Some Thoughts on Locke Lamora and Greek Tragedy

DISCLAIMER: I am not a Proper Classicist. I don’t have any sort of Classics degree, and a lot of this is in fact based on my somewhat hazy memories of texts I studied in translation at school, supplemented by that most dubious of sources, Wikipedia. If anything I say is wrong, please correct me! Likewise, it’s been nearly a year since I read the Gentleman Bastards books for the first time, and I don’t have ebook copies that I can easily search inside for the exact quotes I need as textual evidence. If I’ve misremembered or misrepresented anything, please do pick me up on it!

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My flatmate recently read the Gentleman Bastards series, and when she finished The Republic of Thieves [TRoT] we got chatting about Archedama Patience. Specifically, we debated the likelihood of the incredibly far-fetched Lamor Acanthus story being true versus the likelihood of it NOT being true, and Patience going to all that tremendous effort (including bringing Locke back from the very brink of death at great physical expense) just in order to troll him. 

On the one hand, the story seems so unlikely. From a Watsonian perspective, the idea that a Bondsmage could break all the known boundaries of magic and succeed in taking over another body but not stop to first discover whether that particular body is actually capable of magic…seems decidedly odd. Rather sloppy for a Bondsmage. Similarly fishy is the notion that he could accomplish such a feat without drawing attention to himself. Then there are the few little slips and contradictions in the story even as Patience is telling it – she refers to Locke (or his body) as Lamor Acanthus’ ‘first victim’…after she has already explained that he previously experimented on the inhabitants of Catchfire. Perhaps she is just being careless here, but there are holes in the story even as she is weaving it. The whole ‘Seamstress’ thing, for example? None of the other Bondsmagi, as far as I can remember, ever call her that. She tells Locke that ‘Seamstress’ was her original grey name, and she confuses him with the form of her supposed sigil, but she could easily have made all that up AFTER interrogating Sabetha and finding out that Locke's one abiding childhood memory is of needles and thread…it is not the proof she claims it is.

Moreover, on a Doylist level, Locke being effectively the reincarnation of a dead Bondsmage seems like something from a rather different genre of fantasy. Oh, there are most certainly secrets to Locke’s past and his parentage which I’ve no doubt will be gradually unveiled as the series goes on, but something about the Lamor Acanthus story seems to sit very uneasily amidst the other fantasy elements in the story. I’m not nearly genre-savvy enough to articulate exactly why that is, but it might be to do with the way the gods are treated. The presence of the gods in Lynch's writing is felt continually, but it is never made clear whether they are ‘really’ there, or not. Whether Locke’s muttered prayers to the Nameless Thirteenth really do have a cosmic effect, or whether they are just words said to the darkness. And I love that. I don’t want to know. The important thing, for me, is the faith and the religion, and the role these play in the characters’ lives – I don’t care about the existence or otherwise of the gods themselves. (This is one area where I know Lynch has deliberately looked to Greek mythology – and then gone 'nah' and looked away again. The Therin pantheon was, I believe, originally intended to resemble the Olympian model much more closely, but Lynch wisely changed his mind. This, at least, tells me that he has consciously considered certain elements of Classical mythology, and so perhaps not all of the following essay will be complete bollocks.) Anyway, where was I? Oh yes – the lack of evidence for the literal existence of the gods in this text makes it a lot harder for me to accept the literal existence of a ‘soul’ or some other metaphysical manifestation of selfhood, that could transfer from the body of Lamor Acanthus to the body of a child. Perhaps nobody else will agree with me here – or perhaps, as the story and the world continue to evolve over the next four books, it will all start to sit together more peacefully. We are, after all, less than half way through the series as of the end of TRoT, and it’s not as if Scott Lynch’s writing is easily pigeonholed. It’s one of the reasons it’s so enjoyable.

For the record, I think there may be an element of truth in the Lamor story, but there's no way we've got the whole truth and nothing but the truth from Patience. So assuming, for a moment, that these issues all point to the Lamor Acanthus story being – at least partially – fabricated by Patience to fuck with Locke, we’re still left with the question of why she would go to so much effort just to do that. The answer ‘revenge’ only goes so far.

Or does it?

I think that in Locke's world, in order for revenge to really be, well, Revenge, it needs three things: it needs to be personal, it needs to suit the crime, and the victim needs to be aware that it's an act of revenge. So, Patience couldn’t allow Locke to die from Requin's poison, because even such a horribly slow and painful death would not be as satisfying for her as saving his life in order to toy with him indefinitely. This would also fit the crime better - Locke didn't kill the Falconer, but he did strip him of his dignity and freedom, separated him from all his old supporters and left him unable to be a part of his society. Locke changed the Falconer’s way of life forever. Patience spinning this story about Locke being the reincarnation of a nefarious Bondsmage with a redheaded wife does a very similar thing - Locke, being the inveterate worrier that he is, can't ever be free of this gnawing fear, unless it’s conclusively disproven (and with the Bondsmagi leaving Karthain, it’s going to be very hard for him to do that). He can't help but look at himself in a different way, if there’s even the shadow of a possibility that it could be true. This story cuts him off from Sabetha, sets him apart from Jean, and even casts doubt on the one part of his origin story that he was always so certain of - "I'm from Camorr!" It's a story Patience can spin out for as long as she likes, knowing Locke will always listen, in spite of his better judgement, and she thereby effectively has him under her control for as long as she wants. Or, you know, she would have done if she hadn't suffered The Death Of A Thousand Pecks been killed by the Falconer.

This sort of thing is all very Greek Tragedy. It makes me think of Aeschylus’ three part Oresteia. In the Oresteia, King Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia on the way to Troy because it's the only way to appease the goddess Artemis who is holding their ships hostage. SO his wife Clytaemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, after waiting for more than ten years, kill Agamemnon when he returns home, to avenge Iphigenia. SO Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra’s son Orestes - again, after a long and dedicated wait - kills Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus. SO the Furies pursue and torment Orestes until the gods swoop in and pass judgement and stop the cycle of bloody revenge. And that's the highly simplified version - in fact the story doesn't even really begin with the sacrifice of Iphigenia, it begins long before that. The reasons given for the sacrifice differ depending on which source you read, and in Aeschylus’ version it's all particularly timey-wimey - it could be that Artemis is angry about something that hasn't even happened yet. It can be argued that the cycle of revenge begins with Helen running away with Paris to Troy, or that it begins with Eris the goddess of discord and her apple, or with Zeus not inviting Eris to Peleus and Thetis' wedding…besides which, Aegisthus has his own long and tragic family history, and has his own reasons to want revenge on Agamemnon even without the fact that he wants to get rid of his lover Clytaemnestra's husband. Furthermore, the House of Atreus - Agamemnon's family - is cursed because of the horrifying misdeeds of various of Agamemnon's ancestors, so perhaps the cycle could also have begun there. It's a cycle of revenge that's all to do with family and blood ties and overwhelming hubris. (More on hubris later.)

This is all rather like what's going on in Locke's world, isn't it? Capa Barsavi returns to Camorr, fights his way to power and creates the Secret Peace - and for all we know, he has his own motivations and a Tragic Backstory (tm) which compels him to do this, we have no idea - and in the process, he kills most of Luciano Anatolius' family out of 'necessity'. Anatolius and his surviving sisters dedicate the rest of their lives to the pursuit of revenge, and eventually get it by murdering Barsavi and his family right back. BUT this also involves the incidental murder Calo, Galdo and Bug, thereby dragging Locke and Jean into the cycle, so they need to get their revenge on Anatolius, which also involves getting revenge on the Falconer as the instrument if not the instigator of their brothers’ murder, and this in turn drags Patience and the other Bondsmagi into the cycle….Patience (as much as she is also responsible for what happened to the Falconer) needs to avenge the damge done to her son and the slight to her people by wreaking her revenge on Locke and Jean, and THEN the Falconer eventually recovers himself and immediately sets out to get revenge on Patience. And I'm pretty sure he's not done with his revenge yet. He's not going to stop there – he’s going to wait and rest and build his strength, and then he's going to go after Locke and Jean and the rest of the Bondsmagi. The cycle continues. As in Aeschylus.

The parallels are not exact. The matricide issue kind of makes the Falconer the equivalent of Orestes (though he’s avenging a wrong done to himself, rather than to his family) and I whilst I hope he IS pursued by the Therin equivalent of the Furies for all eternity, I rather think that the mental anguish is all going to be Locke's instead. But the themes are the same. Family loyalty. But also family members killing family members. An escalating cycle of patient waiting and planning followed by bloody revenge. Personal revenge taking precedence over legal justice. Hubris. Scott Lynch has said, in some interview I that I can no longer find, that the sin that leads to almost every death and near-death in The Lies Of Locke Lamora [TLoLL] is hubris, and thinking about it it's absolutely true. Only Nazca is really innocent of that. Everyone else thinks they can beat the system, thinks they are above retribution or are one step ahead of their foes.  Richer and cleverer than everybody else. They’re all wrong.

