DW 9.07 and 9.08. The Zygon Invasion and The Zygon Inversion
Meta! I am leaving out so much, but time is snatching at my heels. So this'll have to do. With thanks to promethia_tenk without whom I couldn't do this.
Also janie_aire wrote a fascinating post that you should go read: Genre Competition (Kill the Moon)... and Zygons
The Doctor
The President of the world
The heart of this episode is the Doctor's speech. Moffat has said that this was a story he wanted to tell for a long time, and Day of the Doctor was the set-up. It is also in many ways a continuation of those themes. DotD focussed so much on the Doctor's actions that there wasn't time to go into all the details of what war means. But in this episode the Doctor - older and wiser - gets to speak out about what he's learned.
I presume that that scene, that speech, will come to define the Twelfth Doctor - much like A Good Man Goes To War did for Eleven. Follo wme for a brief run-through of the evolution.
AGMGTW was pivotal - a moment of reckoning. Eleven tried to move on from Ten’s PTSD, but the change needed to be fundamental, and acknowledged and permanent.
The other pivotal moment was Day of the Doctor.
And now we have a third such moment, although it is different in quality - whereas those episodes saw major shifts, a clear break with what came before, in The Zygon Inversion we see the result of the other moments, the ways in which they have affected the Doctor.
In all three cases it’s a question of war.
DOCTOR: There was another box. I was going to press another button. I was going to wipe out all of my own kind, man, woman and child. I was so sure I was right.
War Doctor. No other option. We saw how this mindset affected later incarnations. Nine refused to duplicate his actions. Ten in contrast became very rigid, and dangerously self-assured. (No second chances.) His way, or nothing. (He had to be right. About everything. Because if he was wrong, maybe he had been wrong about the Time War too…? And he couldn’t have been, because that would mean he murdered his own kind in error.)
Then Eleven is put on an intensive course of Pondliness, at the heart of which stands Demons Run, and the war he waged to save the child of his companions. The child who was River, and it was River who then turned it all back on him: Is this who you are? A warrior? Asking questions that Clara would echo, later, in Day of the Doctor:
CLARA: Look at you. The three of you. The warrior, the hero, and you.
DOCTOR: And what am I?
CLARA: Have you really forgotten?
DOCTOR: Yes. Maybe, yes.
CLARA: We've got enough warriors. Any old idiot can be a hero.
DOCTOR: Then what do I do?
CLARA: What you've always done. Be a doctor.
We see this basic kind of statement again in S9:
DOCTOR: I know where I got this face, and I know what it's for.
CLARA: Okay, what's it for?
DOCTOR: To remind me. To hold me to the mark. I'm the Doctor, and I save people.
But it goes back further than this. We see the first proper outcome of Day of the Doctor in Time of the Doctor, and Eleven’s choice to stay on Trenzalore.
He often gets accused on running away, and he often does.
DOCTOR: Sorry, but there's no way we could have rescued your men.
OCTAVIAN: I know that, sir. And when you've flown away in your little blue box, I'll explain that to their families.
Time of Angels
ASHILDR: So you intend to fix me? Make me feel again, then run away? I don't need your help, Doctor, you need mine. Just this once, you can't run off like you usually do.
DOCTOR: How do you know? How do you know what I usually do? We've met once in a Viking village. I didn't give you my life story.
ASHILDR: It's true though, isn't it? You're the man who runs away.
The Woman Who Lived
But… Beginning with the Ponds (River in particular) we see him taking responsibility for things he has set in motion. Most of the time he turns up, upends things/events/people and then skedaddles off once the main issue has been resolved.
However. With River he very carefully looks after her, makes sure she is OK. Her start in life, the loss of her parents, the way she was turned into a weapon - it’s all his fault, and he does his utmost to make it all up to her. And it starts in AGMGTW.
Ditto Trenzalore. The planet gets caught in the crossfire between the Daleks, his own people, and the Church of the Silence, and he stays.
His war, his people, his planet. His responsibility.
Which brings me to:
DOCTOR: You're all the same, you screaming kids. You know that? Look at me, I'm unforgivable. Well, here's the unforeseeable. I forgive you. After all you've done, I forgive you.
