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.

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?

The Snowmen Meta

So, Christmas Doctor Who happened.

As usual, my brain was COMPLETELY TAKEN OVER with DW-related thoughts for pretty much the whole of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. This year I thought I might keep them here for posterity. So:

My first thoughts, as ever, run to parallels. I LOVE PARALLELS. I think I have an addiction. Anyway, there are so many parallels between this ep and A Christmas Carol (a frozen woman, a grumpy old man who wants to ruin Christmas because of his Lonely Childhood, a man who lives high up in a tower and initially refuses to help those who explicitly beg for it, mention of FISH (which are always metaphors for PEOPLE), frozen time represented as ice, memories re-written, a steampunk aesthetic….) lots of deliberate references, I think. Hopefully this means this ep is going to be as significant for the forthcoming series as ACC was for S6.

But the parallels make it very easy to spot the differences. Obviously the Doctor’s whole demeanour is different here – the circumstances have changed. Last time he was celebrating a wedding, this time he’s in mourning. The differences in the ways the Doctor deals with Kazran and Simeon, I think are particularly interesting - he takes the time to rewrite K's whole life to make him better. He doesn't even bother with S, he just mindwipes him. Given that both K and S are intended as mirrors for the Doctor, this surely has deeper meaning - the Doctor is a lot less forgiving of himself, now? It also reminded me of the way he treated Solomon in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, and the way he initially treated the other doctor in Mercy - he recognises his mirrors now, and doesn't like them very much…Poor Doctor. He needs to start learning to recognise the POSITIVE mirrors too. Clara is one. 'Clara' = 'light', 'clarity', 'fame' - Clara will help the Doctor see clearly again? He needs more than those round glasses. Looking through Amy's glasses he's just looking into his past. He needs someone to illuminate his present again. Surely ‘Oswin’, ‘God’s friend’ will help with this? And if my theory (one of them) that she is somehow one person split and splintered throughout time, then surely *he* will help fix *her* and make her whole again, which is what doctors do. He is 'here to help'.

On the subject of Clara and parallels, I've seen several people point out how Clara was working at the Rose and Crown, and she wears a rose in her hair as Dalek!Oswin, and there's a rose engraved on her gravestone - she is very like Rose here, the perky, peppy, curious girl who meets a tired, grumpy old man who wants nothing to do with the human race, and manages to convince him to see the wonder in the universe again.

She is, of course, also Martha - the first companion to join the Doctor after his best friend was sucked away into nothingness before his eyes (there are very clear visual parallels between Rose in Doomsday and Amy in Angels) - and is super-smart enough to deal.

She is Donna, in Partners of Crime - sees something weird going on, marches out to investigate! No sitting back and letting things happen for HER. She even manages to steamroller the Doctor into submission via gesticulating through a window. Also I suspect she may well get to be The Most Important Person ( / People?!) In Creation (tm) at some point on or before the 50th anniversary.

And she is Amy - with her magical brain and magical tears and impossible life that Doesn’t Make Any Sense and her penchant for dressing up.

She is Rory, with her multiple deaths and rebirths, and the duality of her nature (nurse/warrior - barmaid/governess).

She is River, with her hyper-competence and flirtyness, and in fact her whole demeanour. Like River, her life is a timey-wimey mystery just tantalisingly beyond the Doctor's grasp, and she may or may not have been created by a higher power for a purpose...

She is Jack, as we've already seen her live in the past and in the future, and she likes to dress up and play other people. (she's a con artist!)

And she is Micky - computer whizz, hacker extraordinaire.

As the 50th Anniversary Companion, she should be the sort of 'archetypal' companion. So she should represent all the things they've ever been, as much as you can fit them in one person. She's an individual but also maybe a symbol of what that role is all about, as well as being a refreshingly old skool trope – the super-clever companion! We haven’t had one of those in New Who yet (River doesn’t count. She is not a ‘full time’ companion - River is a whole category to herself!)