‘Hubris’ is an interesting word – it is comes from the same root as the word ‘hybrid’, and it originally meant an outrage against the gods. In other words, Human acting as Deity, human beings assuming the rights/powers/privileges of their divine overlords. People becoming hybrids of God and Mortal. If there is any truth to the Lamor Acanthus story, then Locke is a hybrid in a very literal sense: a hybrid of two people.  Even if it’s not true – or that part isn’t – Locke and his crooked family have always lead a duel life as staunch allies of Barsavi and determined breachers of the Secret Peace. Chains trained them up to be equally comfortable amongst the aristocracy and amidst the Camorri underworld. They were common thieves who slept next to a literal pile of gold. Perhaps Locke-the-hyrbid cannot help his hubris. But it is definitely one of his Tragic Flaws.

I will be very interested to see how it all plays out. How will Locke’s cycle of revenge and hubris end? And…where did it start?

The Oresteia is not the only Greek Tragedy parallel. There are many more superficial ones, little cosmetic touches which put in me in a Greek Tragedy frame of mind. For example, there’s Euripides’s Medea, from which Scott Lynch has poached a very tiny but very memorable plot point - the poisoned clothing that burns away the skin. In Red Seas Under Red Skies [RSuRS] Selendri suffers the same punishment that spurned wife Medea doles out to her husband’s mistress Glauce, in the form of a poisoned dress and crown. And Requin, just like Glauce’s father Creon, inadvertently shares her fate as he rushes to her aid. Glauce and Creon die burning, of course, whilst Requin and Selendri live disfigured, but it's the same concept.

There’s also a touch of the Greek Epic going on, particularly in RSuRS. The long tale, unfolding over years of the characters’ lives, peppered with flashbacks and side-quests – it makes me think of the Odyssey. (Though perhaps the Iliad will be the one to come to mind after reading The Thorn Of Emberlain, in which apparently Locke and Jean are going to war…) Lynch’s lavish descriptions of food, each dish described in loving detail, could be straight out of the Odyssey. And elements of Locke and Jean’s dicey maritime exploits put me in mind of Odysseus’ adventures – the mysterious voice in the fog en route to Port Prodigal, for example, reminds me of a particular sinister version of the Sirens, heard by Odysseus strapped to the mast. There must be lots of other small similarities, and if anyone can think of any do let me know. 

Locke and Odysseus certainly have a lot in common: both are accomplished liars, masters of disguise and escape artists, both undertake long sea voyages and lose all their friends to tragedy (I’m so very scared for Jean). Both men are rather more emotional than your ‘typical’ hero. Both are (apparently) favoured by the gods. Whilst Odysseus is definitely rather more handy with a blade (and a bow) than Locke is, he is best known for his wits and trickery – he is ‘polytropos Odysseus’. ‘Polytropos’ means ‘resourceful’, ‘wily’, ‘cunning’, as well as ‘well-travelled’ or, metaphorically ‘having many twists and turns’. If there is a better epithet for Locke, I can’t think of it. The utterly wonderful Sabetha, meanwhile seems to be a direct rebuttal of the character of Locke’s faithful wife, Penelope. Don’t get me wrong – Penelope is badass and I love her, and Sabetha definitely shares Penelope’s devious nature and ability to ward off irritatingly persistent men. But between Locke and Sabetha, Sabetha is the one with Odysseus’s spirit of adventure, whilst Locke is definitely the one who, if there was even the smallest chance that she would come back, would sit around at home for twenty years and wait for her, showing not the slightest interest in other suitors. I love that it’s that way round.

I think the thing initially that got me pondering these parallels with ancient Greek literature, is the way the theatre scenes unfold in the flashbacks in TRoT. What with the open air theatre, the use of masks on stage, the invocation of the gods before the play, the use of a Chorus, the festival atmosphere that surrounds the performance, the play’s high flown language, etc - Lynch has very explicitly based it all on a mixture of Shakespearean and Greek tragedy. There’s also the cathartic element to the play: it is surely no coincidence that Chains (/Lynch) sends teenage Locke and co to join a theatre troupe, the summer that they are all at each others' throats. He could have sent them anywhere - to a farm, to sea, to improve their language skills in Emberlain, etc. But he sends them to become actors. It is through their experiences on stage and off with the theatre troupe that Locke and all the young Gentleman Bastards are able to work through their tensions towards each other, and reaffirm their friendship. That’s the sort of ‘emotional cleansing’ or ‘catharsis’ that was supposedly achieved through Tragedy. (Not to mention the copious amounts of alcohol imbibed by various members of the theatre troupe – tragedies in Athens were originally staged as part of the Great Dionysia, a festival in honour of Dionysus, god of wine.)

The way Lynch uses time as well - the intercutting of past and present in all his books, and in particular the addition in TRoT of those almost timeless 'Interludes' of mental conversation between the Bondsmagi - it's very similar to the endless flashbacks and flash-forwards and out-of-time moments that make the Oresteia so confusing complex. I mentioned ‘timey-wimey’ already, didn’t I?

There are other motifs that match up as well. Prophecy is a BIG theme in Greek tragedy - think of Oedipus most famously, but also Hippolytus and many others. And yes, this is of course a theme that crops up in myths and fairytales from many other cultures. But the way it's used here feels very Greek. Or perhaps that’s just because I’m looking at it through the lens of the Oresteia, which relies heavily on the tragic prophetess Cassandra. But either way, the idea that Locke doesn't know where he came from, and that delving into the secrets of his identity can only lead to pain…well, Oedipus knows a lot about that. Oedipus's whole tragic downfall occurs because he doesn't know who he is. His very name is a pun on that fact. Like Locke, Oedipus is adopted as a child, and remains ignorant of his biological parentage until it’s too late. His fateful journey to Thebes, which leads him to kill his birth father and marry his birth mother, is precipitated after he learns of the prophecy that foretells that he will kill his father and marry his mother. So he leaves his adoptive home and his adoptive parents, and the very act of trying desperately to avoid his fate leads him to walk headlong into it. He only discovers this as, one by one, in a frenzied quest for the truth, he peels away the layers of his own identity.

There is another link as well – plague. Locke emerges as an infant from the ashes of the Catchfire plague, which leaves very few survivors. Patience claims that this plague is the result of Lamor Acanthus’ magical experimentation, making, if she is to be believed, Locke the unwitting cause of the plague. Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus opens with a deadly plague sweeping through Thebes, the cure for which is, apparently, to drive out the corruptive influence from the city. In his determined way, Oedipus gradually unwinds the tangled threads of his history, only to learn that he, accidentally patricidal and incestuous Oedipus, is the corruptive influence. He blinds himself (engraving his sins on his eyes?), and banishes himself.

I am afraid that the same thing is going to happen to Locke, now that he has this supposed prophecy of 'Key, Crown, Child' to worry about. (And he will worry about it, however much Jean tells him not to.) Well…not exactly the same thing, because I’m pretty sure incest is not on the cards here, but some terrible catastrophe (again) that Locke brings down on himself and his loved ones through trying to discover the ‘truth’ about his past. The Greek phrase 'Know Thyself' is carved on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the place of prophecy. Alongside the theme of hubris, it's kind of a central pillar of Greek tragedy - so many unfold because people do not truly know themselves, either in the sense that they don't know where they came from, or that they don't fully understand the nature of their relationships with others or their role in society.

Locke has a desperate need to know himself, to define himself. Which is, when you think about it, an interesting quality for an adept conman who can immerse himself in another identity at a moment’s notice. Or perhaps it’s not so odd – without a firm grasp on the Facts of his identity, he could lose himself entirely. So he thinks he knows himself: he is Camorri, he is a thief, he is a priest of the Crooked Warden and the garrista of the Gentlemen Bastards. He is Jean’s best friend. Whenever one or other of these truths is pulled out from under him, he crumbles completely. When Calo and Galdo and Bug are murdered, for example, and he believes that he, as their garrista should have stopped it – he sinks into a debilitating depression that is related as much to guilt and self-doubt as it is to grief. When he sees the vision of Bug which causes him to question everything he has ever learnt about the Therin gods, and his position as a priest, he is far more shaken by it than Jean is, though Jean is also a devout believer. And when he and Jean have their falling out on board the Poison Orchid, Locke’s whole existence seems out of joint because Jean has favoured someone else over him. What I’m trying to say is, Locke’s ability to function relies on his sense of self, and his sense of self relies on him holding certain facts to be true and immutable.

