Meta: The God Complex.
This week’s Doctor Who is without a doubt one of my favourite things ever. It was beautiful and heartbreaking and hit one of my major, major kinks and it also - miracles of miracles - treated religion with intelligence, rather than just steal some imagery and then sneer. Basically it was [metaphorically, and literally] 1 Corinthians 13, 11-12 in Doctor Who form (and yes, that is a spoiler-y, so don’t look it up if you don’t want to know). :)
Oh and please no spoilers beyond this episode. Thank you.
The God Complex
Now, for those not terribly familiar with the Bible, here it is written out:
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
Hello there Growing-Up Theme, have we met? Why yes we have. A long time ago I think...
Let’s go back to the beginning. The Doctor was late for Amelia (twice), and
DOCTOR: So... coming?
AMY: No!
DOCTOR: You wanted to come 14 years ago.
AMY: I grew up.
DOCTOR: Don't worry. I'll soon fix that.
Season 5 was about the Doctor trying to fix the little girl he broke - give her back the magic of childhood, so she could grow up properly and be ready to take that final step into adulthood and get married. We saw that he was ready to leave Amy and Rory behind, sneaking away from the reception on his own - happy about the way everything had turned out for the best, and prepared to let his young friends explore married life on their own.
Except... except River. River who turned up and delayed him long enough for Amy and Rory to get to the TARDIS for a new round of running away. Now River was obviously keen to ensure her own future, and the Doctor was hardly going to kick Amy and Rory out. But - there are consequences for refusing to grow up. Let me borrow two quotes:
“...the Doctor has sort of hung around in her life for far too long. He never says it out loud, but he obviously has an MO. 'I'll get out before I screw up their chances of happiness. I'll run away, and let them grow up. I'll go and find somebody else to mess about with.' But he's accidentally ended up with a married couple in the TARDIS, because he ran alway with Amy on the night of her wedding, and now he's in the most dreadful pickle. "
Steven Moffat, DWM 433
You can run, run forever, never put away childish things. You can stay a child forever.
All it takes is sacrifice. Your firstborn. That will do.
janie_aire
This episode was all about growing up and putting aside childish things. About seeing things for what they really are. About examining faith and whether it is true or misplaced.
The Doctor never really stopped seeing Amy as that little 7 year old girl (which was undoubtedly one reason he would never ever go there with her), and the hard work to restore her faith in him worked too well - her belief is that of a child's, who believes completely and without question. I think we can probably blame this faith/attitude for the lack of talk about Melody since LKH. a) Amy - still - believed that the Doctor would somehow fix the situation, and because of this b) She was running away. And oh my, has the Doctor been her enabler on that front...
AMY: You know what I said about getting back for tomorrow morning... Have you ever run away from something because you were scared, or not ready, or just... Just because you could?
DOCTOR: Once...a long time ago.
AMY: What happened?
DOCTOR: Hello!
They're both running from the truth that the Doctor can't fix Amy's life. Older Amy in The Girl Who Waited learned it the hard way, with almost nothing except bitterness left. And Rory, always more aware of things, always the adult, was already berating the Doctor in Vampires of Venice.
So faith... Good or bad? Well, let's look at Gibbis first. He was the only survivor, and people have wondered at this. But once I thought about it in a little more detail it was obvious - Gibbis, essentially, will believe in anything. He'll trow himself behind whatever presents the best hope of personal survival, so the minotaur could never get a foothold as Gibbis' faith kept shifting. Everyone else believed in something specific.
ETA: Forgot to mention! Gibbis is basically the anti-Doctor, cowardly where the Doctor is brave, ready to follow where the Doctor takes charge. The Doctor saves even the fish - Gibbis eats them. In an episode so critical of the Doctor, Gibbis is very important in showing us the flip side.
Which brings me to Rita. Oh Rita. Brilliant, wonderful Rita. Now she was clever and the Doctor was attracted to her like a moth to a flame, but she did something even more brilliant - she in no time at all pinpointed the Doctor's god complex, and I absolutely attribute this to her faith. Because the thing about real faith is that it's not blind or unquestioning. If you want to base your life on something, any intelligent person wants to make sure that's it's a solid foundation and not just pretty words. Which is why she questions the Doctor - as far as she can tell, he's just a man. Why is he setting himself up as saviour? (There is a difference between making yourself leader - which Rita has obviously done in her little group, since she's by far the most capable - and telling everyone that you are going to save them.)
