Meta: The Time of the Doctor
Welcome to the Meta Café!
However, this is not comprehensive meta, as I only scratch the surface of a few of the main themes, so there will be more later. (One about all the stuff that wouldn’t fit in here, one about Moffat’s story telling and one about Clara. Possibly more.) Hopefully the others will be more coherent, although I’ve tried my best to make it flow. Beware though, at the end I can do nothing more than just stand back and love my Doctor.
Because this is the story of The Man Who Stayed for Christmas.
Trenzalore
As the days passed, and the years, the Doctor stayed true to his word. On the fields of Trenzalore, he stood as protector, both of his own people, and his new home.
Tasha Lem
The man who balked at the dullness of Leadworth, the man who got bored after watching Vincent paint for a day... Found a home in a place that made Leadworth look like Grand Central Station. And stopped running...
He appointed himself Sheriff, just like the gunslinger in A Town Called Mercy, and spent his days fixing toys and fighting monsters... With the light from his own people brightening his life, and the life of his adopted home unfolding all around him.
THE DOCTOR:
Time travel is... damage. It's like a tear in the fabric of reality. That is the scar tissue of my journey through the universe. My path through time and space, from Gallifrey to Trenzalore.
What he didn’t guess then was that he would be travelling from one home to another - and that Trenzalore would be the place where he would find his people calling.
(When Handles tells him that the planet below is Gallifrey, he denies it vehemently, ending with the words: "That is not my home!" But oh, it is...)
I shall get back to the crack further down, for now I want to look at why is the town called Christmas? Yes it’s a lovely idea, and plays on the whole Christmas Special thing, but there are more layers to it...
This story, basically, has the same structure as The Girl in the Fireplace, except with a few roles reversed - specifically the Doctor has Reinette’s role, living along the slow path, whereas Clara is the one to ‘step from one chapter to the next without increase of age’:
REINETTE
There is a vessel in your world... where the days of my life are pressed together like the chapters of a book so that he may step from one to the other without increase of age... while I, weary traveller... must always take the slower path?
And staying means ageing. The Doctor ages at a different rate to the humans around him, but he still ages and grows old.
So thinking, his untrimmed hair fell down about his shoulders, the stone slab at the side of the antelope skin was dented into a little hole by the foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the place between the tree-trunks, where the begging-bowl rested day after day, sunk and wore into a hollow almost as smooth as the brown shell itself; and each beast knew his exact place at the fire. There were few changes in the village. The priest was older, and many of the little children who used to come with the begging-dish sent their own children now; and when you asked of the villagers how long their holy man had lived in Kali’s Shrine at the head of the pass, they answered, “Always.”
From ‘The Miracle of Purun Bhagat’ by Rudyard Kipling
Speaking of the slower path and TGiF, then the Doctor abandons Clara just the way he abandons Rose - and quite simply because other people need him more.
And although he is initially trapped (since the TARDIS takes 300 years to come back because it’s trying to protect Clara at the same time), the second time he could leave whenever he wants - and yet he stays.
Because they are his people and his town. And they need him... It is also, of course, a callback to The Day of the Doctor, and the references to The Beast Below that the episode brought:
If you were that old, and that kind, and the very last of your kind... you chouldn’t just stand there and watch children cry.
And indeed, is there a lovelier image of the Doctor in Trenzalore than the starwhale carrying a whole people on its back?
And we even have the Doctor living ‘below’ - he lives under the church. And - for centuries - he carries the people of Trenzalore. If he leaves, the place disintegrates, and falls. Of course he goes back/stays.
~~~
I said, in my initial reaction, that Moffat went baroque again. The last time that happened to such a degree was The Wedding of River Song, and indeed, the mirrors pile up to a ridiculous degree:
CHURCHILL:
What time do you have, doctor?
MALOKEH:
Two minutes past five, Caesar.
CHURCHILL:
It's always two minutes past five. Day or night, it's always two minutes past five in the afternoon. Why is that?
MALOKEH:
Because that is the time, Caesar.
CHURCHILL:
And the date. Always the 22nd of April. Does it not bother you?
MALOKEH:
The date and the time have always been the same, Caesar. Why should it start bothering me now?
In TWoRS the time of day/date never changed. Here, it is always Christmas - always snowy and with twinkling lights. In TGiF they wonder why the spaceship chose Reinette, not realising that the vessel was called ‘Madame de Pompadour’. There is a similar thing going on here: for Clara it is a single Christmas Day - for the Doctor it is centuries, yet he, too, is living ‘in Christmas’, throughout.
And there is another dimension here, a very gentle breaking of the fourth wall - for us, it is also a single Christmas Day. An hour, as a matter of fact. We are Clara, dipping in and out of the Doctor’s life on Trenzalore, having a story told to us... One that speeds up as time goes on, as centuries pass while we step from one page to another with ease.