And so we come back around to Patience’s Lamor Acanthus story, which casts doubt on all those facts. In some ways, that’s worse than destroying them completely and replacing them with a new paradigm – right now Locke doesn’t know what to believe about himself. He’s caught between the Scylla of painful truth and the Charybdis of endless doubt, and it’s a dangerous place indeed. I fear that this lack of self-knowledge and determination to find definitive answers – combined with the innate hubris which leads him into trouble time and time again, and the Aeschylus-esque cycle of revenge that shows no signs of abating – I fear that this is going to push him into a discovery that he is better off without.

Vids

A masterpost of all my Doctor Who vids. Download links in the titles.

Blank Space - Doctor/Master, multi-era. Bondage and scenery chewing and their relationship in all its cracky, beautiful glory. Music by Taylor Swift. Co-vidded with such_heights.

Short Skirt / Long Jacket - Romana I. A celebration of her awesomeness. Music by Cake.

Never Look Away - Clara and Eleven, a meta vid. This is what my brain looks like whilst I watch Doctor Who. Music by Vienna Teng. Made as part of the Aims Vidding Project.

You've Got The Love - The Doctor (9, 10 & 11) and the TARDIS. The box and her boy, off to see the universe. Music by Florence and the Machine.

Read My Mind - Amy/Rory. All of my Pond feelings (up to the end of S6). I don't shine if you don't shine. Music by The Killers.

Love Is Cool - Eleven, River, Amy & Rory, a celebration of their love in all its forms. Music by MoZella. Co-vidded with such_heights.

Glósóli - Fairytale themes in S5 and S6, a meta vid. We're all stories in the end. Music by Sigur Ros. Co-vidded with such_heights.

Howl - Amy, Rory and River, and the danger of running with the Doctor. Music by Florence and the Machine. Co-vidded with such_heights.

Last Christmas meta: Tangerine Dreams and Third Party Perception.

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.

Fearful Symmetry

What immortal hand or eye….?

I already talked about the theme of eyes, pre-finale. About how the-eyes-are-not-the-windows-to-the-soul-they-are-the-doors, and what that means for Clara's transformation into the Doctor (and vice-versa). About how to-be-seen-is-to-exist, and what that means for the Doctor's conception of his new identity (eye-dentity?). About all of the Doctor's comments on Clara's eyes ('Why are you all eyes?! Get them under control!' 'Don't do that with the eyes.') and all the eye imagery that has surrounded her all season ('Could you trust someone who looked back at you out of your own eyes?'). It's always, always been about the eyes.

Oh, look:


They only put her eyes in the goddamned title sequence.

That was it, that was the ultimate moment of Clara's Doctorhood, but also the ultimate moment of Clara being just Clara.

Let me explain.

Way back when, Ibishtar wrote a great essay on Clara as a metaphor for the show itself, which I always enjoyed, particularly as it dovetails nicely with my feeling that Amy represents fandom. This concept is taken to its natural conclusion with the use of Clara's eyes in place of the Doctor's in the title sequence - it is almost as if the title of the show itself has become 'Clara Who', the main question S7 (and the pre-finale weeks of S8) had us all asking. Audience and Doctor. It is almost indescribably meta! Clara, the companion through whose eyes we the audience are supposed to perceive events (that is the supposed role of the companion, is it not?) - she is now looking out at us. Clara the control-freak has taken over the show's titles, and thus the show itself. Clara, who has become almost addicted to Tardis travel, has become intertwined with the time vortex, seeing all of time and space. It's just a trick, a joke on the part of Steven Moffat, a momentary repeat of Clara's S7 arc - she's built up to be 'impossible' and it turns out she's just an ordinary woman who does an extraordinary thing - and yet the image is striking and works on a number of levels. And somehow feels much more organic to Clara's own story than it would have done for any previous companion.

Because whilst all the Doctor's companions are his best friends for the time they travel with him, and all try to put themselves on an equal footing with him as much as possible, Clara has taken that a step or two further. As many people have noticed and discussed, Clara has become ever more like the Doctor this season, more overtly and deliberately than any companion in New Who before her. But also more carefully. She wasn't 'ordinary companion' one moment and boom! Doctor! the next. Her whole, entire journey has been leading up to this. She has always been 'too perfect' for the Doctor. From every single perspective, her first appearance has foreshadowed this. Oswin, when we the audience first meet her, explicitly mirrors the Doctor:

DOCTOR [on screen]: How can you hack into everything? It should be impossible. You're in a crashed ship!
OSWIN: Long story. Is there a word for total screaming genius that sounds modest and a tiny bit sexy?
DOCTOR [on screen]: Doctor. You call me the Doctor.
OSWIN: See what you did there.

She echoes him in lots of other little ways, not least in the simple fact that she is not what she outwardly appears to be. But that exchange is the most obvious, and is the first little hint that we should expect more of this. (Side note: we also get, in the Nina conversation, an explicit mention of gender expectations, and gender-swapping, which became an important if subtle theme in S8, leading up to the Missy reveal. End side note.) In this episode, Oswin fundamentally changes the Doctor's existence by wiping him from the Daleks' memory banks. At the time, we thought 'who is she, to do this? Such a huge thing?' Little did we know back then that she would stop the Doctor destroying Gallifrey, or that she would save his whole timeline with her life, or that she would persuade the Time Lords to give him more regenerations, or that she would be the one to comfort the Doctor as a scared child. Little did we know the path she would take would lead her to become the Doctor. (Though some of us suspected! I remember writing about my desperate hope that she would follow Ace's intended storyline, and enter the Academy on Gallifrey...) But those first acts - the momentous memory deletion and Oswin's later self-sacrifice - they started a pattern that was noticeable at the time, but only visible in all its glory now we can see the whole tapestry.

The next time we see Clara is in The Snowmen, and this is arguably the first time the Doctor (as opposed to the audience) 'meets' Clara. He sees her face, he interacts with her physically, and it's through her that he discovers the link to Oswin and the mystery of the 'impossible girl'. And oh look what we get here:

DOCTOR: That was stupid.
CLARA: You were stupid, too.
DOCTOR: I'm allowed. I'm good at stupid.
GOVERNESS: That's the way to do it!
CLARA: Why does she keep saying that?
DOCTOR: Mirroring. Random mirroring. We need to get on the roof.
CLARA: This way!
DOCTOR: No, I do the hand grabbing. That's my job. That's always me!

'Mirroring. Random mirroring.' FFS, Moffat. Stop that. There's nothing 'random' about it! Clara and the Doctor are constantly mirroring each other, and here we have Clara performing an action that's 'always' the Doctor's role. She also demonstrates an almost uncanny ability to read and manipulate him already - I'm thinking of 'Pond' in the one word game here, and the umbrella-on-the-rooftop scene. Besides which, she is honoured with the Tardis-key-receiving ritual the very first time she steps in the Tardis! The first companion to have that. Also the first companion to try to destroy all the Tardis keys. The moment has been prepared for. Clara has always mirrored the Doctor, always been destined to become him.

We, the audience, see modern day Clara for the first time in the BOSJ prequel, which has young Clara and the Doctor mirroring each other on the swings, and Clara assuming the Doctor's role of giving advice to a lost soul. She got her mojo back, though (just as she Victorian!Clara reignites the grieving Doctor's zest for life, and Clara at Christmas gets him his life back).

In The Rings of Akhaten we see the first time Clara ever meets the Doctor, as a tiny child in the park with two hearts on her jumper. (She hits him in the face with a football <3) And, in TBOSJ, we see Clara meeting the Doctor properly for the first time as an adult. The first time she is really conscious of him. As in her previous two episodes, and as she continues to do for the rest of season 7, she is dressed in red and blue, the two colours most associated with the Doctor, with the Tardis and Gallifrey and the time vortex. Once again, she displays a preternatural ability to do things no 'normal' companion (as if any of them are ever 'normal') should be able to do to the Doctor, such as phone the Tardis without ever having met him. We now know, of course, that Missy gave her that phone number. From pretty early on, Clara sets herself up on an equal footing with him:

(Sitting at a round table, a la King Arthur and his knights, tugging a laptop back and forth)
DOCTOR: If I can't find them, you definitely can't.
CLARA: They uploaded me, remember? I've got computing stuff in my head.
DOCTOR: So do I.
CLARA: I have insane hacking skills.
DOCTOR: I'm from space and the future with two hearts and twenty seven brains.
CLARA: And I can find them in under five minutes plus photographs. Twenty seven?
DOCTOR: Okay, slight exaggeration.
CLARA: Coffee, go get. Five minutes, I promise.

(Who else once promised five minutes?)

