Soldiers in Doctor Who Season 8
Once again, I set out to write a series of bullet points covering a range of themes and motifs in Doctor Who S8...and once again, I found myself stuck on one particular topic. Concise, I am not. So - having discussed Eyes in S8, here you go, have some significantly less focused thoughts on soldiers. This is a very long, fairly superficial summary of what we've seen so far in terms of soldiers and how they relate to the Doctor's character (plus, er, multiple digressions onto barely-related topics). Don't expect in-depth analysis, because my brain can't seem to manage that right now. Just 4000+ words of blather. Also be warned: there are spoilers for the Finale in here, but nothing that hasn't been revealed in official promo photos/trailers already.
This has obviously been one of the major recurring issues of this season. Is the Doctor a 'soldier' ? What does it really mean to be a soldier? Can you be both a 'soldier' and a 'good man' ? (A question first addressed directly in S6 A Good Man Goes To War, and raised on-and-off since then.) This theme has been prominent since ep2, Into The Dalek, when we first meet Danny and discover that he (like the Doctor's old friend, the Brig) is a soldier-turned-maths teacher. There's a fair bit of mystery surrounding Danny's character still - I've seen lots of people harbouring suspicions that there is more to him than meets the eye, and he may have links, knowingly or unknowingly, to Missy and whatever nefarious powers are going to be revealed in the finale.
For the moment, all we definitely know about Danny is that he grew up in care, had a childhood encounter with the Doctor and Clara that he probably doesn't remember, but which must have had a lasting effect on him: he clearly identified enough with Dan the Soldier Man, the 'soldier without a gun' (ie. one of the many Doctor mirrors this season), that he grew up to join the army. At some point he changes his name from 'Rupert' (meaning 'light', 'fame' - the same as 'Clara') to 'Danny' (meaning 'God has judged', linking to 'Oswald', 'divine ruler'.) He has a descendent who becomes, like Hide's Hila Tacorian, one of the pioneer time travellers. He enjoyed the army but worries that people get the wrong idea about soliders. It wasn't just 'killing people and crying about it afterwards' - there was a 'moral element' to it all. He dug wells. (Water being another big theme in Moffat's DW, which has continued this season.) Then, at some point, he 'had a bad day': he has clearly been through some as-yet-unspecified trauma, which has had a profound impact on his worldview. Presumably this trauma involved being 'pushed too far' by a superior officer, which may or may not have resulted in the accidental death of 'someone who wasn't a soldier'. Based on the 'ladykiller' conversation, my money is on this being a woman, possibly, for poetic reasons, a doctor. (An army medic like Moffat's beloved Dr Watson, perhaps?) OR, for reasons of Steven Moffat, someone who is going to turn out to be a relative/version of Clara. Is Danny's journey from unintentional-killer to saviour going to mirror River Song's? (They have a few things in common after all, including a childhood in an orphanage and an ability to see through the Doctor's bullshit. And Clara is busy mirroring the Doctor, so why not?) Hmmm. I can't quite unravel this one, and would appreciate hearing other people's theories! Anyway, Danny then leaves the army to become a maths teacher. Personality-wise, he most definitely seems to be a 'good man' - he appears to be kind, patient, trustworthy, loyal, brave, etc. He places a high value on honesty, but is also strangely trusting of Clara - who repeatedly lies to him - and he is very insistent that she takes the time she needs to make decisions calmly, rather than in the emotional heat of the moment.
Despite all these positive character traits, the Doctor does not trust Danny. He obnoxiously gets his name wrong, and refuses (for reasons I can't quite figure out, given the Brig) to accept that a former soldier could become a maths teacher. The Doctor refers to him as 'PE', reflecting not only the fact that he apparently sees soldiers as unable to think for themselves (brawn, not brains are needed to follow orders), but also channeling the sense of fear/anxiety that many people associate the stereotype of the bullying PE teacher. (I know I certainly had a few of those.) It's a joke that would be funny (I don't like you, therefore you must be the worst of all humans...a *PE teacher*!) were it not for the uncomfortably racist overtones that emerge when you consider his past treatment of Micky ('Ricky the idiot'), Martha and more recently Courtney ('don't you have shoplifting to go to?'). I'm not going to dwell on this here, because this is not the point of this essay, but I couldn't talk about Danny without acknowledging it. ANYWAY. The Doctor does not like Danny, does not trust him, and refuses to warm to him no matter how many times he proves himself (though he does at least grudgingly admit that Danny was right about something in In The Forest Of The Night.) He does not approve of Clara dating him, and tells us outright that this is because Danny is a soldier. Once a soldier, always a soldier, apparently, in the Doctor's mind. The soldier is always lurking beneath the skin of the teacher - Danny still drills the school's cadets and his training comes out under pressure, as in the end of The Caretaker. The Doctor, as we learned in Listen was once a scared little boy who did not want to join the army. See elisi's lovely meta post on The Caretaker for a clear, insightful discussion of Danny and the Doctor's first meeting, and all it entails. I will come back to some more analysis later, but first - what other soldiers are there?
We've met several other soldiers this season, in various guises. There's the aforementioned toy Dan the Soldier Man, the lone soldier who has lost his gun - without his gun or his army, what is it that defines him as a 'soldier'? Danny points out to Clara that people get 'the wrong idea' about soldiers, and it's clear that the Doctor has a particularly fixed idea of what a soldier *is*. He doesn't carry a gun (just a screwdriver - 'doesn't kill, doesn't wound, doesn't maim'), is not part of anyone's army and therefore does not think of himself as a soldier. But at the same time, he must have a deeper idea of what 'makes' a soldier, because he sees Danny as one even thought he's swapped his training exercises for exercise books. So if it's not just the weapon, what is it he objects to? The obeying of orders? The rigidity of the chain of command? What is it about an unarmed teacher that screams 'soldier' to the Doctor? I hope we get to find out.
The first soldier of the season is in the very first episode - Deep Breath gives us Strax. His role is mostly for comic relief, but he also gets to help in a bit of foreshadowing, when the newly-regenerated Doctor can't tell the warrior alien apart from his own companion. Clara absolutely does not share Strax's (hilariously) bloodthirsty nature, but she has become increasingly capable of switching off her natural emotional response to death and leading the troops - actually, she was good at this last season too (see Nightmare in Silver) but it's getting ever more pronounced. She is turning into the Doctor, and that means becoming a soldier - hence the confusion with Strax.
Meanwhile, it's always the 'monsters' who tend to parallel the Doctor, and this season is no exception. The broken Dalek is a soldier, as all Daleks are, and the Doctor works oh so hard to 'fix' it. He ultimately fails, crushing his own spirit more than a little. 'You are a good Dalek'…there is far more meta in this episode than I can begin to think about just now without my head exploding, and it has been eloquently discussed elsewhere, so I'm afraid I'm going to chicken out of analysing this ep in any depth. Instead I'll move quickly onto another broken soldier: 'The Foretold', the eponymous Mummy on the Orient Express. There are all sorts of obvious parallels going on with the Doctor here - an 'ancient soldier being driven by malfunctioning tech' including a 'personal teleporter', who is 'wounded in a forgotten war thousands of years ago', still fighting a battle that won't end. Except that whilst the Doctor's many skirmishes with alien foes take up the major part of most episodes, his real war is with himself. ('He's the Architect and I! Hate! Him!') It's interesting to me that both the Dalek and the Foretold are soldiers who are damaged, physically and mentally scarred, by their experiences of war - but not only that, they are both subject to experimentation. The Dalek is hooked up to all sorts of wires, and the Doctor is tasked with examining it from the inside out to find out how it works (or how it isn't working. Is a soldier without a gun still a soldier? Is a Dalek without hate still a Dalek? Is a Doctor who doesn't make people better still a Doctor?). The case of the Mummy turns out to be very similar - the mysterious Gus (G.U.S.?) has summoned the Doctor and a handful of other scientists to figure out what the Foretold is and how it works. What makes these broken soldiers tick? It's a good question for the Doctor to be asking himself. (And incidentally also ties in nicely with the self-repairing clockwork droids, the Robots in Sherwood and the Time Heist's 'augmented human' and the Boneless dissecting humans in foreshadowing the involvement of the Cybermen in the upcoming finale.)
It's also interesting that of all the soldiers in the series so far, the ones the Doctor invests the most emotion in, and tries hardest to save, are the 'monsters'. Obviously he hates the Dalek, but look at how hard he tries to believe in the possibility of a 'good' Dalek. Look at the impassioned speech he gives it (and contrast with his complete disconnect from even trying to engage with Danny.) Look at the sympathy he expresses for the Mummy, once he's worked out what it is ('You're relieved, soldier.') - sympathy he expresses for none of the human soldiers in the series, that I can remember…true he promises to 'do something amazing' in the name of Gretchen Alison Carlisle, but he doesn't work too hard to save her, or her male colleague who dies early in the episode. He is fairly contemptuous of former soldier Quell's dreams of a 'cushy desk job' on the Orient Express ('why am I even talking to you?'). And then there's Journey...
Because of all the soldiers in the series, the first to really turn our attention to this theme is the lovely Journey Blue, whose name evokes the Tardis herself and who was created as a very obvious parallel for Danny. She too is kind and brave and clever, but in the end she's a 'soldier' and so the Doctor rejects her plea to travel with him. Never mind that she is clearly a soldier out of necessity - hers is a world under siege - and not out of choice. Never mind that she helps save the day. Never mind that the Doctor has known and loved *many* other kind, brave, clever soldiers in the past (and even helped to turn some of them *into* soldiers - who got Martha that job at UNIT, Doctor? Who made use of 'Rory the Roman' in AGMGTW?) - she is a soldier, she 'takes orders', and therefore he can't bear to have her travel with him.
The first time I watched this ep, this forceful reaction against soldiers struck me as rather strange - even allowing for the particularly bleak frame of mind in which he understandably found himself at that point in time. It struck me as strange because my personal interpretation of the 50th Anniversary Episode was that it was all about the Doctor coming to terms with the War Doctor, integrating him as an accepted part of himself, acknowledging that he was still 'The Doctor' on the day that it 'wasn't possible to get it right'. It was about embracing 'the beast below' within himself, and becoming *whole*, and in the process - by working together with the Warrior side of himself - managing to save everyone after all. (The whole thing foreshadowed by his previous leap into his own timestream to rescue and reunite the fragmented Clara.) Perhaps, if he had regenerated not long after that, we would now have a much mellower Doctor.