I’m sure we all remember Ten forgiving the Master after The Year That Never Was. At the time I called it ‘breathtakingly arrogant’, as the Doctor basically made himself a god.
But this time it’s very different. I’ll go into the personal side in a moment, but first I want to point out how the Doctor’s position is very different. Because this time he does have the authority to speak for humankind. Yes, the ‘President of Earth’ thing is played for laughs, but the fact of the matter is that they chose him. He can speak on behalf of humankind, he has that authority.
And he takes it seriously.
DOCTOR: There are safeguards beyond safeguards. I did this on a very important day for me and this ceasefire will stand.
Most times the Doctor turns up when there’s a conflict. But here the conflict has already happened. And everyone sat down and discussed things and found the best possible way forward.
So now he’s not the chaos element, but the peace keeper. It’s a shared role, with the Osgoods ‘on the ground’ and the Doctor as the one who resolves conflicts when they crop up.
As above, so below. The Doctor in his TARDIS, in the heavens, the Osgoods in the Black Archives, underground. Remember Osgood peering through the painting of Ten and Liz I? Her face in the place of the Queen's? If not, then here it is:
Queen Elizabeth's role in DotD had a heavy emphasis on protecting her kingdom: including the Undergallery and appointing the Doctor as protector. We can see a direct line from then to now. The Doctor is the President of Earth, rather then King of England, but that's merely because the scope has widened. And Osgood has stepped into the Queen's place. Protector and defender of not just England, but the world.
And if we want to consider what the Doctor ‘as President’ is like, then he’s very responsible and responsive, but also hugely manipulative (the boxes are empty, he tries to get people to think) - and heartfelt.
Because it’s personal.
Amazing Grace
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.
’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
Through many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
(I love this show. The fact that this was the song the Doctor was playing…)
BONNIE: I don't understand how you could just forgive me.
DOCTOR: Because I've been where you have.
Where Ten’s forgiveness of the Master came from a place of… Well, all their issues plus a god complex, Twelve’s forgiveness of Bonnie comes from a place of compassion:
AMY: You want to be forgiven
DOCTOR: Don’t we all?
The Doctor’s Wife
DOCTOR [to River]: And you are forgiven. Always, and completely, forgiven.
The Wedding of River Song
As he told Bonnie, he’s been in her shoes, he knows what she needs:
BONNIE: You don't understand. You will never understand.
DOCTOR: I don't understand? Are you kidding? Me? Of course I understand. I mean, do you call this a war? This funny little thing? This is not a war! I fought in a bigger war than you will ever know. I did worse things than you could ever imagine. And when I close my eyes I hear more screams than anyone could ever be able to count! And do you know what you do with all that pain? Shall I tell you where you put it? You hold it tight till it burns your hand, and you say this. No one else will ever have to live like this. No one else will have to feel this pain. Not on my watch!
The Doctor comes from a place of profound empathy, but now he’s not just dealt with some of the pain, he’s able to articulate what it has done to him, and help others, not just condemn them.
The Twelfth Doctor is quite gruff, and often rude and dismissive. But, as we guessed, at heart he’s a marshmallow. He struggled, last year, with the question of whether he was a good man. Of course this turned out to be irrelevant - it was the wrong question. What matters is what he does.
And what he does in these episodes is to keep the peace, and stop someone following his own path. Because he knows that 'winning' isn't all it's cracked up to be:
BONNIE: We'll win.
DOCTOR: Oh, will you? Well, maybe, maybe you will win! But nobody wins for long. The wheel just keeps turning.
This goes right back to 'Dalek' in S1:
DOCTOR: A little piece of home. Better than nothing.
ROSE: Is that the end of it, the Time War?
DOCTOR: I'm the only one left. I win. How about that?
DOCTOR: Sometimes winning, winning is no fun at all.
Vincent and the Doctor
Because what the Doctor knows is that the cost of winning that kind of war is not a price worth paying...
Now I feel I should really say something about this whole issue in the light of last night's attacks in Paris. I'm not sure what. Because if we had the Doctor facing the terrorists from last night - and forgiving them - what would people think? It's easy when it's just a story. But every story worth telling contains truth. I shall have to quote C.S.Lewis:
The problem of forgiveness
I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. It is laid down in the Christian rule, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' Because in Christian morals 'thy neighbor' includes 'thy enemy', and so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies.
Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war. And then, to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger. It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful and contemptible. 'That sort of talk makes them sick,' they say. And half of you already want to ask me, 'I wonder how you'd feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?' [Or to update it: How would you forgive last nights terrorists if you were from Paris?]
So do I. I wonder very much. Just as when Christianity tells me that I must not deny my religion even to save myself from death by torture, I wonder very much what I should do when it came to the point. I am not trying to tell you in this book what I could do - I can do precious little - I am telling you Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it. What are we to do?
From Chapter 7 of Mere Christianity.
DOCTOR: Look at me, I'm unforgivable. Well, here's the unforeseeable. I forgive you. After all you've done, I forgive you.
Whatever faith [or none] you are of, It seems to me that forgiveness, mercy, grace - these are important in order to move forward. Be doctors, not warriors. Because what the Doctor got from River in AGMGTW and from Clara in Day of the Doctor wasn't forgiveness. What he got was a second chance. Someone to save him from himself. Grace.
Grace has, in Western Christian theology, been defined, not as a created substance of any kind, but as "the love and mercy given to us by God because God desires us to have it, not because of anything we have done to earn it", "the condescension or benevolence shown by God toward the human race". It is understood by Christians to be a spontaneous gift from God to man - "generous, free and totally unexpected and undeserved" - that takes the form of divine favour, love, clemency, and a share in the divine life of God.
(x)
♥
Claras and Osgoods and hybrids
CLARA-Z: What happened?
DOCTOR: The same thing that happened to you. I let Clara Oswald get inside my head. Trust me. She doesn't leave.
I would say this quality is inherent to Clara:
The first time they met, he never even saw her face. But she got into his head… She existed as a mystery, a riddle, as an instruction…
And he went searching for her.
But as it turned out, she was in his head because she had always been a part of him:
She was the girl ‘born to save the Doctor’. Always there. The Doctor's protector. She goes on to save him - and Gallifrey - again in Day of the Doctor, and in Time of the Doctor gets him a whole new cycle of regenerations. Look into the Doctor, and who do you find? Clara.
Now the thing that struck me, even last week, was how Osgood (or the Osgoods, rather) have basically become a concept:
DOCTOR: Which one are you? Human or Zygon?
OSGOOD: I don't answer that question.
DOCTOR: Why not?
OSGOOD: Because there isn't a question to answer. I don't accept it. My sister and I were the living embodiment of the peace we made. I will give all the lives that I have to protect it. You want to know who I am, Doctor? I am the peace. I am Human and Zygon.
Now we have a lot of Clara hybrids...
The former was permanent (a full conversion), the latter not. And yet... Could she be altered without her knowledge?
MISSY: There's loads of nano-tech repairing any damage as the feed goes in.
CLARA: What about when it comes out?
MISSY: No idea. Nobody knows.
The Witch's Familiar
AMY: Explain. That's what you're good at. How'd he get all Daleked?
DOCTOR: Because he wasn't wearing one of these [wristbands]. Oh, ho, ho. That's clever. The nanocloud. Microorganisms that automatically process any organic matter, living or dead, into a Dalek puppet. Anything attacks this place, it automatically becomes part of the on-site security.
AMY: Living or dead?
DOCTOR: These wristbands protect us. The only thing stopping us going exactly the way he did.
The Dalek Asylum
And she has also been inside the Doctor's time stream:
What do these things mean for her? What does it mean that one of her echoes, apparently, became Gallifreyan?
That she now also became a Zygon hybrid is almost the last step, if that makes sense... (The caps are awful, I'd have loved an image of her in the Zygon pod a la the one where she was in the Dalek Missy put her in - as in, the pod open, with her inside it. So this'll have to do):
Because in Day of the Doctor the Zygon story was a small story inside a bigger story, leading the bigger one by the hand, as it were - and I think this will also be the same case here. And Osgood is showing us how a ‘hybrid’ could work. (And Clara was always two things at once...)
We have the Osgood boxes, such beautiful echoes of The Moment - The Moment which was a concept, an action, pure destruction. Yet it became a person.
OSGOOD: You want to know who I am, Doctor? I am The Peace.
