meta: The Freedom to Live: The Angels Take Manhattan
A meta, written with so much love in me for the end of the story of Amelia Pond. Looking at: the episode as the final stage of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey; Doctor Who as myth; River Song's role; the use of the X symbol, lightbulbs and eggs; mirroring, looking glasses and metaphors; juxtaposition of opposites; parallels with other stories.
The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another.
The Freedom to Live - Amy and Rory's Story as the Hero's Journey
In my last meta, I looked at the storyline of The Power of Three as a manifestation of the penultimate stage of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth or Hero's Journey. Now, this episode represents the very last stage.
Briefly, on the Monomyth: Campbell argues that there is a basic structure that underlies all stories and myths. This structure is composed of different stages the hero goes through on their journey/during the course of their story. These stages reflect elements of human experience, both the little journeys that we make in and out of the darkness during life, and the larger cycle of our lifespan.
In the Power of Three we saw Amy and Rory at the penultimate stage of Campbell's Monomyth, a stage which is called The Master of Two Worlds. This is where the Hero (Amy and/or Rory) learns to reconcile the lessons they have learned in the Otherworld (the world of the Doctor) with their experiences in the Ordinary World. They bring the two worlds into balance within themselves and without, and they then gain the ability to pass freely between both of them. This is what we saw happen as Amy and Rory finally decided to carry on travelling with the Doctor as well as maintaining a home life.
After this comes the final stage of the Journey in the Monomyth, which is called The Freedom to Live. Here the Hero/Rory/Amy is at the completion of their journey. They have integrated everything they learned, and now, having mastered both worlds, the Hero is freed from concerns about the past and the future and is able to live unattached to them both. Significantly they are also freed utterly from the fear of Death. Campbell has this to say about the hero at this stage:
He does not mistake apparent changelessness in time for the permanence of Being, nor is he fearful of the next moment (or of the 'other thing'), as destroying the permanent with its change.
Here, both Rory and Amy have reached this stage. Having reconciled both worlds, having seen their own lives and deaths over and over, they are now able to let go of the fear of death and of what the future/past holds (remember, the ideas of future/past are all bound into one in Winter Quay). They let that fear become annihilated in the light of their love. Sometimes in Who we see the battle between Love and Fear play out, where they are in opposition to each other. However, the dynamic between Love and Death isn't the same. Here Death does not equal Fear, that's precisely what Amy and Rory have overcome. It's not a battle between Love and Death, so much as a type of mystical union. We have seen it before many times with Moffat, where Love is Death is Love... with the Pandorica, in Let's Kill Hitler and maybe most explicitly in The Wedding.
Death has always shrouded Rory Williams. He is a mirror of the Doctor in this respect - he has died and resurrected again and again. In retrospect, it feels that it should have been inevitable that his final fate would be bound up in Death. Here, Rory's Love leads him to embrace Death - because a life without Amy isn't worth living. Amy too lets go of her fear of Death - in her Love for Rory she steps onto the ledge with him. Bearing in mind what I just said above about marriage of River song being a union of Love and Death, Amy's words take on a new meaning. Because here is what Amy is doing:
Amy: Changing the future. It's called marriage.
*
This moment in their marriage isn't just the marriage of Amy and Rory, it's a representation of the Hieros Gamos, the Sacred Marriage as much as the Doctor's marriage to River is.
*
We're All Stories in the End
My approach to Who, as well as loving it for all its majestically wonderful silliness, is to read it as myth. As a story that can be read on so many levels, ranging from it reflecting individual experience of the self, right out to the wider human experience; to reading it as a story which can reflect some of the mysteries of life and death.
There's a school of thought I've encountered which says: it's just a TV show and it doesn't mean anything. On the contrary, for me it means everything, and then some. It's easy to think that our modern culture has moved past the need for myths, or that these days there is a void where once - for ancient people - there were myths. There's the idea that the growth of science and industry have taken away the need for myths. The idea that the natural wonders and the events of the world are explained, thus there is no need for the stories which tell how all the fish in the sea came to be there, or how a rainbow comes to be in the sky. The idea that with the growth of psychology and self awareness, the plethora of self-help books, we don't even need myth to explain ourselves to ourselves - to explain what the journey into the dark inside ourself is, and how we might face the monsters that we find there.
Not so. Myth is still there. It's there in the books that we read. It's there on the movie screen, and it's there in the TV shows that we love. In an age where science and psychology may seem to have dispelled the need for myth, this is when we need stories more than ever.
