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?

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….?

More thoughts post-A Town Called Mercy

Pondering (ha!) more overnight has lead me to more overt parallels in this episode. But first, a theory:

I think we are in for a New Gallifrey, come the 50th Anniversary. All these symbols - eggs (which explode), lights (which flicker), christmas - these are symbols of creation and destruction, death and rebirth. They are symbols of regeneration. They could be pointing to the departure of the Ponds, or to the advent of the next Companion, but they could be pointing further afield. We know Moffat likes to play long games. You can't kill an idea. If something can be remembered it can be brought back. "The idea became flesh" (a biblical allusion made in the prequel to 7.3) - to (completely irrelevantly) quote one of my favourite plays, 'Translations' by Brian Friel, "Name a thing and - bang! - it leaps into existence!'. I think Gallifrey is coming back. Maybe not Old Gallifrey - because that's happened once before already, and let's face it the Doctor wasn't actually too happy about that. But somehow we're going to get a Gallifrey with a clean slate, I think. The Doctor is erasing his name from the universe, he's going back to how it all began, all those years ago, when he was stolen by a magic box and ran away. I think he's going to give his 11th regeneration to help bring Gallifrey back, just as he gave his 8th regeneration to destroy it. I'm therefore hoping this doesn't happen for a while, because NO MATT STAY FOREVER PLEASE. Ahem.

Moving on to less speculative meta:

In 7.3, the Gunslinger is a mirror for Oswin. This much is pretty clear - everyone in that episode is a mirror for everyone else (which I would have enjoyed even more if they hadn't actually pointed it out in the dialogue). But more interestingly, the Gunslinger and Oswin are mirrors for River and Rory - specifically, River/Mels the 'bespoke psychopath' and Rory the Last Centurion. All four characters are human beings who are turned into robot (or robot-like, ie. brainwashed) killing machines BUT ultimately embrace their humanity, and prove that they are more than what they have been made into. They choose what they are. Rory and the Gunslinger become guards, standing watch over something they once endangered, but have now sworn to protect. River and Oswin subvert their prisons (their boxes, to return to one of my *favourite* themes from last season - an egg is a kind of box...) and use them as a source of power: Oswin hacks into her Dalek nature and uses it to destroy the Asylum and wipe the Daleks' memories of the Doctor. River uses her Stormcage cell as a convenient base in between time-travelling jaunts, and in so doing manages to safeguard the secret of the Doctor's death.

Both River and Rory first kill, then marry the one they love. Love and hate and life and death - as I said yesterday, these not the binary opposites, especially in the Doctor's wibbly-wobbly universe. River and Rory both have memories of being someone else - a plastic robot, a would-be-killer - and these are now an irremovable part of them. But they have chosen to be other than what they were created for: they have chosen to embrace their humanity.

This will also be Amy's choice. Not her 'humanity', perhaps, as she's always had that - but her 'humanness'. The travelling is starting to feel like running away, she says in the series trailer. We know she is going to be leaving at the end of this series, and although we don't yet know how, I have very high hopes that it is going to be on her terms. Unlike Rose or Donna - or even Martha, whose decision to leave was motivated more by self-preservation than anything else - I hope Amy will make positive decision to stay and live life in the right order, on Earth, and she will enjoy being a human with a regular human life.

Until now, she has been - like Queen Nefertiti - the 'Lady of the Two Lands'; the Crack in time and space has run through Amy's life like the Nile, dividing her ordinary human world from her space adventures, dividing her memories and her many lives ("does it ever bother you that your life doesn't make any sense?") Her 'two lands' are presented as diametrically opposed. "Goodbye Leadworth, hello everywhere" - how do you reconcile that? Of course you can't. But in this next episode, which I am INORDINATELY excited about, we will see those two worlds reconciled, as the Doctor comes to live with the Ponds (for a year?! God, I hope so!) I have no idea how it will be handled, or how it will turn out, but it is the first indication since the Tardis landed at their wedding that 'real life' and 'Tardis life' can co-exist happily, and don't have to be opposites. Amy will choose which of her two lives she wants to live to the full, but that doesn't mean completely giving the other one up completely - she will still have her memories, and everything she's learnt. So much of who she is comes from her life with her raggedy doctor - the two little children who used to dress up as the raggedy man have now become like him, and they will stay this way whether or not they are travelling in time and space.

Amy has not been turned into a robot killing machine, but she has been through more physical transformations than any other companion - she was almost a dalek, almost a vampire-space-fish, almost an Angel, she was a ganger and an old woman and a wooden doll and a worshipper of the Minotaur, she was the tesselector, she was an orphan and not an orphan, dead and alive again, pregnant and not pregnant at the same time, married to a plastic roman, mother to her best mate and mother-in-law to her imaginary friend - like Oswin and like the Gunslinger, she didn't choose how her new life began, but she will choose how it ends. When the war is over, the war machine still has a role to play. When the waiting and the travelling's over, the 'Girl Who Waited', the girl who travelled amongst the stars will still have a role. It's Amy's choice.

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.