I think it will be very interesting to see what job presentday!Clara has, because the Companions' jobs have usually been significant in some way - there was Donna's whole issue with being a 'temp', and that reflecting how she felt about herself (which was tragically ironic at the end, when all the wonderful character arc she went through in S4 turned out to be temporary...); there was Martha, the doctor-in-training, who restarted both the Doctor's hearts in her first 2 eps, and brought him back to life post-Rose; Rose was, of course, a shop assistant - and therefore in the later mythology of the show, 'here to help' - first the Doctor, and then she went on to dedicate her life to rebuilding TW and helping the whole of her new world. Rory is a nurse, with all of the nurturing, healing power that implies, Mickey is a mechanic, which is good because he ended up with the job of helping to rebuild a world. River is an archaeologist, who spends much of her life uncovering the mysteries in her own history, and she's also a professor - she has a lot to teach the Doctor. Jack is initially a con-man, which...well, that one doesn't really need explaining. And Amy! Amy goes through lots of jobs, but settles on being a storyteller, in charge of finding herself and others, and saving the world through the magic of words. Though of course, when we meet her, she's a kissogram (who has been known to bite people) in disguise as a police officer....it's no wonder she shares motherhood of her child with the Tardis. So much foreshadowing.

And Clara? We will see! So far she's been a 'Junior entertainment manager', a barmaid and a governess. The Governess part is easy - not only is she channelling Mary Poppins (continuing the Moff's quest to INCLUDE ALL THE BRITISH ICONS EVER in his show) but she is a *teacher*, in charge of caring for (unruly?) children. The perfect person to take the Doctor in hand - she DOES teach him things in this episode, and she helps him return from being a crochety old man to a delighted kid. A Governess. perfect. Barmaid...the opposite of Governess. Someone who serves people something that makes them release their inhibitions, talk more freely. Looking at you again, Doctor. She is also not ashamed of her working class roots, the way Rose sometimes was (‘I work in a shop!’) but also not afraid to aim for something other than what is expected of her. Junior Entertainment Manager - ie. Highly Technical Person In Charge Of Fun On Long Journeys! Also sounds familiar, n'est pas?

At the moment she is rather like a set of Russian dolls - there is CLARA OSWIN OSWALD, who breaks down into Victorian Clara, Modern Clara, and Future Oswin. Victorian Clara is a barmaid and a governess, and the governess even has a 'secret voice'. Oswin is a human and a Dalek. Modern Clara....is a mystery. So many doubles….

It’s all about duality, as ever. Moffat’s favourite theme - snow is both a solid and a liquid, and we encounter both Clara AND Oswin in places covered in snow (Oswin = an anagram of ‘I snow’ ! Takes one to snow one I guess…sorry.) Oswin is a human and a Dalek. (The monsters and the Doctor - you can't have one without the other. The same goes for Oswin) Clara is a barmaid and a governess. The Doctor loses his new companion to Death just as he learns to Love her; she falls down to earth in the very moment he invites her to join him up in the stars. Her death inspires him to look for her life. There are two children, two governesses, everything is a mirror, as we've known for a very long time. The Doctor sees himself in a mirror, again. Everything - once again - is doubled. Last time, in S6, it was predicted that the endless doubling was foreshadowing some sort of parallel world situation, and this turned out to be pretty accurate. So what is this lot of doubling leading to? Two Doctors? (please please please…) Two planets? Earth and Gallifrey? If Clara is not a time-spliced, fobwatched Romana in some form (my previous crack theory), perhaps she will at least get to live out Ace's intended storyline, the last unfinished business of Classic Who, and Gallifrey will come back - better than before, as I have already discussed here - and she will end up there, studying at the Academy, or even founding it. As well as being the most beautiful nod to Classic Who, it would be the perfect way for Clara to stop travelling with the Doctor without it being another epic GOODBYE FOREVER parting, which would just undo all the emo-angst she is supposed to have fixed. Speaking of fixing, that’s what I think all this duality is about - it's about bringing different parts together into a whole, rather than doubling and split realities. It’s about making something splintered WHOLE again - both Clara (in all her forms) and the Doctor, and in the process probably the Universe/Time/Gallifrey. And maybe we’ll have two Doctors…

….though I'm still holding out for three! (Nine, please come back, I love you.) As we know there are actually at least 3 Claras – a magic fairytale number, and a holy trinity! A holy Trinity of girls who are all one girl, who die and are reborn, who are bringers of Light and who save the Doctor and come from humble beginnings but go on to be saviours. Christmas is a very apt symbol. I talked before about how I thought the repeated references to eggs/lightbulbs/Christmas were foreshadowing New Gallifrey, but they are also foreshadowing Clara.

