.
And, of course, what is 'real' for one person might not be for someone else. At the Doctor and Clara's last meeting, they lied to each other for their own good. For the last however long it's been for them, Clara's 'reality' has been that the Doctor is happily living on Gallifrey, and the Doctor's 'reality' has been that Clara is happily living with Danny. But those were both lies. They both hid their faces, hid their eyes, and lied to each other. The Dream Crabs are like the 'face huggers', they cover their victims' faces as they feast on them. They blind them, and stop others seeing their faces. They are masks. In order to survive, the mask must come off, must literally be torn off and crumble to dust, and then the truth can be visible again. This episode served to tear off the masks the Doctor and Clara wore for each other at the end of Death in Heaven. After the 'Danny is dead / Gallifrey is lost' conversation, the Doctor and Clara stare wordlessly at each other for long moments. Everything they were sure of since their last meeting has just been reframed. Even what they previously believed was the truth, in the 'real' world, has proven to be a lie. Their whole foundations have shaken up. Layers and layers and layers of masks came off, and as in the other Moffat-era dream episode, Amy's Choice, the Doctor and companion learn truths about themselves and each other by the end. 'Trust nothing, interrogate everything you see, in case it's a lie' (Amy's Choice: 'Trust nothing. From now on, trust nothing you see, hear or feel.')
At the end, when the Doctor has awoken Clara for real, he invites her back to the Tardis. He is nervous, excited, desperate, afraid, overjoyed, hopeful - you can see the emotions thrilling in his usually cold face. And he has no idea if she will say 'yes'. But their emotions clearly mirror each other's, just as their poses are a mirror for their very first meeting upon Twelve's sudden regeneration (no coincidence on the part of the director, I assume). The masks have come off. They are so happy to see each other again, to have a second chance. A new beginning. But it's not like the first beginning, with Clara and Eleven, when he was only chasing her mystery, or like the second beginning, with Clara and Twelve, when she was just trying to find her old friend. Now they know each other better, and they know themselves better. Now the Doctor knows who he is (just an idiot with a box!) and Clara has recognised herself in the mirror, and I am so full of hope for their journey ahead. <3
Ok, I'm pretty sure none of that made any sense because it's now 2am, oops.