(We have had Rory criticising the Doctor for a long while, because he is a very realistic person. To have a someone else make the same kind of critisism, but coming from a completely different worldview, is too delightful for words. So very often faith is portrayed as something irrational, which seriously annoys me. So thank you Mr Whithouse. I was not expecting this.)
Rita, although flattered and intrigued, rejects the Doctor, seeing him clearly for what he is. Rita is an adult, not ready to be drawn in by fairy tales when her life hangs in the balance.
Unlike Amy...
The Doctor's actions are long overdue, and deeply necessary. And not just for Amy's sake. 'What do Time Lords pray to?' asks Amy.
DOCTOR: Oh! Oh, Amelia Pond before I got it all wrong. My sweet little Amelia.
INTERFACE: I am not Amelia Pond. I am a voice interface.
DOCTOR: Hey, let's run away and have adventures. Come along, Pond.
[...]
DOCTOR: I'm going out in the first round. Ringing any bells? (cries in pain and falls face-down on the floor) OK, need something for the pain now. Come on, Amelia. It's me. Please.
INTERFACE: I am not Amelia Pond. I am a voice interface.
DOCTOR: Amelia, listen to me... I can be brave for you but you have got to tell me how.
The Doctor needs her faith, as much as she needs her belief in him. It's the most delightful co-dependency. The Doctor wants his sweet little Amelia, that he can run away with forever. Amy wants her Raggedy Doctor, who will fix her life. And in destroying Amy's faith in him, the Doctor is simultaneously allowing himself to see her as she really is - not his glorious Pond, but Amy Williams, a young married woman (the 'Williams' isn't about saying that women should take their husband's name - it's just a shorthand to differentiate). Which again is what leads to the minotaur's death. Both Amy and the Doctor found their rooms, so to destroy the minotaur they both needed their faith broken. (Rory didn't have a room and I don't think the Angels were it for Gibbis.)
Anyway, the Doctor then does the mature thing. He doesn't try to rebuild her faith, he lets her go.
To call back to The Girl Who Waited:
AMY: Why now?
DOCTOR: Because you're still breathing.
[...]
And what's the alternative? Me standing over your grave? Over your broken body? Over Rory's body?
In TGWW the focus was quite rightly on Rory and Amy... yet the Doctor was the one to close the door on older Amy, the one who lied through his teeth to save one because he couldn’t have both. We see the effects here.
It’s the mature thing to do, and I love that he does it, and that it show adulthood as an inevitable part of life, not something terrible. Amy is sad to leave her childhood behind, but clinging onto it for too long came with a heavy price (see janie_aire's quote above). And growing up is good - you get to have new little people, who need parents, adults, to help and guide. Refusing to accept how life goes - clinging onto childhood, or life, for too long - is never good.
Another thing I love is how the Doctor has clearly learned from the past, and is able to do the right thing, no matter how painful. Because he knows that the alternative is worse. Rose and Donna's 'forever' always bothered me (as did the Doctor's acceptance of those words - even if he was lying), and considering the way that he lost them, it is no wonder that he lets Amy go, forcing her to see the truth.
Stepping sideways for a minute, then it's interesting to look at River. River believes in the Doctor 100% (and she knows he needs that belief), but she has extremely realistic expectations of him):
OCTAVIAN: Dr Song, I've lost good Clerics today. You trust this man?
RIVER: I absolutely trust him.
OCTAVIAN: He's not some kind of madman then?
RIVER: I absolutely trust him.
RIVER: Father Octavian, when the Doctor is in the room, your only mission is to keep him alive long enough to get everyone else home. And trust me. It's not easy.
Now going back to Amy running from reality in regards to the Melody situation, then I am actually reminded of Fred from Angel. Fred was sucked into a Helldimension where humans were kept as cattle and survived by her wits for five years, before Team Angel happened to end up in the same place and rescued her. Now some months after retuning to Earth, and having slowly readjusted to normal life, Fred's parents turned up, looking for their daughter (Fred's parents are probably the NICEST parents in the whole of the Joss verse). And what did Fred do? Did she fall into their arms, saying how much she'd missed them? No - she ran. She grabbed her things and ran as far and as fast as she could. As she explained once they were reunited:
Trish: "Honey, don't you remember us?"
Fred: "I was - I was five years and so lost and, and at night I would... I was all by myself and you weren't there!"
Fred starts to cry.
Roger: "Fred, I don't understand."
Fred: "I got lost. I got lost, and they did terrible things to me, but, but it was just a storybook. It was just a story with monsters, not real. (keeps shaking her head) Not in the world but - but if you're here and you see me then - then it's real! And it did happen. If you see what they made of me... I - I didn't mean to get so lost!"