Oh, and whilst we're on that particular scene, look at that building behind the Doctor, in Clara's first proper episode, an episode about human souls being trapped in a computer matrix:



There is so much foreshadowing, it blows my mind. (Oh, and to the people who say her 'bossy control freak' personality was not present until the Christmas episode when it became a minor plot point, to you I say 'come back tomorrow. Ask me again. Tomorrow I might say yes. Some time after seven?' But I'm getting side tracked.) There will be more examples from S7 - many more - and if I've missed any glaringly obvious ones please let me know. I haven't watched S7 since this time last year when I was vidding it, and have forgotten a lot. S7 culminates with Clara literally scattering her whole life throughout the Doctor's. She becomes insinuated into every part of his life. Equal and opposite to the forces that seek to destroy him. Clara binds his timeline together. (That we still don't know how she survived, or how she and the Doctor escaped from there is the one thing that still bugs me about S7…) This is, as we've seen, not unprecedented in her story as we the audience have seen it, but chronologically for her this is perhaps the moment her conversion to 'Doctor' takes a step up.

On to The Day Of The Doctor, and we have the first time Clara - whole, unfractured present day Clara - meets other versions of the Doctor. And the first time they properly meet her. She can open the Tardis doors with a snap of her fingers, and she demonstrates, once again, that she can read the Doctor like a book (has read him in a book, actually, in JTTCOTT). 'I always know. Those big sad eyes'.

And then there's this:

WARRIOR: And if I grow to be half the man that you are, Clara Oswald, I shall be happy indeed.
CLARA: That's right. Aim high.

Aim high indeed. This is the moment that Ten and Eleven think the War Doctor is going to talk about *them*, and instead he talks about Clara. As she did in The Snowmen and Asylum, and TBOSJ, she subverts the Doctor/viewer's expectations by assuming the Doctor's qualities. Moffat has been playing a very long game.

In TTOTD, when Eleven regenerates - so now we're on Twelve's first 'meeting' with Clara, through his new eyes - the first thing he says directly to her is 'do you know how to fly this thing?!' With no idea who he is, he assumes she must be in charge of the Tardis. Once he's got a little more of a handle on things (but not much) he identifies Clara as 'the not-me one' - he's still not sure who she is, or how to define or distinguish her in any way, except that she (a)is not him, (b)asks questions, and (a) her name is a mystery. Seem familiar? Later on, in the restaurant, we get a wonderful dark reflection of the conversation between the Doctor and Oswin that I quoted earlier:

CLARA: Mmm hmm. Okay, so what sort of person would put a cryptic note in, in a newspaper advert?
DOCTOR: Well, I wouldn't like to say.
CLARA: Oh, go on, do say.
DOCTOR: Well, I would say that that person would be an egomaniac, needy, game-player sort of person.
CLARA: Ah, thank you. Well, at least that hasn't changed.
DOCTOR: And I don't suppose it ever will.
CLARA: No, I don't suppose it will, either.
DOCTOR: Clara, honestly, I don't want you to change. It was no bother, really. I saw your advert, I figured it out. I'm happy to play your game.
CLARA: No. No, no. I didn't place the ad. You placed the ad.
DOCTOR: No, I didn't.

They each mirror the other, and see their own qualities most clearly in the other person. But this time it's the negative qualities. The 'slightly sexy' 'total screaming genius' is now an 'egomaniac needy game-player'. And so begins the second half of Clara's 'becoming the Doctor' arc.

All Doctor Who companions become like the Doctor. All of them get braver, wiser, fiercer, kinder. All of them become more willing to fight for change. Sometimes they start to mirror some of his less desirable qualities too - a certain blasé reaction to danger perhaps - but none of them have becomes like him quite as wholeheartedly as Clara. And as she begins to mirror more and more of his negative qualities, instead of just the positive ones we saw in S7 (signs, along with her increasing abandonment of her 'Wednesdays only' rule, that she is becoming more 'addicted' to him and his lifestyle), this transformation is addressed ever more overtly. I don't need to discuss it much here, as it's treated pretty overtly in the text and has been discussed in detail by many people throughout this season (also I'm tired and there's a lot) but this transformation leads to Flatline, where she to all intents and purposes IS the Doctor in that episode (that is, in fact, the ep's whole purpose) and to ITFOTN where the mystery is, for the first time, more important to her than the lost children. This is a particularly telling moment, I think, as Clara has been fundamentally associated with both children and the need to stop people being 'lost' throughout her arc. It's one of the first things we learn about Victorian and Present Day Clara. And here, that quintessential spark of Clara-ness is briefly extinguished by her growing need to be the Doctor. It is also in this episode that Clara tricks the Doctor into going back to the Tardis, back to safety, just as he did to her in TTOTD.

And then on to the finale. The finale, where not just Clara's expected role as 'companion' but the whole natural order of things is subverted - the graves are 'giving birth', the dead are saving the living, rain brings death and fire saves everyone. Pain is a Gift. It's volcano day, and Clara and the Doctor wrest power back and forth (as they did oh so long ago in their tussle over the laptop at that little round table), both fighting for control of the situation. It turns out that the Doctor is still in ultimate control, but he then uses that control to do exactly as Clara wants him to, so who is really in charge? (I realise am talking about this scene quite coldly. I do not feel at all cold about it. I think it was one of the most moving moments I've ever seen on television, and it made mesob.)

Through two seasons of literal and figurative mirrors, of looking into each other's eyes ('If you want me to travel with you, that's fine. But as me.' / 'Just see me.') they have finally stepped through those doorways and Clara, at least, has the Doctor in her soul. And her eyes in the credits.

'Clara Oswald never existed. I am the Doctor.'

Of course, she isn't. Not literally. It's a clever lie. Just the kind of thing the Doctor would do.

And in the end, after the fighting is over and the Good Man who was also a Soldier saved the day - that victory belonged to Danny, not to the Doctor or to Clara - and after Clara had made her 'promise' in the form of her love for her cyber-soldier-man (just as the Doctor reaffirmed the 'promise' of his name in TNOTD - interesting, the echoes in those lines)…after everything, she and the Doctor independently come to the same decision, to lie to each other, to protect them. This is a kindness. This is such fearful symmetry.

Am I A Good Man? Soldiers in Season 8

Once again, I set out to write a series of bullet points covering a range of themes and motifs in Doctor Who S8...and once again, I found myself stuck on one particular topic. Concise, I am not. So - having discussed Eyes in S8, here you go, have some significantly less focused thoughts on soldiers. This is a very long, fairly superficial summary of what we've seen so far in terms of soldiers and how they relate to the Doctor's character (plus, er, multiple digressions onto barely-related topics).

So - being a soldier has obviously been one of the major recurring issues of this season. Is the Doctor a 'soldier' ? What does it really mean to be a soldier? Can you be both a 'soldier' and a 'good man' ? (A question first addressed directly in S6 A Good Man Goes To War, and raised on-and-off since then.) This theme has been prominent since ep2, Into The Dalek, when we first meet Danny and discover that he (like the Doctor's old friend, the Brig) is a soldier-turned-maths teacher. There's a fair bit of mystery surrounding Danny's character still - I've seen lots of people harbouring suspicions that there is more to him than meets the eye, and he may have links, knowingly or unknowingly, to Missy and whatever nefarious powers are going to be revealed in the finale.

For the moment, all we definitely know about Danny is that he grew up in care, had a childhood encounter with the Doctor and Clara that he probably doesn't remember, but which must have had a lasting effect on him: he clearly identified enough with Dan the Soldier Man, the 'soldier without a gun' (ie. one of the many Doctor mirrors this season), that he grew up to join the army. At some point he changes his name from 'Rupert' (meaning 'light', 'fame' - the same as 'Clara') to 'Danny' (meaning 'God has judged', linking to 'Oswald', 'divine ruler'.) He has a descendent who becomes, like Hide's Hila Tacorian, one of the pioneer time travellers. He enjoyed the army but worries that people get the wrong idea about soliders. It wasn't just 'killing people and crying about it afterwards' - there was a 'moral element' to it all. He dug wells. (Water being another big theme in Moffat's DW, which has continued this season.) Then, at some point, he 'had a bad day': he has clearly been through some as-yet-unspecified trauma, which has had a profound impact on his worldview. Presumably this trauma involved being 'pushed too far' by a superior officer, which may or may not have resulted in the accidental death of 'someone who wasn't a soldier'. Is Danny's journey from unintentional-killer to saviour going to mirror River Song's? (They have a few things in common after all, including a childhood in an orphanage and an ability to see through the Doctor's bullshit. And Clara is busy mirroring the Doctor, so why not?) Anyway, Danny then leaves the army to become a maths teacher. Personality-wise, he most definitely seems to be a 'good man' - he appears to be kind, patient, trustworthy, loyal, brave, etc. He places a high value on honesty, but is also strangely trusting of Clara - who repeatedly lies to him - and he is very insistent that she takes the time she needs to make decisions calmly, rather than in the emotional heat of the moment.

