DW meta: The Mirror of the Doctor
Doctor Who: The Name of the Doctor
meta through the finale
spoilers! (through the finale, I don't know anything about the 50th)
mirrors, the world tree, and tea
Clara Through the Looking Glass
"I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning?
I almost think I can remember reeling a little different. But if I'm not the same,
the next question is, 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!"
-- Alice, in Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
Clara Oswin Oswald is our Alice in Wonderland, following her White Rabbit of a Doctor (with fob watch, no less) down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass to the wonderland that is Doctor Who, a dark mirror of the subconscious. It's the role of mythology to open this door, give us a peek at what lurks behind the veil, and even whisper to those strange creatures.
We have two Wonderland stories to draw on thanks to Lewis Carroll, and both of them are rolled up into one for the season finale. Let's start with our Alice, who opens the episode already in the act of falling down the rabbit hole, slipping into the different realities of the Doctor, but that's not where Clara starts -- we're seeing the end before the beginning. No, for Clara it begins with a letter, which she reads in front of the Mirror:
She's invited to a Tea Party, sans the Mad Hatter, but about said Hatter nonethless. And Clara arrives in typical looking-glass fashion: thanks to the soporific-laden letter, she falls asleep in front of shelves of books (her own personal Library) and falls into a Chair. (I love me these chairs, with headboards shaped like Eyes!)
Doctor Who, of course, was originally broadcast as "tea time" television -- the TV is a looking glass itself, natch -- but the Tea House has long been a center of social interaction. In the East it's strongly associated with a religious flavor -- Taoists, Confusians, and Buddhists have all used tea ritually and as an aid to meditation. In some Western Esoteric traditions, the reading of tea leaves is used for Divination; I'm happy to note that the Tea Room scene functions as prophecy.
Vastra and Jenny are the hosts of this particular tea party. They pass into slumber thanks to a Candle, long a symbol of the individual spirit and kin to Enlightenment. Once in this little Dream World, they talk about the new decor, which apparently has changed -- this is something they've done many times before, as Strax's weariness with yet another conference call indicates. This is a ritual.
VASTRA: I was getting a little bored of the Taj Mahal.
The Taj Mahal is a Tomb, of course. It was built in India for a Shah's third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth. It's a symbol of the union of Love and Death, a theme we've seen over and over again in the current run of Doctor Who.
Should guilty seek asylum here,
Like one pardoned, he becomes free from sin.
Should a sinner make his way to this mansion,
All his past sins are to be washed away.
The sight of this mansion creates sorrowing sighs;
And the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes.
In this world this edifice has been made;
To display thereby the creator's glory.
-- Dedication to The Taj Mahal
The table is a Pentagon, and comes over from Jenny and Vastra's parlor in the Ordinary World. It's rather out of place in a Japanese Tea Room, but it's not out of place in a story that draws on Western Occultism. Da Vinci's Vetruvian Man is drawn in a pentagram, the four limbs and head; we have five senses. For the Rosicrucians, it's an emblem of health and safety, and a reminder of unity.
However, this table doesn't have a star drawn in it; neither the points of the shape nor the participants at its sides are directly connected. Instead, trapezoids almost form barriers between the edges and the center.
An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?
VASTRA: The tea should be superb. It's drawn from one of my favourite memories.
In Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the most famous passage is when the narrator is flooded with memories upon eating a madeleine cookie during tea. It's one of the most important works of literature in the 20th Century, not just for its contributions to the craft, but for its expression of the human condition. In Proust, memory is the great freedom, what allows us to be here and elsewhere at the same time, and so we transcend the limitations of a strictly materialist existence through the invocation of those materialist experiences which are strongly tagged by emotion, by our lived experience. It is a spiritual consolation in the modern age.
Vastra's Tea Room is awash in color. An ever-changing psychedelic cornucopia of light contributes to the Otherworldliness of the environment. Paisleys and Leaves swirl about on the walls behind them.
Psychedelia is no stranger to Doctor Who. The show was born in the 60s, and not infrequently invoked the counterculture, from the strange opening credits and theme music, to sly references in the story itself, be it the glowing caves of The Mutants or the mixing of "acid" in The Krotons. Take note that Strax often suggests "acid" as a tactical device -- whether its filling a trench with acid, or launching projectile acid fish at the enemy, the better to interrogate them.
VASTRA: Time travel has always been possible in dreams.
In 1927, J. W. Dunne published his An Experiment With Time, a long essay on the nature of time and human consciousness. Dunne believed that all time was "happening at once" and that it was only the nature of the mind that restricted the perception of time at a fixed rate. In dreams, however, consciousness is no longer fixed and may access all of time, leading to precognition and deja vu.
Accompanying this theory was the notion that we exist in two "planes" simultaneously, the Moment and Eternity. Not unsurprisingly, this has correlates in several "mystery traditions" and other metaphysical frameworks, including the Kabbalah, the Aboriginal Dreamtime, and Taoism. Presented as a scientific theory, Dunne's book had a not insignificant impact on Science Fiction at the time, from The Shape of Things To Come by H.G. Wells to The Dark Tower by C.S. Lewis, and even the philosophy of quantum physicist David Bohm.
Holography comes into play in the Tea Room. A hologram is not an image per se, but a recording of the interference patterns of a coherent light beam that's been split in two and scattered across the subject of interest; light is treated as waves rather than particles, as in traditional photography. The effect is to render an image three-dimensionally.
Interestingly, a holograph that's split in two doesn't tear the image in half. Rather, it twins the image -- each shard of the hologram maintains a whole copy of the image, albeit a proportionately smaller one. This is rather the same kind of principle we see in fractals. It's also applicable when considering Clara, who's sundered into a million pieces that nonetheless retain a "whole" image of the original soufflé.
The Great Intelligence breaches the Tea Room holographically, but his Whisper Men (who seem to function holographically in their own right) get in on the call and threaten our heroes, murdering Jenny and necessitating River to become an "alarm clock" by encouraging everyone else to "wake up." She slaps Vastra -- there's a great shot where her head is suddenly slammed against the pentagonal table -- and tosses champagne in Strax's face; "wine" is a metaphor for the substance of spiritual awakening in several faiths.
This should not be surprising, as "to wake up" is an esoteric allegory for Enlightenment. It's central to the intentions of Buddhism -- the word "budhi" literally means "to wake up" -- and it's also indicated in Gnosticism and other mystery traditions. To Philip K Dick, it was closely linked with "anamnesis" -- that the Truth is something that's been forgotten, and that we need to "remember" it, which is a form of "waking up." Vanilla Sky, a movie alluded to in The Bells of Saint John, plays with similar themes. Remember, "wakey-wakey" is a recurring catchphrase of Moffat's run; the climactic song to The Rings of Akhaten is dominated by the phrase "wake up."
GREAT INTELLIGENCE: His friends are LOST for evermore, unless he goes to Trenzalore.
The short bit of rhyme employed by the Great Intelligence practically shouts out to Poe's Raven, a poem whose narrator struggles with the conflicting desires to forget and to remember, specifically in reference to his lost love, Lenore.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!” -
Merely this and nothing more.
The Paternoster Mirror
The action of a Mirror is rather simple. Light reflects off glass, a second image forms, and we see "twins." In cinema, of course, the mirror-twins aren't literally twins, but given enough parallels we can see how one character illuminates another.
Take, for example, Strax and his buddy from the North, Archie. Archie's bald, like Strax, broad-shouldered, strong, taking the same pose. They like to fight, and are happy to hurl insults at each other while they do -- and Archie calls Strax a "wee midden", that same penchant for misgendering. Archie's name means "bold, brave, genuine" -- all Strax.
Not that we didn't already know that Strax was The Strongman for the Paternoster Gang, but it's nice to see it dramatized.
This kind of mirroring goes both ways. The Paternoster Gang also function as mirrors for our main heroes. Vastra was previously established as Doctorish well enough, as they're both not-quite-human, Holmsian detectives, who work best with companions. In The Name of the Doctor, this time it's Jenny's turn to be a mirror.
In this episode, Jenny dies twice -- not just here in the Tea Room, but at the Doctor's grave -- which makes her The Woman Twice Dead, an obvious juxtaposition to Clara. In a nice touch as far as The Chair Agenda is concerned, she's framed through a Chair when she announces her murder, and then we get a close up of her Eye, with a single tear running down. This is the same imagery we got in The Snowmen when Clara died, a close-up of her eye, from the side, with a single tear rolling down.