The Amy who keeps travelling with the Doctor can pretend that in some ways everything that happened to her was just a story. It feels like a story, sounds like a story. And because it's a story with the Doctor in, and he's the hero, then it will have a happy ending, she just needs to wait. Because there is always a happy ending to fairy tales, isn't there?
Mirrors and Boxes.
Now, as for the Doctor and his role and the way he is mirrored in the minotaur. Well. donna_c_punk has a wonderful theory that the whole hotel is the Doctor's room, and it was set up to trap him. I'm not sure I am convinced, but the parallels between the minotaur and the Doctor are spelled out so clearly (hello anvils! I don't mind you, you help my children understand stuff) that all I can do is try to look beyond them.
This is where 'For now we see in a mirror dimly' comes into play. The number of mirrors (both real and metaphorical) on this show is getting almost ridiculous. Let's start with the boxes.
The minotaur was actually in a prison. And the thing is - the Doctor lives in a Police Box. Again, River in Stormcage is such a perfect parallel... all these Doctor mirrors in their prison boxes.
The difference with the minotaur is that it's lost itself and has become pure instinct, and we see this trait in the Doctor both when he's talking to Rita and in his last goodbye to Amy. He can't stop himself from running, from looking to the next thing, from talking about all the bright and shiny things out there. Matt once said that his Doctor was addicted to time travel, and this is beginning to ring true in a way I'd not foreseen - he needs thrills, feeds off them, very much like an addict. Much like he constantly asks people to trust him...
Now these are not bad qualities. The Doctor is brave and marvellous and amazing, but any one thing taken to extremes can turn into something much darker. What is the Doctor afraid of? We hear the cloister bell, but I don't think the death of the TARDIS is his greatest fear. My guess as to who is in his room is his own dark mirror - The Valeyard/The Timelord Victorious/The Dream Lord. Someone who demands/steals what should be freely given ('He never asks to be thanked'/'Isn't anyone going to thank me?'), someone who makes himself god, playing with people, taking all for himself.
Oh he really, really had to let Amy go... (And she him: 'But don't tell him I said that. The levels of smugness would be truly frightening.')
Anyway, that brings me to the general topic of 'monsters'. And - House apart, and 'he' was from outside the universe - no monster this season could be labelled as straightforward 'evil':
- The Silence. We now know that the Silence is actually a religious order, which makes their motives much more complex than 'evil aliens'. They're not nice by any stretch of the imagination, but they have agency beyond 'we kill things'. Also I'm guessing that 'The oldest question in the universe' will have something to do with the Doctor, so we have to wait and see.
- The Siren turned out to be a virtual doctor, trying to save people. Hello mirror.
- House (as I said) was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, yet even there we had a (dark) mirror for the Doctor: 'Fear me, I have killed hundreds of Timelords.'/'Fear me. I have killed them all.')
- The Gangers provided us with an actual, literal copy of the Doctor, and turned out to be as monstrous/brave as any human.
- Kovarian and her army were formed as a deliberate reaction against the Doctor's reputation and actions, and provided the Doctor with a mirror he could not deny ('This was exactly you...')
- Melody, created by Kovarian, was a perfect dark mirror, until she chose to become River, the mirror that runs through the whole series.
- The monsters George feared came from his fear of rejection, and were easily overcome, once his father accepted him for what he was. (Seeing each other clearly...)
- The handbots (robot doctors!) were only trying to help, and through that could have killed Amy. (So. Many. Mirrors.)
- Finally the minotaur, a parallel so big that the theme is truly spelled out for all to see.
So, in conclusion (because omg I do not have the time for this...), what the mirrors tell us is that the Doctor is good, but often misdirected, and because of that can be a danger to those around him. My immediate reaction to this episode was this. The Doctor, by misunderstanding the situation and by setting himself up as Hero in Charge (TM), nearly committed a terrible mistake. He did what he always does, what he can't help doing, and that is both wonderful and also dangerous. And it also set up Amy as the Doctor's mirror - taking his place, making the final decision. ('You could have killed everyone'/'You could have killed a starwhale'), something which was made literal in TGWW, right down to the sonic and 'I am going to tear time apart for you'... And it ends up destroying her. In The Beast Below we were also given Amy's image of the Doctor ('Very old and very kind...').
Mirrors, mirrors everywhere.