People can be concepts, can be a living story:
DOCTOR: There's no such thing as the Doctor. I'm just a bloke in a box, telling stories. [...] And because sometimes, on a good day, if I try very hard, I'm not some old Time Lord who ran away. I'm the Doctor.
The Witch's Familiar
Identity is mutable. Names are aspirations. Bonnie becomes Osgood, leaving behind her warrior mantle and becomes The Peace.
The boxes are of course important - the very design, the circle in a square, is (as I'm sure everyone by now knows) is a spiritual reference to man’s instinctive quest to harmonize our physical and spiritual natures. Since Antiquity, the square has represented the physical body. The circle, on the other hand, has always represented the soul. Or, in the words of janie_aire: 'The boxes themselves bear the Circle in the Square motif. This comes to us from Masonry, and symbolizes the union of the Divine in the Material Body. The alchemical “great work” is all about synthesis, of bringing together opposites and by so doing transcending the limits of duality altogether.'
In other words - circles in squares is all about hybrids.
Back to Osgood, then she died - yet now she lives again. Both of her. And it's entirely possible that the 'original' Osgood is dead, yet the two we have now are still most definitely 'Osgood'. It is their title, their identity, their work.
I don't know what Clara's fate will be, as I don't know what the show has in store. (NO SPOILERS!!!) But her ultimate fate, I think, will be to be Clara Oswin Oswald. The way the Osgoods are Osgood, and the Doctor is the Doctor.
And of she is indeed the prophesied hybrid Davros was talking about, I'll presume that the 'warrior' part is deeply subversive, and means something other than they think. (After all, The Moment was a weapon that chose to save instead of destroy.) Because if anyone could be 'The Peace' between the Daleks and the Time Lords... I'd say it'd be Clara. The girl who held onto her humanity when all alone in the Dalek Asylum, with no hope of rescue. The girl who saved Gallifrey, and later told the Time Lords to save the Doctor.
She gets into people's heads. And she doesn't leave.
And if it seems that there could never be any such thing as a Dalek-Time Lord hybrid, that their differences are too pronounced, that the Daleks are quite simply too evil...
DOCTOR: I'm not sure that any of that matters, friends, enemies. So long as there's mercy. Always mercy.
Mercy, Grace, Forgiveness, Peace.
Clara?
Also janie_aire wrote a fascinating post that you should go read: Genre Competition (Kill the Moon)... and Zygons
The Doctor
The President of the world
The heart of this episode is the Doctor's speech. Moffat has said that this was a story he wanted to tell for a long time, and Day of the Doctor was the set-up. It is also in many ways a continuation of those themes. DotD focussed so much on the Doctor's actions that there wasn't time to go into all the details of what war means. But in this episode the Doctor - older and wiser - gets to speak out about what he's learned.
I presume that that scene, that speech, will come to define the Twelfth Doctor - much like A Good Man Goes To War did for Eleven. Follo wme for a brief run-through of the evolution.
AGMGTW was pivotal - a moment of reckoning. Eleven tried to move on from Ten’s PTSD, but the change needed to be fundamental, and acknowledged and permanent.
The other pivotal moment was Day of the Doctor.
And now we have a third such moment, although it is different in quality - whereas those episodes saw major shifts, a clear break with what came before, in The Zygon Inversion we see the result of the other moments, the ways in which they have affected the Doctor.
In all three cases it’s a question of war.
DOCTOR: There was another box. I was going to press another button. I was going to wipe out all of my own kind, man, woman and child. I was so sure I was right.
War Doctor. No other option. We saw how this mindset affected later incarnations. Nine refused to duplicate his actions. Ten in contrast became very rigid, and dangerously self-assured. (No second chances.) His way, or nothing. (He had to be right. About everything. Because if he was wrong, maybe he had been wrong about the Time War too…? And he couldn’t have been, because that would mean he murdered his own kind in error.)
Then Eleven is put on an intensive course of Pondliness, at the heart of which stands Demons Run, and the war he waged to save the child of his companions. The child who was River, and it was River who then turned it all back on him: Is this who you are? A warrior? Asking questions that Clara would echo, later, in Day of the Doctor:
CLARA: Look at you. The three of you. The warrior, the hero, and you.
DOCTOR: And what am I?
CLARA: Have you really forgotten?