So there's something in Jenny that will help illuminate Clara, but Jenny's work isn't done yet. In the other shot, we see Jenny start to fade out like a Ghost. This is signficant not only for understanding Clara, but for understanding River. River is also a companion, she's also a Ghost as we'll find out, and she's married -- so, too, is Jenny married to Vastra. So in one supporting character, we get a glimpse of two other characters.
(I'd like to point out that in my previous meta on the prequel She Said He Said, there was a Victorian dress that was presented on a headless mannequin. That dress was Jenny's, and to my chagrin I didn't comment on that.)
Jenny is a Mirror, a prophetic fractal for so much that happens in this story. For this is a Ghost Story. It's revealed that River is a ghost. The Whisper Men disappear as ghosts when the Great Intelligence gives up his ghost upon enacting his vengeance -- indeed, the Great Intelligence is a Ghost himself, making himself "headless" when he shows this off by stepping into another Whisperman. Clara's fracturing through space and time as the Universal Companion renders her as a ghost, often not see by the Doctor himself, ghosts of whom appear at the end of the story. Hell, half the story takes place in a graveyard, which has become a recurring setting in this season -- the graves of Amy and Rory, and the cemetary where Victorian Clara's buried, a grave upon which modern Clara declares, "I don't believe in ghosts." Hide is a Ghost Story of a time-traveler. Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS has ghosts of the past and future wandering all over the place; Clara herself is "ghosted" in several different ways in that one.
Anyways, the principle of Twinning goes beyond the Paternoster gang, as this shot demonstrates:
We already had the sequence where Simeon (yes, he's the Great Intelligence, but the "L" key on my keyboard is acting up, and I'm azy) transmigrates from one Whisper Man to another. They're all twins, of course, even down to the tie-pin and faux wool lapels.
But they are also mirror-twins for The Doctor, what with that gargantuan chin -- you could pole vault yourself with a chin like that -- and the Mad Hatter top-hat sported in The Snowmen, and recently seen in Nightmare in Silver on another Doctor-twin, Webley (whose name sounds like Wibbly.)
Finally, and this may be just for kicks, but the principle has breached other media.
A couple years ago, Scott Snyder uncovered a bizarre pattern of the same two "hipster cops" showing up in all kinds of comics. Both Marvel and DC, different writers, different artists, yet there's always the dark-haired guy and the red-haired guy.
Hell, they even showed up on South Park.
I'm just saying.
The Universal Companion
A lot of this story's most interesting imagery, I think, is in the treatment of Clara intersecting the Doctor in so many different ways, so as to evoke the changes in storytelling that the show's undergone. It's not just a matter of Clara being a part of stories seen and unseen, but crossing the boundaries of Story itself, and the role she ends up playing in the story as Myth.
The Invasion of Time --- The Five Doctors --- The Arc of Infinity
So, for example, we see her several Gallifrey stories -- helping the original find the right TARDIS, trailing the 4th Doctor in the Citadel's hallowed halls (the story redeemed by Journey to the Centre, and where Clara finds the Encyclopedia Gallifreya), waving to the 3rd before he's whisked to the Dark Tower in another Gallifreyan plot, finding the 5th in The Matrix. These aren't just Doctor Who stories, they're Gallifrey stories, they're a part of the Doctor's mythos.
But not all the appearances are Gallifreyan. That shot from Dragonfire, with the Seventh Doctor hanging over a sheet of ice from his umbrella, isn't a terribly mythological story (except for how it introduces the most interiorized companion to the show at the time) but it's a very Meta story. It's this story where we see the Cliffhanger "literalized," where a quote from a literary critic's take on the show ends up in the show, where the Doctor reads a book about a Doctor -- this is a very self-aware episode. Clara's leap of faith confers a tremendous amount of self-awareness.
The bit with the 8th and the 2nd by the Palm Trees (heh, "palm" "trees") is also quite clever. Back in the 80s, Robert Holmes penned "The Two Doctors" in such a way as to retcon the end of the 2nd Doctor's era, making it such that the Doctor didn't immediately regenerate into his 3rd incarnation, but did a bunch of missions for the Celestial Intervention Agency in-between. This was an interstitial retcon -- Holmes found a crack between Seasons 6 and 7 and created a brand new Season 6B. Likewise, Clara's been retconned into the entire history of the show. She's an interstitial character now, she's slipped between the cracks.
But the Palm Tree scene is also brilliant in that it's got Two and Eight together, as if Two can put a more charming gloss on Eight, whose regeneration happened in California, and who's the least recognized Doctor of the bunch, simply by virtue of having a single mediocre TV Movie to his credit (which Big Finish only partially mitigates, since it's got such a niche audience.) Likewise, bringing Six on board what looks like the current TARDIS is to make the Doctor interstitial himself, drawing him out of the past and into the present.
The show has a tremendous amount of self-awareness.
I think it shows in some of the episodes they referenced. We see Oswin in the Library, which is the story of River's ascension. We see her in the Matrix of the 5th Doctor story Arc of Infinity, itself a meta-reference to the vaguely ascension-oriented Season 20, and a story that features near-death imagery. The Five Doctors is a story of a Time Lord trying to ascend to immortal, with all the extant Doctors appearing -- quite the meta choice. The Invasion of Time is the story that inspired Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.
We also get to see Clara in a huge variety of outfits. "The soufflé is not the soufflé," she says, it's the recipe -- and the Companion is the Companion regardless of what she wears. And yet her outfits make it very easy to identify where in time we are with Clara -- she's got a 60's outfit, a 70's outfit, an 80's outfit, making her utterly contemporary; she's also got clothing from other worlds, other times -- so Clara belongs in every time and in every place.
She's the Eternal Companion, a distilled essence of the Companion role. I think she was written in "generic companion" mode for much of this season precisely to point to this episode, to her stepping into an Archetype and away from a more distinct "characterization" -- though as we'll see, there is much to Clara that's distinctly Clara. But in terms of what happens when she leaps into The Light, Clara's a mirror for all companions, a clarion call whose role is to help the Doctor, and ultimately to save him.
The Whispers Are Beautiful
Do you hear the Whisper Men?
The Whisper Men are near.
If you hear the Whisper Men
Then turn away your ear.
Do not hear the Whisper Men
Whatever else you do
For once you've heard the Whisper Men
They'll stop and look at you.
This is what Clarence repeats to himself in prison -- "Clarence" of course being the male version of the name "Clara." A key detail, that he's in prison. He won't accept the gift the Whisper Men offer, but he can't help but hear, can't help but turn to the camera and break the Fourth Wall, making him a Whisperer and us the ones who've heard the Whispers.
Clarence is wrong, because the whispers of the Whisper Men have saved him from The Rope.
The Whisper Men come, and they kill Jenny. But the Whispers themselves are what gives Jenny the premonition that she's about to die, and from there she can warn the others. River helps Vastra and Strax to wake up and they, in turn, bring Jenny back to life.
This, I say, is Beautiful.
But the Whisper Men aren't the only Whisperers. Once they get into the tomb, we see a Whisper Man emerge from River's Ghost. River, herself, is a Whisperer, and her Whispers to the Doctor save them, showing them a way out, which is through a grave that's not a grave. This salvation is accomplished through mirrored dialogue (remember, we were clued into Mirror-Talk in the prequel) as River whispers in Clara's ear:
RIVER: If it's not my gravestone, then what is it?
CLARA: What do you think the gravestone really is?
DOCTOR: The gravestone?
RIVER: Maybe it's a false grave.
CLARA: Maybe it's a false grave.
DOCTOR: Yeah, maybe.
RIVER: Maybe it's a secret entrance to the tomb.
CLARA: Maybe it's a secret entrance to the tomb!
DOCTOR: Yes, of course, makes sense! They'd never have buried my wife out here!
CLARA: Your what?
The Man Who Lies will lie no more
When this man lies at Trenzalore
So there's a bit to unpack here. First, there's a distinct correlation between the Whispers and dying. But we already know that Love and Death are intertwined in the show. Second, once again the Whispers lead our heroes into a grave that's really A Way Out. And that way out is through the grave of the Doctor's wife -- as I said, Love and Death.
The union of Love and Death is Beautiful.
There's also a bit about "lies" here. On the one hand, "lies" can refer to falsehoods. On the other hand, "lies" refers to lying down, to death. This goes back to the False Grave, that death is a lie, not the final end but a way out, a way to love.
Clara hears whispers from the TARDIS, but these aren't just words, they're images. Memories. Snippets from a lost past. And it functions as both Past and Prophecy, for it tells Clara the truth of where she's been, and provides the key to opening her future, a future that made that Past possible, that brought the Doctor to her doorstep.
