Eye Sea You
More sylummy yumminy after the break, many more pics.
Os-Eye-lum? Os-Isle-um?
The mirror-twinning isn't just about Rory and Amy, it's about the Doctor too -- quite a bit to unpack here, with the introduction of Oswin Oswald (whose name means "God's Friend, God's Power,") but more on this in a bit.
Eyes...
The one-eyed Emporer of the Daleks, who suggests the Doctor's hatred of them is too beautiful to extinguish. "Beautiful," if you recall, is one of the Doctor's catch-words for describing monsters when he first meets them. It's a word Amy started to invoke quite a bit in The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex.
And here's the Doctor, with nearly the same expression. The same expression of surprise when he realized that River was about to change a fixed point in Time, the point of his death at Lake Silencio.
See, in Doctor Who, the adventures are metaphors for whatever's bugging the protagonists. Doctor is still upset about what's gonna be happening to River, so we get a stories like this, or like The Wardrobe, which was also an extended metaphor of River's experience of Ascending in a Forest.
When he first lands on the Asylum planet, and looks the eyestalk sticking out of the snow in the... eye... he's got his left eye closed again. And pouting at Oswin's camera with one eye.
The Doctor really, really wants to peek in on her.
Lots of play with eyes. The opening shot looks through the eyestalk of the massive Dalek statue on a ruined Skaro, and there's a woman in the eye... a woman who's narrating... (and it's foregrounding the sun in the background, more on that in a bit.)
Which is what the Pond women are known for in this show. (Rory's self-conscious in other ways.)
Which brings us back to Oswin. She "lives" in the eyestalk of a Dalek, and her home reflects this reality. Behind her is a massive eye, carved into her soul. The eyes are the doors -- but her door's all boarded up.
Again, this is a mirroring, a twinning, a metaphor. She's in the position not unlike River's. Here's someone the Doctor's just met, and she's trapped in the core of a planet that's completely inaccessible, a woman he's going to travel with, apparently.
River, if you remember, died in the Library by sitting in a Chair and sacrificing herself to save the Doctor and all the people trapped in the Wi-Fi. She's now in a virtual reality. Well, sounds an awful lot like Oswin...
Anywhere want to hear me go on about Chairs?
Apparently not. Instead, look at these shots from The Byzantium and Hitler, both featuring women in red looking out of eyeballs.
The Doctor's juxtaposed with this imagery. Look:
Rory and Amy open themselves up to each other on top of this Eye motif, which is also a teleport -- the device by which they ascend back to the TARDIS in the end.
This eye also looks like the big circles of the Pandorica, and Rory's wait by that particular box is invoked during their frank, revealing conversation. They both wear "eyes" on their wrists, protecting them from becoming monsters, and in turn they're allowed to reveal their inner monsters to each other. Rory lords his time by the box over Amy, and Amy makes a "choice" for Rory by "giving him up" -- making a choice for someone else is the very sin the Doctor accused Amy of back in The Beast Below.
This monster inside each of us has to be loved.
Finally, when River was trapped in the Exploding TARDIS, it appeared as an Eye up in the sky, becoming a Sun to keep planet Earth warm until she could be rescued -- and of course, there's a Dalek who ascends into the Eye.
But there's no rescuing River from the Library, and there's no rescuing Oswin from the Asylum.
Os-Eye-lum? Os-Isle-um?
The mirror-twinning isn't just about Rory and Amy, it's about the Doctor too -- quite a bit to unpack here, with the introduction of Oswin Oswald (whose name means "God's Friend, God's Power,") but more on this in a bit.
Eyes...
The one-eyed Emporer of the Daleks, who suggests the Doctor's hatred of them is too beautiful to extinguish. "Beautiful," if you recall, is one of the Doctor's catch-words for describing monsters when he first meets them. It's a word Amy started to invoke quite a bit in The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex.
And here's the Doctor, with nearly the same expression. The same expression of surprise when he realized that River was about to change a fixed point in Time, the point of his death at Lake Silencio.
See, in Doctor Who, the adventures are metaphors for whatever's bugging the protagonists. Doctor is still upset about what's gonna be happening to River, so we get a stories like this, or like The Wardrobe, which was also an extended metaphor of River's experience of Ascending in a Forest.
When he first lands on the Asylum planet, and looks the eyestalk sticking out of the snow in the... eye... he's got his left eye closed again. And pouting at Oswin's camera with one eye.
The Doctor really, really wants to peek in on her.
Lots of play with eyes. The opening shot looks through the eyestalk of the massive Dalek statue on a ruined Skaro, and there's a woman in the eye... a woman who's narrating... (and it's foregrounding the sun in the background, more on that in a bit.)
Which is what the Pond women are known for in this show. (Rory's self-conscious in other ways.)
Which brings us back to Oswin. She "lives" in the eyestalk of a Dalek, and her home reflects this reality. Behind her is a massive eye, carved into her soul. The eyes are the doors -- but her door's all boarded up.
Again, this is a mirroring, a twinning, a metaphor. She's in the position not unlike River's. Here's someone the Doctor's just met, and she's trapped in the core of a planet that's completely inaccessible, a woman he's going to travel with, apparently.
River, if you remember, died in the Library by sitting in a Chair and sacrificing herself to save the Doctor and all the people trapped in the Wi-Fi. She's now in a virtual reality. Well, sounds an awful lot like Oswin...
Anywhere want to hear me go on about Chairs?
Apparently not. Instead, look at these shots from The Byzantium and Hitler, both featuring women in red looking out of eyeballs.
The Doctor's juxtaposed with this imagery. Look:
Rory and Amy open themselves up to each other on top of this Eye motif, which is also a teleport -- the device by which they ascend back to the TARDIS in the end.
This eye also looks like the big circles of the Pandorica, and Rory's wait by that particular box is invoked during their frank, revealing conversation. They both wear "eyes" on their wrists, protecting them from becoming monsters, and in turn they're allowed to reveal their inner monsters to each other. Rory lords his time by the box over Amy, and Amy makes a "choice" for Rory by "giving him up" -- making a choice for someone else is the very sin the Doctor accused Amy of back in The Beast Below.
This monster inside each of us has to be loved.
Finally, when River was trapped in the Exploding TARDIS, it appeared as an Eye up in the sky, becoming a Sun to keep planet Earth warm until she could be rescued -- and of course, there's a Dalek who ascends into the Eye.
But there's no rescuing River from the Library, and there's no rescuing Oswin from the Asylum.