Doctor Who under Moffat is self aware of itself as myth. From the very first episode, we're shown that what we see on the screen is to be read as myth.
This particular story is framed by a book, by a story. The events of it are contained in and ultimately defined by the book. Moffat tells us through this that the internal world of Who is aware of itself as a story. It's a fourth wall breach if ever I saw one. Further, the episode tells us that the story can speak to us directly, because that's what myth does and because the way this story works is also a reflection of fandom and of the way we are woven into the show, and into its story making. Like this:
Amy: Time can be rewritten.
Doctor: Not once you know what's coming, it's written in stone.
Right after this dialogue, we cut to Rory's gravestone. Later, we are shown both Rory's and Amelia's fate in writing. We know what's coming.
With the moment of seeing Rory's gravestone, we find that the Doctors words apply to us too. That Moffat is telling us that now we as audience have seen what is coming, it cannot be changed. That we influence the myth of Who. We have the foresight that fixes Rory and Amy's future. We see the outcome of the episode before it even occurs, we see the end of how the story is written.
On one quite lovely level, this episode also acts as a myth which is a meditation on the nature of fate and predestination as opposed to free will. It speculates that life is in flux - until we see ahead. The act of seeing ahead, of trying to fix and predict our own future, to pre-decide what our path will be - this act then creates self fulfilling prophecies, by locking us into acting towards a future we know is coming. It says that changing that future or living a different one is possible, and involves relinquishing fear and letting go of old modes of thinking. As Campbell says:
We must be willing to let go of the life we had planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
*
In this myth/story, the Doctor tells Amy that they can only read the story of their lives in parallel with it occurring to them. If they read ahead it becomes fixed. It's a lovely message about the ways in which we actually interact with stories. It says that myth informs our lives as they happen - but we mustn't let stories define our future for us. We do that ourselves.
A box of matches with an image on it of the typewriter River uses to write the myth of this episode, tell us this. That, basically, stories just light our way through the dark:
* A River Runs Through It
River is back, and she is the bridge. She is the bridge between the Doctor and the Ponds. Yes, he has his own relationship with the Ponds - but River is the one who makes it a family connection via her marriage to the Doctor.
Our Ponds are in the Park at first, and in this opening scene we see a shot of a bridge over water just as this dialogue takes place.
Rory: What's the book?
Doctor: Melody Malone...
We see in this ep here how River is so very much their daughter, prone to gestures as grand as her mother and father. She too stood on the top of a building, with the Chrysler Building in the background, in The Impossible Astronaut, then let herself fall from it, secure in the knowledge that Love would carry her through safely. Both rooftops were also filled with metal structures with X shapes on them. Hang on...is this the same building?
Amy: Is there a way down?
Rory: No, but there is a way out.
River: There's always a way out.
The really important thing about River here though, is that she is the storyteller. Right back in The Library, we were introduced to River as the Doctor's storyteller. She was the one who held the fairytale like book of stories of the Doctor's life, stories she was intertwined in. She was the one who recounted his myth to Anita. She had a whole world of his stories and myths locked inside her. She narrates his story both to her children and to us at the end of the episode, breaking the fourth wall to look right at us before she switches the lights out. We find out in later episodes that she studied his stories, his myths. This episode positions her back in this role. Her tale wraps around and defines the whole narrative, it fixes the events. It;s especially interesting, because this is a later River that we see here, a Professor. It takes us right back to her role in the first story we ever saw her in. It brings us full circle...worryingly.
There are nods to the whole issue of River's death here, throughout the episode. The whole thing about a future being fixed once you know what it is echoes what is going to happen to her...that is unless you can cheat Time in the same way that the Doctor, Amy and Rory did. If where you once died, you only appeared to die.
X Marks the Spot
The X motif is here with a vengeance. To recap from my previous meta, the X symbol is littered through Moffat's Who. It represents a crossing over of energies, a meeting of opposites, a mirroring experience, or some some sort of intersection or union. X is also an ancient Scandinavian runic symbol galled Gebo meaning gift, exchange, intersection. Here, in this ep we have many mirrorings, many intersections and meeting of opposites.
Voiceover: New York. City of a million stories. Half of them are true, half of them just haven't happened yet.
Immediately after this piece of dialogue, comes this image (look closely on the left it hard to see, but there are X symbols in the scaffold.) It's appropriate here, because we have the idea of conflicting or separate things coming together. Implicit in that voiceover, is the idea that stories, usually seen as fiction - are in fact true. That the only ones which are fiction are the ones that haven't happened yet. There is also the idea that the city holds within itself both the past and the future.