CLARA: What do you mean you keep meeting me? You said I died. How could I die?
DOCTOR: That is not a conversation you should remember.
CLARA: What do you mean, I died?
The girl who died he tried to save
She'll die again inside his grave
Again, the Whispers are aligned with the "whispers" given by the TARDIS to Clara. They come across as menacing, that's their intent, but there's always a way out. A way through the Looking Glass, to reverse the polarity of the meaning of what's inevitably going to happen.
It should be quite clear now that Whispers come from The Other Side. The Whisperers may be avatars of the Great Intelligence, or the ghosts of dearly departed loved ones -- the TARDIS, Jenny, River -- but they are the voices of death nonetheless.
And this plays out all the way to the end, and all the way to the beginning:
From these Whispers, Clara sees the choice she would always make, and always makes.
The whispers, then, lead Clara to embrace her destiny, leading her to her own kind of Ascension. It is, tellingly, an ascension shared with The Great Intelligence. Who is a dark avatar of God.
So, they enter the Doctor's life, they pass through his Looking Glass -- and they both die. They are ghosts. And as ghosts, they begin Whispering to the Doctor. He hears whispers that would lead him to his doom, and whispers that would lead to his deliverance. They made be one and the same -- he can see a malevolence behind them -- the Lies of a false god -- or he can see the beauty of someone's sacrifice made in the name of his salvation.
And so Clara becomes a Ghost Whisperer, always calling out to the Doctor, rarely being heard, but giving him just enough of a suggestion, just enough of a nudge, that he can be saved.
Listen to the Whispers.
By the way, this goes back to LOST. The Whispers began on The Island. They are the voices of the Dead. Voices that call out to save the living from making terrible mistakes, mistakes that could only be seen by the Dead, who are out of Time and Space altogether. They may not always succeed (Shannon) but they try. They don't want any other souls to be lost like them.
The Whispers are Beautiful. Isn't that always how the Doctor refers to his glorious monsters?
The Mirror of the Doctor
I want to go back to some earlier stories -- Black Spot, Power of Three, and The Snowmen. In Curse of the Black Spot, we discover that there's a parallel dimension to ours which exists on the other side of reflections, on the other side of the mirror. To get to that Other Side, the Doctor, Amy, and Avery deliberately prick their fingers and fall in love with the Siren, who will take them there -- and it's made clear throughout the text that this is considered a form of Death.
In The Power of Three, the Doctor and Amy find an elevator in the hospital that will take them to the Shakri spaceship. "Through the Looking Glass?" the Doctor asks before taking her hand and leading her through. Again, the Other Side is likened to Death, where the Shakri are describing as bringing about Judgment Day. In The Snowmen, the "mirroring" is a special effect at the top of the spiral staircase, whereby the staircase "reverses polarity" and starts going counter-clockwise instead of clockwise as it enters the Doctor's cloud, which is a metaphor for Heaven -- Death. Actually, thinking about it, we can add Turn Left to this list. Donna stands in a Circle of Mirrors and time-travels to her death.
So with that in mind, let's look at one of the central images of the episode:
This spiraling light represents the Doctor's death. In many near-death accounts, people report heading to "the light" and having an encounter with Deity, where one's life is reviewed.
Notice how when we're first introduced to the Light, the Doctor's judges -- the Great Intelligence and the Whisper Men -- are on one side of the frame, and his allies are on the other side, but Clara doesn't stand with the Paternoster Gang. Clara is on the opposite side of the Light from the Doctor himself.
VASTRA: But what is the Light?
JENNY: It's beautiful.
"Beautiful" is a recurring description, primarily used by the Doctor when he encounters a new form of monster. Well, Death is certainly considered a monster.
When the Doctor sonics the Light, we hear whispers come from it, voices of past Doctors -- "Have you ever thought what it's like to be wanderers in the 4th Dimension?" "You were fantastic." "Hello, Stonehenge!" "It was the daisiest daisy I'd ever seen." This makes the Light like the Whisper Men themselves.
I think the actual "architecture" of the Light is worth noting. It looks like a bunch of overgrown vines -- not unlike the physical vines lining the TARDIS walls. But, as the Doctor says, it's the scar tissue of his path through time-traveling. So, if the Light is a path, what do we make of all those little tendrils that branch off to nowhere? Days that never came? The Doctor doubling back on his path, all those reset buttons never seen, or choices that were lost due to other interventions?
In the prequel She Said He Said, I noted that the use of repetition in the structure of the two parts made the whole piece function as a mirror. Repetition is a significant feature in this story, at many points. Most obvious, of course, is that entering the Light recapitulates the Doctor's life -- his Light is a mirror of all he's ever done.
But structurally, the repetition of this story is all on Clara. It's her Opening Eyes that are repeated, her Fall that bookends the story, her insertion into the Doctor's story.
And then there's the bit above. We see Clara jump into the Doctor's Light not once, but twice, and the second time is not a strict repetition, it's different. The first time, on the left at 35:12, she jumps through and there's a flash, and then we see she's disappeared; we then cut to her Opening Eyes, her voice-over narration, and over the next minute we see her encounters with the Doctor before we loop back to this very moment and see her jump through again.
In the shot on the right, the whole pictures goes rubedo; Clara's done this over and over again, the basic act of affirmation in the concept of Eternal Return. Then a shot of a Cloud -- a repeated concept from Asylum, Snowmen, Bells -- before everything goes Blue again.
The other significant thing about the Doctor's Light is that it looks like it's made of vines, of vegetation -- this image represents The World Tree, that which connects to everything else. So of course Clara's going to jump in that light, because she's our Tree Woman, and has been for some time:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This story reminds me of Osiris. In that Egyptian myth, Osiris dies twice. First his brother Set tricks the god into a box, which is sealed with lead and thrown into the River Nile. Some time later the goddess Isis finds the box in a tree trunk holding up a palace roof -- the World Tree. She uses a spell of her father to bring Osiris back to life. He impregnates her, then dies again. Set find the body, tears it to pieces, and scatters them across the land. Isis gathers the pieces of Osiris back together, prepares a proper funeral, and Osiris is resurrected once more.
So, in the small opera of Doctor Who, it seems that Clara gets to play Osiris this time around. She's the one who dies twice, who is scattered into thousands of pieces, and who is recovered by the Doctor, who plays Isis. Nice, that.
Osiris is known as the Lord of Love, the Lord of Silence, and The One Who Continues to be Perfect. The Doctor describes Clara as "perfect." The instruments of Osiris are the Crook and Flail -- for Clara, it's the Umbrella, and flailing through that World Tree, wheat threshed from chaff.
The final scene also smacked of Orpheus to me, the Doctor going into the Underworld to retrieve his Eurydice, and the Not!Doctor functioning as the god Hades. But Clara, who we've suggested is some kind of Egg, could also be Humpty Dumpty, who had a great fall, and fell to pieces. The ancient Greek myth of the Moirae also comes to mind. The Universe is a Tapestry, woven with the individual threads of every single life. As a Time Traveler, the Doctor can theoretically see the entire Tapestry at once, and with his own thread mend those places where moths have chewed through the fabric.
Love and Death
Doctor Who is a Ghost Story -- it's here to teach us about Death. But it's also a Love story. These aren't mutually exclusive at all, as we saw in The Wedding, in Rings of Akhaten, and in The Name of the Doctor. The point of this is not to make us afraid of Love, but to help us realize the tremendous amount of love there can be in Death, when life is lived in relationship, when we expand our sense of self to include the people around us.
It's really been ramped up since The Wedding, the union of Love and Death: River killing and marrying the Doctor in the same instant; Amy and Rory dying in each other's arms in Manhattan, and renewing their vows in the Asylum; Clara's Leaf, which holds a Love Story and a Mother's Ghost; the "ghost" of Hide turning out to be the descendent of Emma and Palmer, whose love for each other to that point had been repressed. The whole Doctor/River story hinges on the acceptance of both Love and Death. Yes, these are forces in our lives that have to be accepted, resistance is futile, and potentially damaging with all the repression that would be involved. Interesting, interesting that Love and Death share this in common.
But this is more than showing us a love story in a graveyard. Instead we get depictions of The Other Side, a taste of the experience of Death. It's pretty obvious in this one -- the Climax takes place in a Tomb, the tomb of the TARDIS, and they're everywhere and everywhen at once, like that time the TARDIS exploded. And once again, the portal through which we pass to the Other Side is like a Mirror -- we've seen this before, in Black Spot, and Power of Three -- the Doctor's Time-Tree is itself a reflection of all that made him what he is.