DOCTOR: Yes. Maybe, yes.
CLARA: We've got enough warriors. Any old idiot can be a hero.
DOCTOR: Then what do I do?
CLARA: What you've always done. Be a doctor.
We see this basic kind of statement again in S9:
DOCTOR: I know where I got this face, and I know what it's for.
CLARA: Okay, what's it for?
DOCTOR: To remind me. To hold me to the mark. I'm the Doctor, and I save people.
But it goes back further than this. We see the first proper outcome of Day of the Doctor in Time of the Doctor, and Eleven’s choice to stay on Trenzalore.
He often gets accused on running away, and he often does.
DOCTOR: Sorry, but there's no way we could have rescued your men.
OCTAVIAN: I know that, sir. And when you've flown away in your little blue box, I'll explain that to their families.
Time of Angels
ASHILDR: So you intend to fix me? Make me feel again, then run away? I don't need your help, Doctor, you need mine. Just this once, you can't run off like you usually do.
DOCTOR: How do you know? How do you know what I usually do? We've met once in a Viking village. I didn't give you my life story.
ASHILDR: It's true though, isn't it? You're the man who runs away.
The Woman Who Lived
But… Beginning with the Ponds (River in particular) we see him taking responsibility for things he has set in motion. Most of the time he turns up, upends things/events/people and then skedaddles off once the main issue has been resolved.
However. With River he very carefully looks after her, makes sure she is OK. Her start in life, the loss of her parents, the way she was turned into a weapon - it’s all his fault, and he does his utmost to make it all up to her. And it starts in AGMGTW.
Ditto Trenzalore. The planet gets caught in the crossfire between the Daleks, his own people, and the Church of the Silence, and he stays.
His war, his people, his planet. His responsibility.
Which brings me to:
DOCTOR: You're all the same, you screaming kids. You know that? Look at me, I'm unforgivable. Well, here's the unforeseeable. I forgive you. After all you've done, I forgive you.
I’m sure we all remember Ten forgiving the Master after The Year That Never Was. At the time I called it ‘breathtakingly arrogant’, as the Doctor basically made himself a god.
But this time it’s very different. I’ll go into the personal side in a moment, but first I want to point out how the Doctor’s position is very different. Because this time he does have the authority to speak for humankind. Yes, the ‘President of Earth’ thing is played for laughs, but the fact of the matter is that they chose him. He can speak on behalf of humankind, he has that authority.
And he takes it seriously.
DOCTOR: There are safeguards beyond safeguards. I did this on a very important day for me and this ceasefire will stand.
Most times the Doctor turns up when there’s a conflict. But here the conflict has already happened. And everyone sat down and discussed things and found the best possible way forward.
So now he’s not the chaos element, but the peace keeper. It’s a shared role, with the Osgoods ‘on the ground’ and the Doctor as the one who resolves conflicts when they crop up.
As above, so below. The Doctor in his TARDIS, in the heavens, the Osgoods in the Black Archives, underground. Remember Osgood peering through the painting of Ten and Liz I? Her face in the place of the Queen's? If not, then here it is:
Queen Elizabeth's role in DotD had a heavy emphasis on protecting her kingdom: including the Undergallery and appointing the Doctor as protector. We can see a direct line from then to now. The Doctor is the President of Earth, rather then King of England, but that's merely because the scope has widened. And Osgood has stepped into the Queen's place. Protector and defender of not just England, but the world.
And if we want to consider what the Doctor ‘as President’ is like, then he’s very responsible and responsive, but also hugely manipulative (the boxes are empty, he tries to get people to think) - and heartfelt.
Because it’s personal.
Amazing Grace
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.
’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
Through many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
(I love this show. The fact that this was the song the Doctor was playing…)
BONNIE: I don't understand how you could just forgive me.
DOCTOR: Because I've been where you have.
Where Ten’s forgiveness of the Master came from a place of… Well, all their issues plus a god complex, Twelve’s forgiveness of Bonnie comes from a place of compassion:
AMY: You want to be forgiven
DOCTOR: Don’t we all?
The Doctor’s Wife
DOCTOR [to River]: And you are forgiven. Always, and completely, forgiven.
The Wedding of River Song
As he told Bonnie, he’s been in her shoes, he knows what she needs:
BONNIE: You don't understand. You will never understand.