So, even before the credits roll the X is all over the place. Mr Garner enters Winter Quay, walks over a black and white tiled floor (juxtaposition of opposites of black/white,) where the shot is angled to make the tiling appear in Xs. The X is also visible above the lift, and also visible through a small window to the right (under the dark arch.) The lift doors are a standard door closing for lifts, but nevertheless, they also provide the shape of many Xs together. The symbol points to our crossover event, which is a present self meeting a future life which never existed. That is, it's a present life which is actually the past life of someone living in the past, who is about to become that present person's future. Confused yet? It's life and death all rolled into one, in a circular way. The person witnesses their own death, then are thrown back to live another life.
Below left, here's the X motif with an Angel behind it and a flickering lightbulb. Then, after Garner discovers his older self, there's the Xs on the top of the building, supporting the Winter Quay sign. The thing is, usually when we're dealing with the idea of a lift (frequently used as a gateway to Above or Below - see The Power of Three, Closing Time, Night Terrors) or some type of transport moving someone up or down, we're dealing in ideas of Upperworld/Above and Underworld/Below. But here the lift that transports to the Above is really a journey not of ascension, but of Death, and those who travel in it are carried by killer Angels instead of divine ones. It's all back to front. People go Above to meet their Death.The top of the building is where it all happens, where present meets past.
And all that even before the credits roll. After the credits roll there are many examples of the X symbol too. When the Tardis tries to achieve the impossible, to materialise in a city where Time is too unstable. In front of the mansion where Mr Grayle lives.
On the bridge again, below left. And, in Amy and Rory's final moments on the rooftop. Here Amy is stood in the middle of a tangle of criss-crossing shadows as she stares into a monstrous mouth (monstrous mouths being another favourite image of Moffat). What a tangle her life has been, so many crossings and intersections, so much shifting time, so much mirroring - now all come to a (monstrous) head as she stares into the jaws of the beast. But she finds that the Beast is not so scary after all. Death is nothing to fear, if you love.
Opposites
The idea of the meeting of opposites and/or union doesn't just stop with the occasions where the X symbol is present. We have the name of the vase: Rapture of Summer, and the name of the building: Winter Quay, giving us the opposite seasons of Summer and Winter. On the topic of the name Winter Quay, through its name, the building is associated with the time of the year where life dies back, where everything becomes dark, the time of the year where the natural cycle is evocative of loss, death and separation. We talk about people being in the winter of their lives when they have reached old age, and this is the building where people meet themselves in old age. The idea of a Quay is obviously taken from the area of Manhattan the building is located in, but it's also worth pointing out that the idea of a Quay as a place that boats dock is also very relevant to the idea of death. In Greek myth, the ferryman Charon carries those who have passed over across the river Styx and into the Underworld. In Arthurian myth, the dying Arthur is carried to the centre of the lake in the Lady of the Lake's barge.
A vase smashes when the Doctor arrives at Grayle's place very chaotically in the Tardis...okay it's not the Rapture of Summer vase, but it looks damn like it so I'm going to read it as a metaphor. The summer of Amy and Rory is over, shattered by this final journey with the Doctor. They are entering the part of the cycle of winter where life dies away, where old age and death take hold.
We've got the Time Vortex, which has been betting consistently darker every week - and it now appears with a lot of black in it. That is, until the final moments of the credits, when we get a glaring white.
Also, we have the circle in the square, another popular Moffat image. Squaring the circle is to do the impossible - here, death meets life meets death - and becomes one.
*
Mirrors, Literal and Otherwise
Ah, Moffat and his mirroring. Most interesting to me are the mirrors that take place without a physical looking glass. Here, the Doctor heals River with the touch of his hands, just as River healed him in Let's Kill Hitler. Both of them manifest both the healer and warrior. Here the Doctor shows he is willing to give as much as she has given - if necessary.
This moment is then linked back even more to series six, with River reaction to it mirroring back the language the Doctor once used to her.
River: That was a stupid waste of regeneration energy. Nothing is gained by being a sentimental idiot.
Doctor: River!