This is the place where Clara recovers the Leaf of her Mother, which embodies both Love and Death, the alchemical kiss, a Leaf given up to a god, that kills a god. Returned the token of the World Tree, Clara is no longer lost, she's found. This place is a place of both, of a contradiction, but a union of opposites.
Death is a Mirror.
This is a place between the worlds. This Hurt Doctor, he isn't an Nth Doctor. He's an interstitial Doctor, spliced into the narrative. He's not even the Zeroeth Doctor, he's just The Doctor. But he's the Doctor who's not the Doctor! That makes him a contradiction. A paradox. A dark reflection.
We find out who we are by seeing who we are not. We find out who we are by discovering those aspects of ourselves we refuse to acknowledge, by unearthing our own souls, like an archeologist digging through so many layers of repression.
He's the X Doctor.
He's a Mirror. And he has to be loved. The Doctor represses him, refuses to acknowledge his name, but the narrative is quite clear -- this man is the Doctor, even though the Eleventh says he's not.
So there's another sense of Love at play, not just the romantic love story between the Doctor and River, or Jenny and Vastra, or even the sort of platonic love that friends have for each other, like Clara for the Doctor or Strax for his gang. There's also the play of Love as the basic principle of union that binds opposites together. And it's a principle that's been in play practically since the show was Revived. It's an alchemical principle, and it's getting messed with big-time here.
In the prequel I observed that the Circle and Square had been separated. Here we see the Doctor's TARDIS as both Circle (cylinder) and Square (box).
It's hugely indicated at Gallifrey. All those circles on the walls of the repair shop, and then we pull out through a Square, through a Circle that's in a Square, and back to a Circle which is also a Snowglobe. I practically died screaming in delight at this!
Esoterically, the Circle represents the Self partaking of Divinity, and the Square refers to the material world. We have a sliver of the Divine in our hearts, a slender link to the Godhead. Gallifrey has a sliver of the material world in its heart -- it is a place of Myth now, and always has been, but even lost to the Time War, there's still a slender link to what's Read.
False Ascension?
I've been thinking about this the past couple of days.
When Clara "ascends" as I've been calling it, she simultaneously "falls" and at the end of her journey she literally falls to the ground. Billows of cloud plume away. This is definitely an Underworld.
So it's not an Ascent. It's a Descent. So I wonder, in what mythological respects, this experience differs from, say, Rose's "Bad Wolf" moment. Or Madge's rescue of the Forest. River uploaded to the Library.
Am I supposed to read Clara's sacrifice as a fall from Grace? I wonder. See, after she's fallen, not only does she not know where she is (meaning, she's still lost) but she also says, "I don't know who I am!" I think this makes sense, because she's entered the Doctor's Underworld, not her own. She's "ascended" in the sense that she's now scattered throughout time and space, a consequence of Ego-Death (a good thing) but without clinging to who she is, to some sort of essence of Self beyond ego, she's emptied out, a vessel for the Companion Archetype.
Anyways, I wonder if it's a Fall ultimately because she's still on an ego-trip, but the Doctor's ego-trip instead of her own?
Maybe, maybe not. Remember, the first time we meet Oswin, she breaks the 4th Wall, saying "remember me," and now we see she's not just speaking to us, but also to the Doctor, and for a specific reason, I think. Because she's seen his whole life, and she's seen herself jump into the Light -- I think there's a part of her that realizes that when her fall is complete, she doesn't know who she is.
She needs the Doctor to "remember" her. "Remembering" not just in the sense of recalling from memory, but as the antidote to being "dismembered," for Clara's been scattered into a million pieces. She's a broken doll now and has to be put back together again.
Clara is Humpty Dumpty. She's the Egg.
But she's also so much more. She's born, she lives, she dies, and always she's there to save the Doctor. She's a Savior, which is a Christ role, an Archetypal role, there to "whisper" at just the right moment to lead the Doctor away from the temptations of the False God, and towards the path of Love.
My little children, these things write I unto you that ye may not sin.
And if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous:
and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world.
1 John 2:1-2
So, in Christian theology (and probably others, too) there's the notion that we have an Advocate for us on Judgment Day. Now, in Doctor Who, we've typically had the Doctor functioning as our Advocate. For example, in The Power of Three, when he and Amy travel "through the looking glass" to the Other Side and confront the Shakri, who've laid judgment against humanity, it's the Doctor we've got on our side, balancing the equation. In The Wedding, he's the one giving complete forgiveness to River.
This season, we've had the Companion/Doctor dynamic reversed, in stark contrast especially to Rose/Nine. This time around, we have the Doctor as the well-known figure, standing in for the audience, while Clara's presented as the Mystery. It makes sense, then, that Clara ends up playing the Advocate, against the Judgment of The Great Intelligence, with the Doctor representing us.
But the one figure Clara can't redeem is the one whom the Doctor himself lays judgment against.
She falls, and she doesn't know "who she is." The Doctor names her archetypally, the Impossible Girl, but also invokes her personally, through the specificity of her Leaf. In return, we see both the Doctor-archetype, and the one time he was himself and not The Doctor.
And I'm not speaking as a Platonist. I don't believe in Forms. These "ideals" are what we make in our heads, the sum total of our experiences with the people around us. The ideal (or "essence") is derived from the real, which is why the real always seems "flawed" -- because map is not the territory.
When Clara falls and gives her voice-over narration, she's not... real. She's speaking not as Clara, but as The Impossible Girl. Her voice becomes childlike. A narrator's voice, as opposed to living flesh and blood. She's not even The Woman Twice Dead.
Clara's face covered by the Leaf, just like her Father's face was covered by the Leaf.
I love how the Leaf played out at the end. Because in her act of self-sacrifice, Clara's "self" is destroyed (the ego-death) and she becomes Archetypal, a Story of Stories, but the Leaf is so very specific, so rooted not just in the mythology of the show but the arc of her character. She is the Leaf, it's what gives her an identity as Clara and not as Companion. And yet the Leaf is show covering her face, the Doctor's face, her father's face, which is a way of blotting out identity, covering the face.
It would be a contradiction, except that the show is invested in demonstrating that Identity isn't strictly a matter of physical features (the Light Bulb) but rather the recipe, the pattern, the interiority of the person inside (the Light.)
So what is it that makes Clara an individual in her own right?
She's more than a collection of facts -- she's not what she wears, she's not just a history, she's not just an archetype. I think to really identify someone, we need to understand their needs. But this isn't a show that's just going to spell those needs out to us, especially with Moffat at the helm. Previously we got Amy, the abandoned child who learned to put up a wall between herself and the people she loved, making her very repressed, struggling to express what she really wanted and what was really important to her; Amy was not someone to make herself vulnerable. And in the midst of that mess, she was driven by the internal conflict for adventure and domesticity, as represented by The Doctor and Rory.
This is not Clara at all. Clara's relationships aren't metaphors for who she is, though they're certainly important to her. Rather, she's the one to define relationships and set the terms for them. She doesn't run away with the Doctor at the drop of a bowtie, she makes him wait, setting a date. She still hasn't moved into the TARDIS, but sets up weekly excursions from her own home. (Wednesdays -- a day named for Wotan, who was considered the equivalent of Mercury to the Romans.)
But onboard the TARDIS, we don't see someone who calls the shots -- Clara is more than happy to follow the Doctor's rules, recognizing that he knows a lot more about adventuring than she does. She doesn't go off exploring when told not to, she doesn't follow the Doctor into the Eye of Harmony until he gives the go-ahead, and even given command of a military platoon she sticks to the orders she's given: find a safe place, and don't let them blow up the planet.
What these behaviors have in common is a need for boundaries. Since the loss of her mother, Clara's needed a measure of control in her life. And actually, this might even go back to when she was a little girl and got lost. Ah, being lost! When you're lost, you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, boundaries become indistinct. For someone who loves boundaries, who loves Order, this is the worst place imaginable. For Clara to achieve wholeness in her life, she's got to break the rules (the Doctor tells her not to jump into the Light) and she's got to embrace Chaos, that experience of being scattered into a million pieces. So her "ascension" comes after this happens, when she stands up and grabs the Leaf.
Oh, that Leaf. It's a solitary symbol of Love and Death. It's also a union of the Finite and the Infinite, of the specificity of a particular leaf flying into a particular face, and all the countless untold stories that could only be untold because of the vast boundlessness of Death.
