Meta: Dark Water
Canonnical Genderswap Master-Doctor kiss in Tomb of the Cyberman The Invasion mash-up. Wibble.
paratti Seven Keys to Doomsday
Clara’s arc and development have been off the scale. Can anyone imagine Rose, Martha or Donna on that volcano? No, their focus was squarely on the Doctor. Mind you, of course Clara started out that way too. From Asylum to Time of the Doctor, the Doctor was her focus. Her story could have ended with Name of the Doctor and her self-sacrifice, and it would have been perfectly satisfactory. (Well, serviceable at least.) But Moffat has taken her much, much further. This season the development has been Clara’s, not the Doctor’s. And she has grown and learned and - quite literally - become the Doctor… She has held the fate of the world in her hands more than once, has balked and yet returned.
Here we see the consequences.
That whole scene in the kitchen - 'It was boring' and 'I am owed' - they all show how far she's come from the person she was, back in Bells of St John. And her choices from then on were in many ways her own ‘Waters of Mars’ - ‘My will be done!’ What is also noteworthy is how she went about it. The Ponds, any of them, generally adopted an ‘unstoppable force/immovable object’ strategy. (And the Doctor stopped.) But Clara manipulates. Clara uses the Doctor’s own methods against him. It doesn’t matter that she’s unsuccessful, it’s the fact that we see how she now thinks - which is like him. (Much like the Doctor himself is outwitted later by Missy.) Clara has learned, and she has learned well.
And this is where it gets properly interesting. The Master has always been a dark mirror for the Doctor. And the companion - often - the one that saves the day. (Examples include Martha in Last of the Time Lords and Jo in The Daemons - Jo of course saving the world with LOVE. <3) But Clara, now, is in an fascinating position - she mirrors both of them. I have previously gone on about how she has been monster’d from the beginning, and we have had both the Doctor and Missy call her ‘My Clara’. So Clara is in the middle, mirroring both of them. (Many thought Missy would turn out to be an evil Clara echo, esp given her outfit.) It would not surprise me in the least for Clara to be caught in the middle between them both in the final part, having to choose… And the choice not being easy.
The simplest one would be having to choose between Danny and saving the world. In Moffat Who these choices tend to end up being false binaries - see anything from The Beast Below to Day of the Doctor - but even so I can see Clara being tempted by Missy if there is a chance to save Danny. (‘I’d do it again!’) This is of course a simple projection from the ‘facts’ as we now see them, and there will be at least twenty three twists before then, I’m sure.
There is also the delightful ‘Clara Oswald has never existed’ line which hints at all kinds of possibilities, yet might just be Clara lying her little head off to get out of a sticky situation.
Now about those keys. ‘Of course’, people have said, ‘the Doctor can open his TARDIS merely by snapping his fingers, so the whole standoff is a little pointless from that angle. It doesn’t take away from a fantastic scene though.’ I think there is more going on. After all, the cloister bell rings. And Clara sets this up very carefully, and she knows what she is doing. Since she can open the TARDIS with a snap of her fingers, she must know something about the keys that we don’t. Could the keys be a little like horcruxes, maybe? After all, the Doctor can summon the TARDIS from elsewhere, his key glows when the TARDIS has finished 'redecorating' in Eleventh Hour... So I'm sure there's more to those keys than we know. And considering how much time they spend on it, it could look very much like stealth set-up for a later plot point. After all, I believe we're supposed to find out why the TARDIS disliked Clara...
ETA: Meant to include this:
Please observe this wonderful reference to River Song.
Also the fact that the whole thing is a dream made me think of this:
ROMEO
And we mean well in going to this mask,
But ’tis no wit to go.
MERCUTIO
Why, may one ask?
ROMEO
I dreamt a dream tonight.
MERCUTIO
And so did I.
ROMEO
Well, what was yours?
MERCUTIO
That dreamers often lie.
ROMEO
In bed asleep while they do dream things true.
MERCUTIO
Oh, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
I wish I’d thought of it after Forest of the Night, but it might still be relevant… Never underestimate the power of dreams.
Plus, there is the old Gallifreyan fairytale - Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday. (Started out as a play in 1974, then became a Big Finish Audio in 2008. I am only familiar with the Brilliant Book version, but even that is excellent!)
Page 1 Page 2 Oh, and about that amazing Doctor/Clara scene, these lines (obviously) stood out:
"Do you really think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?"