Now earlier on today I recced this vid, and it still says it perfectly - the lyrics are amazing:
Hardly a Hero
Exuberant and terrified
Every time I look into your eyes
But I can't entertain the thought
Cuz we both know I'm not the man you thought I was
And I'm hardly the hero
This is the only thing I know to do
To make it through
I'll leave you with this:
Oh and please no spoilers beyond this episode. Thank you.
The God Complex
Now, for those not terribly familiar with the Bible, here it is written out:
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
Hello there Growing-Up Theme, have we met? Why yes we have. A long time ago I think...
Let’s go back to the beginning. The Doctor was late for Amelia (twice), and
DOCTOR: So... coming?
AMY: No!
DOCTOR: You wanted to come 14 years ago.
AMY: I grew up.
DOCTOR: Don't worry. I'll soon fix that.
Season 5 was about the Doctor trying to fix the little girl he broke - give her back the magic of childhood, so she could grow up properly and be ready to take that final step into adulthood and get married. We saw that he was ready to leave Amy and Rory behind, sneaking away from the reception on his own - happy about the way everything had turned out for the best, and prepared to let his young friends explore married life on their own.
Except... except River. River who turned up and delayed him long enough for Amy and Rory to get to the TARDIS for a new round of running away. Now River was obviously keen to ensure her own future, and the Doctor was hardly going to kick Amy and Rory out. But - there are consequences for refusing to grow up. Let me borrow two quotes:
“...the Doctor has sort of hung around in her life for far too long. He never says it out loud, but he obviously has an MO. 'I'll get out before I screw up their chances of happiness. I'll run away, and let them grow up. I'll go and find somebody else to mess about with.' But he's accidentally ended up with a married couple in the TARDIS, because he ran alway with Amy on the night of her wedding, and now he's in the most dreadful pickle. "
Steven Moffat, DWM 433
You can run, run forever, never put away childish things. You can stay a child forever.
All it takes is sacrifice. Your firstborn. That will do.
janie_aire
This episode was all about growing up and putting aside childish things. About seeing things for what they really are. About examining faith and whether it is true or misplaced.
The Doctor never really stopped seeing Amy as that little 7 year old girl (which was undoubtedly one reason he would never ever go there with her), and the hard work to restore her faith in him worked too well - her belief is that of a child's, who believes completely and without question. I think we can probably blame this faith/attitude for the lack of talk about Melody since LKH. a) Amy - still - believed that the Doctor would somehow fix the situation, and because of this b) She was running away. And oh my, has the Doctor been her enabler on that front...
AMY: You know what I said about getting back for tomorrow morning... Have you ever run away from something because you were scared, or not ready, or just... Just because you could?
DOCTOR: Once...a long time ago.
AMY: What happened?
DOCTOR: Hello!
They're both running from the truth that the Doctor can't fix Amy's life. Older Amy in The Girl Who Waited learned it the hard way, with almost nothing except bitterness left. And Rory, always more aware of things, always the adult, was already berating the Doctor in Vampires of Venice.
So faith... Good or bad? Well, let's look at Gibbis first. He was the only survivor, and people have wondered at this. But once I thought about it in a little more detail it was obvious - Gibbis, essentially, will believe in anything. He'll trow himself behind whatever presents the best hope of personal survival, so the minotaur could never get a foothold as Gibbis' faith kept shifting. Everyone else believed in something specific.
ETA: Forgot to mention! Gibbis is basically the anti-Doctor, cowardly where the Doctor is brave, ready to follow where the Doctor takes charge. The Doctor saves even the fish - Gibbis eats them. In an episode so critical of the Doctor, Gibbis is very important in showing us the flip side.
Which brings me to Rita. Oh Rita. Brilliant, wonderful Rita. Now she was clever and the Doctor was attracted to her like a moth to a flame, but she did something even more brilliant - she in no time at all pinpointed the Doctor's god complex, and I absolutely attribute this to her faith. Because the thing about real faith is that it's not blind or unquestioning. If you want to base your life on something, any intelligent person wants to make sure that's it's a solid foundation and not just pretty words. Which is why she questions the Doctor - as far as she can tell, he's just a man. Why is he setting himself up as saviour? (There is a difference between making yourself leader - which Rita has obviously done in her little group, since she's by far the most capable - and telling everyone that you are going to save them.)
(We have had Rory criticising the Doctor for a long while, because he is a very realistic person. To have a someone else make the same kind of critisism, but coming from a completely different worldview, is too delightful for words. So very often faith is portrayed as something irrational, which seriously annoys me. So thank you Mr Whithouse. I was not expecting this.)