Despite all these positive character traits, the Doctor does not trust Danny. He obnoxiously gets his name wrong, and refuses (for reasons I can't quite figure out, given the Brig) to accept that a former soldier could become a maths teacher. The Doctor refers to him as 'PE', reflecting not only the fact that he apparently sees soldiers as unable to think for themselves (brawn, not brains are needed to follow orders), but also channeling the sense of fear/anxiety that many people associate the stereotype of the bullying PE teacher. (I know I certainly had a few of those.) It's a joke that would be funny were it not for the uncomfortably racist overtones that emerge when you consider his past treatment of Micky ('Ricky the idiot'), Martha and more recently Courtney ('don't you have shoplifting to go to?'). I'm not going to dwell on this here, because this is not the point of this essay, but I couldn't talk about Danny without acknowledging it. ANYWAY. The Doctor does not like Danny, does not trust him, and refuses to warm to him no matter how many times he proves himself (though he does at least grudgingly admit that Danny was right about something in In The Forest Of The Night.) He does not approve of Clara dating him, and tells us outright that this is because Danny is a soldier. Once a soldier, always a soldier, apparently, in the Doctor's mind. The soldier is always lurking beneath the skin of the teacher - Danny still drills the school's cadets and his training comes out under pressure, as in the end of The Caretaker. The Doctor, as we learned in Listen was once a scared little boy who did not want to join the army. See elisi's lovely meta post on The Caretaker for a clear, insightful discussion of Danny and the Doctor's first meeting, and all it entails. I will come back to some more analysis later, but first - what other soldiers are there?

We've met several other soldiers this season, in various guises. There's the aforementioned toy Dan the Soldier Man, the lone soldier who has lost his gun - without his gun or his army, what is it that defines him as a 'soldier'? Danny points out to Clara that people get 'the wrong idea' about soldiers, and it's clear that the Doctor has a particularly fixed idea of what a soldier *is*. He doesn't carry a gun (just a screwdriver - 'doesn't kill, doesn't wound, doesn't maim'), is not part of anyone's army and therefore does not think of himself as a soldier. But at the same time, he must have a deeper idea of what 'makes' a soldier, because he sees Danny as one even thought he's swapped his training exercises for exercise books. So if it's not just the weapon, what is it he objects to? The obeying of orders? The rigidity of the chain of command? What is it about an unarmed teacher that screams 'soldier' to the Doctor? I hope we get to find out.

The first soldier of the season is in the very first episode - Deep Breath gives us Strax. His role is mostly for comic relief, but he also gets to help in a bit of foreshadowing, when the newly-regenerated Doctor can't tell the warrior alien apart from his own companion. Clara absolutely does not share Strax's (hilariously) bloodthirsty nature, but she has become increasingly capable of switching off her natural emotional response to death and leading the troops - actually, she was good at this last season too (see Nightmare in Silver) but it's getting ever more pronounced. She is turning into the Doctor, and that means becoming a soldier - hence the confusion with Strax.

Meanwhile, it's always the 'monsters' who tend to parallel the Doctor, and this season is no exception. The broken Dalek is a soldier, as all Daleks are, and the Doctor works oh so hard to 'fix' it. He ultimately fails, crushing his own spirit more than a little. 'You are a good Dalek'…there is far more meta in this episode than I can begin to think about just now without my head exploding, and it has been eloquently discussed elsewhere, so I'm afraid I'm going to chicken out of analysing this ep in any depth. Instead I'll move quickly onto another broken soldier: 'The Foretold', the eponymous Mummy on the Orient Express. There are all sorts of obvious parallels going on with the Doctor here - an 'ancient soldier being driven by malfunctioning tech' including a 'personal teleporter', who is 'wounded in a forgotten war thousands of years ago', still fighting a battle that won't end. Except that whilst the Doctor's many skirmishes with alien foes take up the major part of most episodes, his real war is with himself. ('He's the Architect and I! Hate! Him!') It's interesting to me that both the Dalek and the Foretold are soldiers who are damaged, physically and mentally scarred, by their experiences of war - but not only that, they are both subject to experimentation. The Dalek is hooked up to all sorts of wires, and the Doctor is tasked with examining it from the inside out to find out how it works (or how it isn't working. Is a soldier without a gun still a soldier? Is a Dalek without hate still a Dalek? Is a Doctor who doesn't make people better still a Doctor?). The case of the Mummy turns out to be very similar - the mysterious Gus (G.U.S.?) has summoned the Doctor and a handful of other scientists to figure out what the Foretold is and how it works. What makes these broken soldiers tick? It's a good question for the Doctor to be asking himself. (And incidentally also ties in nicely with the self-repairing clockwork droids, the Robots in Sherwood and the Time Heist's 'augmented human' and the Boneless dissecting humans in foreshadowing the involvement of the Cybermen in the upcoming finale.)

It's also interesting that of all the soldiers in the series so far, the ones the Doctor invests the most emotion in, and tries hardest to save, are the 'monsters'. Obviously he hates the Dalek, but look at how hard he tries to believe in the possibility of a 'good' Dalek. Look at the impassioned speech he gives it (and contrast with his complete disconnect from even trying to engage with Danny.) Look at the sympathy he expresses for the Mummy, once he's worked out what it is ('You're relieved, soldier.') - sympathy he expresses for none of the human soldiers in the series, that I can remember…true he promises to 'do something amazing' in the name of Gretchen Alison Carlisle, but he doesn't work too hard to save her, or her male colleague who dies early in the episode. He is fairly contemptuous of former soldier Quell's dreams of a 'cushy desk job' on the Orient Express ('why am I even talking to you?'). And then there's Journey...

Because of all the soldiers in the series, the first to really turn our attention to this theme is the lovely Journey Blue, whose name evokes the Tardis herself and who was created as a very obvious parallel for Danny. She too is kind and brave and clever, but in the end she's a 'soldier' and so the Doctor rejects her plea to travel with him. Never mind that she is clearly a soldier out of necessity - hers is a world under siege - and not out of choice. Never mind that she helps save the day. Never mind that the Doctor has known and loved *many* other kind, brave, clever soldiers in the past (and even helped to turn some of them *into* soldiers - who got Martha that job at UNIT, Doctor? Who made use of 'Rory the Roman' in AGMGTW?) - she is a soldier, she 'takes orders', and therefore he can't bear to have her travel with him.

The first time I watched this ep, this forceful reaction against soldiers struck me as rather strange - even allowing for the particularly bleak frame of mind in which he understandably found himself at that point in time. It struck me as strange because my personal interpretation of the 50th Anniversary Episode was that it was all about the Doctor coming to terms with the War Doctor, integrating him as an accepted part of himself, acknowledging that he was still 'The Doctor' on the day that it 'wasn't possible to get it right'. It was about embracing 'the beast below' within himself, and becoming *whole*, and in the process - by working together with the Warrior side of himself - managing to save everyone after all. (The whole thing foreshadowed by his previous leap into his own timestream to rescue and reunite the fragmented Clara.) Perhaps, if he had regenerated not long after that, we would now have a much mellower Doctor.

But that's not what happened. Instead, he spent 300 years on Trenzalore - perhaps that's partly why he tries to disassociate himself from Earth in Kill The Moon. He's lived longer on Trenzalore than on Earth now. He spends that time on Trenzalore fighting a war that started because of him, seeing children he cares about grow up and (if they're lucky) grow old and die, or (if they're less lucky) get killed by the Daleks/Cybermen/Angels/other nasties that surrounded the town of Christmas. And he stayed there to fight, in this dark, cold little town (flickering lightbulbs) for so long, it eventually killed him. That's got to take a toll. That's got to make you more than a little bitter. Eleven regenerated knowing he had been granted the gift of new life by the Time Lords (unless there's something underhand going on there, of course. We'll find out soon enough) and knowing that he was loved by Clara, that he'd saved the town, and that Gallifrey was safe somewhere in another universe. But he also regenerated with 300 years of war having worn him down.

And also...I keep thinking about that Truth Field. Not much is made of it in the episode, after the initial joke when Eleven and Clara first arrive, but it is presumably there the whole time. 'The Doctor Lies', but he spent 300 years only able to tell the truth. The only lies he can tell are when he's on board the Tardis ('Clara Oswald, I will never send you away again'- his first bittersweet lie in god knows how long) and his regeneration process started when he was still outside, within the confines of the truth field. Perhaps that is a part of what has made him so blunt, so abrasive (so much like his original incarnation), so unwilling to compromise on who he is or blend in as a human. Perhaps it's part of the reason he makes so many personal remarks about Clara's appearance (as well as my other theory that he's projecting his concerns about his own face).

