meta: The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe analysis
Trickster God
I thought it was interesting that we hear the Doctor characterised by Madge as an angel who has fallen to earth. He was mirrored so much to the monsters in series 6 that i'm curious to see what his role will be now he has destroyed his own myth by dying.
In this episode though, he is very much the Trickster God, or the angel who has fallen because of doing things that go against structure and against the order. And that's the Doctor's home territory, for me, to go against the grain, to cause havoc, then to rearrange things so they can be veiwed with a fresh persepctive- all qualities of the Trickster God .
One of the key roles of the trickster is to cause chaos, to turn things upside down and back to front in order to create new persepctive. This role to be played is signalled with the Doctor himself being back to front in the spacesuit when Madge first meets him. He's also shown as haloed in the shot below. Haloes are a symbol that come up again and again in Moffat's Who, suggesting divinity, and we'll see a halo later on in this ep in the form of the crown. So he's the back to front god/angel who has fallen to earth, bringing chaos with him
When he returns to Madge's life later, he steps fully into the role of Trickster, creating a house full of impossible things. It's a house where things aren't necessarily as they first appear, where things serve functions that are other to their usual function, a place of the unexpected.
The children's room is the most chaotic, and where the Trickster really comes into his own. He creates a chaotic place with lots of things jumbled together, some of them significant in terms of motifs and themes, some of them completely random. The tone of this particular scene with the children gets more and more frenetic until Madge finally puts a stop to it.
His description of the room;
Doctor: A sciencey-wiencey workbench, a jungle, a maze, a mirror disguised as a window, a window disguised as a mirror a selection of torches for midnight feasts and secret reading, zen garden, mysterious cupboard, zone of tranquillity, rubber ball, dream tank, exact model of the rest of the house not quite to scale - apologies, dolls with comical expressions, the Magna Carte, a foot spa, Cluedo, a yellow fort!
We've got talk of windows/mirrors. Mirrors are another key theme and image in Moffat's Who. We see them used again and again in scenes, and thematic mirrors are also often used, so i reckon it's significant that they are mentioned here.
Here the idea of window and mirror is flipped. Mirrors help us to see ourselves, when we look into them - whether they are a physical mirror, another person, or the world around us, we see the truth of ourselves reflected back at us. Windows help us to see through to the things that are outside rather than inside, or things that are other to ourselves, separate.
But the Doctor is saying that he's created things that serve the opposite function - inside becomes outside, outside becomes inside. Again, the role of the Trickster, to mix things up to flip poles.
There's also mention of a mysterious cupboard. Cupboards/wardrobes as a symbol for holding fears, or as gateways to another place have come up numerous times in series 6 - and also later come up agaiin this episode where there is discussion of the Tardis as the Doctor's wardrobe. But it also keys us in to the C S Lewis concept of the wardrobe as a container of mystery, as a doorway to something else.
The final shot of the Doctor in this scene is magic, imagery wise. He stands in the doorway/on the threshold of the room of chaos, next to an image of a clown/the trickster clad in red and blue, there's also a tree to the left (see further down for discussion of the World Tree), and the circle in the square image .
In this ep it's the Doctor who brings the chaos to the Arwell's door. There is no alien invasion or incursion, there is nothing to save or protect them from. Instead, the Trickster opens a doorway to trouble and the Arwell's go through it - though all's well that ends well as is often the case in the tales of the Trickster.
The World Tree
The World Tree mythic concept is utterly key to this episode.
There are a couple of World Trees going on, the first and less obvious is the house itself. Upstairs in the attic we have the Tardis (or the wardrobe, as he tells Lily, a wardrobe painted to look like a police box). This is the Upperworld with the gateway to all of time and space.
The downstairs is the Underworld - the blue giftbox is the mirror of the Tardis - a gateway to another world where death is present and imminent and living souls of the trees await transition to another bodiless state.
The Doctor has the Tardis in some way wired up to the Gift, and he is working on the wiring, creating a link between Above and Below . This connection of these two poles serves to open a doorway to another world. The blue present glows with the X motif, symbolising the intersection of the two planes of alien planet and earth, and the mirroring/connection of Tardis and the gift.
The Tower
The Tower is the most blatant World Tree, where the key action of the episode takes place. Except it's not a man made tower, it's really a group of trees grown and twined together that look like a human made tower. The illusion of the man made overlying the trees - a great metaphor for the idea that the consensual reality we live in overlies the cosmological structure of the World Tree.
Doctor This building, it isn’t a building. It’s a group of trees grown in the shape of a building, disguised as a building
Within the World Tree and at the two poles - Above and Below we have - appropriately - Male and Female energies in the form of the King and Queen of the trees, or the God and Goddess. And both above and below also has a throne/chair which i said above is often used as a symbol of ascension.
The Below Chair is a chair of waiting, it's a chair where the God of the forest people waits for the myth that was foretold to them to come true.