As always, thanks for reading.
meta through the finale
spoilers! (through the finale, I don't know anything about the 50th)
mirrors, the world tree, and tea
Clara Through the Looking Glass
"I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning?
I almost think I can remember reeling a little different. But if I'm not the same,
the next question is, 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!"
-- Alice, in Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
Clara Oswin Oswald is our Alice in Wonderland, following her White Rabbit of a Doctor (with fob watch, no less) down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass to the wonderland that is Doctor Who, a dark mirror of the subconscious. It's the role of mythology to open this door, give us a peek at what lurks behind the veil, and even whisper to those strange creatures.
We have two Wonderland stories to draw on thanks to Lewis Carroll, and both of them are rolled up into one for the season finale. Let's start with our Alice, who opens the episode already in the act of falling down the rabbit hole, slipping into the different realities of the Doctor, but that's not where Clara starts -- we're seeing the end before the beginning. No, for Clara it begins with a letter, which she reads in front of the Mirror:
She's invited to a Tea Party, sans the Mad Hatter, but about said Hatter nonethless. And Clara arrives in typical looking-glass fashion: thanks to the soporific-laden letter, she falls asleep in front of shelves of books (her own personal Library) and falls into a Chair. (I love me these chairs, with headboards shaped like Eyes!)
Doctor Who, of course, was originally broadcast as "tea time" television -- the TV is a looking glass itself, natch -- but the Tea House has long been a center of social interaction. In the East it's strongly associated with a religious flavor -- Taoists, Confusians, and Buddhists have all used tea ritually and as an aid to meditation. In some Western Esoteric traditions, the reading of tea leaves is used for Divination; I'm happy to note that the Tea Room scene functions as prophecy.
Vastra and Jenny are the hosts of this particular tea party. They pass into slumber thanks to a Candle, long a symbol of the individual spirit and kin to Enlightenment. Once in this little Dream World, they talk about the new decor, which apparently has changed -- this is something they've done many times before, as Strax's weariness with yet another conference call indicates. This is a ritual.
VASTRA: I was getting a little bored of the Taj Mahal.
The Taj Mahal is a Tomb, of course. It was built in India for a Shah's third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth. It's a symbol of the union of Love and Death, a theme we've seen over and over again in the current run of Doctor Who.
Should guilty seek asylum here,
Like one pardoned, he becomes free from sin.
Should a sinner make his way to this mansion,
All his past sins are to be washed away.
The sight of this mansion creates sorrowing sighs;
And the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes.
In this world this edifice has been made;
To display thereby the creator's glory.
-- Dedication to The Taj Mahal
The table is a Pentagon, and comes over from Jenny and Vastra's parlor in the Ordinary World. It's rather out of place in a Japanese Tea Room, but it's not out of place in a story that draws on Western Occultism. Da Vinci's Vetruvian Man is drawn in a pentagram, the four limbs and head; we have five senses. For the Rosicrucians, it's an emblem of health and safety, and a reminder of unity.
However, this table doesn't have a star drawn in it; neither the points of the shape nor the participants at its sides are directly connected. Instead, trapezoids almost form barriers between the edges and the center.
An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?
VASTRA: The tea should be superb. It's drawn from one of my favourite memories.
In Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the most famous passage is when the narrator is flooded with memories upon eating a madeleine cookie during tea. It's one of the most important works of literature in the 20th Century, not just for its contributions to the craft, but for its expression of the human condition. In Proust, memory is the great freedom, what allows us to be here and elsewhere at the same time, and so we transcend the limitations of a strictly materialist existence through the invocation of those materialist experiences which are strongly tagged by emotion, by our lived experience. It is a spiritual consolation in the modern age.
Vastra's Tea Room is awash in color. An ever-changing psychedelic cornucopia of light contributes to the Otherworldliness of the environment. Paisleys and Leaves swirl about on the walls behind them.
Psychedelia is no stranger to Doctor Who. The show was born in the 60s, and not infrequently invoked the counterculture, from the strange opening credits and theme music, to sly references in the story itself, be it the glowing caves of The Mutants or the mixing of "acid" in The Krotons. Take note that Strax often suggests "acid" as a tactical device -- whether its filling a trench with acid, or launching projectile acid fish at the enemy, the better to interrogate them.
VASTRA: Time travel has always been possible in dreams.
In 1927, J. W. Dunne published his An Experiment With Time, a long essay on the nature of time and human consciousness. Dunne believed that all time was "happening at once" and that it was only the nature of the mind that restricted the perception of time at a fixed rate. In dreams, however, consciousness is no longer fixed and may access all of time, leading to precognition and deja vu.
Accompanying this theory was the notion that we exist in two "planes" simultaneously, the Moment and Eternity. Not unsurprisingly, this has correlates in several "mystery traditions" and other metaphysical frameworks, including the Kabbalah, the Aboriginal Dreamtime, and Taoism. Presented as a scientific theory, Dunne's book had a not insignificant impact on Science Fiction at the time, from The Shape of Things To Come by H.G. Wells to The Dark Tower by C.S. Lewis, and even the philosophy of quantum physicist David Bohm.
Holography comes into play in the Tea Room. A hologram is not an image per se, but a recording of the interference patterns of a coherent light beam that's been split in two and scattered across the subject of interest; light is treated as waves rather than particles, as in traditional photography. The effect is to render an image three-dimensionally.
Interestingly, a holograph that's split in two doesn't tear the image in half. Rather, it twins the image -- each shard of the hologram maintains a whole copy of the image, albeit a proportionately smaller one. This is rather the same kind of principle we see in fractals. It's also applicable when considering Clara, who's sundered into a million pieces that nonetheless retain a "whole" image of the original soufflé.
The Great Intelligence breaches the Tea Room holographically, but his Whisper Men (who seem to function holographically in their own right) get in on the call and threaten our heroes, murdering Jenny and necessitating River to become an "alarm clock" by encouraging everyone else to "wake up." She slaps Vastra -- there's a great shot where her head is suddenly slammed against the pentagonal table -- and tosses champagne in Strax's face; "wine" is a metaphor for the substance of spiritual awakening in several faiths.
This should not be surprising, as "to wake up" is an esoteric allegory for Enlightenment. It's central to the intentions of Buddhism -- the word "budhi" literally means "to wake up" -- and it's also indicated in Gnosticism and other mystery traditions. To Philip K Dick, it was closely linked with "anamnesis" -- that the Truth is something that's been forgotten, and that we need to "remember" it, which is a form of "waking up." Vanilla Sky, a movie alluded to in The Bells of Saint John, plays with similar themes. Remember, "wakey-wakey" is a recurring catchphrase of Moffat's run; the climactic song to The Rings of Akhaten is dominated by the phrase "wake up."
GREAT INTELLIGENCE: His friends are LOST for evermore, unless he goes to Trenzalore.
The short bit of rhyme employed by the Great Intelligence practically shouts out to Poe's Raven, a poem whose narrator struggles with the conflicting desires to forget and to remember, specifically in reference to his lost love, Lenore.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!” -
Merely this and nothing more.
The Paternoster Mirror
The action of a Mirror is rather simple. Light reflects off glass, a second image forms, and we see "twins." In cinema, of course, the mirror-twins aren't literally twins, but given enough parallels we can see how one character illuminates another.
Take, for example, Strax and his buddy from the North, Archie. Archie's bald, like Strax, broad-shouldered, strong, taking the same pose. They like to fight, and are happy to hurl insults at each other while they do -- and Archie calls Strax a "wee midden", that same penchant for misgendering. Archie's name means "bold, brave, genuine" -- all Strax.
Not that we didn't already know that Strax was The Strongman for the Paternoster Gang, but it's nice to see it dramatized.
This kind of mirroring goes both ways. The Paternoster Gang also function as mirrors for our main heroes. Vastra was previously established as Doctorish well enough, as they're both not-quite-human, Holmsian detectives, who work best with companions. In The Name of the Doctor, this time it's Jenny's turn to be a mirror.
In this episode, Jenny dies twice -- not just here in the Tea Room, but at the Doctor's grave -- which makes her The Woman Twice Dead, an obvious juxtaposition to Clara. In a nice touch as far as The Chair Agenda is concerned, she's framed through a Chair when she announces her murder, and then we get a close up of her Eye, with a single tear running down. This is the same imagery we got in The Snowmen when Clara died, a close-up of her eye, from the side, with a single tear rolling down.