Each regeneration is always a reaction against the previous one, and I always like to think that - ever since the enforced regeneration of Eight anyway, I don't know enough about his earlier deaths - the circumstances of regeneration also have an effect. In direct opposition to the Tenth Doctor, whose constant refrain of 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry' eventually came to define him ('the man who regrets'), Twelve has said 'Sorry. No, actually, I'm not sorry' at least twice by my count. This is a Doctor who does not care to sugarcoat reality, does not promise to save people when he knows he can't, or when he knows that trying to save one person may just put more in danger. 'People don't need to be lied to, Clara.' (Listen) Of course he still lies, all the time - how much did he *really* know in Kill The Moon? - but always to serve a specific end. He, somewhat hypocritically, can't stand being lied to. (Just as he gives orders all the time, but can't stand taking them.) But he is very, very good at lying to himself. And he needs to stop lying about what he is. has pointed out (sorry, Elisi, I can't remember which of your metas it's in!) that acknowledging hard truths about yourself is only the first step towards self-improvement: you do actually have to *act* on those truths to be a 'good' person. Which is definitely true! But the Doctor is still not admitting certain truths to himself, however much he might make grandiose statements like 'It's time I did something about that'.

And so the physical distance he tries to keep between himself and his friends (no hugging!) rather tragically reflects the inner barriers he has built up for himself. In stark contrast to hyper-tactile Eleven, who was forever hugging/kissing/poking things and people that interested him (or, indeed, Ten, who tended to lick things!) Twelve is so much more contained. His movements are crisper, brisker, and he is almost phobic of close physical contact with other people. I came across an interesting theory somewhere in the depths of tumblr that this could be due to an increased level of psychic/sensory ability in this particular Doctor (his sense of time in Kill The Moon for example seems stronger than we've seen before) and a corresponding increased sensitivity to touch. I like this idea, but I think it's perhaps more interesting to think of it as an outward manifestation of his psyche. After Ten's death-by-hubris, inevitable from the moment he went too far on Mars and placed himself as a god above everyone else, Eleven went back to what was important to him: he found himself a loving, unconventional family and a large network of friends. He almost physically tugged people into his flaily orbit. They filled a hole in his life, perhaps, left by the loss of Gallifrey (a hole which Ten tried to fill with a succession of solo companions, endless guilt, and ultimately, by trying to make his own ego large enough to cover it.) That hole is no longer there since his acceptance of the War Doctor and the discovery of the truth about Gallifrey. Sure, the Doctor still seems to think of himself as 'the last of his kind' (see his rather flippant comment in In The Forest Of The Night and also the almost pathological way in which he leaps to the totally groundless conclusion that other troubled and isolated creatures must also be 'unique' - see the Teller and the moon dragon) BUT that is only true in this universe. He knows the Time Lords are out there somewhere, he knows he didn't kill them, and he knows that one day they will come back. But now there are other things he's hiding from himself - there's no hole now, but there's a scar instead and he's not going to touch it, or let people touch him, until he admits the truth about it.

To bring this back round to soldiers again, (sorry! got really distracted there) the truth he won't admit is that he is clearly a soldier. Or rather - an officer. I was saying this after Into the Dalek aired, and was thrilled when Danny brought it up and confronted the Doctor with this obvious truth. He is the soldier who trains up other people to fight, then sends them off to war. He hates obeying orders, but insists that others obey his. He has 'so many' rules…this is the thing he needs to accept about himself before he can really become a 'good man', whatever that may be. In his deeply ingrained self-loathing, he has set up this entirely false dichotomy of Doctor/Soldier, which he perhaps briefly dismantled in The Day Of The Doctor but rebuilt over 1000 years of war on Trenzalore. He needs to break it down again. And something needs to happen to force the issue, because it won't come naturally - the Doctor is, and has for some time, been a really *epic* procrastinator. As is only fitting for someone with a time machine, I suppose. Ten knew his time was up, and knew the Ood needed him for something, but fled from it all and went gallivanting off round the universe marrying monarchs instead. Eleven also ran from his 'death' at Lake Silencio for a very long time, and put off saying goodbye to his Ponds until they were forcibly taken from him. Twelve - as we saw at the start of Listen - spends his alone-time furiously investigating completely irrelevant mysteries and 'what if' questions, rather than searching for Gallifrey. (Unless that's what all the scribbles on his blackboard are for, of course). For all that he is very good at making other people face their fears, he is really extraordinarily bad at confronting his own issues. Then again, it's always easier to see your faults when they're safely ensconced in other people, and it's often true that the things that annoy you most about other people are the things that actually annoy you most about yourself. Which is why he needs a mirror in his companions, and few have mirrored him more than Clara. (What is going on in that trailer?? Oh Clara my Clara, I'm so afraid for you.)

So: what's going to happen in the finale to make the Doctor admit the truth about himself, and start to accept it? There are definitely armies involved - armies of Cybermen at the very least. Whose armies are they, who is in command (Missy? The Doctor? Clara?) and why? Who are they fighting? And how is this all going to play into the Doctor's obsessive rejection of soldiers? How does he even define a soldier?

There has been an interesting thread running through this series of defining things and 'naming things', ever since Trenzalore and the Question of the Doctor's name. I touched on the meanings of Danny and Clara's names earlier, and how Danny has chosen to change his name. Does it define him better now? In the Doctor's big speech at the end of Flatline he takes peculiar care to name the aliens ('the Boneless') which seems like a very odd thing to do, as you reject them from your reality. There is a lot of discussion about how to name things in Flatline, actually. In In The Forest Of The Night the Doctor has to be reminded that the small child in his Tardis 'probably has a name'. Almost the first thing Twelve does in Deep Breath is run through the list of deterministic names of the Seven Dwarfs, in the hope of pinning one on Strax. There is a fairytale power in knowing someone's 'true name', but there is also a certain power in how you choose to name yourself. Names have meanings, and how you choose to name yourself can define who or what you are. ('Name a thing and bang! It leaps into existance' - a quote from a play called 'Translations', which is one of my favourite things.) See all the discussion about the 'War Doctor' and how he could not call himself 'The Doctor' because of what he did. If the War Doctor could not name himself as the Doctor because he was a soldier, it seems Twelve has gone the other way - he is so determined now to be 'The Doctor' (after Clara reinforced that idea for him several times in The Day/Time Of The Doctor) that he refuses to name himself as a soldier.

But another thread running through this series has been that of ambiguity/duality. A lot of the 'monsters' this season have turned out to not be monsters after all - the Teller, the moon dragon, even the Mummy at heart. The trees in London were there to save the Earth, not to kill it. This is turned on its head in Flatline when the Doctor gives the Boneless a chance to prove their good intentions, and they reject it - but he acknowledged that the possibility was there. We don't all communicate the same way. There are shades of meaning in everything, including people. Again, has discussed the duality of Clara in depth and I don't need to go into it here. But there have been other things too - someone on tumblr pointed out that there has been a distinctly 'choose your own ending' theme this season. In Deep Breath did the Doctor push the cyborg or did he jump? In Mummy On The Orient Express did the Doctor really save everyone, or is that just what he told Clara? Was Robin Hood really real, or was he created from the legend by the aliens? Was there really a monster under the blanket, or was it a child? Was there something outside at the end of the universe, or was it just the ship creaking? You decide. Perhaps the truth is a matter of perspective. (If Robin Hood was created from the legends, does that make him any less real than if the legends came from him?) Perhaps more than one thing can be true. Kalabraxos literally existed as multiple versions of herself. The moon dragon was 'a baby' or 'a parasite' depending on who was looking at it.

This plays into the idea of 'fear less, trust more' that came up at the end of Forest - yes, 'fear is a superpower', but only when it has to be and only certain kinds of fear. The kind of fear that sends adrenaline pumping can motivate you, but there's also the cold kind of fear that paralyses. 'Trust me, I'm the Doctor'. The Doctor needs to start to trust himself more, to like himself more and fear himself less. He needs to deconstruct what he really means by the word 'soldier', because he has imbued it with all sorts of meanings it doesn't need to carry. (It was a beautiful, beautiful symbolic moment when Lord Nelson's statue came crashing down in Trafalgar Square, nearly crushing the Doctor and Clara. They are being crushed under the weight of meaning he has built into the concept of the 'soldier'. Of course, it could also symbolise that the Doctor himself is due for a Fall at the end of this season, but I hope it is ultimately a fall which knocks some sense into him.) The Doctor needs to recognise that he can name himself as a soldier and still be the Doctor, and still be a 'good man' if he tries to be.

So...that's it. Tell me your thoughts! If you have any brain left, after making it to the end of this. Congrats, if you managed it.

The Window To The Soul: Eyes in Season 8

In The Forest of the Night airs tomorrow - the last standalone Doctor Who ep before the two-part season finale. At this point last season, just before Neil Gaiman's Nightmare In Silver graced our screens, I posted my summary of Clara theories, which has now once more become relevant in light of the end of Flatline. This time, I was intending to write a succinct summary of all of the main themes and motifs of Doctor Who S8, along with speculation as to where they might be leading. Instead I got carried away thinking about Eyes, and so discussion of Soldiers, Robots, Naming Things and other themes will have to wait until my brain has recalibrated. Also, I am sure that there will be a LOT of meta to ponder after tomorrow's tree-filled episode. So in the meantime: Eyes!