In fact, the Power of Three theme (cunningly introduced in season 7a!) is pretty strong in this ep – now I think about it there are actually THREE of most things in the ep - 3 friends of the Doctor (Vastra, Jenny and Strax), 3 governesses, if you count the one in the daughter's dream (and you should ALWAYS count dreams, dreams are very important), 3 men who have distanced themselves from the world (Doctor, Simeon, Latimer), 3 children if you include young Simeon, 3 villains (the snowmen, the ice nanny and Simeon - all united by the Great Intelligence, an unholy Trinity...), 3 worlds - the heaven of the Tardis, Earth on the ground, and the hell beneath the ice where Governess 1 died (ok maybe that's stretching it a bit...) This Clara actually has 3 lives - 'sweet little Clara' the barmaid, 'Miss Montague' the governess, and Clara Oswin Oswald the adventurer, the woman who sought out the Doctor and ran after him and passed his test and generally acted in a manner befitting neither a Victorian barmaid nor a Victorian governess. She ran after him and hunted him down, like Donna in Partners in Crime (Donna, who turned out to be ‘the most important woman in all creation’…)

The power of 3...we learned all about duality and the power of doubles in seasons 5 and 6, and this culminated in various parallel worlds being created and destroyed, and, ultimately, in 2 couples finding their life partners. They also had 2 lives - River had her days in prison and her nights with the Doctor, whilst Amy and Rory had 'real life' and 'Doctor life' - lots of binaries, and lots of FALSE binaries also. In the end though, Amy and Rory found a 3rd way to live - a 'real life' but outside of their time, so it was still something of an adventure. Maybe there are more than two choices after all. Maybe we're now moving on to the most fairytale of numbers? 3 Fates, 3 wishes, 3 Wise Men....the number is important in mythology, fairy tales and religion. (DW is a fairy tale with 50 years of mythology and fans with an almost religious devotion) Clara, (whose name means Light) who the doctor met - properly, face to face - for the first time at Christmas, and who will return at Easter (eggs) has already Died So That Others Might Live and come back to life - a theme in religion, obviously, but also in myths and fairytales. (and DW - see The Doctor's Daughter, and the Library, and of course any time the Doctor has regenerated whilst saving a life). She seems to be loosely associated with roses, as I mentioned above (the same way Amy was loosely associated with apples and all they represented) - Roses are, appropriately, symbols of Christ in Christian tradition, and are also a very common fairytale motif. Most obviously, they represent Love, which is often a force used to bring people back from the edge of destruction in DW (and in stories in general.) Perhaps Clara-Oswin will be the one to CREATE New Gallifrey, build a kingdom of heaven etc etc.....

But roses are dangerous. Beauty, appealing symmetry - these are accompanied by thorns, and by layer upon layer of petals which can conceal secrets. So many layers of petals, so many Russian dolls, so many mysteries surrounding her. Is she dangerous? Does she know it if she is? Clara WHO? We speculate, yet we still know so little about her.

We know she has already heard the Call To Adventure and set out on her Quest, has been tested with riddles by Vastra, and been found worthy, and has rescued the princess in the tower (the Doctor) - but who is she? What is the Name of this rose? Is she Mary Poppins? Is she Belle (a character also associated with roses), who will save the Beast (Below) ? Is she Clara from the Nutcracker? Is she Pinocchio?

To elaborate on that last one - the whole puppetry/Punch and Judy thing in this episode – besides being representing the Trickster archetype, this continues the dominant theme of S5 & 6 actually, of people being physically or mentally controlled (the Great Intelligence does this too) – perhaps there is some sort of great intelligence behind everything, manipulating the Doctor the way the Master was manipulated? Is Clara an unknowing Time Lord puppet, who has become a Real Girl? Deposited throughout time and space with some sort of inbuilt chameleon circuit to help her blend in ….which she has naturally managed to override or break, just like the Doctor’s Tardis (how else could she be a barmaid AND a governess?)