So there's something in Jenny that will help illuminate Clara, but Jenny's work isn't done yet. In the other shot, we see Jenny start to fade out like a Ghost. This is signficant not only for understanding Clara, but for understanding River. River is also a companion, she's also a Ghost as we'll find out, and she's married -- so, too, is Jenny married to Vastra. So in one supporting character, we get a glimpse of two other characters.
(I'd like to point out that in my previous meta on the prequel She Said He Said, there was a Victorian dress that was presented on a headless mannequin. That dress was Jenny's, and to my chagrin I didn't comment on that.)
Jenny is a Mirror, a prophetic fractal for so much that happens in this story. For this is a Ghost Story. It's revealed that River is a ghost. The Whisper Men disappear as ghosts when the Great Intelligence gives up his ghost upon enacting his vengeance -- indeed, the Great Intelligence is a Ghost himself, making himself "headless" when he shows this off by stepping into another Whisperman. Clara's fracturing through space and time as the Universal Companion renders her as a ghost, often not see by the Doctor himself, ghosts of whom appear at the end of the story. Hell, half the story takes place in a graveyard, which has become a recurring setting in this season -- the graves of Amy and Rory, and the cemetary where Victorian Clara's buried, a grave upon which modern Clara declares, "I don't believe in ghosts." Hide is a Ghost Story of a time-traveler. Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS has ghosts of the past and future wandering all over the place; Clara herself is "ghosted" in several different ways in that one.
Anyways, the principle of Twinning goes beyond the Paternoster gang, as this shot demonstrates:
We already had the sequence where Simeon (yes, he's the Great Intelligence, but the "L" key on my keyboard is acting up, and I'm azy) transmigrates from one Whisper Man to another. They're all twins, of course, even down to the tie-pin and faux wool lapels.
But they are also mirror-twins for The Doctor, what with that gargantuan chin -- you could pole vault yourself with a chin like that -- and the Mad Hatter top-hat sported in The Snowmen, and recently seen in Nightmare in Silver on another Doctor-twin, Webley (whose name sounds like Wibbly.)
Finally, and this may be just for kicks, but the principle has breached other media.
A couple years ago, Scott Snyder uncovered a bizarre pattern of the same two "hipster cops" showing up in all kinds of comics. Both Marvel and DC, different writers, different artists, yet there's always the dark-haired guy and the red-haired guy.
Hell, they even showed up on South Park.
I'm just saying.
The Universal Companion
A lot of this story's most interesting imagery, I think, is in the treatment of Clara intersecting the Doctor in so many different ways, so as to evoke the changes in storytelling that the show's undergone. It's not just a matter of Clara being a part of stories seen and unseen, but crossing the boundaries of Story itself, and the role she ends up playing in the story as Myth.
The Invasion of Time --- The Five Doctors --- The Arc of Infinity
So, for example, we see her several Gallifrey stories -- helping the original find the right TARDIS, trailing the 4th Doctor in the Citadel's hallowed halls (the story redeemed by Journey to the Centre, and where Clara finds the Encyclopedia Gallifreya), waving to the 3rd before he's whisked to the Dark Tower in another Gallifreyan plot, finding the 5th in The Matrix. These aren't just Doctor Who stories, they're Gallifrey stories, they're a part of the Doctor's mythos.
But not all the appearances are Gallifreyan. That shot from Dragonfire, with the Seventh Doctor hanging over a sheet of ice from his umbrella, isn't a terribly mythological story (except for how it introduces the most interiorized companion to the show at the time) but it's a very Meta story. It's this story where we see the Cliffhanger "literalized," where a quote from a literary critic's take on the show ends up in the show, where the Doctor reads a book about a Doctor -- this is a very self-aware episode. Clara's leap of faith confers a tremendous amount of self-awareness.
The bit with the 8th and the 2nd by the Palm Trees (heh, "palm" "trees") is also quite clever. Back in the 80s, Robert Holmes penned "The Two Doctors" in such a way as to retcon the end of the 2nd Doctor's era, making it such that the Doctor didn't immediately regenerate into his 3rd incarnation, but did a bunch of missions for the Celestial Intervention Agency in-between. This was an interstitial retcon -- Holmes found a crack between Seasons 6 and 7 and created a brand new Season 6B. Likewise, Clara's been retconned into the entire history of the show. She's an interstitial character now, she's slipped between the cracks.
But the Palm Tree scene is also brilliant in that it's got Two and Eight together, as if Two can put a more charming gloss on Eight, whose regeneration happened in California, and who's the least recognized Doctor of the bunch, simply by virtue of having a single mediocre TV Movie to his credit (which Big Finish only partially mitigates, since it's got such a niche audience.) Likewise, bringing Six on board what looks like the current TARDIS is to make the Doctor interstitial himself, drawing him out of the past and into the present.
The show has a tremendous amount of self-awareness.
I think it shows in some of the episodes they referenced. We see Oswin in the Library, which is the story of River's ascension. We see her in the Matrix of the 5th Doctor story Arc of Infinity, itself a meta-reference to the vaguely ascension-oriented Season 20, and a story that features near-death imagery. The Five Doctors is a story of a Time Lord trying to ascend to immortal, with all the extant Doctors appearing -- quite the meta choice. The Invasion of Time is the story that inspired Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.
We also get to see Clara in a huge variety of outfits. "The soufflé is not the soufflé," she says, it's the recipe -- and the Companion is the Companion regardless of what she wears. And yet her outfits make it very easy to identify where in time we are with Clara -- she's got a 60's outfit, a 70's outfit, an 80's outfit, making her utterly contemporary; she's also got clothing from other worlds, other times -- so Clara belongs in every time and in every place.
She's the Eternal Companion, a distilled essence of the Companion role. I think she was written in "generic companion" mode for much of this season precisely to point to this episode, to her stepping into an Archetype and away from a more distinct "characterization" -- though as we'll see, there is much to Clara that's distinctly Clara. But in terms of what happens when she leaps into The Light, Clara's a mirror for all companions, a clarion call whose role is to help the Doctor, and ultimately to save him.
The Whispers Are Beautiful
Do you hear the Whisper Men?
The Whisper Men are near.
If you hear the Whisper Men
Then turn away your ear.
Do not hear the Whisper Men
Whatever else you do
For once you've heard the Whisper Men
They'll stop and look at you.
This is what Clarence repeats to himself in prison -- "Clarence" of course being the male version of the name "Clara." A key detail, that he's in prison. He won't accept the gift the Whisper Men offer, but he can't help but hear, can't help but turn to the camera and break the Fourth Wall, making him a Whisperer and us the ones who've heard the Whispers.
Clarence is wrong, because the whispers of the Whisper Men have saved him from The Rope.
The Whisper Men come, and they kill Jenny. But the Whispers themselves are what gives Jenny the premonition that she's about to die, and from there she can warn the others. River helps Vastra and Strax to wake up and they, in turn, bring Jenny back to life.
This, I say, is Beautiful.
But the Whisper Men aren't the only Whisperers. Once they get into the tomb, we see a Whisper Man emerge from River's Ghost. River, herself, is a Whisperer, and her Whispers to the Doctor save them, showing them a way out, which is through a grave that's not a grave. This salvation is accomplished through mirrored dialogue (remember, we were clued into Mirror-Talk in the prequel) as River whispers in Clara's ear:
RIVER: If it's not my gravestone, then what is it?
CLARA: What do you think the gravestone really is?
DOCTOR: The gravestone?
RIVER: Maybe it's a false grave.
CLARA: Maybe it's a false grave.
DOCTOR: Yeah, maybe.
RIVER: Maybe it's a secret entrance to the tomb.
CLARA: Maybe it's a secret entrance to the tomb!
DOCTOR: Yes, of course, makes sense! They'd never have buried my wife out here!
CLARA: Your what?
The Man Who Lies will lie no more
When this man lies at Trenzalore
So there's a bit to unpack here. First, there's a distinct correlation between the Whispers and dying. But we already know that Love and Death are intertwined in the show. Second, once again the Whispers lead our heroes into a grave that's really A Way Out. And that way out is through the grave of the Doctor's wife -- as I said, Love and Death.
The union of Love and Death is Beautiful.
There's also a bit about "lies" here. On the one hand, "lies" can refer to falsehoods. On the other hand, "lies" refers to lying down, to death. This goes back to the False Grave, that death is a lie, not the final end but a way out, a way to love.
Clara hears whispers from the TARDIS, but these aren't just words, they're images. Memories. Snippets from a lost past. And it functions as both Past and Prophecy, for it tells Clara the truth of where she's been, and provides the key to opening her future, a future that made that Past possible, that brought the Doctor to her doorstep.