But let me go back to the mirrors. The Doctor to a great degree does what River did in TWoRS - he forces time to stop, creating an endless stand-off.
But it’s not just TWoRS - Clara is kept safe and ‘frozen’ by the TARDIS, static and unchanging, much like Abigail in A Christmas Carol, whilst the Doctor ages, like Kazran. (Clara has, in many ways, taken River’s role - I’ll try to get back to that.)
This is also something specific to Clara - she who has lived countless lives, always saving the Doctor. He keeps changing, she stays the same. Leaping into his time stream, she encompasses all of him - from Gallifrey to Trenzalore.
Tasha Lem and her Church
“Tasha Lem is an old friend of the Doctor's. She has worked her way up through her organisation, the Papal Mainframe. We haven't met her before, but we have met her troops. She's like the head of the galactic UN - but much more warlike.
I always meant to ask Steven Moffat if he was referencing Stanislaw Lem, who wrote Solaris. I wondered if it was a nod to this father of sci-fi.”
Orla Brady, the actor who plays Tasha
Names are always important when it comes to Moffat’s characters. Let’s have a look at Tasha Lem. Because there’s more than sci-fi authors here (with thanks to owlsie for the 'Lem' part):
Tasha
The name Tasha is a Russian baby [boy] name. Tasha is an Abbreviation of Natasha - the Russian form of the English Natalie 'Born at Christmas/born on Christmas Day’.
Lem
In Scots ‘Lem’ means 'a disciple of St John’ and in Hebrew it means ‘Belonging/devoted to God’ - both of which of course tie in with Tasha’s ‘nun’ status very nicely.
Now, I like the idea of ‘Space UN’. Despite a few cheap (but funny) digs at religion, Moffat has by now evolved the Church of the Papal Mainframe into a good and solid player, and part of the ‘verse. It is, essentially, the organisation that has stepped into the void left by the Time Lords. They keep the peace, protecting people and planets.
Indeed, towards the end of the Trenzalore Siege, the Church of the Silence is the only thing in the path of the Daleks - again underscoring their position.
(There is, of course, the Shadow Proclamation, but I think Moffat likes the moral complexities of the Church of the Mainframe better. And the Shadow Proclamation was never very... involved in anything. Maybe a lot of bureaucracy, and not a lot of activity? The Church goes out there and gets its hands dirty. Probably because it believes it has a moral obligation/right.)
But going back to the beginning, then Tasha Lem and the Doctor are old friends (so old, that she has not seen his eleventh incarnation before), and they are on very flirty and intimate terms. However, I’d say there are trust issues (she takes his TARDIS key), and Orla Brady has described her character as somewhat scorpion-like, and likely to strike at any point. Which the Doctor likes...
However, when the Doctor discovers the origin of the message (and what it means), Tasha Lem is swift to act. Seeing clearly that letting the Time Lords return would result unmitigated mayhem for the universe, and start the Time War again, she does not hesitate to let the Doctor know that should he act, she will destroy him and Trenzalore - and dedicates her church to Silence Falling.
And thus, we have a delicate balance of mutually assured destruction, as laid out so carefully in ‘Cold War’.
~~~
RIVER:
How do you know who I am?
KOVARIAN:
I *made* you what you are.
Closing Time S6.12
Now, a lot of people have remarked upon the fact that Tasha Lem seems River-like. I shall start by quoting lyricwrites:
‘Kovarian is essentially River's abusive adopted mother. [note: In fairy tale terms, Evil Stepmother] No, as Amy says, she didn't get all her characteristics from Kovarian-but Kovarian was a formative influence.
Kovarian is probably a very close protégé of Tasha Lem, possibly the closest to a daughter that she has. After all, she must have been pretty close to the top in order to commandeer that much of the Church; it makes sense that she'd be Lem's hand-picked successor. It also makes the whole thing more personal, sort of a Shakespearean tragedy that we never get to see.
Thus, Tasha Lem is sort of like River's grandmother. It's a familial resemblance, just emotional rather than genetic.
Which means that (a) the Doctor's relationship to in-laws is getting weirder by the minute, and (b) quite a bit of the episode was filled up with various grandmothers checking out the naked goodies and thinking, "Aw, yeah, Santa's being very good to me!"
Mostly though, then we can trace River’s earliest influences back to the teachings and codes of Tasha Lem’s church. She was brought up by Bossy Psycho Space Nuns, and it shows.
Now follow me through the story of the Silence...
Tasha Lem sets up the initial siege, and dedicates the Church to the Doctor’s Silence. Kovarian 'rebels' - splits from the main church and tries to change the past to stop the whole situation in the first place:
KOVARIAN:
Do you understand yet? Oh, don't worry, I'm a long way away. But I like to keep tabs on you. The child then... What do you think?