"Clara, I'm very sorry, but I am exactly what you deserve."
For me, they made me think of this:
The Doctor knows all about betraying those he loves, and the fact that he is honest enough to admit this is making me very happy indeed. ('Tell me Clara - am I a good man?')
Dan, Dan, the Soldier Man
I didn’t think this would be the story we’d pursue (figured he’d ‘get his mojo back’ - and he might still), but this is so much better. Very dark, and very heavy for a family show, yet I admire them for going there. Far too often soldiers are just people with guns, shooting at other people/monsters with guns. It’s loud and bright and oddly sanitised. This drags it down to a human level, and in the process unlocks a lot of Danny’s motivations and reasonings. No wonder that his number one priority, no matter what, are the children in his care. No wonder he knows what he wants from Clara, and isn’t bothered about the rest. No wonder he tries to convince Clara to stop before she ends up doing something similar… (And oh, Kill the Moon.)
Also we have a very interesting gender-role-swapping thing going on. If Danny were female, I am sure everyone would talk about how he’d been ‘fridged’ - and in a sense he has been. He was killed off in order to trigger a particular emotional reaction in Clara. But the flipping goes further. Danny is the one who gets emotionally manipulated, ending up in tears. (And no wonder! Poor Danny.) Clara is the one told to be ‘Sceptical and critical. Remember. Be strong. Even if if breaks your heart.’ One ‘emotional’, one ‘rational’.
So we end up with Clara asking questions of someone she can’t see (essentially someone in a different dimension), trying to establish his identity, which sounds a little familiar… Except there’s a different outcome than in Time of the Doctor. (So far at least.)
Of course, Danny is also ‘our guy’ inside the Nethersphere. And we see how effectively they manage to manipulate people into ‘deleting’ themselves .’The three words’ are a truly horrific concept, yes. But if you want people to get rid of emotions and feelings, what better tool? Danny of course gets a double whammy - both the body horror of being cremated, and the guilt over killing that little boy. People have called the notion offensive, but that is almost the point… If people genuinely believed that the dead could still feel, of course they’d shell out for special tanks & equipment where their dead could be kept comfortable. It just goes to show the level Missy will stoop to.
Now, having just re-watched Deep Breath, it is easy to see how that sets up the theme - the droid using people as spare parts, people being kept in the larder ‘alive’ (both the criminal Vastra catches, and later the Doctor and Clara when they are snatched from the restaurant) - all the clockwork droids (an army, essentially) made from dead people. There are echoes elsewhere in the season (the robots in Sherwood f.ex.) although what I’m mostly reminded of is Bells of St John and the GI. Different reason, but the same principle of snatching people’s ‘souls’ and storing them electronically. Here Danny echoes Clara’s ‘I don’t know where I am!’
Although he’s probably been dead for too long to be ‘safely downloaded’ back into his body… Darn, I don’t want him to be dead dead. Mind you, Rory was killed and erased, and he turned out just fine.
But I’m getting ahead. The episode ends with Danny, his finger hovering over the ‘delete’ button. Yet the boy is reflected in the ipad. Which points to the characters’ choices being more important than the big cyber army...
MISSY
('I don't think I know who the Doctor is anymore')
CLARA: It's just-
JENNY: What?
CLARA: Nothing. If. If Vastra changed, if she was different, if she wasn't the person that you liked?
VASTRA: I don't like her, ma'am. I love her. And as to different? Well, she's a lizard.
Looking back, then Deep Breath (and the whole season really) has been setting us up for this. Because the Doctor has changed so very drastically. Clara would probably have walked out if it hadn’t been for Eleven’s phone call. And even with that, she has had great difficulty adjusting - just look at their conversation on the beach at the end of Mummy on the Orient Express. She almost sees him as someone completely new that she has to get to know all over again. And he has had to prove that he’s still the same…
In Missy, the Master has changed gender, but the personality is still pretty much intact.
‘The Master is so pleased that the Doctor has worked out what's going on! Everything becomes at least a hundred times more satisfying when the Doctor is around to be audience to his triumph, you see.’