Honestly, this is not a new motif. In fact, most of the motifs in this series are not new - they have been knocking around throughout the whole of Moffat's tenure so far (see also: Mirrors/Reflections/Doubles, Trees/Leaves, Books, Boxes, Memories, Puppets, Chess, Family and 'The Beast Below'). I mean, ten minutes into The Eleventh Hour we were faced with a gigantic eye through the crack in the wall (oh, such wonderful foreshadowing of The Time Of The Doctor, and the Timelords waiting and searching beyond this universe...). BUT! There have been an even higher number of Eye references than usual this season - from Deep Breath onwards, the Doctor is constantly imploring Clara to 'look at me', he's comments repeatedly on her appearance (more on this later) and in particular on her eyes - 'you're all eyes! You've got eyes out to here!'. Not to mention all the comments from other characters - 'how could you trust someone if they looked at you out of your own eyes?' (some VERY heavy foreshadowing there, and not just for the end of that episode.) In Into The Dalek, Clara really hits us over the head with it by wearing a whole shirt covered in eyes, as she enters the Dalek through its eyestalk. The optic nerve has been mentioned not once but twice, first in Deep Breath and then in Flatline when the Doctor 'hacks' Clara's optic nerve in order to see out of her eyes. And those are just the references I can think of off the top of my head. I know there are more. So what is this all pointing towards? I would say there are several meanings:

(1) Clara and the Doctor are studying each other, sussing each other out. And thus they are *becoming* each other. Of all the Doctor/Companion relationships of the new series, theirs (in my opinion) has been one of the most interesting because they have BOTH been mysteries to each other. Eleven seeks out Clara because she is an 'enigma', the 'impossible girl', and spends the first half of their time together covertly investigating her origins - is she 'a trick, a trap?' (a question that has become very relevant once again, in light of Missy's words at the end of Flatline)- and he stalks her timeline, foreshadowing Clara's later split throughout his own timeline. Meanwhile, Clara is sussing him out, as all the Companions do at first. Then, just as they have become truly comfortable together, they have really *seen* each other ('I always know…those big sad eyes')...BAM! Regeneration. And suddenly the Doctor has new eyes with which to see the world, and a whole new personality which Clara struggles to really 'see': she initially sees straight through him ('just see me') to the ghost of Eleven, just as he once saw through her and only saw Oswin and Victorian!Clara. I love and adore that scene at the end of Deep Breath, because it worked for me too - until that point, I had felt like I was seeing the echo of Eleven behind Twelve's every step and word and gesture, like watching the pair of them move in blurry parallel. One Doctor dead and gone, one Doctor too newly formed to feel *real*. Suddenly, with that speech, it was as if they both slid together and snapped into focus and I could 'see' Twelve as The Doctor and oh it was wonderful. I imagine it was the same for Clara (for all that she has lived other lives with other Doctors, Eleven was *her* Doctor). And for the Doctor - well, the pain of Clara seeing right through him made me stop and think. 'Do you have any idea what that's like?' he asks her. Yes. Of course she does. That's how you saw her, Doctor, for most of S7. This is your comeuppance. Elisi has written some truly wonderful meta on Clara as 'Schrodinger's Companion', and how to be seen is to exist, in Moffat's Who. I won't try to summarise it all here because I absolutely won't do it justice. But you should read it, because it's extremely pertinent. Steven Moffat has long been obsessed with eyes, and seeing - think of the 'quantum locked' Weeping Angels, or the Silence who you only remember when you are looking at them. Think of Reinette, who is the proto-Schrodinger's Companion: young/old/alive/dead, her status is only fixed when the Doctor *sees* her, and once seen it can't be unseen and undone. (Remember that Moffat has been a Sherlock Holmes fan since forever - it is important not just 'to see' but 'to observe'. In the Sherlockian universe a person's whole life may be understood with little more than judicious use of eyesight.) Think of "The eyes are not the window to the soul, they are the doors. Beware what may enter there." (The Time Of Angels, one of my very favourite quotes) And this leads naturally to: "A door, once opened, can be stepped through in either direction." (The Girl In The Fireplace) Clara and the Doctor have been looking at each other, scrutinising each other for so long, they have stepped through the doorways into each others' souls. Clara is becoming ever more like the Doctor (a point hammered home in Flatline, but very much in place long before then - god, even the mirror she looks into so the Doctor can see her face in Flatline is eye-shaped. What an endless series of reflections.) Meanwhile the Doctor has taken Clara's place as 'The Impossible Man', the man twice dead - 'who frowned me this face?'. We're due an answer on this. Caecilius and Frobisher (from Torchwood) and goodness knows how many other people have worn Twelve's face before, just like all of Clara's time-split selves. (Whilst all of the Doctor's MANY comments on Clara's physical appearance have made me slightly uncomfortable this season, I am choosing to see it in a Watsonian light - his own face is clearly preying on his mind, and he is externalising this and projecting it onto Clara and what *she* looks like. This is very much the Doctor of Moffat's The Doctor Dances - 'Cuts himself shaving, does half an hour on life forms he's cleverer than.') He has become 'Schrodinger's Doctor', and needs Clara to 'see' him to be sure that he exists. Sure, he can bop around the universe without her, but he always keeps coming back for her. He can run around time and space observing things all he likes - see the beginning of Listen - but in order to make sense of anything he needs someone to observe *him*.

(2) Someone is observing both Clara and the Doctor. I should have posted this a few weeks ago, because now this seems like less of a revelation, though it's been clear for ages. Obviously, that someone is Missy - but who is she? To them? And is she working for anyone else? The predominant theory on the interwebs is that she is the Master, which I very much hope is true. So much of her demeanor points to this, as well as the obvious 'Mistress' connotations of her name, her garden which looks like a Tardis with the central column, and all of the throwaway comments on subverting ideas of gender that happened this season (See: Strax misgendering Clara, the female dinosaur, the female president in Kill The Moon, 'you're built like a man', etc etc). I have privately wondered if Missy might be a Tardis in human form (something I wondered a lot about Clara last season), as she seems to have abilities to pluck people from death that even Timelords shouldn't have. But that is probably too far-fetched. Other popular online theories are that she is - or is connected to - the Valeyard, the Black/White Guardians, the Great Intelligence, River Song, CAL, etc etc. And of course she could always be something new. But whoever she is, she has been *watching* the Doctor and Clara, and the implication is that she has somehow played intergalactic puppeteer or chess grandmaster (see that giant chess board Clara stands on in The Caretaker) and handpicked them for each other, making efforts to ensure they stay together. Possibly she even manipulated the Doctor's regeneration, somehow. Why? How? How long has she been playing this game? How is she watching them? What is her ultimate aim? How is she plucking people from death and what does she want them for? What is 'Heaven' or the 'Nethersphere' (and is it connected to the Timelord 'Matrix')? So much we still don't know, and I don't have many convincing theories to add to it all. Whatever the answers to all these questions, it's clear that Missy's eyes have been on Clara (literally, in the case of her Into the Dalek shirt!) for a long time.

(3) Clara as a Witness. This is more speculative, but I am wondering if the Doctor is - once again - going to be put on trial. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Twelve is a more obviously aristocratic and imperious iteration of the Doctor than we've seen in a while, there have been more attempts than usual to undermine his authority. At least two characters have asked 'who put you in charge?' or words to that effect (in Time Heist and Kill The Moon) and in Flatline his role and title are taken wholesale by Clara. Danny - whose name means 'God has judged' - has taken issue with the Doctor's behaviour. Add to that the continued question of 'what is a Good Man?' as well as Psy's comment to Clara that she must have been with the Doctor for a long time because she is so good at 'making excuses' for him - is the Doctor going to have to answer for his actions before the gates of Heaven? Is he going to have to prove that he is a Good Man and will Clara be there to defend him or to prosecute him? Why her? Why now? I don't think Gallifrey is going to come back for good just yet - I think that's going to be next season's arc - so who or what is Missy working towards? When the Timelords are reinstated, there will always be someone Watching the Doctor and taking note of his actions. In the meantime, it's just Clara. She has become the authority on the Doctor, and likely that in either this finale or at Christmas, she will take her last look at him. The Doctor can see that she is turning into him, and knows that 'goodness has nothing to do with it'. One of them - and I very much hope it's Clara - is going to make the decision that they have to stop looking.

So...that's it for now. I will inevitably edit to add things later, as they strike me at inappropriate times. In the meantime - who has things to add?

Who is Clara Oswin Oswald?