elisi and lonewytch have concocted a fabulous theory that Clara-Oswin is some sort of Time Lord ‘egg’ or seed, planted throughout time and space to help resurrect Gallifrey. She is the ‘blueprint’ for the Time Lord planet, just as the Ice Nanny was the blueprint for the Great Intelligence. Eggs, seeds, containing all the information needed to create new life…I approve of this theory, not least because it sits nicely with my last epic ramble about New Gallifrey, but also because the Tardis stairs connecting Clara to the Doctor and the Tardis look like a strip of DNA….and she was born on the show’s birthday. Initially I thought perhaps she was splintered throughout time because of some cataclysmic event happening on the moment of her birth (see – the Ponds’ wedding date), but perhaps her birthday is important because she will bring about the birth of New Gallifrey. (unconnected - but the first time the Doctor mentioned Gallifrey after the Time War, he was on New Earth. Perhaps somehow he knows that New Gallifrey is possible)

Or perhaps she is supposed to help the Doctor remember something? In S5, the Doctor had to make Amy *remember*, so she could bring him back into existence. It was the last thing he said to her before he went to his (supposed) death in the Pandorica. 'Run you clever boy…and remember' - twice now, Oswin has said that to him before her supposed death. Is she some sort of aide-memoirs for him? Is she (sorry, this is a cheesy image) going to be his 'eureka' moment, when the metaphorical lightbulb goes on over his head? The Tardis bulb needs replacing, River said so in Manhattan…Is Clara the replacement bulb? Perhaps, by stripping the Doctor of his Name - a process she has already begun - she will remind him that he was once more than just a Name. He was a rebel! But without the authority of Gallifrey, he has nothing really to rebel from….sorry, this got away from the point somewhat.

Perhaps Oswin will dream Gallifrey into existence. If she can remember it….doesn't Simeon talk about the dream outliving the dreamer? And that, in turn links back to one of my favourite scenes of the whole show: 'what if we had ideas that could think for themselves? What if one day our dreams no longer needed us? When these things occur and are held to be true, the time will be upon us. The time of Angels.' The Time Of Angels...the Doctor is an Angel, and has been (in Moffat's writing) since Girl in the Fireplace ('lonely Angel..). Oswin, 'God's friend', is surely also an angel? The time of angels maybe is their time, the time of the Doctor and Oswin and their dreams that no longer need them.

Speaking of which - I read some very interesting meta by ibishtar about how Oswin is a metaphor for DW, the tv show. My summary would be a poor substitute for original brilliant essay, which can be read here She makes lots of really brilliant points, and it made me reinforce some thoughts I've always had about Amy Pond. (this is a bit of a digression). DW Companions have always represented 'the viewer', but I have thought since early in S5 that Amy represents FANDOM specifically: she something of an outsider, and is introduced to the Doctor as a child, and grows up dreaming of time and space, making up stories about him, dressing up, making models and art - she's a fangirl! She drags Rory into her fandom, and when she grows up, she has, as I have already mentioned, 2 lives - 'doctor life' and 'real life', which she tries to keep separate (and in particular her 'doctor life' is a secret in her real life, whilst the Doctor does actually know something of her 'real life') just as many fans have their fannish and RL circles. 'If something can be remembered it can come back' - Amy remembered the Doctor back into existence, just as fandom's collective memory is ultimately responsible for bringing the show back to life in 2005. The show would never have come back without the fandom.

Just as most hardcore fans of this epic tv show whose convoluted cannon spans 50 years and multiple formats, Amy and Rory grapple with multiple, contradictory lives/memories (/plot lines) that don't make any sense. Does it bother them? No! They pick their own canon. They know it's all there, but they choose the memories that make the most sense, whilst acknowledging the existence of the others, just as fans often handwave dodgy bits of story. Moffat, the fanboy who is living the dream of RUNNING his own fandom, is as big a fanboy nerd as they come - he LOVES his geeky facts and obscure references and nostalgia trips. But he knows that the Show must go on, and if its too weighted down by the knots and tangles in its mythology it's going to die a death - so he writes that things 'fell into a crack in time', or that things are 'wibbly wobbly timey wimey'. Amy and Rory rewrite their lives. They choose their memories - as should the fans.

Going back to the original point about Oswin being a metaphor for the show - like the show, she has existed in multiple 'formats' (human, Dalek, past, present, future), she is smart and entertaining (Junior entertainment manager), educational (Governess), good for children and adults (Governess/barmaid) - but most of all, she is 'God's friend', an Angel, an idea that can think for itself and no longer needs its creators - just as DW, the show, is now something so vast and extraordinary it is bigger than its creators, bigger than its cast and crew and writers, bigger than its fans……it really has taken on a life of its own. But it's still the same show that's always been there since that very first episode - in the beginning, God said 'let there be light', and there was Clara, at the dawn of creation.