River: No! You embarrass me. (The Angels Take Manhattan)
Doctor: River! River! This is ridiculous! That would mean nothing to anyone. It's insane. Worse, it's stupid! You embarrass me. (The Wedding of River Song)
*
Rory has been mirrored to the Doctor this series, as healer/warrior in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, as a dark mirror in A Town Called Mercy. Here, what the Doctor says to Rory is mirrored by both what Dorium said to him, and by what he said himself about a life of running. Ahead of him lies a life of running if the paradox doesn't work. Thing is, Rory is choosing to run through Love. We've yet to find out why the Doctor is running from his true identity, but the implication is that Fear is motivating him.
Doctor: Rory, even if you got out, you'd be running forever. They's be chasing you for the rest of your life.
Dorium: The first question! The question that must never be answered! Hidden in plain sight! The question you've been running from all your life. (The Wedding of River Song)
Doctor: I've been running. Faster than I've ever run. And I've been running my whole life. Now it's time for me to stop. (The Impossible Astronaut.)
*
River... so much the daughter of Amy and Rory, such a mirror of both of them.
Doctor: You just changed the future!
River: It's called marriage honey.
Doctor: What the hell are you doing?
Amy: Changing the future. It's called marriage.
*
The physical mirrors are here again. Rory, River and the Doctor are all portrayed in physical mirrors.
*
Lightbulbs/Eggs/Christmas
They've all been a running them this series. They're still here. Well, mostly. The only tenuous reference to Christmas I could find in the ep was the name of the building Winter Quay. Though of course there is the huge great big Christmas reference of the Christmas preview at the end.
Flickering lightbulbs are all over the place. Perhaps it is where this particular theme was leading: the lights are going out because the Angels are coming. Rory and Amy's lights are going out for the Doctor, their lights are flaring and then fading away, to paraphrase the Doctor's words in The Power of Three. However, I think there is still a connection to be made between the light and the eggs, in keeping with the idea of death and resurrection, and looking forwards to the new companion's era. Here's a nice shot of the Doctor trying to keep the lights on in the room where he and River are left after Amy and Rory escape. He tells River he can't keep doing this. And he can't. He can't keep Amy's and Rory's light alive in his life. He has to let them flare and fade away now.
There's also this little bit of dialogue from later on:
River: Does the lightbulb on top need changing?
Doctor: I just changed it.
And down in the basement, where the baby Angels are, the lights aren't working. We see the redundant bulbs as Rory is thrown down the stairs.
Gangster: The lights are out, you'll last longer with these. (gives Rory matches)
As for eggs/fertility, something we have seen come up again both in the form of visual eggs and in the theme of fertility and parenting. We've got baby Angels. We've got the parent/child relationship of Amy, Rory and River. Also, we've got this little bit of dialogue, which likens the situation the Angels have engineered at Winter Quay to poultry farming for eggs.
Doctor: This place is a farm. A battery farm.
Again, I believe we may see this theme further develop with the new companion, as eggs were so very important in the first episode of the series.
*
The Angel Complex
There's similarities to The God Complex here, just as there was in A Town Called Mercy. The shots of the stairs are very reminiscent of it.
The whole building consists, like the hotel in The God Complex, of rooms for those who are sent there. That room contains the one thing that many many people fear - the moment of their own deaths.
In The God Complex, the Doctor is mirrored to the Monster of that episode, the Minotaur. The promotional image for Angels in Manhattan clearly mirrors the Doctor to the monsters of this episode. Thanks toelisi for initially pointing this out, and for sharing thoughts on it. He has one eye covered (and there's that one-eyed thing I've talked about over and over in previous meta,) in the traditional position of a weeping Angel. In so many ways he is like an Angel. He steals away people original futures by stepping into their lives, and he displaces them in time, returning them to their present moment older than they once were - a clear parallel with the moments when people in the present encounter their older selves in this ep. Just like the Minotaur feeds on people's faith, just as the Angels feed on the potential of a life un-lived - so the Doctor too feeds on the energy of his companions. He needs their awe, their wonder to sustain him - if he doesn't get that, if he is starved of their company, his dark side begins to take hold.
*
All in all I thought it was a beautiful episode for them to go out on. It wasn't precisely a happy ending. But then the tale of Amelia Pond has always been something of a Dark Fairytale, tied up in life, love and death - much more in keeping with the traditional themes of fairytales before they were sanitised and cleaned up for modern bedtime stories. It was never going to be the happy ever after of the girl who wins her prince and lives out her days in her castle filled with gold. Because that's not who Amelia Pond was. She's the girl who waited over and over, the girl whose child was stolen away by the goblins, the girl who loved and lost and loved again. She's the girl who watched the man she loved die, the girl who died with him, the girl who read his gravestone and then gave up the magical world of her imaginary friend to be with him. She's the girl who Loved.