End of Time post by aria <- highly recommended and entertaining
Now there are people complaining about how Missy/Doctor is all heteronormative and why couldn’t we have had Doctor/Master ‘properly’… At which point I shall quote Phil Sandifer, because he has already said it, and said it well:
So, female Master. That’s a female Doctor made basically inevitable, then. There are of course people complaining that it’s heteronormative to have the Master change genders before finally admitting their love of the Doctor. It’s not an unfair point. Although after Davies wrote the most slashable Master ever, simply going one further and having a male Master actually snog the Doctor would probably feel like diminishing returns. If I’m thinking with my writer brain, and being honest, going even gayer after John Simm would have been a bad call.
Dark Water Review <- excellent!
Also there is the fact that we couldn't have BOTH a gender change AND a gay relationship. And since Eleven merrily snogged the face off Rory when he was happy, I'd say that the gender swap - paving the way for a female Doctor - is the better and more progressive choice. Plus we have Vastra/Jenny gaying up the show already. (And I'm sure Moffat would bring back Jack if he could...) But that's a sidebar.
Personally, then I adore it to teeny tiny bits. I might have been a happy flailing mass for all of Missy’s scenes and could happily watch her forever more. Michelle Gomez is a genius and every line out of her mouth is quotable.
Now we’ve had a male/female Doctor/Master before, although that was of course a female Doctor to the Master’s male (The Curse of Fatal Death) and mostly played for laughs. But, it bears remembering that Moffat gave us a female Doctor in 1999! That’s fifteen years ago.
(And like I said previously - it’s beyond delightful that he’s now being accused of cosying up to the feminazis and paving the way for a female Doctor and destroying the show, since everyone knows that he hates women… It’s like the Spike Wars all over again.) (Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not Spike from Press Gang!)
The whole Missy/Doctor dynamic is fabulous though:
- Every single line she says whilst pretending to be an android.
-The way she takes a moment to just look at him with such an air of taking possession before she snogs him, and the three little nose kisses afterwards.
-The ‘I’ve disabled the lifts’ line, because of course she is twenty steps ahead.
-The way she grabs hold of him - ‘Don’t make a scene, you idiot!’ - and the eye roll when he STILL hasn’t worked out who she is… (And his FACE! Full-blown panic, which is not an emotion we have seen with Twelve before.)
I want to keep her FOREVER. Pretty please Santa Moff?
To quote Michelle Gomez (from
this interview):
"So yeah, I suppose she is the sum of all human emotion in just one droplet."
And about the Doctor and what Missy means for him:
MTV: Over the course of this season we’ve seen this new Doctor struggle with his humanity - or his lack of humanity… And all the best villains are, of course, a parallel or opposite for the hero. So is that what’s going on here? Are we getting through Missy what the Doctor has been lacking?
Gomez: Yes! Some people in our lives somehow mirror who we really are, and they are not mirroring the mask that we put on to meet and greet on a daily basis. For a man such as The Doctor, he has this kind of conscience now, asking the bigger questions of, “who am I really?”
We all arrive at that point in our lives, and whether we can really with rigorous honesty find answers that can sit well… There will be demons there that perhaps he hasn’t dealt with, or he’s repressed or he doesn’t feel good about.
Missy just blazes that light on all of the defects of his character. There’s that wonderful feeling you cant bulls-t a bullsh-ter. It’s almost that type of relationship with them of a sibling, or any close friend of yours that knows who you really are at your core… And is able to turn up, and remind you who you really are behind that mask. Missy is his barometer conscience that turns up.
I should write more. But it’s Friday already and Missy reduces me to a puddle of shippy goo. Much like Simm!Master did before her, although moreso, because Missy is done with UST and is going straight for bald honesty. Which I’m hoping will pay off handsomely. And besides, all we need is some throwaway line from her about how he should stop being so reticent as this is hardly new for them, and all the slash anyone has ever wanted will be cemented as canon. And even without that we have a much more stable 'ship retroactively. ‘The Doctor maintains my heart’/’Two hearts, both of them yours’ <- this is hardly something that’s happened overnight.
/o\ SO MUCH THERE! Maybe after Death In Heaven I’ll do a properly huge post with everything and the kitchen sink and a million images… (So many things I’ve not even touched on. Such as the dark water itself… Too much there, Moffat shouldn’t cram his episodes so full of STUFF!)
Which reminds me. I am UNSPOILED for Death in Heaven. To the point where I have not even watched the trailer or the preview clip. (I get like this - a sort of excessive spoiler avoidance.) So please do not post anything at all about the finale. Not even stuff you think ‘everyone’ knows. Chances are, I don’t!
Thank you. :)