So what next for the show, the Companion, and the Doctor….?

Thoughts post-A Town Called Mercy

Oh look, I have a blog. Let me attempt to write down my thoughts about the next Doctor Who companion in a vaguely coherent manner...

Ok, so - I am really, REALLY hoping that Oswin is the next companion. I mean, actually Oswin, Dalek Oswin, not some mysteriously-similar-looking relative. Because here's the thing: the doctor takes ordinary people and turns them into weapons. He doesn't *mean* to, of course, and mostly they are more confident and badass at the end of it. But still - it happens all the time, it is one of his biggest fears, one of the things he feels most guilty about, and one of the things at least one (possibly more?) of his worst enemies has accused him of.

In A Town Called Mercy, Jex is carefully designed to be a mirror for the Doctor - besides the whole killing/healing/running/bringing death in his wake parallels, he has also taken ordinary people and absolutely LITERALLY turned them into weapons. As Sherlock would say: so far, so obvious.

SO - what if the Doctor's next companion is a weapon who he turns into an ordinary person? "Give me a Dalek any day", he says - what if what he gets is Oswin, a woman who in a very real sense "carries her prison with her". What if he reverses his usual polarity and makes her NOT a weapon? This doesn't have to mean he literally de-Daleks her. But perhaps he helps her come to terms with being a Dalek, and helps her to more permanently overcome the killer instincts that lie dormant in her Dalek shell.

Speaking of shells - all these references to eggs and Christmas and lightbulbs - they're all very glaring symbols of rebirth, new beginnings, the advent of a saviour, etc. At Christmas this year, the Doctor may get something that wasn't on his Christmas list - a weapon - and help her to be reborn as a person. And in so doing, he is also reborn, just as the 'monstrous' Gunslinger became an Angel.

Of course, we've already seen him do this to some extent with River, who is another parallel to the most recent episode. The 'Ultimate Weapon' who became his wife. Which makes Jex a rather wonderful parallel for Madame Kovarian, who also took a person and turned her into a weapon, with the aim of wiping out a perceived source of evil in the universe. Of course, we *know* the Doctor, we know he's not the evil 'Predator', etc etc that his enemies see him as. But this does not change the fact that an awful lot of problems in the universe have stemmed from his existence - "we have grown stronger in fear of you", said the Dalek, echoing River's "all this, my love, in fear of you". 'Doctor' means 'warrior' in the language of the Gamma Forest. We are not meant to sympathise with Kovarian at all, but we are encouraged to do so with Jex - just as we are meant to applaud the Doctor's decision not to kill Jex, but conversely we also applaud Amy's decision to leave Kovarian to her fate. "This is not how we roll, Doctor", said Amy - but it was, for her, just once. What a confusing message.

But perhaps that's ok. Perhaps there is not supposed to be a definitive answer on this. Right and wrong are not always so black and white, as Jex himself points out in the episode. "Humans, you're so linear" - the Doctor is anything but. Especially the Eleventh Doctor. He is wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, he is a cheat, a thief, a trickster, an escapist. Boundaries are not relevant (see - kissing all the Ponds!), which is why it is so hard for him to know what to do when he tries to force Jex over the physical demarcation line between good and evil, life and death, guilt and innocence, Mercy and the great desert beyond. Such lines are meaningless, and he should not try to pretend they really exist.

His prison is his guilt, which ultimately stems from his love of the universe and the people in it ("you care so much...") - and thus he carries his prison with him - as do Amy, Rory, River, Oswin, everyone - and it is also the thing that sets him free. The boundaries between his prison and his freedom are blurred. (Interestingly, Toby Whithouse's last episode was The God Complex, which is intricately associated in my mind with the Vienna Teng song 'Augustine' - "lead me now/I understand/Faith is both a prison and an open hand" - clearly this is a theme of his.) Which is why when he tries to act like the Tesselector, the "Judgement Death Machine" and push Jex over the line, he doesn't know what to do. Unlike Ten, who was always so confident in his actions, even when they were wrong, Eleven has grown enough to recognise the inherent uncertainty of things. Perhaps he has also grown enough to de-weaponise a Dalek, as Rose once did. We will see.