The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another.
The Freedom to Live - Amy and Rory's Story as the Hero's Journey
In my last meta, I looked at the storyline of The Power of Three as a manifestation of the penultimate stage of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth or Hero's Journey. Now, this episode represents the very last stage.
Briefly, on the Monomyth: Campbell argues that there is a basic structure that underlies all stories and myths. This structure is composed of different stages the hero goes through on their journey/during the course of their story. These stages reflect elements of human experience, both the little journeys that we make in and out of the darkness during life, and the larger cycle of our lifespan.
In the Power of Three we saw Amy and Rory at the penultimate stage of Campbell's Monomyth, a stage which is called The Master of Two Worlds. This is where the Hero (Amy and/or Rory) learns to reconcile the lessons they have learned in the Otherworld (the world of the Doctor) with their experiences in the Ordinary World. They bring the two worlds into balance within themselves and without, and they then gain the ability to pass freely between both of them. This is what we saw happen as Amy and Rory finally decided to carry on travelling with the Doctor as well as maintaining a home life.
After this comes the final stage of the Journey in the Monomyth, which is called The Freedom to Live. Here the Hero/Rory/Amy is at the completion of their journey. They have integrated everything they learned, and now, having mastered both worlds, the Hero is freed from concerns about the past and the future and is able to live unattached to them both. Significantly they are also freed utterly from the fear of Death. Campbell has this to say about the hero at this stage:
He does not mistake apparent changelessness in time for the permanence of Being, nor is he fearful of the next moment (or of the 'other thing'), as destroying the permanent with its change.
Here, both Rory and Amy have reached this stage. Having reconciled both worlds, having seen their own lives and deaths over and over, they are now able to let go of the fear of death and of what the future/past holds (remember, the ideas of future/past are all bound into one in Winter Quay). They let that fear become annihilated in the light of their love. Sometimes in Who we see the battle between Love and Fear play out, where they are in opposition to each other. However, the dynamic between Love and Death isn't the same. Here Death does not equal Fear, that's precisely what Amy and Rory have overcome. It's not a battle between Love and Death, so much as a type of mystical union. We have seen it before many times with Moffat, where Love is Death is Love... with the Pandorica, in Let's Kill Hitler and maybe most explicitly in The Wedding.
Death has always shrouded Rory Williams. He is a mirror of the Doctor in this respect - he has died and resurrected again and again. In retrospect, it feels that it should have been inevitable that his final fate would be bound up in Death. Here, Rory's Love leads him to embrace Death - because a life without Amy isn't worth living. Amy too lets go of her fear of Death - in her Love for Rory she steps onto the ledge with him. Bearing in mind what I just said above about marriage of River song being a union of Love and Death, Amy's words take on a new meaning. Because here is what Amy is doing:
Amy: Changing the future. It's called marriage.
*
This moment in their marriage isn't just the marriage of Amy and Rory, it's a representation of the Hieros Gamos, the Sacred Marriage as much as the Doctor's marriage to River is.
*
We're All Stories in the End
My approach to Who, as well as loving it for all its majestically wonderful silliness, is to read it as myth. As a story that can be read on so many levels, ranging from it reflecting individual experience of the self, right out to the wider human experience; to reading it as a story which can reflect some of the mysteries of life and death.
There's a school of thought I've encountered which says: it's just a TV show and it doesn't mean anything. On the contrary, for me it means everything, and then some. It's easy to think that our modern culture has moved past the need for myths, or that these days there is a void where once - for ancient people - there were myths. There's the idea that the growth of science and industry have taken away the need for myths. The idea that the natural wonders and the events of the world are explained, thus there is no need for the stories which tell how all the fish in the sea came to be there, or how a rainbow comes to be in the sky. The idea that with the growth of psychology and self awareness, the plethora of self-help books, we don't even need myth to explain ourselves to ourselves - to explain what the journey into the dark inside ourself is, and how we might face the monsters that we find there.
Not so. Myth is still there. It's there in the books that we read. It's there on the movie screen, and it's there in the TV shows that we love. In an age where science and psychology may seem to have dispelled the need for myth, this is when we need stories more than ever.
Doctor Who under Moffat is self aware of itself as myth. From the very first episode, we're shown that what we see on the screen is to be read as myth.