DOCTOR:
What is she?
KOVARIAN:
Hope. Hope in this endless, bitter war.
DOCTOR:
What war? Against who?
KOVARIAN:
Against you, Doctor.
Tasha Lem is the Doctor’s friend, but to Kovarian he’s probably only ever been an enemy, and this is the mindset she instils in River. But River - when meeting the Doctor herself and making up her own mind - in her turn rebels against Kovarian, refusing to play her part, and (because she is a Pond, something Kovarian failed to take into account) becomes the Doctor’s protector, keeping him safe and alive until he reaches Trenzalore...
Which brings us back to Tasha Lem and the stalemate. Which is rather beautiful. The Women of the Silence... and Ouroboros.
Also, it is quite obvious why River can’t be present in this particular story. (Apart from the fact that she is dead.) a) This is what she was born to prevent and b) She’s no Tasha Lem. Please compare and contrast:
DOCTOR: River, you and I, we know what this means. We are ground zero of an explosion that will engulf all reality. Billions on billions will suffer and die.
RIVER: I'll suffer if I have to kill you.
DOCTOR: More than every living thing in the universe?!
RIVER: Yes.
Vs.
TASHA LEM: None of this was for you, you fatuous egotist. It was for the peace!
Not that River didn’t mature as she grew - as we see in her wonderful dressing down in AGMGTW - but at heart she’s a very particular kind of psychopath:
Also, you have to remember, she’s a specifically engineered psychopath and it never really goes away - she loves her mum and dad, and her fella, but the rest of the universe can go hang. She falls in with the Doctor’s moral code because she loves him, not because she especially feels it - bad girl, turned good (kind of).
Moffat
Tasha Lem is the head of a church/peace keeping organisation. Her objectives are to keep the peace, to sacrifice the few for the sake of the many if it comes to it.
Now, I shall ask you to imagine River being present at the end of ‘The Time of the Doctor’. The Doctor is literally walking to his death, old, frail and helpless, calmly expecting the Daleks to finally do him in - and River WOULDN’T personally kill every single one of them? Seriously? River is a Pond with a Time head, and she rejected the church and her teachings a long, long time ago. Her only objective is to Keep the Doctor Safe. The universe be damned.
~~~
”Flying the TARDIS was always easy”
Tasha Lem
Please consider the following list of what the Church of the Silence have done with Time Lord technology:
- Part-created River Song. Which included a) knowing that exposure to the Time Vortex would enable Time Lord abilities, b) how to utilise and expand upon that so as to create an actual human Time Lord, and c) how to keep a direct line to the TARDIS at all times in order to keep flesh!Amy ‘online’.
- Exploded the TARDIS, including flying it remotely.
- Built a proto-TARDIS (seen in The Impossible Astronaut and The Lodger).
So far, the only explanation for all this that we have had is Eleven’s ‘Yes, they’re very clever’ from AGMGTW, and - unless we in the future discover that someone like Omega is behind everything - this is all the work of Kovarian/Tasha Lem’s church. So yes - if she kept on top of what Kovarian had been up to (which she quite clearly did ) flying the TARDIS would be easy for her.
Sidebar: She also confesses ‘It was flying the Doctor I never quite mastered’- something River of course did naturally and utterly effortlessly, right from day one. But then, she was bespoke. ;)
Someone should write something about The Women of the Silence - writing and re-writing the Doctor’s story, everything turning around this one place. And Silence Falling.
Cracks
(The Beginning is the end is the beginning)
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
T.S. Eliot (Little Gidding)
The way Eleven’s story loops around back to the beginning makes me happier than I can begin to explain... Instead I’ve put some images together.
Prisoner Zero taunts the Doctor, because he doesn’t know where the cracks came from... Yet the truth is so much more than an exploding TARDIS. Because as Prisoner Zero showed us - there is something on the other side of that crack...
SIGNORA CALVIERRI:
There were cracks. Some were tiny... some were as big as the sky. Through some we saw worlds and people and through others we saw silence... and the end of all things.
Most importantly... At the other side is Gallifrey.
Memories are more powerful than you think, and Amy Pond is not an ordinary girl. Grew up with a time crack in her wall. The universe pouring through her dreams every night.
The crack in Amy’s wall - it was Gallifrey calling. Is it any wonder she become the mother of a Time Lord?
But the crack is dangerous, a gateway between worlds. It stole people, erasing them. And the original TARDIS explosion was destroying the whole universe. Yet here the danger is of a different kind - what could come through is what causes the war.