In The Forest of the Night airs tomorrow - the last standalone Doctor Who ep before the two-part season finale. At this point last season, just before Neil Gaiman's Nightmare In Silver graced our screens, I posted my summary of Clara theories, which has now once more become relevant in light of the end of Flatline. This time, I was intending to write a succinct summary of all of the main themes and motifs of Doctor Who S8, along with speculation as to where they might be leading. Instead I got carried away thinking about Eyes, and so discussion of Soldiers, Robots, Naming Things and other themes will have to wait until my brain has recalibrated. Also, I am sure that there will be a LOT of meta to ponder after tomorrow's tree-filled episode. So in the meantime: Eyes!

Honestly, this is not a new motif. In fact, most of the motifs in this series are not new - they have been knocking around throughout the whole of Moffat's tenure so far (see also: Mirrors/Reflections/Doubles, Trees/Leaves, Books, Boxes, Memories, Puppets, Chess, Family and 'The Beast Below'). I mean, ten minutes into The Eleventh Hour we were faced with a gigantic eye through the crack in the wall (oh, such wonderful foreshadowing of The Time Of The Doctor, and the Timelords waiting and searching beyond this universe...). BUT! There have been an even higher number of Eye references than usual this season - from Deep Breath onwards, the Doctor is constantly imploring Clara to 'look at me', he's comments repeatedly on her appearance (more on this later) and in particular on her eyes - 'you're all eyes! You've got eyes out to here!'. Not to mention all the comments from other characters - 'how could you trust someone if they looked at you out of your own eyes?' (some VERY heavy foreshadowing there, and not just for the end of that episode.) In Into The Dalek, Clara really hits us over the head with it by wearing a whole shirt covered in eyes, as she enters the Dalek through its eyestalk. The optic nerve has been mentioned not once but twice, first in Deep Breath and then in Flatline when the Doctor 'hacks' Clara's optic nerve in order to see out of her eyes. And those are just the references I can think of off the top of my head. I know there are more. So what is this all pointing towards? I would say there are several meanings:

(1) Clara and the Doctor are studying each other, sussing each other out. And thus they are *becoming* each other. Of all the Doctor/Companion relationships of the new series, theirs (in my opinion) has been one of the most interesting because they have BOTH been mysteries to each other. Eleven seeks out Clara because she is an 'enigma', the 'impossible girl', and spends the first half of their time together covertly investigating her origins - is she 'a trick, a trap?' (a question that has become very relevant once again, in light of Missy's words at the end of Flatline)- and he stalks her timeline, foreshadowing Clara's later split throughout his own timeline. Meanwhile, Clara is sussing him out, as all the Companions do at first. Then, just as they have become truly comfortable together, they have really *seen* each other ('I always know…those big sad eyes')...BAM! Regeneration. And suddenly the Doctor has new eyes with which to see the world, and a whole new personality which Clara struggles to really 'see': she initially sees straight through him ('just see me') to the ghost of Eleven, just as he once saw through her and only saw Oswin and Victorian!Clara. I love and adore that scene at the end of Deep Breath, because it worked for me too - until that point, I had felt like I was seeing the echo of Eleven behind Twelve's every step and word and gesture, like watching the pair of them move in blurry parallel. One Doctor dead and gone, one Doctor too newly formed to feel *real*. Suddenly, with that speech, it was as if they both slid together and snapped into focus and I could 'see' Twelve as The Doctor and oh it was wonderful. I imagine it was the same for Clara (for all that she has lived other lives with other Doctors, Eleven was *her* Doctor). And for the Doctor - well, the pain of Clara seeing right through him made me stop and think. 'Do you have any idea what that's like?' he asks her. Yes. Of course she does. That's how you saw her, Doctor, for most of S7. This is your comeuppance. Elisi has written some truly wonderful meta on Clara as 'Schrodinger's Companion', and how to be seen is to exist, in Moffat's Who. I won't try to summarise it all here because I absolutely won't do it justice. But you should read it, because it's extremely pertinent. Steven Moffat has long been obsessed with eyes, and seeing - think of the 'quantum locked' Weeping Angels, or the Silence who you only remember when you are looking at them. Think of Reinette, who is the proto-Schrodinger's Companion: young/old/alive/dead, her status is only fixed when the Doctor *sees* her, and once seen it can't be unseen and undone. (Remember that Moffat has been a Sherlock Holmes fan since forever - it is important not just 'to see' but 'to observe'. In the Sherlockian universe a person's whole life may be understood with little more than judicious use of eyesight.) Think of "The eyes are not the window to the soul, they are the doors. Beware what may enter there." (The Time Of Angels, one of my very favourite quotes) And this leads naturally to: "A door, once opened, can be stepped through in either direction." (The Girl In The Fireplace) Clara and the Doctor have been looking at each other, scrutinising each other for so long, they have stepped through the doorways into each others' souls. Clara is becoming ever more like the Doctor (a point hammered home in Flatline, but very much in place long before then - god, even the mirror she looks into so the Doctor can see her face in Flatline is eye-shaped. What an endless series of reflections.) Meanwhile the Doctor has taken Clara's place as 'The Impossible Man', the man twice dead - 'who frowned me this face?'. We're due an answer on this. Caecilius and Frobisher (from Torchwood) and goodness knows how many other people have worn Twelve's face before, just like all of Clara's time-split selves. (Whilst all of the Doctor's MANY comments on Clara's physical appearance have made me slightly uncomfortable this season, I am choosing to see it in a Watsonian light - his own face is clearly preying on his mind, and he is externalising this and projecting it onto Clara and what *she* looks like. This is very much the Doctor of Moffat's The Doctor Dances - 'Cuts himself shaving, does half an hour on life forms he's cleverer than.') He has become 'Schrodinger's Doctor', and needs Clara to 'see' him to be sure that he exists. Sure, he can bop around the universe without her, but he always keeps coming back for her. He can run around time and space observing things all he likes - see the beginning of Listen - but in order to make sense of anything he needs someone to observe *him*.

(2) Someone is observing both Clara and the Doctor. I should have posted this a few weeks ago, because now this seems like less of a revelation, though it's been clear for ages. Obviously, that someone is Missy - but who is she? To them? And is she working for anyone else? The predominant theory on the interwebs is that she is the Master, which I very much hope is true. So much of her demeanor points to this, as well as the obvious 'Mistress' connotations of her name, her garden which looks like a Tardis with the central column, and all of the throwaway comments on subverting ideas of gender that happened this season (See: Strax misgendering Clara, the female dinosaur, the female president in Kill The Moon, 'you're built like a man', etc etc). I have privately wondered if Missy might be a Tardis in human form (something I wondered a lot about Clara last season), as she seems to have abilities to pluck people from death that even Timelords shouldn't have. But that is probably too far-fetched. Other popular online theories are that she is - or is connected to - the Valeyard, the Black/White Guardians, the Great Intelligence, River Song, CAL, etc etc. And of course she could always be something new. But whoever she is, she has been *watching* the Doctor and Clara, and the implication is that she has somehow played intergalactic puppeteer or chess grandmaster (see that giant chess board Clara stands on in The Caretaker) and handpicked them for each other, making efforts to ensure they stay together. Possibly she even manipulated the Doctor's regeneration, somehow. Why? How? How long has she been playing this game? How is she watching them? What is her ultimate aim? How is she plucking people from death and what does she want them for? What is 'Heaven' or the 'Nethersphere' (and is it connected to the Timelord 'Matrix')? So much we still don't know, and I don't have many convincing theories to add to it all. Whatever the answers to all these questions, it's clear that Missy's eyes have been on Clara (literally, in the case of her Into the Dalek shirt!) for a long time.

(3) Clara as a Witness. This is more speculative, but I am wondering if the Doctor is - once again - going to be put on trial. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Twelve is a more obviously aristocratic and imperious iteration of the Doctor than we've seen in a while, there have been more attempts than usual to undermine his authority. At least two characters have asked 'who put you in charge?' or words to that effect (in Time Heist and Kill The Moon) and in Flatline his role and title are taken wholesale by Clara. Danny - whose name means 'God has judged' - has taken issue with the Doctor's behaviour. Add to that the continued question of 'what is a Good Man?' as well as Psy's comment to Clara that she must have been with the Doctor for a long time because she is so good at 'making excuses' for him - is the Doctor going to have to answer for his actions before the gates of Heaven? Is he going to have to prove that he is a Good Man and will Clara be there to defend him or to prosecute him? Why her? Why now? I don't think Gallifrey is going to come back for good just yet - I think that's going to be next season's arc - so who or what is Missy working towards? When the Timelords are reinstated, there will always be someone Watching the Doctor and taking note of his actions. In the meantime, it's just Clara. She has become the authority on the Doctor, and likely that in either this finale or at Christmas, she will take her last look at him. The Doctor can see that she is turning into him, and knows that 'goodness has nothing to do with it'. One of them - and I very much hope it's Clara - is going to make the decision that they have to stop looking.

So...that's it for now. I will inevitably edit to add things later, as they strike me at inappropriate times. In the meantime - who has things to add?