This particular story is framed by a book, by a story. The events of it are contained in and ultimately defined by the book. Moffat tells us through this that the internal world of Who is aware of itself as a story. It's a fourth wall breach if ever I saw one. Further, the episode tells us that the story can speak to us directly, because that's what myth does and because the way this story works is also a reflection of fandom and of the way we are woven into the show, and into its story making. Like this:
Amy: Time can be rewritten.
Doctor: Not once you know what's coming, it's written in stone.
Right after this dialogue, we cut to Rory's gravestone. Later, we are shown both Rory's and Amelia's fate in writing. We know what's coming.
With the moment of seeing Rory's gravestone, we find that the Doctors words apply to us too. That Moffat is telling us that now we as audience have seen what is coming, it cannot be changed. That we influence the myth of Who. We have the foresight that fixes Rory and Amy's future. We see the outcome of the episode before it even occurs, we see the end of how the story is written.
On one quite lovely level, this episode also acts as a myth which is a meditation on the nature of fate and predestination as opposed to free will. It speculates that life is in flux - until we see ahead. The act of seeing ahead, of trying to fix and predict our own future, to pre-decide what our path will be - this act then creates self fulfilling prophecies, by locking us into acting towards a future we know is coming. It says that changing that future or living a different one is possible, and involves relinquishing fear and letting go of old modes of thinking. As Campbell says:
We must be willing to let go of the life we had planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
*
In this myth/story, the Doctor tells Amy that they can only read the story of their lives in parallel with it occurring to them. If they read ahead it becomes fixed. It's a lovely message about the ways in which we actually interact with stories. It says that myth informs our lives as they happen - but we mustn't let stories define our future for us. We do that ourselves.
A box of matches with an image on it of the typewriter River uses to write the myth of this episode, tell us this. That, basically, stories just light our way through the dark:
* A River Runs Through It
River is back, and she is the bridge. She is the bridge between the Doctor and the Ponds. Yes, he has his own relationship with the Ponds - but River is the one who makes it a family connection via her marriage to the Doctor.
Our Ponds are in the Park at first, and in this opening scene we see a shot of a bridge over water just as this dialogue takes place.
Rory: What's the book?
Doctor: Melody Malone...
We see in this ep here how River is so very much their daughter, prone to gestures as grand as her mother and father. She too stood on the top of a building, with the Chrysler Building in the background, in The Impossible Astronaut, then let herself fall from it, secure in the knowledge that Love would carry her through safely. Both rooftops were also filled with metal structures with X shapes on them. Hang on...is this the same building?
Amy: Is there a way down?
Rory: No, but there is a way out.
River: There's always a way out.
The really important thing about River here though, is that she is the storyteller. Right back in The Library, we were introduced to River as the Doctor's storyteller. She was the one who held the fairytale like book of stories of the Doctor's life, stories she was intertwined in. She was the one who recounted his myth to Anita. She had a whole world of his stories and myths locked inside her. She narrates his story both to her children and to us at the end of the episode, breaking the fourth wall to look right at us before she switches the lights out. We find out in later episodes that she studied his stories, his myths. This episode positions her back in this role. Her tale wraps around and defines the whole narrative, it fixes the events. It;s especially interesting, because this is a later River that we see here, a Professor. It takes us right back to her role in the first story we ever saw her in. It brings us full circle...worryingly.
There are nods to the whole issue of River's death here, throughout the episode. The whole thing about a future being fixed once you know what it is echoes what is going to happen to her...that is unless you can cheat Time in the same way that the Doctor, Amy and Rory did. If where you once died, you only appeared to die.
X Marks the Spot
The X motif is here with a vengeance. To recap from my previous meta, the X symbol is littered through Moffat's Who. It represents a crossing over of energies, a meeting of opposites, a mirroring experience, or some some sort of intersection or union. X is also an ancient Scandinavian runic symbol galled Gebo meaning gift, exchange, intersection. Here, in this ep we have many mirrorings, many intersections and meeting of opposites.
Voiceover: New York. City of a million stories. Half of them are true, half of them just haven't happened yet.
Immediately after this piece of dialogue, comes this image (look closely on the left it hard to see, but there are X symbols in the scaffold.) It's appropriate here, because we have the idea of conflicting or separate things coming together. Implicit in that voiceover, is the idea that stories, usually seen as fiction - are in fact true. That the only ones which are fiction are the ones that haven't happened yet. There is also the idea that the city holds within itself both the past and the future.