Story-wise, the crack is a thread, weaving together the whole of Eleven’s era, from first to last:
I’ve quoted T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ above (it was owlsie who first brought it up, and promethia_tenk expanded upon it - see image below), and will do so again, because the poem beautifully encapsulates this episode
Here is the whole section:
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
Especially the last lines... ‘The intersection of the timeless moment’ - if there is a more poetic description of the crack, and its place within Eleven’s story, possible, I do now know what it could be.
Amy’s crack, deeply tied into her life. And although the Doctor reboots the universe, it’s Clara who closes it. Clara, the Impossible Girl, who Answers The Question.
Of course, she did this already in The Day of the Doctor:
Eleven: And what am I?
Clara: Have you really forgotten?
Eleven: Yes. Maybe yes.
Clara: We’ve got enough warriors. And any old idiot can be a hero.
Eleven: Then what do I do?
Clara: What you’ve always done. Be a Doctor!
His name is unimportant. Who he is (“What was the promise?”) is what matters.
And again, this can be traced straight back to AGMGTW (The Day Everything Changed, the episode at the centre, the heart of Eleven’s run).
Because what that whole episode turns around is the question: ‘What does the name ‘Doctor’ mean’?
And now we have the answer. (An answer we knew already, of course... ♥)
~~~
"When you run with The Doctor, it feels like it will never end. But however hard you try, you can't run for ever. Everybody knows that everybody dies, and nobody knows it like The Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark, if he ever, for one moment, accepts it."
River Song
And so we get what the beginning of S6 promised us - the Doctor’s death. Or rather - the Doctor walking to his death, accepting it.
He’s old, and he’s tired, but he is also quietly brave, going to meet his inevitable fate with perfect calm, and even a little black humour.
The trouble with Daleks is, it takes them so long to say anything, I’ll probably die of boredom before they shoot me...
And there is something too wonderful for words about this very, very old and rather grumpy Eleven, looking so very reminiscent of One, waving his walking stick at the Daleks as he expresses his displeasure.
But it is the end, and he will face it. Not running, nor regretting his choices. He has been a guardian, saving people to the last (‘Every life I save is a victory. Every single one’), and that is who he is:
DOCTOR:
No, Stay here.
CLARA:
Why?
DOCTOR:
I’ll be keeping you safe. One last victory. Allow me that. Give me that. My Impossible Girl. Thank you. And good bye.
No, this time it is not the Doctor refusing to accept death and finding a way out - it is Clara, who continually mirrors River; River who refused to accept the choice given to her. Clara became River’s mouthpiece in The Name of the Doctor, and she carries River’s mantle magnificently here.
However, she does not argue with the Doctor himself, like River did in TWoRS - yet her arguments are very, very similar as she pleads with the Time Lords. Allow me to illustrate (Clara’s words bolded, River’s words from TWoRS in brackets):
promethia_tenk once said that ‘83% off all Moffat plots are resolved by characters claiming each other as family’.
When it comes to Doctor Who, I think the figure is probably more like 100%.
Because what else was the resolution to this episode, than Gallifrey acknowledging the Doctor as theirs?
DOCTOR:
We saw the future, Clara. This is how it ends.
CLARA:
Change it! Like Tasha said, change the future!
DOCTOR:
I could have, once. When there were Time Lords. Not any more.
Oh but they’re there. Right on the other side of a crack in the universe... A crack in a little girl’s bedroom, that drew him close the moment he’d regenerated.
We’re all Stories in the End
There's a man called the Doctor. He lives on a cloud in the sky, and all he does, all day every day, is to stop all the children in the world ever having bad dreams.
Governess Clara
One thing that is underlined very carefully in Time of the Doctor, is the fact that the Doctor is a story. Right from the start we had Amelia’s drawings and stories, and here this is multiplied - we see how the people of Christmas make little plays about his adventures, see his joy at the children he is surrounded by. His room under the church is covered in drawings, generations of children documenting his life, as a story. (Just like in the real world...) Even the TARDIS - the TARDIS full of ghosts of the past, that only he could see - was covered in drawings. Because that's who he was.
But all stories must come to an end, and the Doctor know this... And he knows what the important part is. After all, his wife made sure he knew (with thanks to owlsie for spotting the echo):
So he says ‘goodbye’ to everything that made him him - the fish fingers and custard, the bow tie... And, as always, the music spoke volumes:
The show is woven through with poetry, and this episode was no exception, words and images beautifully complimenting each other:
But at the end, we all felt like Clara’s grandmother. If only we could pause time...
This was an episode of goodbyes, and even Eleven's story had to end...
Everything has to end some time, otherwise nothing would ever get started.
A Christmas Carol
And the Eleventh Doctor went to his rest, with a little help from his family - the same way he had helped River... (same place, different time)
And finally, this says it all. Goodbye my Eleven. I will not forget one line of this, not one day, I swear.
However, this is not comprehensive meta, as I only scratch the surface of a few of the main themes, so there will be more later. (One about all the stuff that wouldn’t fit in here, one about Moffat’s story telling and one about Clara. Possibly more.) Hopefully the others will be more coherent, although I’ve tried my best to make it flow. Beware though, at the end I can do nothing more than just stand back and love my Doctor.
Because this is the story of The Man Who Stayed for Christmas.
Trenzalore
As the days passed, and the years, the Doctor stayed true to his word. On the fields of Trenzalore, he stood as protector, both of his own people, and his new home.
Tasha Lem
The man who balked at the dullness of Leadworth, the man who got bored after watching Vincent paint for a day... Found a home in a place that made Leadworth look like Grand Central Station. And stopped running...
He appointed himself Sheriff, just like the gunslinger in A Town Called Mercy, and spent his days fixing toys and fighting monsters... With the light from his own people brightening his life, and the life of his adopted home unfolding all around him.
THE DOCTOR:
Time travel is... damage. It's like a tear in the fabric of reality. That is the scar tissue of my journey through the universe. My path through time and space, from Gallifrey to Trenzalore.
What he didn’t guess then was that he would be travelling from one home to another - and that Trenzalore would be the place where he would find his people calling.
(When Handles tells him that the planet below is Gallifrey, he denies it vehemently, ending with the words: "That is not my home!" But oh, it is...)
I shall get back to the crack further down, for now I want to look at why is the town called Christmas? Yes it’s a lovely idea, and plays on the whole Christmas Special thing, but there are more layers to it...
This story, basically, has the same structure as The Girl in the Fireplace, except with a few roles reversed - specifically the Doctor has Reinette’s role, living along the slow path, whereas Clara is the one to ‘step from one chapter to the next without increase of age’:
REINETTE
There is a vessel in your world... where the days of my life are pressed together like the chapters of a book so that he may step from one to the other without increase of age... while I, weary traveller... must always take the slower path?
And staying means ageing. The Doctor ages at a different rate to the humans around him, but he still ages and grows old.
So thinking, his untrimmed hair fell down about his shoulders, the stone slab at the side of the antelope skin was dented into a little hole by the foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the place between the tree-trunks, where the begging-bowl rested day after day, sunk and wore into a hollow almost as smooth as the brown shell itself; and each beast knew his exact place at the fire. There were few changes in the village. The priest was older, and many of the little children who used to come with the begging-dish sent their own children now; and when you asked of the villagers how long their holy man had lived in Kali’s Shrine at the head of the pass, they answered, “Always.”
From ‘The Miracle of Purun Bhagat’ by Rudyard Kipling
Speaking of the slower path and TGiF, then the Doctor abandons Clara just the way he abandons Rose - and quite simply because other people need him more.
And although he is initially trapped (since the TARDIS takes 300 years to come back because it’s trying to protect Clara at the same time), the second time he could leave whenever he wants - and yet he stays.
Because they are his people and his town. And they need him... It is also, of course, a callback to The Day of the Doctor, and the references to The Beast Below that the episode brought:
If you were that old, and that kind, and the very last of your kind... you chouldn’t just stand there and watch children cry.
And indeed, is there a lovelier image of the Doctor in Trenzalore than the starwhale carrying a whole people on its back?
And we even have the Doctor living ‘below’ - he lives under the church. And - for centuries - he carries the people of Trenzalore. If he leaves, the place disintegrates, and falls. Of course he goes back/stays.
~~~
I said, in my initial reaction, that Moffat went baroque again. The last time that happened to such a degree was The Wedding of River Song, and indeed, the mirrors pile up to a ridiculous degree:
CHURCHILL:
What time do you have, doctor?
MALOKEH:
Two minutes past five, Caesar.
CHURCHILL:
It's always two minutes past five. Day or night, it's always two minutes past five in the afternoon. Why is that?
MALOKEH:
Because that is the time, Caesar.
CHURCHILL:
And the date. Always the 22nd of April. Does it not bother you?
MALOKEH:
The date and the time have always been the same, Caesar. Why should it start bothering me now?
In TWoRS the time of day/date never changed. Here, it is always Christmas - always snowy and with twinkling lights. In TGiF they wonder why the spaceship chose Reinette, not realising that the vessel was called ‘Madame de Pompadour’. There is a similar thing going on here: for Clara it is a single Christmas Day - for the Doctor it is centuries, yet he, too, is living ‘in Christmas’, throughout.
And there is another dimension here, a very gentle breaking of the fourth wall - for us, it is also a single Christmas Day. An hour, as a matter of fact. We are Clara, dipping in and out of the Doctor’s life on Trenzalore, having a story told to us... One that speeds up as time goes on, as centuries pass while we step from one page to another with ease.
But let me go back to the mirrors. The Doctor to a great degree does what River did in TWoRS - he forces time to stop, creating an endless stand-off.
But it’s not just TWoRS - Clara is kept safe and ‘frozen’ by the TARDIS, static and unchanging, much like Abigail in A Christmas Carol, whilst the Doctor ages, like Kazran. (Clara has, in many ways, taken River’s role - I’ll try to get back to that.)
This is also something specific to Clara - she who has lived countless lives, always saving the Doctor. He keeps changing, she stays the same. Leaping into his time stream, she encompasses all of him - from Gallifrey to Trenzalore.
Tasha Lem and her Church
“Tasha Lem is an old friend of the Doctor's. She has worked her way up through her organisation, the Papal Mainframe. We haven't met her before, but we have met her troops. She's like the head of the galactic UN - but much more warlike.
I always meant to ask Steven Moffat if he was referencing Stanislaw Lem, who wrote Solaris. I wondered if it was a nod to this father of sci-fi.”
Orla Brady, the actor who plays Tasha
Names are always important when it comes to Moffat’s characters. Let’s have a look at Tasha Lem. Because there’s more than sci-fi authors here (with thanks to owlsie for the 'Lem' part):
Tasha
The name Tasha is a Russian baby [boy] name. Tasha is an Abbreviation of Natasha - the Russian form of the English Natalie 'Born at Christmas/born on Christmas Day’.
Lem
In Scots ‘Lem’ means 'a disciple of St John’ and in Hebrew it means ‘Belonging/devoted to God’ - both of which of course tie in with Tasha’s ‘nun’ status very nicely.
Now, I like the idea of ‘Space UN’. Despite a few cheap (but funny) digs at religion, Moffat has by now evolved the Church of the Papal Mainframe into a good and solid player, and part of the ‘verse. It is, essentially, the organisation that has stepped into the void left by the Time Lords. They keep the peace, protecting people and planets.
Indeed, towards the end of the Trenzalore Siege, the Church of the Silence is the only thing in the path of the Daleks - again underscoring their position.
(There is, of course, the Shadow Proclamation, but I think Moffat likes the moral complexities of the Church of the Mainframe better. And the Shadow Proclamation was never very... involved in anything. Maybe a lot of bureaucracy, and not a lot of activity? The Church goes out there and gets its hands dirty. Probably because it believes it has a moral obligation/right.)
But going back to the beginning, then Tasha Lem and the Doctor are old friends (so old, that she has not seen his eleventh incarnation before), and they are on very flirty and intimate terms. However, I’d say there are trust issues (she takes his TARDIS key), and Orla Brady has described her character as somewhat scorpion-like, and likely to strike at any point. Which the Doctor likes...
However, when the Doctor discovers the origin of the message (and what it means), Tasha Lem is swift to act. Seeing clearly that letting the Time Lords return would result unmitigated mayhem for the universe, and start the Time War again, she does not hesitate to let the Doctor know that should he act, she will destroy him and Trenzalore - and dedicates her church to Silence Falling.
And thus, we have a delicate balance of mutually assured destruction, as laid out so carefully in ‘Cold War’.
~~~
RIVER:
How do you know who I am?
KOVARIAN:
I *made* you what you are.
Closing Time S6.12
Now, a lot of people have remarked upon the fact that Tasha Lem seems River-like. I shall start by quoting lyricwrites:
‘Kovarian is essentially River's abusive adopted mother. [note: In fairy tale terms, Evil Stepmother] No, as Amy says, she didn't get all her characteristics from Kovarian-but Kovarian was a formative influence.
Kovarian is probably a very close protégé of Tasha Lem, possibly the closest to a daughter that she has. After all, she must have been pretty close to the top in order to commandeer that much of the Church; it makes sense that she'd be Lem's hand-picked successor. It also makes the whole thing more personal, sort of a Shakespearean tragedy that we never get to see.
Thus, Tasha Lem is sort of like River's grandmother. It's a familial resemblance, just emotional rather than genetic.
Which means that (a) the Doctor's relationship to in-laws is getting weirder by the minute, and (b) quite a bit of the episode was filled up with various grandmothers checking out the naked goodies and thinking, "Aw, yeah, Santa's being very good to me!"
Mostly though, then we can trace River’s earliest influences back to the teachings and codes of Tasha Lem’s church. She was brought up by Bossy Psycho Space Nuns, and it shows.
Now follow me through the story of the Silence...
Tasha Lem sets up the initial siege, and dedicates the Church to the Doctor’s Silence. Kovarian 'rebels' - splits from the main church and tries to change the past to stop the whole situation in the first place:
KOVARIAN:
Do you understand yet? Oh, don't worry, I'm a long way away. But I like to keep tabs on you. The child then... What do you think?
DOCTOR:
What is she?
KOVARIAN:
Hope. Hope in this endless, bitter war.
DOCTOR:
What war? Against who?
KOVARIAN:
Against you, Doctor.
Tasha Lem is the Doctor’s friend, but to Kovarian he’s probably only ever been an enemy, and this is the mindset she instils in River. But River - when meeting the Doctor herself and making up her own mind - in her turn rebels against Kovarian, refusing to play her part, and (because she is a Pond, something Kovarian failed to take into account) becomes the Doctor’s protector, keeping him safe and alive until he reaches Trenzalore...
Which brings us back to Tasha Lem and the stalemate. Which is rather beautiful. The Women of the Silence... and Ouroboros.
Also, it is quite obvious why River can’t be present in this particular story. (Apart from the fact that she is dead.) a) This is what she was born to prevent and b) She’s no Tasha Lem. Please compare and contrast:
DOCTOR: River, you and I, we know what this means. We are ground zero of an explosion that will engulf all reality. Billions on billions will suffer and die.
RIVER: I'll suffer if I have to kill you.
DOCTOR: More than every living thing in the universe?!
RIVER: Yes.
Vs.
TASHA LEM: None of this was for you, you fatuous egotist. It was for the peace!
Not that River didn’t mature as she grew - as we see in her wonderful dressing down in AGMGTW - but at heart she’s a very particular kind of psychopath:
Also, you have to remember, she’s a specifically engineered psychopath and it never really goes away - she loves her mum and dad, and her fella, but the rest of the universe can go hang. She falls in with the Doctor’s moral code because she loves him, not because she especially feels it - bad girl, turned good (kind of).
Moffat
Tasha Lem is the head of a church/peace keeping organisation. Her objectives are to keep the peace, to sacrifice the few for the sake of the many if it comes to it.
Now, I shall ask you to imagine River being present at the end of ‘The Time of the Doctor’. The Doctor is literally walking to his death, old, frail and helpless, calmly expecting the Daleks to finally do him in - and River WOULDN’T personally kill every single one of them? Seriously? River is a Pond with a Time head, and she rejected the church and her teachings a long, long time ago. Her only objective is to Keep the Doctor Safe. The universe be damned.
~~~
”Flying the TARDIS was always easy”
Tasha Lem
Please consider the following list of what the Church of the Silence have done with Time Lord technology:
- Part-created River Song. Which included a) knowing that exposure to the Time Vortex would enable Time Lord abilities, b) how to utilise and expand upon that so as to create an actual human Time Lord, and c) how to keep a direct line to the TARDIS at all times in order to keep flesh!Amy ‘online’.
- Exploded the TARDIS, including flying it remotely.
- Built a proto-TARDIS (seen in The Impossible Astronaut and The Lodger).
So far, the only explanation for all this that we have had is Eleven’s ‘Yes, they’re very clever’ from AGMGTW, and - unless we in the future discover that someone like Omega is behind everything - this is all the work of Kovarian/Tasha Lem’s church. So yes - if she kept on top of what Kovarian had been up to (which she quite clearly did ) flying the TARDIS would be easy for her.
Sidebar: She also confesses ‘It was flying the Doctor I never quite mastered’- something River of course did naturally and utterly effortlessly, right from day one. But then, she was bespoke. ;)
Someone should write something about The Women of the Silence - writing and re-writing the Doctor’s story, everything turning around this one place. And Silence Falling.
Cracks
(The Beginning is the end is the beginning)
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
T.S. Eliot (Little Gidding)
The way Eleven’s story loops around back to the beginning makes me happier than I can begin to explain... Instead I’ve put some images together.
Prisoner Zero taunts the Doctor, because he doesn’t know where the cracks came from... Yet the truth is so much more than an exploding TARDIS. Because as Prisoner Zero showed us - there is something on the other side of that crack...
SIGNORA CALVIERRI:
There were cracks. Some were tiny... some were as big as the sky. Through some we saw worlds and people and through others we saw silence... and the end of all things.
Most importantly... At the other side is Gallifrey.
Memories are more powerful than you think, and Amy Pond is not an ordinary girl. Grew up with a time crack in her wall. The universe pouring through her dreams every night.
The crack in Amy’s wall - it was Gallifrey calling. Is it any wonder she become the mother of a Time Lord?
But the crack is dangerous, a gateway between worlds. It stole people, erasing them. And the original TARDIS explosion was destroying the whole universe. Yet here the danger is of a different kind - what could come through is what causes the war.
Story-wise, the crack is a thread, weaving together the whole of Eleven’s era, from first to last:
I’ve quoted T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ above (it was owlsie who first brought it up, and promethia_tenk expanded upon it - see image below), and will do so again, because the poem beautifully encapsulates this episode
Here is the whole section:
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
Especially the last lines... ‘The intersection of the timeless moment’ - if there is a more poetic description of the crack, and its place within Eleven’s story, possible, I do now know what it could be.
Amy’s crack, deeply tied into her life. And although the Doctor reboots the universe, it’s Clara who closes it. Clara, the Impossible Girl, who Answers The Question.
Of course, she did this already in The Day of the Doctor:
Eleven: And what am I?
Clara: Have you really forgotten?
Eleven: Yes. Maybe yes.
Clara: We’ve got enough warriors. And any old idiot can be a hero.
Eleven: Then what do I do?
Clara: What you’ve always done. Be a Doctor!
His name is unimportant. Who he is (“What was the promise?”) is what matters.
And again, this can be traced straight back to AGMGTW (The Day Everything Changed, the episode at the centre, the heart of Eleven’s run).
Because what that whole episode turns around is the question: ‘What does the name ‘Doctor’ mean’?
And now we have the answer. (An answer we knew already, of course... ♥)
~~~
"When you run with The Doctor, it feels like it will never end. But however hard you try, you can't run for ever. Everybody knows that everybody dies, and nobody knows it like The Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark, if he ever, for one moment, accepts it."
River Song
And so we get what the beginning of S6 promised us - the Doctor’s death. Or rather - the Doctor walking to his death, accepting it.
He’s old, and he’s tired, but he is also quietly brave, going to meet his inevitable fate with perfect calm, and even a little black humour.
The trouble with Daleks is, it takes them so long to say anything, I’ll probably die of boredom before they shoot me...
And there is something too wonderful for words about this very, very old and rather grumpy Eleven, looking so very reminiscent of One, waving his walking stick at the Daleks as he expresses his displeasure.
But it is the end, and he will face it. Not running, nor regretting his choices. He has been a guardian, saving people to the last (‘Every life I save is a victory. Every single one’), and that is who he is:
DOCTOR:
No, Stay here.
CLARA:
Why?
DOCTOR:
I’ll be keeping you safe. One last victory. Allow me that. Give me that. My Impossible Girl. Thank you. And good bye.
No, this time it is not the Doctor refusing to accept death and finding a way out - it is Clara, who continually mirrors River; River who refused to accept the choice given to her. Clara became River’s mouthpiece in The Name of the Doctor, and she carries River’s mantle magnificently here.
However, she does not argue with the Doctor himself, like River did in TWoRS - yet her arguments are very, very similar as she pleads with the Time Lords. Allow me to illustrate (Clara’s words bolded, River’s words from TWoRS in brackets):
promethia_tenk once said that ‘83% off all Moffat plots are resolved by characters claiming each other as family’.
When it comes to Doctor Who, I think the figure is probably more like 100%.
Because what else was the resolution to this episode, than Gallifrey acknowledging the Doctor as theirs?
DOCTOR:
We saw the future, Clara. This is how it ends.
CLARA:
Change it! Like Tasha said, change the future!
DOCTOR:
I could have, once. When there were Time Lords. Not any more.
Oh but they’re there. Right on the other side of a crack in the universe... A crack in a little girl’s bedroom, that drew him close the moment he’d regenerated.
We’re all Stories in the End
There's a man called the Doctor. He lives on a cloud in the sky, and all he does, all day every day, is to stop all the children in the world ever having bad dreams.
Governess Clara
One thing that is underlined very carefully in Time of the Doctor, is the fact that the Doctor is a story. Right from the start we had Amelia’s drawings and stories, and here this is multiplied - we see how the people of Christmas make little plays about his adventures, see his joy at the children he is surrounded by. His room under the church is covered in drawings, generations of children documenting his life, as a story. (Just like in the real world...) Even the TARDIS - the TARDIS full of ghosts of the past, that only he could see - was covered in drawings. Because that's who he was.
But all stories must come to an end, and the Doctor know this... And he knows what the important part is. After all, his wife made sure he knew (with thanks to owlsie for spotting the echo):
So he says ‘goodbye’ to everything that made him him - the fish fingers and custard, the bow tie... And, as always, the music spoke volumes:
The show is woven through with poetry, and this episode was no exception, words and images beautifully complimenting each other:
But at the end, we all felt like Clara’s grandmother. If only we could pause time...
This was an episode of goodbyes, and even Eleven's story had to end...
Everything has to end some time, otherwise nothing would ever get started.
A Christmas Carol
And the Eleventh Doctor went to his rest, with a little help from his family - the same way he had helped River... (same place, different time)
And finally, this says it all. Goodbye my Eleven. I will not forget one line of this, not one day, I swear.