But that's not what happened. Instead, he spent 300 years on Trenzalore - perhaps that's partly why he tries to disassociate himself from Earth in Kill The Moon. He's lived longer on Trenzalore than on Earth now. He spends that time on Trenzalore fighting a war that started because of him, seeing children he cares about grow up and (if they're lucky) grow old and die, or (if they're less lucky) get killed by the Daleks/Cybermen/Angels/other nasties that surrounded the town of Christmas. And he stayed there to fight, in this dark, cold little town (flickering lightbulbs) for so long, it eventually killed him. That's got to take a toll. That's got to make you more than a little bitter. Eleven regenerated knowing he had been granted the gift of new life by the Time Lords (unless there's something underhand going on there, of course. We'll find out soon enough) and knowing that he was loved by Clara, that he'd saved the town, and that Gallifrey was safe somewhere in another universe. But he also regenerated with 300 years of war having worn him down.
And also...I keep thinking about that Truth Field. Not much is made of it in the episode, after the initial joke when Eleven and Clara first arrive, but it is presumably there the whole time. 'The Doctor Lies', but he spent 300 years only able to tell the truth. The only lies he can tell are when he's on board the Tardis ('Clara Oswald, I will never send you away again'- his first bittersweet lie in god knows how long) and his regeneration process started when he was still outside, within the confines of the truth field. Perhaps that is a part of what has made him so blunt, so abrasive (so much like his original incarnation), so unwilling to compromise on who he is or blend in as a human. Perhaps it's part of the reason he makes so many personal remarks about Clara's appearance (as well as my other theory that he's projecting his concerns about his own face).
Each regeneration is always a reaction against the previous one, and I always like to think that - ever since the enforced regeneration of Eight anyway, I don't know enough about his earlier deaths - the circumstances of regeneration also have an effect. In direct opposition to the Tenth Doctor, whose constant refrain of 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry' eventually came to define him ('the man who regrets'), Twelve has said 'Sorry. No, actually, I'm not sorry' at least twice by my count. This is a Doctor who does not care to sugarcoat reality, does not promise to save people when he knows he can't, or when he knows that trying to save one person may just put more in danger. 'People don't need to be lied to, Clara.' (Listen) Of course he still lies, all the time - how much did he *really* know in Kill The Moon? - but always to serve a specific end. He, somewhat hypocritically, can't stand being lied to. (Just as he gives orders all the time, but can't stand taking them.) But he is very, very good at lying to himself. And he needs to stop lying about what he is.
elisi has pointed out (sorry, Elisi, I can't remember which of your metas it's in!) that acknowledging hard truths about yourself is only the first step towards self-improvement: you do actually have to *act* on those truths to be a 'good' person. Which is definitely true! But the Doctor is still not admitting certain truths to himself, however much he might make grandiose statements like 'It's time I did something about that'.
And so the physical distance he tries to keep between himself and his friends (no hugging!) rather tragically reflects the inner barriers he has built up for himself. In stark contrast to hyper-tactile Eleven, who was forever hugging/kissing/poking things and people that interested him (or, indeed, Ten, who tended to lick things!) Twelve is so much more contained. His movements are crisper, brisker, and he is almost phobic of close physical contact with other people. I came across an interesting theory somewhere in the depths of tumblr that this could be due to an increased level of psychic/sensory ability in this particular Doctor (his sense of time in Kill The Moon for example seems stronger than we've seen before) and a corresponding increased sensitivity to touch. I like this idea, but I think it's perhaps more interesting to think of it as an outward manifestation of his psyche. After Ten's death-by-hubris, inevitable from the moment he went too far on Mars and placed himself as a god above everyone else, Eleven went back to what was important to him: he found himself a loving, unconventional family and a large network of friends. He almost physically tugged people into his flaily orbit. They filled a hole in his life, perhaps, left by the loss of Gallifrey (a hole which Ten tried to fill with a succession of solo companions, endless guilt, and ultimately, by trying to make his own ego large enough to cover it.) That hole is no longer there since his acceptance of the War Doctor and the discovery of the truth about Gallifrey. Sure, the Doctor still seems to think of himself as 'the last of his kind' (see his rather flippant comment in In The Forest Of The Night and also the almost pathological way in which he leaps to the totally groundless conclusion that other troubled and isolated creatures must also be 'unique' - see the Teller and the moon dragon) BUT that is only true in this universe. He knows the Time Lords are out there somewhere, he knows he didn't kill them, and he knows that one day they will come back. But now there are other things he's hiding from himself - there's no hole now, but there's a scar instead and he's not going to touch it, or let people touch him, until he admits the truth about it.
To bring this back round to soldiers again, (sorry! got really distracted there) the truth he won't admit is that he is clearly a soldier. Or rather - an officer. I was saying this after Into the Dalek aired, and was thrilled when Danny brought it up and confronted the Doctor with this obvious truth. He is the soldier who trains up other people to fight, then sends them off to war. He hates obeying orders, but insists that others obey his. He has 'so many' rules…this is the thing he needs to accept about himself before he can really become a 'good man', whatever that may be. In his deeply ingrained self-loathing, he has set up this entirely false dichotomy of Doctor/Soldier, which he perhaps briefly dismantled in The Day Of The Doctor but rebuilt over 1000 years of war on Trenzalore. He needs to break it down again. And something needs to happen to force the issue, because it won't come naturally - the Doctor is, and has for some time, been a really *epic* procrastinator. As is only fitting for someone with a time machine, I suppose. Ten knew his time was up, and knew the Ood needed him for something, but fled from it all and went gallivanting off round the universe marrying monarchs instead. Eleven also ran from his 'death' at Lake Silencio for a very long time, and put off saying goodbye to his Ponds until they were forcibly taken from him. Twelve - as we saw at the start of Listen - spends his alone-time furiously investigating completely irrelevant mysteries and 'what if' questions, rather than searching for Gallifrey. (Unless that's what all the scribbles on his blackboard are for, of course). For all that he is very good at making other people face their fears, he is really extraordinarily bad at confronting his own issues. Then again, it's always easier to see your faults when they're safely ensconced in other people, and it's often true that the things that annoy you most about other people are the things that actually annoy you most about yourself. Which is why he needs a mirror in his companions, and few have mirrored him more than Clara. (What is going on in that trailer?? Oh Clara my Clara, I'm so afraid for you.)
So: what's going to happen in the finale to make the Doctor admit the truth about himself, and start to accept it? There are definitely armies involved - armies of Cybermen at the very least. Whose armies are they, who is in command (Missy? The Doctor? Clara?) and why? Who are they fighting? And how is this all going to play into the Doctor's obsessive rejection of soldiers? How does he even define a soldier?
There has been an interesting thread running through this series of defining things and 'naming things', ever since Trenzalore and the Question of the Doctor's name. I touched on the meanings of Danny and Clara's names earlier, and how Danny has chosen to change his name. Does it define him better now? In the Doctor's big speech at the end of Flatline he takes peculiar care to name the aliens ('the Boneless') which seems like a very odd thing to do, as you reject them from your reality. There is a lot of discussion about how to name things in Flatline, actually. In In The Forest Of The Night the Doctor has to be reminded that the small child in his Tardis 'probably has a name'. Almost the first thing Twelve does in Deep Breath is run through the list of deterministic names of the Seven Dwarfs, in the hope of pinning one on Strax. There is a fairytale power in knowing someone's 'true name', but there is also a certain power in how you choose to name yourself. Names have meanings, and how you choose to name yourself can define who or what you are. ('Name a thing and bang! It leaps into existance' - a quote from a play called 'Translations', which is one of my favourite things.) See all the discussion about the 'War Doctor' and how he could not call himself 'The Doctor' because of what he did. If the War Doctor could not name himself as the Doctor because he was a soldier, it seems Twelve has gone the other way - he is so determined now to be 'The Doctor' (after Clara reinforced that idea for him several times in The Day/Time Of The Doctor) that he refuses to name himself as a soldier.
But another thread running through this series has been that of ambiguity/duality. A lot of the 'monsters' this season have turned out to not be monsters after all - the Teller, the moon dragon, even the Mummy at heart. The trees in London were there to save the Earth, not to kill it. This is turned on its head in Flatline when the Doctor gives the Boneless a chance to prove their good intentions, and they reject it - but he acknowledged that the possibility was there. We don't all communicate the same way. There are shades of meaning in everything, including people. Again,
elisi has discussed the duality of Clara in depth and I don't need to go into it here. But there have been other things too - someone on tumblr pointed out that there has been a distinctly 'choose your own ending' theme this season. In Deep Breath did the Doctor push the cyborg or did he jump? In Mummy On The Orient Express did the Doctor really save everyone, or is that just what he told Clara? Was Robin Hood really real, or was he created from the legend by the aliens? Was there really a monster under the blanket, or was it a child? Was there something outside at the end of the universe, or was it just the ship creaking? You decide. Perhaps the truth is a matter of perspective. (If Robin Hood was created from the legends, does that make him any less real than if the legends came from him?) Perhaps more than one thing can be true. Kalabraxos literally existed as multiple versions of herself. The moon dragon was 'a baby' or 'a parasite' depending on who was looking at it.
This plays into the idea of 'fear less, trust more' that came up at the end of Forest - yes, 'fear is a superpower', but only when it has to be and only certain kinds of fear. The kind of fear that sends adrenaline pumping can motivate you, but there's also the cold kind of fear that paralyses. 'Trust me, I'm the Doctor'. The Doctor needs to start to trust himself more, to like himself more and fear himself less. He needs to deconstruct what he really means by the word 'soldier', because he has imbued it with all sorts of meanings it doesn't need to carry. (It was a beautiful, beautiful symbolic moment when Lord Nelson's statue came crashing down in Trafalgar Square, nearly crushing the Doctor and Clara. They are being crushed under the weight of meaning he has built into the concept of the 'soldier'. Of course, it could also symbolise that the Doctor himself is due for a Fall at the end of this season, but I hope it is ultimately a fall which knocks some sense into him.) The Doctor needs to recognise that he can name himself as a soldier and still be the Doctor, and still be a 'good man' if he tries to be.
So...that's it. Tell me your thoughts! If you have any brain left, after making it to the end of this. Congrats, if you managed it.
This has obviously been one of the major recurring issues of this season. Is the Doctor a 'soldier' ? What does it really mean to be a soldier? Can you be both a 'soldier' and a 'good man' ? (A question first addressed directly in S6 A Good Man Goes To War, and raised on-and-off since then.) This theme has been prominent since ep2, Into The Dalek, when we first meet Danny and discover that he (like the Doctor's old friend, the Brig) is a soldier-turned-maths teacher. There's a fair bit of mystery surrounding Danny's character still - I've seen lots of people harbouring suspicions that there is more to him than meets the eye, and he may have links, knowingly or unknowingly, to Missy and whatever nefarious powers are going to be revealed in the finale.
For the moment, all we definitely know about Danny is that he grew up in care, had a childhood encounter with the Doctor and Clara that he probably doesn't remember, but which must have had a lasting effect on him: he clearly identified enough with Dan the Soldier Man, the 'soldier without a gun' (ie. one of the many Doctor mirrors this season), that he grew up to join the army. At some point he changes his name from 'Rupert' (meaning 'light', 'fame' - the same as 'Clara') to 'Danny' (meaning 'God has judged', linking to 'Oswald', 'divine ruler'.) He has a descendent who becomes, like Hide's Hila Tacorian, one of the pioneer time travellers. He enjoyed the army but worries that people get the wrong idea about soliders. It wasn't just 'killing people and crying about it afterwards' - there was a 'moral element' to it all. He dug wells. (Water being another big theme in Moffat's DW, which has continued this season.) Then, at some point, he 'had a bad day': he has clearly been through some as-yet-unspecified trauma, which has had a profound impact on his worldview. Presumably this trauma involved being 'pushed too far' by a superior officer, which may or may not have resulted in the accidental death of 'someone who wasn't a soldier'. Based on the 'ladykiller' conversation, my money is on this being a woman, possibly, for poetic reasons, a doctor. (An army medic like Moffat's beloved Dr Watson, perhaps?) OR, for reasons of Steven Moffat, someone who is going to turn out to be a relative/version of Clara. Is Danny's journey from unintentional-killer to saviour going to mirror River Song's? (They have a few things in common after all, including a childhood in an orphanage and an ability to see through the Doctor's bullshit. And Clara is busy mirroring the Doctor, so why not?) Hmmm. I can't quite unravel this one, and would appreciate hearing other people's theories! Anyway, Danny then leaves the army to become a maths teacher. Personality-wise, he most definitely seems to be a 'good man' - he appears to be kind, patient, trustworthy, loyal, brave, etc. He places a high value on honesty, but is also strangely trusting of Clara - who repeatedly lies to him - and he is very insistent that she takes the time she needs to make decisions calmly, rather than in the emotional heat of the moment.
Despite all these positive character traits, the Doctor does not trust Danny. He obnoxiously gets his name wrong, and refuses (for reasons I can't quite figure out, given the Brig) to accept that a former soldier could become a maths teacher. The Doctor refers to him as 'PE', reflecting not only the fact that he apparently sees soldiers as unable to think for themselves (brawn, not brains are needed to follow orders), but also channeling the sense of fear/anxiety that many people associate the stereotype of the bullying PE teacher. (I know I certainly had a few of those.) It's a joke that would be funny (I don't like you, therefore you must be the worst of all humans...a *PE teacher*!) were it not for the uncomfortably racist overtones that emerge when you consider his past treatment of Micky ('Ricky the idiot'), Martha and more recently Courtney ('don't you have shoplifting to go to?'). I'm not going to dwell on this here, because this is not the point of this essay, but I couldn't talk about Danny without acknowledging it. ANYWAY. The Doctor does not like Danny, does not trust him, and refuses to warm to him no matter how many times he proves himself (though he does at least grudgingly admit that Danny was right about something in In The Forest Of The Night.) He does not approve of Clara dating him, and tells us outright that this is because Danny is a soldier. Once a soldier, always a soldier, apparently, in the Doctor's mind. The soldier is always lurking beneath the skin of the teacher - Danny still drills the school's cadets and his training comes out under pressure, as in the end of The Caretaker. The Doctor, as we learned in Listen was once a scared little boy who did not want to join the army. See elisi's lovely meta post on The Caretaker for a clear, insightful discussion of Danny and the Doctor's first meeting, and all it entails. I will come back to some more analysis later, but first - what other soldiers are there?
We've met several other soldiers this season, in various guises. There's the aforementioned toy Dan the Soldier Man, the lone soldier who has lost his gun - without his gun or his army, what is it that defines him as a 'soldier'? Danny points out to Clara that people get 'the wrong idea' about soldiers, and it's clear that the Doctor has a particularly fixed idea of what a soldier *is*. He doesn't carry a gun (just a screwdriver - 'doesn't kill, doesn't wound, doesn't maim'), is not part of anyone's army and therefore does not think of himself as a soldier. But at the same time, he must have a deeper idea of what 'makes' a soldier, because he sees Danny as one even thought he's swapped his training exercises for exercise books. So if it's not just the weapon, what is it he objects to? The obeying of orders? The rigidity of the chain of command? What is it about an unarmed teacher that screams 'soldier' to the Doctor? I hope we get to find out.
The first soldier of the season is in the very first episode - Deep Breath gives us Strax. His role is mostly for comic relief, but he also gets to help in a bit of foreshadowing, when the newly-regenerated Doctor can't tell the warrior alien apart from his own companion. Clara absolutely does not share Strax's (hilariously) bloodthirsty nature, but she has become increasingly capable of switching off her natural emotional response to death and leading the troops - actually, she was good at this last season too (see Nightmare in Silver) but it's getting ever more pronounced. She is turning into the Doctor, and that means becoming a soldier - hence the confusion with Strax.
Meanwhile, it's always the 'monsters' who tend to parallel the Doctor, and this season is no exception. The broken Dalek is a soldier, as all Daleks are, and the Doctor works oh so hard to 'fix' it. He ultimately fails, crushing his own spirit more than a little. 'You are a good Dalek'…there is far more meta in this episode than I can begin to think about just now without my head exploding, and it has been eloquently discussed elsewhere, so I'm afraid I'm going to chicken out of analysing this ep in any depth. Instead I'll move quickly onto another broken soldier: 'The Foretold', the eponymous Mummy on the Orient Express. There are all sorts of obvious parallels going on with the Doctor here - an 'ancient soldier being driven by malfunctioning tech' including a 'personal teleporter', who is 'wounded in a forgotten war thousands of years ago', still fighting a battle that won't end. Except that whilst the Doctor's many skirmishes with alien foes take up the major part of most episodes, his real war is with himself. ('He's the Architect and I! Hate! Him!') It's interesting to me that both the Dalek and the Foretold are soldiers who are damaged, physically and mentally scarred, by their experiences of war - but not only that, they are both subject to experimentation. The Dalek is hooked up to all sorts of wires, and the Doctor is tasked with examining it from the inside out to find out how it works (or how it isn't working. Is a soldier without a gun still a soldier? Is a Dalek without hate still a Dalek? Is a Doctor who doesn't make people better still a Doctor?). The case of the Mummy turns out to be very similar - the mysterious Gus (G.U.S.?) has summoned the Doctor and a handful of other scientists to figure out what the Foretold is and how it works. What makes these broken soldiers tick? It's a good question for the Doctor to be asking himself. (And incidentally also ties in nicely with the self-repairing clockwork droids, the Robots in Sherwood and the Time Heist's 'augmented human' and the Boneless dissecting humans in foreshadowing the involvement of the Cybermen in the upcoming finale.)
It's also interesting that of all the soldiers in the series so far, the ones the Doctor invests the most emotion in, and tries hardest to save, are the 'monsters'. Obviously he hates the Dalek, but look at how hard he tries to believe in the possibility of a 'good' Dalek. Look at the impassioned speech he gives it (and contrast with his complete disconnect from even trying to engage with Danny.) Look at the sympathy he expresses for the Mummy, once he's worked out what it is ('You're relieved, soldier.') - sympathy he expresses for none of the human soldiers in the series, that I can remember…true he promises to 'do something amazing' in the name of Gretchen Alison Carlisle, but he doesn't work too hard to save her, or her male colleague who dies early in the episode. He is fairly contemptuous of former soldier Quell's dreams of a 'cushy desk job' on the Orient Express ('why am I even talking to you?'). And then there's Journey...
Because of all the soldiers in the series, the first to really turn our attention to this theme is the lovely Journey Blue, whose name evokes the Tardis herself and who was created as a very obvious parallel for Danny. She too is kind and brave and clever, but in the end she's a 'soldier' and so the Doctor rejects her plea to travel with him. Never mind that she is clearly a soldier out of necessity - hers is a world under siege - and not out of choice. Never mind that she helps save the day. Never mind that the Doctor has known and loved *many* other kind, brave, clever soldiers in the past (and even helped to turn some of them *into* soldiers - who got Martha that job at UNIT, Doctor? Who made use of 'Rory the Roman' in AGMGTW?) - she is a soldier, she 'takes orders', and therefore he can't bear to have her travel with him.
The first time I watched this ep, this forceful reaction against soldiers struck me as rather strange - even allowing for the particularly bleak frame of mind in which he understandably found himself at that point in time. It struck me as strange because my personal interpretation of the 50th Anniversary Episode was that it was all about the Doctor coming to terms with the War Doctor, integrating him as an accepted part of himself, acknowledging that he was still 'The Doctor' on the day that it 'wasn't possible to get it right'. It was about embracing 'the beast below' within himself, and becoming *whole*, and in the process - by working together with the Warrior side of himself - managing to save everyone after all. (The whole thing foreshadowed by his previous leap into his own timestream to rescue and reunite the fragmented Clara.) Perhaps, if he had regenerated not long after that, we would now have a much mellower Doctor.
But that's not what happened. Instead, he spent 300 years on Trenzalore - perhaps that's partly why he tries to disassociate himself from Earth in Kill The Moon. He's lived longer on Trenzalore than on Earth now. He spends that time on Trenzalore fighting a war that started because of him, seeing children he cares about grow up and (if they're lucky) grow old and die, or (if they're less lucky) get killed by the Daleks/Cybermen/Angels/other nasties that surrounded the town of Christmas. And he stayed there to fight, in this dark, cold little town (flickering lightbulbs) for so long, it eventually killed him. That's got to take a toll. That's got to make you more than a little bitter. Eleven regenerated knowing he had been granted the gift of new life by the Time Lords (unless there's something underhand going on there, of course. We'll find out soon enough) and knowing that he was loved by Clara, that he'd saved the town, and that Gallifrey was safe somewhere in another universe. But he also regenerated with 300 years of war having worn him down.
And also...I keep thinking about that Truth Field. Not much is made of it in the episode, after the initial joke when Eleven and Clara first arrive, but it is presumably there the whole time. 'The Doctor Lies', but he spent 300 years only able to tell the truth. The only lies he can tell are when he's on board the Tardis ('Clara Oswald, I will never send you away again'- his first bittersweet lie in god knows how long) and his regeneration process started when he was still outside, within the confines of the truth field. Perhaps that is a part of what has made him so blunt, so abrasive (so much like his original incarnation), so unwilling to compromise on who he is or blend in as a human. Perhaps it's part of the reason he makes so many personal remarks about Clara's appearance (as well as my other theory that he's projecting his concerns about his own face).
Each regeneration is always a reaction against the previous one, and I always like to think that - ever since the enforced regeneration of Eight anyway, I don't know enough about his earlier deaths - the circumstances of regeneration also have an effect. In direct opposition to the Tenth Doctor, whose constant refrain of 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry' eventually came to define him ('the man who regrets'), Twelve has said 'Sorry. No, actually, I'm not sorry' at least twice by my count. This is a Doctor who does not care to sugarcoat reality, does not promise to save people when he knows he can't, or when he knows that trying to save one person may just put more in danger. 'People don't need to be lied to, Clara.' (Listen) Of course he still lies, all the time - how much did he *really* know in Kill The Moon? - but always to serve a specific end. He, somewhat hypocritically, can't stand being lied to. (Just as he gives orders all the time, but can't stand taking them.) But he is very, very good at lying to himself. And he needs to stop lying about what he is.
elisi has pointed out (sorry, Elisi, I can't remember which of your metas it's in!) that acknowledging hard truths about yourself is only the first step towards self-improvement: you do actually have to *act* on those truths to be a 'good' person. Which is definitely true! But the Doctor is still not admitting certain truths to himself, however much he might make grandiose statements like 'It's time I did something about that'.
And so the physical distance he tries to keep between himself and his friends (no hugging!) rather tragically reflects the inner barriers he has built up for himself. In stark contrast to hyper-tactile Eleven, who was forever hugging/kissing/poking things and people that interested him (or, indeed, Ten, who tended to lick things!) Twelve is so much more contained. His movements are crisper, brisker, and he is almost phobic of close physical contact with other people. I came across an interesting theory somewhere in the depths of tumblr that this could be due to an increased level of psychic/sensory ability in this particular Doctor (his sense of time in Kill The Moon for example seems stronger than we've seen before) and a corresponding increased sensitivity to touch. I like this idea, but I think it's perhaps more interesting to think of it as an outward manifestation of his psyche. After Ten's death-by-hubris, inevitable from the moment he went too far on Mars and placed himself as a god above everyone else, Eleven went back to what was important to him: he found himself a loving, unconventional family and a large network of friends. He almost physically tugged people into his flaily orbit. They filled a hole in his life, perhaps, left by the loss of Gallifrey (a hole which Ten tried to fill with a succession of solo companions, endless guilt, and ultimately, by trying to make his own ego large enough to cover it.) That hole is no longer there since his acceptance of the War Doctor and the discovery of the truth about Gallifrey. Sure, the Doctor still seems to think of himself as 'the last of his kind' (see his rather flippant comment in In The Forest Of The Night and also the almost pathological way in which he leaps to the totally groundless conclusion that other troubled and isolated creatures must also be 'unique' - see the Teller and the moon dragon) BUT that is only true in this universe. He knows the Time Lords are out there somewhere, he knows he didn't kill them, and he knows that one day they will come back. But now there are other things he's hiding from himself - there's no hole now, but there's a scar instead and he's not going to touch it, or let people touch him, until he admits the truth about it.