So, even before the credits roll the X is all over the place. Mr Garner enters Winter Quay, walks over a black and white tiled floor (juxtaposition of opposites of black/white,) where the shot is angled to make the tiling appear in Xs. The X is also visible above the lift, and also visible through a small window to the right (under the dark arch.) The lift doors are a standard door closing for lifts, but nevertheless, they also provide the shape of many Xs together. The symbol points to our crossover event, which is a present self meeting a future life which never existed. That is, it's a present life which is actually the past life of someone living in the past, who is about to become that present person's future. Confused yet? It's life and death all rolled into one, in a circular way. The person witnesses their own death, then are thrown back to live another life.
Below left, here's the X motif with an Angel behind it and a flickering lightbulb. Then, after Garner discovers his older self, there's the Xs on the top of the building, supporting the Winter Quay sign. The thing is, usually when we're dealing with the idea of a lift (frequently used as a gateway to Above or Below - see The Power of Three, Closing Time, Night Terrors) or some type of transport moving someone up or down, we're dealing in ideas of Upperworld/Above and Underworld/Below. But here the lift that transports to the Above is really a journey not of ascension, but of Death, and those who travel in it are carried by killer Angels instead of divine ones. It's all back to front. People go Above to meet their Death.The top of the building is where it all happens, where present meets past.
And all that even before the credits roll. After the credits roll there are many examples of the X symbol too. When the Tardis tries to achieve the impossible, to materialise in a city where Time is too unstable. In front of the mansion where Mr Grayle lives.
On the bridge again, below left. And, in Amy and Rory's final moments on the rooftop. Here Amy is stood in the middle of a tangle of criss-crossing shadows as she stares into a monstrous mouth (monstrous mouths being another favourite image of Moffat). What a tangle her life has been, so many crossings and intersections, so much shifting time, so much mirroring - now all come to a (monstrous) head as she stares into the jaws of the beast. But she finds that the Beast is not so scary after all. Death is nothing to fear, if you love.
Opposites
The idea of the meeting of opposites and/or union doesn't just stop with the occasions where the X symbol is present. We have the name of the vase: Rapture of Summer, and the name of the building: Winter Quay, giving us the opposite seasons of Summer and Winter. On the topic of the name Winter Quay, through its name, the building is associated with the time of the year where life dies back, where everything becomes dark, the time of the year where the natural cycle is evocative of loss, death and separation. We talk about people being in the winter of their lives when they have reached old age, and this is the building where people meet themselves in old age. The idea of a Quay is obviously taken from the area of Manhattan the building is located in, but it's also worth pointing out that the idea of a Quay as a place that boats dock is also very relevant to the idea of death. In Greek myth, the ferryman Charon carries those who have passed over across the river Styx and into the Underworld. In Arthurian myth, the dying Arthur is carried to the centre of the lake in the Lady of the Lake's barge.
A vase smashes when the Doctor arrives at Grayle's place very chaotically in the Tardis...okay it's not the Rapture of Summer vase, but it looks damn like it so I'm going to read it as a metaphor. The summer of Amy and Rory is over, shattered by this final journey with the Doctor. They are entering the part of the cycle of winter where life dies away, where old age and death take hold.
We've got the Time Vortex, which has been betting consistently darker every week - and it now appears with a lot of black in it. That is, until the final moments of the credits, when we get a glaring white.
Also, we have the circle in the square, another popular Moffat image. Squaring the circle is to do the impossible - here, death meets life meets death - and becomes one.
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Mirrors, Literal and Otherwise
Ah, Moffat and his mirroring. Most interesting to me are the mirrors that take place without a physical looking glass. Here, the Doctor heals River with the touch of his hands, just as River healed him in Let's Kill Hitler. Both of them manifest both the healer and warrior. Here the Doctor shows he is willing to give as much as she has given - if necessary.
This moment is then linked back even more to series six, with River reaction to it mirroring back the language the Doctor once used to her.
River: That was a stupid waste of regeneration energy. Nothing is gained by being a sentimental idiot.
Doctor: River!
River: No! You embarrass me. (The Angels Take Manhattan)
Doctor: River! River! This is ridiculous! That would mean nothing to anyone. It's insane. Worse, it's stupid! You embarrass me. (The Wedding of River Song)
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Rory has been mirrored to the Doctor this series, as healer/warrior in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, as a dark mirror in A Town Called Mercy. Here, what the Doctor says to Rory is mirrored by both what Dorium said to him, and by what he said himself about a life of running. Ahead of him lies a life of running if the paradox doesn't work. Thing is, Rory is choosing to run through Love. We've yet to find out why the Doctor is running from his true identity, but the implication is that Fear is motivating him.