CLARA: What do you mean you keep meeting me? You said I died. How could I die?
DOCTOR: That is not a conversation you should remember.
CLARA: What do you mean, I died?
The girl who died he tried to save
She'll die again inside his grave
Again, the Whispers are aligned with the "whispers" given by the TARDIS to Clara. They come across as menacing, that's their intent, but there's always a way out. A way through the Looking Glass, to reverse the polarity of the meaning of what's inevitably going to happen.
It should be quite clear now that Whispers come from The Other Side. The Whisperers may be avatars of the Great Intelligence, or the ghosts of dearly departed loved ones -- the TARDIS, Jenny, River -- but they are the voices of death nonetheless.
And this plays out all the way to the end, and all the way to the beginning:
From these Whispers, Clara sees the choice she would always make, and always makes.
The whispers, then, lead Clara to embrace her destiny, leading her to her own kind of Ascension. It is, tellingly, an ascension shared with The Great Intelligence. Who is a dark avatar of God.
So, they enter the Doctor's life, they pass through his Looking Glass -- and they both die. They are ghosts. And as ghosts, they begin Whispering to the Doctor. He hears whispers that would lead him to his doom, and whispers that would lead to his deliverance. They made be one and the same -- he can see a malevolence behind them -- the Lies of a false god -- or he can see the beauty of someone's sacrifice made in the name of his salvation.
And so Clara becomes a Ghost Whisperer, always calling out to the Doctor, rarely being heard, but giving him just enough of a suggestion, just enough of a nudge, that he can be saved.
Listen to the Whispers.
By the way, this goes back to LOST. The Whispers began on The Island. They are the voices of the Dead. Voices that call out to save the living from making terrible mistakes, mistakes that could only be seen by the Dead, who are out of Time and Space altogether. They may not always succeed (Shannon) but they try. They don't want any other souls to be lost like them.
The Whispers are Beautiful. Isn't that always how the Doctor refers to his glorious monsters?
The Mirror of the Doctor
I want to go back to some earlier stories -- Black Spot, Power of Three, and The Snowmen. In Curse of the Black Spot, we discover that there's a parallel dimension to ours which exists on the other side of reflections, on the other side of the mirror. To get to that Other Side, the Doctor, Amy, and Avery deliberately prick their fingers and fall in love with the Siren, who will take them there -- and it's made clear throughout the text that this is considered a form of Death.
In The Power of Three, the Doctor and Amy find an elevator in the hospital that will take them to the Shakri spaceship. "Through the Looking Glass?" the Doctor asks before taking her hand and leading her through. Again, the Other Side is likened to Death, where the Shakri are describing as bringing about Judgment Day. In The Snowmen, the "mirroring" is a special effect at the top of the spiral staircase, whereby the staircase "reverses polarity" and starts going counter-clockwise instead of clockwise as it enters the Doctor's cloud, which is a metaphor for Heaven -- Death. Actually, thinking about it, we can add Turn Left to this list. Donna stands in a Circle of Mirrors and time-travels to her death.
So with that in mind, let's look at one of the central images of the episode:
This spiraling light represents the Doctor's death. In many near-death accounts, people report heading to "the light" and having an encounter with Deity, where one's life is reviewed.
Notice how when we're first introduced to the Light, the Doctor's judges -- the Great Intelligence and the Whisper Men -- are on one side of the frame, and his allies are on the other side, but Clara doesn't stand with the Paternoster Gang. Clara is on the opposite side of the Light from the Doctor himself.
VASTRA: But what is the Light?
JENNY: It's beautiful.
"Beautiful" is a recurring description, primarily used by the Doctor when he encounters a new form of monster. Well, Death is certainly considered a monster.
When the Doctor sonics the Light, we hear whispers come from it, voices of past Doctors -- "Have you ever thought what it's like to be wanderers in the 4th Dimension?" "You were fantastic." "Hello, Stonehenge!" "It was the daisiest daisy I'd ever seen." This makes the Light like the Whisper Men themselves.
I think the actual "architecture" of the Light is worth noting. It looks like a bunch of overgrown vines -- not unlike the physical vines lining the TARDIS walls. But, as the Doctor says, it's the scar tissue of his path through time-traveling. So, if the Light is a path, what do we make of all those little tendrils that branch off to nowhere? Days that never came? The Doctor doubling back on his path, all those reset buttons never seen, or choices that were lost due to other interventions?
In the prequel She Said He Said, I noted that the use of repetition in the structure of the two parts made the whole piece function as a mirror. Repetition is a significant feature in this story, at many points. Most obvious, of course, is that entering the Light recapitulates the Doctor's life -- his Light is a mirror of all he's ever done.
But structurally, the repetition of this story is all on Clara. It's her Opening Eyes that are repeated, her Fall that bookends the story, her insertion into the Doctor's story.
And then there's the bit above. We see Clara jump into the Doctor's Light not once, but twice, and the second time is not a strict repetition, it's different. The first time, on the left at 35:12, she jumps through and there's a flash, and then we see she's disappeared; we then cut to her Opening Eyes, her voice-over narration, and over the next minute we see her encounters with the Doctor before we loop back to this very moment and see her jump through again.
In the shot on the right, the whole pictures goes rubedo; Clara's done this over and over again, the basic act of affirmation in the concept of Eternal Return. Then a shot of a Cloud -- a repeated concept from Asylum, Snowmen, Bells -- before everything goes Blue again.
The other significant thing about the Doctor's Light is that it looks like it's made of vines, of vegetation -- this image represents The World Tree, that which connects to everything else. So of course Clara's going to jump in that light, because she's our Tree Woman, and has been for some time:
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This story reminds me of Osiris. In that Egyptian myth, Osiris dies twice. First his brother Set tricks the god into a box, which is sealed with lead and thrown into the River Nile. Some time later the goddess Isis finds the box in a tree trunk holding up a palace roof -- the World Tree. She uses a spell of her father to bring Osiris back to life. He impregnates her, then dies again. Set find the body, tears it to pieces, and scatters them across the land. Isis gathers the pieces of Osiris back together, prepares a proper funeral, and Osiris is resurrected once more.
So, in the small opera of Doctor Who, it seems that Clara gets to play Osiris this time around. She's the one who dies twice, who is scattered into thousands of pieces, and who is recovered by the Doctor, who plays Isis. Nice, that.
Osiris is known as the Lord of Love, the Lord of Silence, and The One Who Continues to be Perfect. The Doctor describes Clara as "perfect." The instruments of Osiris are the Crook and Flail -- for Clara, it's the Umbrella, and flailing through that World Tree, wheat threshed from chaff.
The final scene also smacked of Orpheus to me, the Doctor going into the Underworld to retrieve his Eurydice, and the Not!Doctor functioning as the god Hades. But Clara, who we've suggested is some kind of Egg, could also be Humpty Dumpty, who had a great fall, and fell to pieces. The ancient Greek myth of the Moirae also comes to mind. The Universe is a Tapestry, woven with the individual threads of every single life. As a Time Traveler, the Doctor can theoretically see the entire Tapestry at once, and with his own thread mend those places where moths have chewed through the fabric.
Love and Death
Doctor Who is a Ghost Story -- it's here to teach us about Death. But it's also a Love story. These aren't mutually exclusive at all, as we saw in The Wedding, in Rings of Akhaten, and in The Name of the Doctor. The point of this is not to make us afraid of Love, but to help us realize the tremendous amount of love there can be in Death, when life is lived in relationship, when we expand our sense of self to include the people around us.
It's really been ramped up since The Wedding, the union of Love and Death: River killing and marrying the Doctor in the same instant; Amy and Rory dying in each other's arms in Manhattan, and renewing their vows in the Asylum; Clara's Leaf, which holds a Love Story and a Mother's Ghost; the "ghost" of Hide turning out to be the descendent of Emma and Palmer, whose love for each other to that point had been repressed. The whole Doctor/River story hinges on the acceptance of both Love and Death. Yes, these are forces in our lives that have to be accepted, resistance is futile, and potentially damaging with all the repression that would be involved. Interesting, interesting that Love and Death share this in common.
But this is more than showing us a love story in a graveyard. Instead we get depictions of The Other Side, a taste of the experience of Death. It's pretty obvious in this one -- the Climax takes place in a Tomb, the tomb of the TARDIS, and they're everywhere and everywhen at once, like that time the TARDIS exploded. And once again, the portal through which we pass to the Other Side is like a Mirror -- we've seen this before, in Black Spot, and Power of Three -- the Doctor's Time-Tree is itself a reflection of all that made him what he is.