To bring this back round to soldiers again, (sorry! got really distracted there) the truth he won't admit is that he is clearly a soldier. Or rather - an officer. I was saying this after Into the Dalek aired, and was thrilled when Danny brought it up and confronted the Doctor with this obvious truth. He is the soldier who trains up other people to fight, then sends them off to war. He hates obeying orders, but insists that others obey his. He has 'so many' rules…this is the thing he needs to accept about himself before he can really become a 'good man', whatever that may be. In his deeply ingrained self-loathing, he has set up this entirely false dichotomy of Doctor/Soldier, which he perhaps briefly dismantled in The Day Of The Doctor but rebuilt over 1000 years of war on Trenzalore. He needs to break it down again. And something needs to happen to force the issue, because it won't come naturally - the Doctor is, and has for some time, been a really *epic* procrastinator. As is only fitting for someone with a time machine, I suppose. Ten knew his time was up, and knew the Ood needed him for something, but fled from it all and went gallivanting off round the universe marrying monarchs instead. Eleven also ran from his 'death' at Lake Silencio for a very long time, and put off saying goodbye to his Ponds until they were forcibly taken from him. Twelve - as we saw at the start of Listen - spends his alone-time furiously investigating completely irrelevant mysteries and 'what if' questions, rather than searching for Gallifrey. (Unless that's what all the scribbles on his blackboard are for, of course). For all that he is very good at making other people face their fears, he is really extraordinarily bad at confronting his own issues. Then again, it's always easier to see your faults when they're safely ensconced in other people, and it's often true that the things that annoy you most about other people are the things that actually annoy you most about yourself. Which is why he needs a mirror in his companions, and few have mirrored him more than Clara. (What is going on in that trailer?? Oh Clara my Clara, I'm so afraid for you.)
So: what's going to happen in the finale to make the Doctor admit the truth about himself, and start to accept it? There are definitely armies involved - armies of Cybermen at the very least. Whose armies are they, who is in command (Missy? The Doctor? Clara?) and why? Who are they fighting? And how is this all going to play into the Doctor's obsessive rejection of soldiers? How does he even define a soldier?
There has been an interesting thread running through this series of defining things and 'naming things', ever since Trenzalore and the Question of the Doctor's name. I touched on the meanings of Danny and Clara's names earlier, and how Danny has chosen to change his name. Does it define him better now? In the Doctor's big speech at the end of Flatline he takes peculiar care to name the aliens ('the Boneless') which seems like a very odd thing to do, as you reject them from your reality. There is a lot of discussion about how to name things in Flatline, actually. In In The Forest Of The Night the Doctor has to be reminded that the small child in his Tardis 'probably has a name'. Almost the first thing Twelve does in Deep Breath is run through the list of deterministic names of the Seven Dwarfs, in the hope of pinning one on Strax. There is a fairytale power in knowing someone's 'true name', but there is also a certain power in how you choose to name yourself. Names have meanings, and how you choose to name yourself can define who or what you are. ('Name a thing and bang! It leaps into existance' - a quote from a play called 'Translations', which is one of my favourite things.) See all the discussion about the 'War Doctor' and how he could not call himself 'The Doctor' because of what he did. If the War Doctor could not name himself as the Doctor because he was a soldier, it seems Twelve has gone the other way - he is so determined now to be 'The Doctor' (after Clara reinforced that idea for him several times in The Day/Time Of The Doctor) that he refuses to name himself as a soldier.
But another thread running through this series has been that of ambiguity/duality. A lot of the 'monsters' this season have turned out to not be monsters after all - the Teller, the moon dragon, even the Mummy at heart. The trees in London were there to save the Earth, not to kill it. This is turned on its head in Flatline when the Doctor gives the Boneless a chance to prove their good intentions, and they reject it - but he acknowledged that the possibility was there. We don't all communicate the same way. There are shades of meaning in everything, including people. Again,
elisi has discussed the duality of Clara in depth and I don't need to go into it here. But there have been other things too - someone on tumblr pointed out that there has been a distinctly 'choose your own ending' theme this season. In Deep Breath did the Doctor push the cyborg or did he jump? In Mummy On The Orient Express did the Doctor really save everyone, or is that just what he told Clara? Was Robin Hood really real, or was he created from the legend by the aliens? Was there really a monster under the blanket, or was it a child? Was there something outside at the end of the universe, or was it just the ship creaking? You decide. Perhaps the truth is a matter of perspective. (If Robin Hood was created from the legends, does that make him any less real than if the legends came from him?) Perhaps more than one thing can be true. Kalabraxos literally existed as multiple versions of herself. The moon dragon was 'a baby' or 'a parasite' depending on who was looking at it.
This plays into the idea of 'fear less, trust more' that came up at the end of Forest - yes, 'fear is a superpower', but only when it has to be and only certain kinds of fear. The kind of fear that sends adrenaline pumping can motivate you, but there's also the cold kind of fear that paralyses. 'Trust me, I'm the Doctor'. The Doctor needs to start to trust himself more, to like himself more and fear himself less. He needs to deconstruct what he really means by the word 'soldier', because he has imbued it with all sorts of meanings it doesn't need to carry. (It was a beautiful, beautiful symbolic moment when Lord Nelson's statue came crashing down in Trafalgar Square, nearly crushing the Doctor and Clara. They are being crushed under the weight of meaning he has built into the concept of the 'soldier'. Of course, it could also symbolise that the Doctor himself is due for a Fall at the end of this season, but I hope it is ultimately a fall which knocks some sense into him.) The Doctor needs to recognise that he can name himself as a soldier and still be the Doctor, and still be a 'good man' if he tries to be.
So...that's it. Tell me your thoughts! If you have any brain left, after making it to the end of this. Congrats, if you managed it.