Doctor: Rory, even if you got out, you'd be running forever. They's be chasing you for the rest of your life.
Dorium: The first question! The question that must never be answered! Hidden in plain sight! The question you've been running from all your life. (The Wedding of River Song)
Doctor: I've been running. Faster than I've ever run. And I've been running my whole life. Now it's time for me to stop. (The Impossible Astronaut.)
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River... so much the daughter of Amy and Rory, such a mirror of both of them.
Doctor: You just changed the future!
River: It's called marriage honey.
Doctor: What the hell are you doing?
Amy: Changing the future. It's called marriage.
*
The physical mirrors are here again. Rory, River and the Doctor are all portrayed in physical mirrors.
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Lightbulbs/Eggs/Christmas
They've all been a running them this series. They're still here. Well, mostly. The only tenuous reference to Christmas I could find in the ep was the name of the building Winter Quay. Though of course there is the huge great big Christmas reference of the Christmas preview at the end.
Flickering lightbulbs are all over the place. Perhaps it is where this particular theme was leading: the lights are going out because the Angels are coming. Rory and Amy's lights are going out for the Doctor, their lights are flaring and then fading away, to paraphrase the Doctor's words in The Power of Three. However, I think there is still a connection to be made between the light and the eggs, in keeping with the idea of death and resurrection, and looking forwards to the new companion's era. Here's a nice shot of the Doctor trying to keep the lights on in the room where he and River are left after Amy and Rory escape. He tells River he can't keep doing this. And he can't. He can't keep Amy's and Rory's light alive in his life. He has to let them flare and fade away now.
There's also this little bit of dialogue from later on:
River: Does the lightbulb on top need changing?
Doctor: I just changed it.
And down in the basement, where the baby Angels are, the lights aren't working. We see the redundant bulbs as Rory is thrown down the stairs.
Gangster: The lights are out, you'll last longer with these. (gives Rory matches)
As for eggs/fertility, something we have seen come up again both in the form of visual eggs and in the theme of fertility and parenting. We've got baby Angels. We've got the parent/child relationship of Amy, Rory and River. Also, we've got this little bit of dialogue, which likens the situation the Angels have engineered at Winter Quay to poultry farming for eggs.
Doctor: This place is a farm. A battery farm.
Again, I believe we may see this theme further develop with the new companion, as eggs were so very important in the first episode of the series.
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The Angel Complex
There's similarities to The God Complex here, just as there was in A Town Called Mercy. The shots of the stairs are very reminiscent of it.
The whole building consists, like the hotel in The God Complex, of rooms for those who are sent there. That room contains the one thing that many many people fear - the moment of their own deaths.
In The God Complex, the Doctor is mirrored to the Monster of that episode, the Minotaur. The promotional image for Angels in Manhattan clearly mirrors the Doctor to the monsters of this episode. Thanks toelisi for initially pointing this out, and for sharing thoughts on it. He has one eye covered (and there's that one-eyed thing I've talked about over and over in previous meta,) in the traditional position of a weeping Angel. In so many ways he is like an Angel. He steals away people original futures by stepping into their lives, and he displaces them in time, returning them to their present moment older than they once were - a clear parallel with the moments when people in the present encounter their older selves in this ep. Just like the Minotaur feeds on people's faith, just as the Angels feed on the potential of a life un-lived - so the Doctor too feeds on the energy of his companions. He needs their awe, their wonder to sustain him - if he doesn't get that, if he is starved of their company, his dark side begins to take hold.
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All in all I thought it was a beautiful episode for them to go out on. It wasn't precisely a happy ending. But then the tale of Amelia Pond has always been something of a Dark Fairytale, tied up in life, love and death - much more in keeping with the traditional themes of fairytales before they were sanitised and cleaned up for modern bedtime stories. It was never going to be the happy ever after of the girl who wins her prince and lives out her days in her castle filled with gold. Because that's not who Amelia Pond was. She's the girl who waited over and over, the girl whose child was stolen away by the goblins, the girl who loved and lost and loved again. She's the girl who watched the man she loved die, the girl who died with him, the girl who read his gravestone and then gave up the magical world of her imaginary friend to be with him. She's the girl who Loved.