Rita, although flattered and intrigued, rejects the Doctor, seeing him clearly for what he is. Rita is an adult, not ready to be drawn in by fairy tales when her life hangs in the balance.
Unlike Amy...
The Doctor's actions are long overdue, and deeply necessary. And not just for Amy's sake. 'What do Time Lords pray to?' asks Amy.
DOCTOR: Oh! Oh, Amelia Pond before I got it all wrong. My sweet little Amelia.
INTERFACE: I am not Amelia Pond. I am a voice interface.
DOCTOR: Hey, let's run away and have adventures. Come along, Pond.
[...]
DOCTOR: I'm going out in the first round. Ringing any bells? (cries in pain and falls face-down on the floor) OK, need something for the pain now. Come on, Amelia. It's me. Please.
INTERFACE: I am not Amelia Pond. I am a voice interface.
DOCTOR: Amelia, listen to me... I can be brave for you but you have got to tell me how.
The Doctor needs her faith, as much as she needs her belief in him. It's the most delightful co-dependency. The Doctor wants his sweet little Amelia, that he can run away with forever. Amy wants her Raggedy Doctor, who will fix her life. And in destroying Amy's faith in him, the Doctor is simultaneously allowing himself to see her as she really is - not his glorious Pond, but Amy Williams, a young married woman (the 'Williams' isn't about saying that women should take their husband's name - it's just a shorthand to differentiate). Which again is what leads to the minotaur's death. Both Amy and the Doctor found their rooms, so to destroy the minotaur they both needed their faith broken. (Rory didn't have a room and I don't think the Angels were it for Gibbis.)
Anyway, the Doctor then does the mature thing. He doesn't try to rebuild her faith, he lets her go.
To call back to The Girl Who Waited:
AMY: Why now?
DOCTOR: Because you're still breathing.
[...]
And what's the alternative? Me standing over your grave? Over your broken body? Over Rory's body?
In TGWW the focus was quite rightly on Rory and Amy... yet the Doctor was the one to close the door on older Amy, the one who lied through his teeth to save one because he couldn’t have both. We see the effects here.
It’s the mature thing to do, and I love that he does it, and that it show adulthood as an inevitable part of life, not something terrible. Amy is sad to leave her childhood behind, but clinging onto it for too long came with a heavy price (see janie_aire's quote above). And growing up is good - you get to have new little people, who need parents, adults, to help and guide. Refusing to accept how life goes - clinging onto childhood, or life, for too long - is never good.
Another thing I love is how the Doctor has clearly learned from the past, and is able to do the right thing, no matter how painful. Because he knows that the alternative is worse. Rose and Donna's 'forever' always bothered me (as did the Doctor's acceptance of those words - even if he was lying), and considering the way that he lost them, it is no wonder that he lets Amy go, forcing her to see the truth.
Stepping sideways for a minute, then it's interesting to look at River. River believes in the Doctor 100% (and she knows he needs that belief), but she has extremely realistic expectations of him):
OCTAVIAN: Dr Song, I've lost good Clerics today. You trust this man?
RIVER: I absolutely trust him.
OCTAVIAN: He's not some kind of madman then?
RIVER: I absolutely trust him.
RIVER: Father Octavian, when the Doctor is in the room, your only mission is to keep him alive long enough to get everyone else home. And trust me. It's not easy.
Now going back to Amy running from reality in regards to the Melody situation, then I am actually reminded of Fred from Angel. Fred was sucked into a Helldimension where humans were kept as cattle and survived by her wits for five years, before Team Angel happened to end up in the same place and rescued her. Now some months after retuning to Earth, and having slowly readjusted to normal life, Fred's parents turned up, looking for their daughter (Fred's parents are probably the NICEST parents in the whole of the Joss verse). And what did Fred do? Did she fall into their arms, saying how much she'd missed them? No - she ran. She grabbed her things and ran as far and as fast as she could. As she explained once they were reunited:
Trish: "Honey, don't you remember us?"
Fred: "I was - I was five years and so lost and, and at night I would... I was all by myself and you weren't there!"
Fred starts to cry.
Roger: "Fred, I don't understand."
Fred: "I got lost. I got lost, and they did terrible things to me, but, but it was just a storybook. It was just a story with monsters, not real. (keeps shaking her head) Not in the world but - but if you're here and you see me then - then it's real! And it did happen. If you see what they made of me... I - I didn't mean to get so lost!"