Queen Your coming was foretold….we had faith, your coming was foretold…we waited and you came.
All the God below needs is for someone to arrive and take the crown. Once this happens he can begin his own ascension, moving towards a union with the Queen above, melding above and below. This union of god/Goddess, the connection of the poles has to occur in order for the ascension to take place.
The Above Chair is the chair held by the Queen who also holds the crown. This crown is both a tool to connect to the forest spirits, and a halo which is the symbol of divine connection.
Unification and Ascension
The aim of the episode is to unite the above and the below of the this Tower as World Tree in order to facilitate and Ascension for the spirits of the forest. This time there's a literal Ascension taking place - not just a metaphorical one, the tree spirits are seeking to move beyond a physical form, beyond matter, their souls are rising up and out of their (World) trees.
Lily What is that
Doctor Life force, pure life force. Just….singing
Later…
Doctor Those stars, they’re pure life force, souls if you like
The crown/halo and the act of sitting in the chair are the tools that facilitate that ascension. The crowning creates the connection between above and below. As Cyril is crowned, the male tree spirit at the bottom of the tree awakes and begins to physically ascend up the stairs to initiate the processof unifying the Above/Below.
The King arrives at the top, but Cyril is not suitable for the task. Nor is the Doctor, so ultimately, it's Madge who takes the Crown.
Goddess
Madge is crowned because she is a woman, a mother, a symbol of the Goddess. It's about the Mother or the Goddess being a vessel - both a vessel that is able to carry life and a vessel that is able to carry love, care and compassion. It’s also very much about the female life force as generative - that women can hold and carry life within them therefore they are the tools that are needed tob facilitate this ascent.
Doctor Weak and strong, it’s a translation, translated from the base code of nature itself, toy and I Cyril, we’re weak. But she’s female. More than female, she’s mum. How else does life ever travel? The Mothership!
Marge is able to create the space inside herself to carry the forest away safely. In her act of grace, she becomes elevated to the status of true Goddess, channelling her life giving abilities to hold the life of a forest in her head and rebirth it onto another plane.
It's not necessarily straightforward through. This involves an internal battle inside her as well, a battle of accepting both the good and the bad things about her life, about being human - the pain as well as the joy. She’s forced to watch the moment that she met her husband when he follwed her home, and also the night that he died - and we're back to the theme of Love and Death that we've seen through series 6, the way that Love and Death are inextricably entwined.
She relives the good and bad and she literally watches her life flash before her eyes, as if she is dying.
In accepting both the good and the bad, both the way Love and Death have played into her life Madge is able to return home, and to allow the Tree Spirits to Ascend.
Doctor The life force of the whole forest has transmuted itself into a sub-etheirc waveband of light …..the souls of the trees are out amogst the stars, and they’re shining, very happy.
And in the end we find that Madge has the power of a Goddess not just in the Otherworld (the alien world) but also in this plane, in the human world - her love manages to transcend the Death of her husband, and she brings him home too.
Parallels with River and the Doctor
My issue with this ep at first: why no mention, by the Doctor, of River? Particularly since we are dealing with an episode involving husbands/wives, widowing, and family. But there is River subtext there to read if we want to. It's an ep about a widow and the Doctor is our widower. There's this dialogue:
Doctor Because every time you see them happy, you remember how sad they’re going to be. And it breaks your heart. Because what’s the point of them being happy now if they’re going to be sad later? The answer is, of course…because they are going to be sad later.
He's talking about himself here too. The fact that he has foresight of what will occur in people's futures and therefore in his own future, and how that could destroy him if he lets himself dwell on it. The foresight of knowing that the grief will come eventually .
Then there is the multititude of connections between what Madge does in the forest, and what River does in the Library:
The first timethat we see the Chair, a connection being made and an ascension in a blaze of light, is of course River in the Library.
Like Madge, River is in a forest. Both are forests inhabited by a life force that comes from the trees within them.
River is seated in a Chair, she makes the connection of two wires, symbolising the connection of two poles. Here we have the King from below and the Queen from Above to symbolise this.
River puts on the Crown/halo - this crown is also a neural relay like Madge's - connecting River to Cal and Madge to the Forest.
Both act as the Goddess, like Madge River allows herself to be used as a vessel, she is literally using her memory space to allow the people within CAL to be transited from one state to another, where Madge uses her mind to transit the tree people from one state to another.
River is also a widow - in name. She's married to a man who is supposedly dead - except he isn't really dead, just like Madge's husband.
The moment where Madge is kickass and produces a gun. Very River, and the shots are visually similar.
***
I'm not going to touch the ending with Amy and Rory because it's all sweetness, the message and the feelings are just there and i just want to sit back and go "ahhhhh" about it.
Thanks for reading
X
This entry was originally posted at http://lonewytch.dreamwidth.org/6951.html. You can comment here or there, i watch both.