DOCTOR: I don't understand? Are you kidding? Me? Of course I understand. I mean, do you call this a war? This funny little thing? This is not a war! I fought in a bigger war than you will ever know. I did worse things than you could ever imagine. And when I close my eyes I hear more screams than anyone could ever be able to count! And do you know what you do with all that pain? Shall I tell you where you put it? You hold it tight till it burns your hand, and you say this. No one else will ever have to live like this. No one else will have to feel this pain. Not on my watch!
The Doctor comes from a place of profound empathy, but now he’s not just dealt with some of the pain, he’s able to articulate what it has done to him, and help others, not just condemn them.
The Twelfth Doctor is quite gruff, and often rude and dismissive. But, as we guessed, at heart he’s a marshmallow. He struggled, last year, with the question of whether he was a good man. Of course this turned out to be irrelevant - it was the wrong question. What matters is what he does.
And what he does in these episodes is to keep the peace, and stop someone following his own path. Because he knows that 'winning' isn't all it's cracked up to be:
BONNIE: We'll win.
DOCTOR: Oh, will you? Well, maybe, maybe you will win! But nobody wins for long. The wheel just keeps turning.
This goes right back to 'Dalek' in S1:
DOCTOR: A little piece of home. Better than nothing.
ROSE: Is that the end of it, the Time War?
DOCTOR: I'm the only one left. I win. How about that?
DOCTOR: Sometimes winning, winning is no fun at all.
Vincent and the Doctor
Because what the Doctor knows is that the cost of winning that kind of war is not a price worth paying...
Now I feel I should really say something about this whole issue in the light of last night's attacks in Paris. I'm not sure what. Because if we had the Doctor facing the terrorists from last night - and forgiving them - what would people think? It's easy when it's just a story. But every story worth telling contains truth. I shall have to quote C.S.Lewis:
The problem of forgiveness
I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. It is laid down in the Christian rule, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' Because in Christian morals 'thy neighbor' includes 'thy enemy', and so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies.
Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war. And then, to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger. It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful and contemptible. 'That sort of talk makes them sick,' they say. And half of you already want to ask me, 'I wonder how you'd feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?' [Or to update it: How would you forgive last nights terrorists if you were from Paris?]
So do I. I wonder very much. Just as when Christianity tells me that I must not deny my religion even to save myself from death by torture, I wonder very much what I should do when it came to the point. I am not trying to tell you in this book what I could do - I can do precious little - I am telling you Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it. What are we to do?
From Chapter 7 of Mere Christianity.
DOCTOR: Look at me, I'm unforgivable. Well, here's the unforeseeable. I forgive you. After all you've done, I forgive you.
Whatever faith [or none] you are of, It seems to me that forgiveness, mercy, grace - these are important in order to move forward. Be doctors, not warriors. Because what the Doctor got from River in AGMGTW and from Clara in Day of the Doctor wasn't forgiveness. What he got was a second chance. Someone to save him from himself. Grace.
Grace has, in Western Christian theology, been defined, not as a created substance of any kind, but as "the love and mercy given to us by God because God desires us to have it, not because of anything we have done to earn it", "the condescension or benevolence shown by God toward the human race". It is understood by Christians to be a spontaneous gift from God to man - "generous, free and totally unexpected and undeserved" - that takes the form of divine favour, love, clemency, and a share in the divine life of God.
(x)
♥
Claras and Osgoods and hybrids
CLARA-Z: What happened?
DOCTOR: The same thing that happened to you. I let Clara Oswald get inside my head. Trust me. She doesn't leave.
I would say this quality is inherent to Clara:
The first time they met, he never even saw her face. But she got into his head… She existed as a mystery, a riddle, as an instruction…
And he went searching for her.
But as it turned out, she was in his head because she had always been a part of him:
She was the girl ‘born to save the Doctor’. Always there. The Doctor's protector. She goes on to save him - and Gallifrey - again in Day of the Doctor, and in Time of the Doctor gets him a whole new cycle of regenerations. Look into the Doctor, and who do you find? Clara.
Now the thing that struck me, even last week, was how Osgood (or the Osgoods, rather) have basically become a concept:
DOCTOR: Which one are you? Human or Zygon?