This is the place where Clara recovers the Leaf of her Mother, which embodies both Love and Death, the alchemical kiss, a Leaf given up to a god, that kills a god. Returned the token of the World Tree, Clara is no longer lost, she's found. This place is a place of both, of a contradiction, but a union of opposites.
Death is a Mirror.
This is a place between the worlds. This Hurt Doctor, he isn't an Nth Doctor. He's an interstitial Doctor, spliced into the narrative. He's not even the Zeroeth Doctor, he's just The Doctor. But he's the Doctor who's not the Doctor! That makes him a contradiction. A paradox. A dark reflection.
We find out who we are by seeing who we are not. We find out who we are by discovering those aspects of ourselves we refuse to acknowledge, by unearthing our own souls, like an archeologist digging through so many layers of repression.
He's the X Doctor.
He's a Mirror. And he has to be loved. The Doctor represses him, refuses to acknowledge his name, but the narrative is quite clear -- this man is the Doctor, even though the Eleventh says he's not.
So there's another sense of Love at play, not just the romantic love story between the Doctor and River, or Jenny and Vastra, or even the sort of platonic love that friends have for each other, like Clara for the Doctor or Strax for his gang. There's also the play of Love as the basic principle of union that binds opposites together. And it's a principle that's been in play practically since the show was Revived. It's an alchemical principle, and it's getting messed with big-time here.
In the prequel I observed that the Circle and Square had been separated. Here we see the Doctor's TARDIS as both Circle (cylinder) and Square (box).
It's hugely indicated at Gallifrey. All those circles on the walls of the repair shop, and then we pull out through a Square, through a Circle that's in a Square, and back to a Circle which is also a Snowglobe. I practically died screaming in delight at this!
Esoterically, the Circle represents the Self partaking of Divinity, and the Square refers to the material world. We have a sliver of the Divine in our hearts, a slender link to the Godhead. Gallifrey has a sliver of the material world in its heart -- it is a place of Myth now, and always has been, but even lost to the Time War, there's still a slender link to what's Read.
False Ascension?
I've been thinking about this the past couple of days.
When Clara "ascends" as I've been calling it, she simultaneously "falls" and at the end of her journey she literally falls to the ground. Billows of cloud plume away. This is definitely an Underworld.
So it's not an Ascent. It's a Descent. So I wonder, in what mythological respects, this experience differs from, say, Rose's "Bad Wolf" moment. Or Madge's rescue of the Forest. River uploaded to the Library.
Am I supposed to read Clara's sacrifice as a fall from Grace? I wonder. See, after she's fallen, not only does she not know where she is (meaning, she's still lost) but she also says, "I don't know who I am!" I think this makes sense, because she's entered the Doctor's Underworld, not her own. She's "ascended" in the sense that she's now scattered throughout time and space, a consequence of Ego-Death (a good thing) but without clinging to who she is, to some sort of essence of Self beyond ego, she's emptied out, a vessel for the Companion Archetype.
Anyways, I wonder if it's a Fall ultimately because she's still on an ego-trip, but the Doctor's ego-trip instead of her own?
Maybe, maybe not. Remember, the first time we meet Oswin, she breaks the 4th Wall, saying "remember me," and now we see she's not just speaking to us, but also to the Doctor, and for a specific reason, I think. Because she's seen his whole life, and she's seen herself jump into the Light -- I think there's a part of her that realizes that when her fall is complete, she doesn't know who she is.
She needs the Doctor to "remember" her. "Remembering" not just in the sense of recalling from memory, but as the antidote to being "dismembered," for Clara's been scattered into a million pieces. She's a broken doll now and has to be put back together again.
Clara is Humpty Dumpty. She's the Egg.
But she's also so much more. She's born, she lives, she dies, and always she's there to save the Doctor. She's a Savior, which is a Christ role, an Archetypal role, there to "whisper" at just the right moment to lead the Doctor away from the temptations of the False God, and towards the path of Love.
My little children, these things write I unto you that ye may not sin.
And if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous:
and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world.
1 John 2:1-2
So, in Christian theology (and probably others, too) there's the notion that we have an Advocate for us on Judgment Day. Now, in Doctor Who, we've typically had the Doctor functioning as our Advocate. For example, in The Power of Three, when he and Amy travel "through the looking glass" to the Other Side and confront the Shakri, who've laid judgment against humanity, it's the Doctor we've got on our side, balancing the equation. In The Wedding, he's the one giving complete forgiveness to River.
This season, we've had the Companion/Doctor dynamic reversed, in stark contrast especially to Rose/Nine. This time around, we have the Doctor as the well-known figure, standing in for the audience, while Clara's presented as the Mystery. It makes sense, then, that Clara ends up playing the Advocate, against the Judgment of The Great Intelligence, with the Doctor representing us.
But the one figure Clara can't redeem is the one whom the Doctor himself lays judgment against.
She falls, and she doesn't know "who she is." The Doctor names her archetypally, the Impossible Girl, but also invokes her personally, through the specificity of her Leaf. In return, we see both the Doctor-archetype, and the one time he was himself and not The Doctor.
And I'm not speaking as a Platonist. I don't believe in Forms. These "ideals" are what we make in our heads, the sum total of our experiences with the people around us. The ideal (or "essence") is derived from the real, which is why the real always seems "flawed" -- because map is not the territory.
When Clara falls and gives her voice-over narration, she's not... real. She's speaking not as Clara, but as The Impossible Girl. Her voice becomes childlike. A narrator's voice, as opposed to living flesh and blood. She's not even The Woman Twice Dead.
Clara's face covered by the Leaf, just like her Father's face was covered by the Leaf.
I love how the Leaf played out at the end. Because in her act of self-sacrifice, Clara's "self" is destroyed (the ego-death) and she becomes Archetypal, a Story of Stories, but the Leaf is so very specific, so rooted not just in the mythology of the show but the arc of her character. She is the Leaf, it's what gives her an identity as Clara and not as Companion. And yet the Leaf is show covering her face, the Doctor's face, her father's face, which is a way of blotting out identity, covering the face.
It would be a contradiction, except that the show is invested in demonstrating that Identity isn't strictly a matter of physical features (the Light Bulb) but rather the recipe, the pattern, the interiority of the person inside (the Light.)
So what is it that makes Clara an individual in her own right?
She's more than a collection of facts -- she's not what she wears, she's not just a history, she's not just an archetype. I think to really identify someone, we need to understand their needs. But this isn't a show that's just going to spell those needs out to us, especially with Moffat at the helm. Previously we got Amy, the abandoned child who learned to put up a wall between herself and the people she loved, making her very repressed, struggling to express what she really wanted and what was really important to her; Amy was not someone to make herself vulnerable. And in the midst of that mess, she was driven by the internal conflict for adventure and domesticity, as represented by The Doctor and Rory.
This is not Clara at all. Clara's relationships aren't metaphors for who she is, though they're certainly important to her. Rather, she's the one to define relationships and set the terms for them. She doesn't run away with the Doctor at the drop of a bowtie, she makes him wait, setting a date. She still hasn't moved into the TARDIS, but sets up weekly excursions from her own home. (Wednesdays -- a day named for Wotan, who was considered the equivalent of Mercury to the Romans.)
But onboard the TARDIS, we don't see someone who calls the shots -- Clara is more than happy to follow the Doctor's rules, recognizing that he knows a lot more about adventuring than she does. She doesn't go off exploring when told not to, she doesn't follow the Doctor into the Eye of Harmony until he gives the go-ahead, and even given command of a military platoon she sticks to the orders she's given: find a safe place, and don't let them blow up the planet.
What these behaviors have in common is a need for boundaries. Since the loss of her mother, Clara's needed a measure of control in her life. And actually, this might even go back to when she was a little girl and got lost. Ah, being lost! When you're lost, you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, boundaries become indistinct. For someone who loves boundaries, who loves Order, this is the worst place imaginable. For Clara to achieve wholeness in her life, she's got to break the rules (the Doctor tells her not to jump into the Light) and she's got to embrace Chaos, that experience of being scattered into a million pieces. So her "ascension" comes after this happens, when she stands up and grabs the Leaf.
Oh, that Leaf. It's a solitary symbol of Love and Death. It's also a union of the Finite and the Infinite, of the specificity of a particular leaf flying into a particular face, and all the countless untold stories that could only be untold because of the vast boundlessness of Death.
As always, thanks for reading.