The Amy who keeps travelling with the Doctor can pretend that in some ways everything that happened to her was just a story. It feels like a story, sounds like a story. And because it's a story with the Doctor in, and he's the hero, then it will have a happy ending, she just needs to wait. Because there is always a happy ending to fairy tales, isn't there?
Mirrors and Boxes.
Now, as for the Doctor and his role and the way he is mirrored in the minotaur. Well. donna_c_punk has a wonderful theory that the whole hotel is the Doctor's room, and it was set up to trap him. I'm not sure I am convinced, but the parallels between the minotaur and the Doctor are spelled out so clearly (hello anvils! I don't mind you, you help my children understand stuff) that all I can do is try to look beyond them.
This is where 'For now we see in a mirror dimly' comes into play. The number of mirrors (both real and metaphorical) on this show is getting almost ridiculous. Let's start with the boxes.
The minotaur was actually in a prison. And the thing is - the Doctor lives in a Police Box. Again, River in Stormcage is such a perfect parallel... all these Doctor mirrors in their prison boxes.
The difference with the minotaur is that it's lost itself and has become pure instinct, and we see this trait in the Doctor both when he's talking to Rita and in his last goodbye to Amy. He can't stop himself from running, from looking to the next thing, from talking about all the bright and shiny things out there. Matt once said that his Doctor was addicted to time travel, and this is beginning to ring true in a way I'd not foreseen - he needs thrills, feeds off them, very much like an addict. Much like he constantly asks people to trust him...
Now these are not bad qualities. The Doctor is brave and marvellous and amazing, but any one thing taken to extremes can turn into something much darker. What is the Doctor afraid of? We hear the cloister bell, but I don't think the death of the TARDIS is his greatest fear. My guess as to who is in his room is his own dark mirror - The Valeyard/The Timelord Victorious/The Dream Lord. Someone who demands/steals what should be freely given ('He never asks to be thanked'/'Isn't anyone going to thank me?'), someone who makes himself god, playing with people, taking all for himself.
Oh he really, really had to let Amy go... (And she him: 'But don't tell him I said that. The levels of smugness would be truly frightening.')
Anyway, that brings me to the general topic of 'monsters'. And - House apart, and 'he' was from outside the universe - no monster this season could be labelled as straightforward 'evil':
- The Silence. We now know that the Silence is actually a religious order, which makes their motives much more complex than 'evil aliens'. They're not nice by any stretch of the imagination, but they have agency beyond 'we kill things'. Also I'm guessing that 'The oldest question in the universe' will have something to do with the Doctor, so we have to wait and see.
- The Siren turned out to be a virtual doctor, trying to save people. Hello mirror.
- House (as I said) was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, yet even there we had a (dark) mirror for the Doctor: 'Fear me, I have killed hundreds of Timelords.'/'Fear me. I have killed them all.')
- The Gangers provided us with an actual, literal copy of the Doctor, and turned out to be as monstrous/brave as any human.
- Kovarian and her army were formed as a deliberate reaction against the Doctor's reputation and actions, and provided the Doctor with a mirror he could not deny ('This was exactly you...')
- Melody, created by Kovarian, was a perfect dark mirror, until she chose to become River, the mirror that runs through the whole series.
- The monsters George feared came from his fear of rejection, and were easily overcome, once his father accepted him for what he was. (Seeing each other clearly...)
- The handbots (robot doctors!) were only trying to help, and through that could have killed Amy. (So. Many. Mirrors.)
- Finally the minotaur, a parallel so big that the theme is truly spelled out for all to see.
So, in conclusion (because omg I do not have the time for this...), what the mirrors tell us is that the Doctor is good, but often misdirected, and because of that can be a danger to those around him. My immediate reaction to this episode was this. The Doctor, by misunderstanding the situation and by setting himself up as Hero in Charge (TM), nearly committed a terrible mistake. He did what he always does, what he can't help doing, and that is both wonderful and also dangerous. And it also set up Amy as the Doctor's mirror - taking his place, making the final decision. ('You could have killed everyone'/'You could have killed a starwhale'), something which was made literal in TGWW, right down to the sonic and 'I am going to tear time apart for you'... And it ends up destroying her. In The Beast Below we were also given Amy's image of the Doctor ('Very old and very kind...').
Mirrors, mirrors everywhere.
Now earlier on today I recced this vid, and it still says it perfectly - the lyrics are amazing:
Hardly a Hero
Exuberant and terrified
Every time I look into your eyes
But I can't entertain the thought
Cuz we both know I'm not the man you thought I was
And I'm hardly the hero
This is the only thing I know to do
To make it through
I'll leave you with this: