The Crash of the Byzantium - meta on The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone
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I'm currently doing a rewatch of series 5 as part of a viewing marathon, and I've recently watched The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone. I'd forgotten how much fun and how scary these eps are, but it's also nice to look back at how thematically, visually and mythologically rich they are. This started out as a short meta but then grew to epic proportions as I started to unravel themes and mythologies, so be warned!
Thanks to the people on the Through the Looking Glass viewing marathon on Gallifreybase for sharing ideas and particularly janie_aire. I've also recently read most of promethia_tenk's andelisi's meta, and I share a lot of similar thought and ideas about how to read Who, so apologies if there is inadvertant seepage from their ideas to mine.
There's a few key things I've been thinking about. Or overthinking about. They are delirium/disorder, polarity and unification, the Greek Goddess Hecate and the Underworld, light and dark, and shamanism and the three worlds idea (upper world, middle world, lower world.) The thing with these themes and ideas is that they all really overlap and intermingle and start to spread across each other, so I'm going to try and keep track by going through the eps roughly chronologically and trying not to repeat myself a lot.
River and the Doctor as God and Goddess
Firstly a few words on River and the Doctor. I really see River and the Doctor's relationship as about polarity and unification, and mythologically as the story of the divine principles of the God and the Goddess. This means they represent the primary archetypes of God and Goddess, but also can represent any God and Goddess from a specific pantheon. If we assign the God and Goddess some of their general mythological and archetypal attributes (and I am being very general here - this is not an exhaustive list and I'm not saying that River and the Doctor manifest these attributes exculsively - who in their right mind would call River passive?!), it goes a little bit like this:
God - Male, projective, active, elements of fire and air, rationality, logic, order
Goddess - Female, receptive, passive, elements of earth and water, irrationality , intuition, chaos
The Doctor and River do this dance of polarity, where they are two sides of the same thing (time lord), their poles mingle, become confused, reverse and then dance back again during their time from The Library onwards. This idea of River and the Doctor as God and Goddess and unifying polarites culminated in the latest series in the Hieros Gamos, the Sacred Marriage that we saw at the end of The Wedding. This is a symbolic re-encatment of the union of a god/goddess, or the male/female, projective/receptive principles.
It's all essentially about the unification of two poles in order to bring about balance. Now the thing about assigning these attributes is that really God and Goddess are two halves of the same whole - they are the same thing and it's only in the unifying of these opposite elements into one whole that we find balance. Imagery about polarity and unification can be seen over and over again in Moffat's Who. That said i'm supposed to be writing about this episode....
The Goddess of Delerium, Disorder and Death
I see River in this episode presented as the bringer of delerium and disorder. This idea isn't so explicit in the The Library episodes, although she does bring disorder to the Doctor by overturning his expectations, due to her prior knowledge of her future. But this idea of River being the bringer of Delerium, Disorder - and to that i'm also going to add Death - is something that's carried through from here to the series 5 finale, and then through the series 6 finale as well.
For starters the first scene that we see in TToA isn't actually real. It's an hallucination in the guard's mind, due to the influence of River's hallucinogenic lipstick. So as an audience our first entry into this episode is an hallucination created by River - she casts her influence over us at the first moment. In this first scene the camera pans from earth to sky (unification of opposites) and we are in a field with trees which unify the sky and the earth.
Then, we have River leaving her message on the homebox, which ultimately ends up in the interestingly named Delerium Archive that the Doctor and Amy visit. A museum archiving the message of the bringer of delerium.
River's costuming is worth looking at. While it most obviously screams "Sex!" , it's interesting that culturally we associate red and black with sex/sexiness. Red is the colour of blood, danger, temptation, while black is the colour of death, mourning. Red and black are the colours of the Dark Goddess- the Death Goddess, the Goddess of the Underworld, while red is the colour of the goddess as Lover, Temptress, Seductress. And River is the one who possesses the tool that can bring both death and delerium - her lipstick.
We have her at the conclusion of her scene in the spaceship, flying out into the black void of space and into the order of the Doctor's world.
The Tardis is the physical representation of ordered time - she is the Time Vortex given physical form, physical structure in a way which is touchable and (relatively!) controllable. She allows the Doctor some measure of control over time, allowing him to travel freely within it, and giving him an interface with the Time Vortex. She is the place where the Doctor's order exists.
So River, bringer of delerium, disorder and death flies into the Doctor's time-ordered world. And she straight away starts throwing him off balance. Literally at first, when as soon as she enters the Tardis he falls to the floor with her on top of him.
Next with it being revealed that not only is she is able to fly the Tardis, but she also flaunts knowledge that he doesn't have about how to fly her - the blue stablisers that he doesn't have a clue about.
She then upturns one of the conventions of the show that has been there since the beginning- the wheezing noise that the Tardis makes when she lands. Upturning not only the Doctor's but the audience's expectations of how the Tardis operates.
River It's not supposed to make that noise, you leave the brakes on.
Se flirts with him furiously in these opening scenes, she oozes sex and temptation, she has the upper hand over him. She is a mystery and she is unknowable, encapsulated by her signature "Spoilers!" . The essence of mysteries and of mystery religions is that they are not something that can be known intellectually, they have to be experienced
River It's a long story, Doctor. Can't be told, has to be lived
Normally we are used to seeing the Doctor confounding his companion's expectations, by leading them into his weird and wonderful world. But here River confounds his expectations. And this theme, is carried right on through to the conclusion of this series, where River's prescence alone in the Tardis leads to the explosion that causes the cracks. Ordered time in the form of the Tardis disintegrates, pure uncontrolled time energy begins to bleed through, disorder and chaos in the form of the crack threaten and this is due to River.
Then we see this again at the end of series 6. River breaks the measure of order in the Doctor's world - time - and creates a world full of chaos with no boundaries, no limitations, where time itself it breaking down. The Doctor is pulled into this world, and ultimately the force of River and the force of the Doctor have to be balanced, equalised, unified through the Sacred Marriage.
Hecate in the Underworld
There's a lot of riffing on mythology going on in this episode, it's mainly Greek although i also like to find some Norse references because that's my thing (plus we have had dialogue reference to Asgard, Norse world of the Gods in The Library) ;)
The Greek mythology going on in this episode is mainly around the myth of Persephone, River as the Goddess Hecate and the name "Byzantium".
Firstly, the ship is named after the ancient Greek city Byzantium, which has strong links in with Hecate/the dark goddess. The city of Byzantium was founded by King Byzas on the advice of the Oracle at Delphi. Delphi was an extremely ancient Greek site where an Oracle was located, supplicants would visit her to receive prophecies and advice. These prophecies were inspired by fumes rising from chemicals in cracks in the ground (the Underworld) below the temple where the Oracle was located. There we have the idea of Delerium inspired by the Underworld linked to the name of the ship. So River is also our Delerium inspired Oracle, leading the way across space to the Byzantium.
Secondly, Hecate the Goddess was particularly beloved of the Byzantines. Hecate is a Dark Goddess, a goddess of liminal places, and of the Underworld. She is one who is able to negotiate dark places and cross thresholds.
In the ancient Greek myth, Persephone the maiden is abducted by Hades into the Underworld and her mother Demeter roams the earth searching for her. In the oldest versions of the myth, the dark Goddess Hecate is sent to the Underworld to retrieve Persephone. She is a Goddess who knows the route through the Underworld, is able to negotiate the thresholds and the dangers, and who knows the route back out.
Here, River is essentially the dark goddess, Hecate, who journeys into the Underworld. She leads Amy and the Doctor into the Maze of the Dead, the catacombs under the cliff, a literal Underworld of the dead.
In this image River as Hecate holds the book of knowledge that allows them to negotiate the world of the dead. Amy can be seen as Persephone, the Doctor as Hades.
Just to backtrack a little it's interesting that once we are down to earth in the first episode, we start off on a beach, by the sea. Water is of course River's element as the Goddess and as per her name Pond/River, and they all prepare by the sea for their journey into the Maze of the Dead. With the riffing on Greek mythology it's interesting to think about the Eleusinian Mysteries. These were held by the cult of Persephone and Demeter every year in ancient Greece (and as i've said Hecate appears in the older versions of this myth).
Eleusinian initiates experienced mysteries associated with the story of Persephone's descent into the underworld and subsequent rescue (the details of exactly what these are isn't recorded). One of the initial stages before the initiates began to experience the mysteries was the cry of "initiates to the sea!", where they would then ritually purify themselves in the ocean. So it fits nicely that the preparation for entering the Maze of the Dead takes place on the shore.
For initiates experiencing the Mysteries for the first time, a sacrifice was also required before cleansing. River and the Doctor are both experienced in traversing the mythological Underworld and familiar with Death and Rebirth, but it's Amy's first time. Her preliminary initiation is her experience trapped in the room with the Angel, where she proves herself worth of negotiating the dangers of a journey into the Underworld by defeating the Angel. This ultimately leads to her sacrifice, which is her the loss of her gift of sight/perception.
Amy So what's a Maze of the Dead
River Oh it’s not as bad as it sounds, it’s just a labyrinth with dead people buried in the walls
Language and terminology is important in these episodes, as evidenced by the use of the book about the Angels, the Doctor's words about the Gallifreyan language, and the discussion about their meanings. River is the only person to refer to the maze as a labyrinth, and and a maze and a labyrinth are two completely different things. A maze has wrong turns, dead ends, it is deliberately confusing, you get lost in it and the path inwards and outwards is unclear, this is how the other characters see the catacombs.
However a labyrinth always has a clear path into the centre, then a clear path out again. The classic Greek design has a total of 7 circuits, and labyrinths often represent the journey into the self for self-knowledge (often to meet the monster/dark self within.)
So River/Hecate's term of reference for the maze is as something that can be clearly negotiated, again showing her as Hecate, guide to the Underworld.
Lastly, about the Byzantines again. The reason that Hecate was so honoured by them is because once when they were at war and under seige, an attack on them was thwarted by the appearance in the sky of a very bright celestial body. This was attributed to Hecate's intervention, and she was then honoured by them as Hecate the Light Bringer, and the symbol of a star and a crescent moon became associated with the city. In The Crash of the Byzantium there's a few instances of celestial bodies lighting things up:
The gravity ball, illuminating the dead and the star-like pattern of lights on the bottom of the ship
Then the exploding gravity ball which ultimately leads to their salvation, their release from the seige/attack by the Angels.
Reverse the Polarity of the Neutron Flow
Leading up to the end of the first episode are the trials endured in the underworld, and the literal ascent through the maze which is referenced in the dialogue as the six levels representing the ascent of the soul.
In keeping with the idea of reversing and unifying polarities, the moment which leads from one episode to the next shows the polarites being shifted. Up literally becomes down in the moment that The Time of Angels stops and Flesh and Stone starts, as the Doctor shoots at the Star-like underside of the ship and reverses their location. Except it isn't upside down, it's the right way up for them. Except it's not. Underworld to upperworld, top becomes bottom. More disordering, flipping and confusion about which end of the polarity is which.
The end of the first part also marks the place where characters and audience exit the Underworld and enter Middle Earth/ Midgard/this world.
The Three Worlds and Forests
I talked in a previous meta on The Library 2 parter about the shamanic notion of the three worlds. The idea that reality is composed of the underworld, this world, and the upperworld. The Upperworld is where the Gods and celestial bodies are located, the Underworld where the dead and the Dark God/desses are located. This world, the world of physical reality, lies in-between these two polarities and in many ways acts as a conduit of the energy of one to the other (this world is known as Midgard in Norse mythology - meaning the middle enclosure/world, the place inbetween).
We see this idea in The Library and in these episodes. In The Library we have Cal/Datacore down below, the Library as a forest of the dead in-between, and Doctor Moon and the sunlight above.
Here we've got the catacombs below, literally the world of the dead, then we've got the ship with the forest in the middle, then the trees reaching up to the starlight, the upperworld.
In both cases there are forests, trees, that represent this world and the balancing place between the two worlds. I also mentioned previously in my other meta that this links into Norse cosmology where reality is structured around Yggdrasil, the world tree.
There's also River and forests. We first meet her in a forest that isn't a forest. Here she is again - in a forest that isn't a forest. Her name that she takes for herself is translated through the language of the people of the Gamma Forest. A name that isn't her real name.
Amy's countdown to her sacrifice starts once everyone exits the Underworld and enter this Middle-enclosure.
As an intiate of the mysteries of both the Underworld and the world of the Doctor/River, Amy has undergone her journey through the world of the dead,but has brought Death back with her, inside her, shown by the image of the Angel inside her eye
A sacrifice must be freely given in order for Amy to survive leaving the Underworld . Amy has the gift of sight, intiated in her by the Doctor in the Eleventh hour, when he urges her to look from the corner of her eye at the perception filtered door, and at the end of the Beast Below, when we journey through Amy's eye into her mind, she sees the clear truth about the beast below. She also sees the way to defuse the oblivion bomb in Victory of the Daleks, and this theme of seeing carries on as the series does.
One by one, everyone deserts Amy, and as an initiate she has to find her courage and her own way through the woods without her gift. Moff also begins to draw on fairy tales again here, with Amy as the little girl lost in the forest, wearing a red-riding-hood.
A word on the Angels here because these are the fear and the danger that Amy faces. The Angels tap into one of the primal fears that Moff plays on - fear of the unseen. Visually (and thematically) there's loads of light to dark and back again going on in this episode. Again, this mirrors the visual and thematic light and dark in The Library where there was continual sunshine juxtaposed with shadow.
Here we have the dark catacombs, torches flashing about, the exploding light of the gravity globe, the light and dark in the tunnel as they make their way to the secondary flight deck, then the flashing of the lights in the forest as the Angels rip the trees apart. With the Angels It's all about what they do while you aren't looking at them, while you are being kept in the dark about their movements. They effectively take away the ability to see them in their "living" state, thus appearing ever only as visually "dead" to us due to them being Quantum Locked. Seeing is the only tool against the Angels, and Amy's ability to see is ripped away from her.
Ultimately Amy is saved by River (or Persephone by Hecate). In a reversal of the polarity we saw earlier in the episode, during the scenes on the primary flight deck leading up to Amy's rescue, The Doctor is the one who is chaotic, disordered, he loses control shouting at River and implementing a plan which almost fails. Meanwhile, River is calm, ordered and rational, providing a logical solution that saves Amy's life.
Cracks in the World
The vanquishing of the Weeping Angels is an interesting mirror to River's actions close to the start of the first episode. We have River initiating the events that occur in this 2 parter by flying out of the airborne spaceship towards the Doctor and into the Tardis - into ordered time, time energy controlled and channelled.
Then, in a mirror, events are concluded by the Doctor sending the Angels flying out of the dead, grounded spaceship away from him into disordered, uncontrolled time energy.
Utimately, I see the cracks as a breach between the world of ordered, controlled time and the world of chaotic uncontrolled time. A breach between the world where we have a sense of individual selfhood and separateness from the rest of creation, and the world where we/our identity is subsumed into the whole and there are no boundaries between us and everything else - a world where we forget ourselves, and forget those who enter that state. It's necessary for time to be controlled and structured so that we can operate effectively in consensual reality. However the world of pure time energy is the realm of the transcendant, the fundamental energy that underpins life, yet we cannot operate in it as an individual being.
Perhaps this is the state we return to after death, ultimately. We leave traces of our history behind, just as the traces of people are left behind after they are absorbed by the cracks (the apple, the engagement ring), but ultimately the world will forget us.
The Doctor's realisation of the nature of the cracks is signified by a physical action of two opposites - his drawing a clockwise circle and an anticlockwise circle in the air
He recognises that the cracks represent the breach between two polarities. The written and the unwritten. Entry into the Unwritten means being absorbed by the universe, back into itself, to forget the self and have the self forgotten by others.
I'm going to finish this with this gorgeous image where the crack - disordered pure time and chaos - breaches into our world.
Thank you if you have read all this. I never meant for it to get so long, but it kind of ran away with me.
I'm currently doing a rewatch of series 5 as part of a viewing marathon, and I've recently watched The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone. I'd forgotten how much fun and how scary these eps are, but it's also nice to look back at how thematically, visually and mythologically rich they are. This started out as a short meta but then grew to epic proportions as I started to unravel themes and mythologies, so be warned!
Thanks to the people on the Through the Looking Glass viewing marathon on Gallifreybase for sharing ideas and particularly janie_aire. I've also recently read most of promethia_tenk's andelisi's meta, and I share a lot of similar thought and ideas about how to read Who, so apologies if there is inadvertant seepage from their ideas to mine.
There's a few key things I've been thinking about. Or overthinking about. They are delirium/disorder, polarity and unification, the Greek Goddess Hecate and the Underworld, light and dark, and shamanism and the three worlds idea (upper world, middle world, lower world.) The thing with these themes and ideas is that they all really overlap and intermingle and start to spread across each other, so I'm going to try and keep track by going through the eps roughly chronologically and trying not to repeat myself a lot.
River and the Doctor as God and Goddess
Firstly a few words on River and the Doctor. I really see River and the Doctor's relationship as about polarity and unification, and mythologically as the story of the divine principles of the God and the Goddess. This means they represent the primary archetypes of God and Goddess, but also can represent any God and Goddess from a specific pantheon. If we assign the God and Goddess some of their general mythological and archetypal attributes (and I am being very general here - this is not an exhaustive list and I'm not saying that River and the Doctor manifest these attributes exculsively - who in their right mind would call River passive?!), it goes a little bit like this:
God - Male, projective, active, elements of fire and air, rationality, logic, order
Goddess - Female, receptive, passive, elements of earth and water, irrationality , intuition, chaos
The Doctor and River do this dance of polarity, where they are two sides of the same thing (time lord), their poles mingle, become confused, reverse and then dance back again during their time from The Library onwards. This idea of River and the Doctor as God and Goddess and unifying polarites culminated in the latest series in the Hieros Gamos, the Sacred Marriage that we saw at the end of The Wedding. This is a symbolic re-encatment of the union of a god/goddess, or the male/female, projective/receptive principles.
It's all essentially about the unification of two poles in order to bring about balance. Now the thing about assigning these attributes is that really God and Goddess are two halves of the same whole - they are the same thing and it's only in the unifying of these opposite elements into one whole that we find balance. Imagery about polarity and unification can be seen over and over again in Moffat's Who. That said i'm supposed to be writing about this episode....
The Goddess of Delerium, Disorder and Death
I see River in this episode presented as the bringer of delerium and disorder. This idea isn't so explicit in the The Library episodes, although she does bring disorder to the Doctor by overturning his expectations, due to her prior knowledge of her future. But this idea of River being the bringer of Delerium, Disorder - and to that i'm also going to add Death - is something that's carried through from here to the series 5 finale, and then through the series 6 finale as well.
For starters the first scene that we see in TToA isn't actually real. It's an hallucination in the guard's mind, due to the influence of River's hallucinogenic lipstick. So as an audience our first entry into this episode is an hallucination created by River - she casts her influence over us at the first moment. In this first scene the camera pans from earth to sky (unification of opposites) and we are in a field with trees which unify the sky and the earth.
Then, we have River leaving her message on the homebox, which ultimately ends up in the interestingly named Delerium Archive that the Doctor and Amy visit. A museum archiving the message of the bringer of delerium.
River's costuming is worth looking at. While it most obviously screams "Sex!" , it's interesting that culturally we associate red and black with sex/sexiness. Red is the colour of blood, danger, temptation, while black is the colour of death, mourning. Red and black are the colours of the Dark Goddess- the Death Goddess, the Goddess of the Underworld, while red is the colour of the goddess as Lover, Temptress, Seductress. And River is the one who possesses the tool that can bring both death and delerium - her lipstick.
We have her at the conclusion of her scene in the spaceship, flying out into the black void of space and into the order of the Doctor's world.
The Tardis is the physical representation of ordered time - she is the Time Vortex given physical form, physical structure in a way which is touchable and (relatively!) controllable. She allows the Doctor some measure of control over time, allowing him to travel freely within it, and giving him an interface with the Time Vortex. She is the place where the Doctor's order exists.
So River, bringer of delerium, disorder and death flies into the Doctor's time-ordered world. And she straight away starts throwing him off balance. Literally at first, when as soon as she enters the Tardis he falls to the floor with her on top of him.
Next with it being revealed that not only is she is able to fly the Tardis, but she also flaunts knowledge that he doesn't have about how to fly her - the blue stablisers that he doesn't have a clue about.
She then upturns one of the conventions of the show that has been there since the beginning- the wheezing noise that the Tardis makes when she lands. Upturning not only the Doctor's but the audience's expectations of how the Tardis operates.
River It's not supposed to make that noise, you leave the brakes on.
Se flirts with him furiously in these opening scenes, she oozes sex and temptation, she has the upper hand over him. She is a mystery and she is unknowable, encapsulated by her signature "Spoilers!" . The essence of mysteries and of mystery religions is that they are not something that can be known intellectually, they have to be experienced
River It's a long story, Doctor. Can't be told, has to be lived
Normally we are used to seeing the Doctor confounding his companion's expectations, by leading them into his weird and wonderful world. But here River confounds his expectations. And this theme, is carried right on through to the conclusion of this series, where River's prescence alone in the Tardis leads to the explosion that causes the cracks. Ordered time in the form of the Tardis disintegrates, pure uncontrolled time energy begins to bleed through, disorder and chaos in the form of the crack threaten and this is due to River.
Then we see this again at the end of series 6. River breaks the measure of order in the Doctor's world - time - and creates a world full of chaos with no boundaries, no limitations, where time itself it breaking down. The Doctor is pulled into this world, and ultimately the force of River and the force of the Doctor have to be balanced, equalised, unified through the Sacred Marriage.
Hecate in the Underworld
There's a lot of riffing on mythology going on in this episode, it's mainly Greek although i also like to find some Norse references because that's my thing (plus we have had dialogue reference to Asgard, Norse world of the Gods in The Library) ;)
The Greek mythology going on in this episode is mainly around the myth of Persephone, River as the Goddess Hecate and the name "Byzantium".
Firstly, the ship is named after the ancient Greek city Byzantium, which has strong links in with Hecate/the dark goddess. The city of Byzantium was founded by King Byzas on the advice of the Oracle at Delphi. Delphi was an extremely ancient Greek site where an Oracle was located, supplicants would visit her to receive prophecies and advice. These prophecies were inspired by fumes rising from chemicals in cracks in the ground (the Underworld) below the temple where the Oracle was located. There we have the idea of Delerium inspired by the Underworld linked to the name of the ship. So River is also our Delerium inspired Oracle, leading the way across space to the Byzantium.
Secondly, Hecate the Goddess was particularly beloved of the Byzantines. Hecate is a Dark Goddess, a goddess of liminal places, and of the Underworld. She is one who is able to negotiate dark places and cross thresholds.
In the ancient Greek myth, Persephone the maiden is abducted by Hades into the Underworld and her mother Demeter roams the earth searching for her. In the oldest versions of the myth, the dark Goddess Hecate is sent to the Underworld to retrieve Persephone. She is a Goddess who knows the route through the Underworld, is able to negotiate the thresholds and the dangers, and who knows the route back out.
Here, River is essentially the dark goddess, Hecate, who journeys into the Underworld. She leads Amy and the Doctor into the Maze of the Dead, the catacombs under the cliff, a literal Underworld of the dead.
In this image River as Hecate holds the book of knowledge that allows them to negotiate the world of the dead. Amy can be seen as Persephone, the Doctor as Hades.
Just to backtrack a little it's interesting that once we are down to earth in the first episode, we start off on a beach, by the sea. Water is of course River's element as the Goddess and as per her name Pond/River, and they all prepare by the sea for their journey into the Maze of the Dead. With the riffing on Greek mythology it's interesting to think about the Eleusinian Mysteries. These were held by the cult of Persephone and Demeter every year in ancient Greece (and as i've said Hecate appears in the older versions of this myth).
Eleusinian initiates experienced mysteries associated with the story of Persephone's descent into the underworld and subsequent rescue (the details of exactly what these are isn't recorded). One of the initial stages before the initiates began to experience the mysteries was the cry of "initiates to the sea!", where they would then ritually purify themselves in the ocean. So it fits nicely that the preparation for entering the Maze of the Dead takes place on the shore.
For initiates experiencing the Mysteries for the first time, a sacrifice was also required before cleansing. River and the Doctor are both experienced in traversing the mythological Underworld and familiar with Death and Rebirth, but it's Amy's first time. Her preliminary initiation is her experience trapped in the room with the Angel, where she proves herself worth of negotiating the dangers of a journey into the Underworld by defeating the Angel. This ultimately leads to her sacrifice, which is her the loss of her gift of sight/perception.
Amy So what's a Maze of the Dead
River Oh it’s not as bad as it sounds, it’s just a labyrinth with dead people buried in the walls
Language and terminology is important in these episodes, as evidenced by the use of the book about the Angels, the Doctor's words about the Gallifreyan language, and the discussion about their meanings. River is the only person to refer to the maze as a labyrinth, and and a maze and a labyrinth are two completely different things. A maze has wrong turns, dead ends, it is deliberately confusing, you get lost in it and the path inwards and outwards is unclear, this is how the other characters see the catacombs.
However a labyrinth always has a clear path into the centre, then a clear path out again. The classic Greek design has a total of 7 circuits, and labyrinths often represent the journey into the self for self-knowledge (often to meet the monster/dark self within.)
So River/Hecate's term of reference for the maze is as something that can be clearly negotiated, again showing her as Hecate, guide to the Underworld.
Lastly, about the Byzantines again. The reason that Hecate was so honoured by them is because once when they were at war and under seige, an attack on them was thwarted by the appearance in the sky of a very bright celestial body. This was attributed to Hecate's intervention, and she was then honoured by them as Hecate the Light Bringer, and the symbol of a star and a crescent moon became associated with the city. In The Crash of the Byzantium there's a few instances of celestial bodies lighting things up:
The gravity ball, illuminating the dead and the star-like pattern of lights on the bottom of the ship
Then the exploding gravity ball which ultimately leads to their salvation, their release from the seige/attack by the Angels.
Reverse the Polarity of the Neutron Flow
Leading up to the end of the first episode are the trials endured in the underworld, and the literal ascent through the maze which is referenced in the dialogue as the six levels representing the ascent of the soul.
In keeping with the idea of reversing and unifying polarities, the moment which leads from one episode to the next shows the polarites being shifted. Up literally becomes down in the moment that The Time of Angels stops and Flesh and Stone starts, as the Doctor shoots at the Star-like underside of the ship and reverses their location. Except it isn't upside down, it's the right way up for them. Except it's not. Underworld to upperworld, top becomes bottom. More disordering, flipping and confusion about which end of the polarity is which.
The end of the first part also marks the place where characters and audience exit the Underworld and enter Middle Earth/ Midgard/this world.
The Three Worlds and Forests
I talked in a previous meta on The Library 2 parter about the shamanic notion of the three worlds. The idea that reality is composed of the underworld, this world, and the upperworld. The Upperworld is where the Gods and celestial bodies are located, the Underworld where the dead and the Dark God/desses are located. This world, the world of physical reality, lies in-between these two polarities and in many ways acts as a conduit of the energy of one to the other (this world is known as Midgard in Norse mythology - meaning the middle enclosure/world, the place inbetween).
We see this idea in The Library and in these episodes. In The Library we have Cal/Datacore down below, the Library as a forest of the dead in-between, and Doctor Moon and the sunlight above.
Here we've got the catacombs below, literally the world of the dead, then we've got the ship with the forest in the middle, then the trees reaching up to the starlight, the upperworld.
In both cases there are forests, trees, that represent this world and the balancing place between the two worlds. I also mentioned previously in my other meta that this links into Norse cosmology where reality is structured around Yggdrasil, the world tree.
There's also River and forests. We first meet her in a forest that isn't a forest. Here she is again - in a forest that isn't a forest. Her name that she takes for herself is translated through the language of the people of the Gamma Forest. A name that isn't her real name.
Amy's countdown to her sacrifice starts once everyone exits the Underworld and enter this Middle-enclosure.
As an intiate of the mysteries of both the Underworld and the world of the Doctor/River, Amy has undergone her journey through the world of the dead,but has brought Death back with her, inside her, shown by the image of the Angel inside her eye
A sacrifice must be freely given in order for Amy to survive leaving the Underworld . Amy has the gift of sight, intiated in her by the Doctor in the Eleventh hour, when he urges her to look from the corner of her eye at the perception filtered door, and at the end of the Beast Below, when we journey through Amy's eye into her mind, she sees the clear truth about the beast below. She also sees the way to defuse the oblivion bomb in Victory of the Daleks, and this theme of seeing carries on as the series does.
One by one, everyone deserts Amy, and as an initiate she has to find her courage and her own way through the woods without her gift. Moff also begins to draw on fairy tales again here, with Amy as the little girl lost in the forest, wearing a red-riding-hood.
A word on the Angels here because these are the fear and the danger that Amy faces. The Angels tap into one of the primal fears that Moff plays on - fear of the unseen. Visually (and thematically) there's loads of light to dark and back again going on in this episode. Again, this mirrors the visual and thematic light and dark in The Library where there was continual sunshine juxtaposed with shadow.
Here we have the dark catacombs, torches flashing about, the exploding light of the gravity globe, the light and dark in the tunnel as they make their way to the secondary flight deck, then the flashing of the lights in the forest as the Angels rip the trees apart. With the Angels It's all about what they do while you aren't looking at them, while you are being kept in the dark about their movements. They effectively take away the ability to see them in their "living" state, thus appearing ever only as visually "dead" to us due to them being Quantum Locked. Seeing is the only tool against the Angels, and Amy's ability to see is ripped away from her.
Ultimately Amy is saved by River (or Persephone by Hecate). In a reversal of the polarity we saw earlier in the episode, during the scenes on the primary flight deck leading up to Amy's rescue, The Doctor is the one who is chaotic, disordered, he loses control shouting at River and implementing a plan which almost fails. Meanwhile, River is calm, ordered and rational, providing a logical solution that saves Amy's life.
Cracks in the World
The vanquishing of the Weeping Angels is an interesting mirror to River's actions close to the start of the first episode. We have River initiating the events that occur in this 2 parter by flying out of the airborne spaceship towards the Doctor and into the Tardis - into ordered time, time energy controlled and channelled.
Then, in a mirror, events are concluded by the Doctor sending the Angels flying out of the dead, grounded spaceship away from him into disordered, uncontrolled time energy.
Utimately, I see the cracks as a breach between the world of ordered, controlled time and the world of chaotic uncontrolled time. A breach between the world where we have a sense of individual selfhood and separateness from the rest of creation, and the world where we/our identity is subsumed into the whole and there are no boundaries between us and everything else - a world where we forget ourselves, and forget those who enter that state. It's necessary for time to be controlled and structured so that we can operate effectively in consensual reality. However the world of pure time energy is the realm of the transcendant, the fundamental energy that underpins life, yet we cannot operate in it as an individual being.
Perhaps this is the state we return to after death, ultimately. We leave traces of our history behind, just as the traces of people are left behind after they are absorbed by the cracks (the apple, the engagement ring), but ultimately the world will forget us.
The Doctor's realisation of the nature of the cracks is signified by a physical action of two opposites - his drawing a clockwise circle and an anticlockwise circle in the air
He recognises that the cracks represent the breach between two polarities. The written and the unwritten. Entry into the Unwritten means being absorbed by the universe, back into itself, to forget the self and have the self forgotten by others.
I'm going to finish this with this gorgeous image where the crack - disordered pure time and chaos - breaches into our world.
Thank you if you have read all this. I never meant for it to get so long, but it kind of ran away with me.