OSGOOD: I don't answer that question.
DOCTOR: Why not?
OSGOOD: Because there isn't a question to answer. I don't accept it. My sister and I were the living embodiment of the peace we made. I will give all the lives that I have to protect it. You want to know who I am, Doctor? I am the peace. I am Human and Zygon.
Now we have a lot of Clara hybrids...
The former was permanent (a full conversion), the latter not. And yet... Could she be altered without her knowledge?
MISSY: There's loads of nano-tech repairing any damage as the feed goes in.
CLARA: What about when it comes out?
MISSY: No idea. Nobody knows.
The Witch's Familiar
AMY: Explain. That's what you're good at. How'd he get all Daleked?
DOCTOR: Because he wasn't wearing one of these [wristbands]. Oh, ho, ho. That's clever. The nanocloud. Microorganisms that automatically process any organic matter, living or dead, into a Dalek puppet. Anything attacks this place, it automatically becomes part of the on-site security.
AMY: Living or dead?
DOCTOR: These wristbands protect us. The only thing stopping us going exactly the way he did.
The Dalek Asylum
And she has also been inside the Doctor's time stream:
What do these things mean for her? What does it mean that one of her echoes, apparently, became Gallifreyan?
That she now also became a Zygon hybrid is almost the last step, if that makes sense... (The caps are awful, I'd have loved an image of her in the Zygon pod a la the one where she was in the Dalek Missy put her in - as in, the pod open, with her inside it. So this'll have to do):
Because in Day of the Doctor the Zygon story was a small story inside a bigger story, leading the bigger one by the hand, as it were - and I think this will also be the same case here. And Osgood is showing us how a ‘hybrid’ could work. (And Clara was always two things at once...)
We have the Osgood boxes, such beautiful echoes of The Moment - The Moment which was a concept, an action, pure destruction. Yet it became a person.
OSGOOD: You want to know who I am, Doctor? I am The Peace.
People can be concepts, can be a living story:
DOCTOR: There's no such thing as the Doctor. I'm just a bloke in a box, telling stories. [...] And because sometimes, on a good day, if I try very hard, I'm not some old Time Lord who ran away. I'm the Doctor.
The Witch's Familiar
Identity is mutable. Names are aspirations. Bonnie becomes Osgood, leaving behind her warrior mantle and becomes The Peace.
The boxes are of course important - the very design, the circle in a square, is (as I'm sure everyone by now knows) is a spiritual reference to man’s instinctive quest to harmonize our physical and spiritual natures. Since Antiquity, the square has represented the physical body. The circle, on the other hand, has always represented the soul. Or, in the words of janie_aire: 'The boxes themselves bear the Circle in the Square motif. This comes to us from Masonry, and symbolizes the union of the Divine in the Material Body. The alchemical “great work” is all about synthesis, of bringing together opposites and by so doing transcending the limits of duality altogether.'
In other words - circles in squares is all about hybrids.
Back to Osgood, then she died - yet now she lives again. Both of her. And it's entirely possible that the 'original' Osgood is dead, yet the two we have now are still most definitely 'Osgood'. It is their title, their identity, their work.
I don't know what Clara's fate will be, as I don't know what the show has in store. (NO SPOILERS!!!) But her ultimate fate, I think, will be to be Clara Oswin Oswald. The way the Osgoods are Osgood, and the Doctor is the Doctor.
And of she is indeed the prophesied hybrid Davros was talking about, I'll presume that the 'warrior' part is deeply subversive, and means something other than they think. (After all, The Moment was a weapon that chose to save instead of destroy.) Because if anyone could be 'The Peace' between the Daleks and the Time Lords... I'd say it'd be Clara. The girl who held onto her humanity when all alone in the Dalek Asylum, with no hope of rescue. The girl who saved Gallifrey, and later told the Time Lords to save the Doctor.
She gets into people's heads. And she doesn't leave.
And if it seems that there could never be any such thing as a Dalek-Time Lord hybrid, that their differences are too pronounced, that the Daleks are quite simply too evil...
DOCTOR: I'm not sure that any of that matters, friends, enemies. So long as there's mercy. Always mercy.
Mercy, Grace, Forgiveness, Peace.
Clara?