Closing Time.
You know what’s marvellous about this episode from a meta point-of-view? The mirrors finally [begin to] become clearly defined, and I can write a post with lots of subheadings and different topics, rather than something that’s a big tangled ball with no beginning or end.
Please no spoilers beyond this episode (and the trailer)!!!
General Thoughts
People are, not surprisingly, comparing this to The Lodger. Now I loved The Lodger, and it was my squishy. But The Lodger can’t hold a candle to this. Humorous observations on how alien the Doctor is in human society, a companion trapped in the TARDIS, and a will-they-won’t-they romance is fabulous. But compared to bromance, fatherly love saving the day, and the Doctor’s quiet musings on the eve before his death? No comparison, sorry. And before you start arguing - this episode HAD A BABY. All your arguments are invalid. :)
Anyway, there were lots of marvellous touches, Stormageddon not the least. And the fact that Auntie Mabel was in it... (She has a dog called Pippin and a spotty plane. The Doctor would ADORE her.) The shushing. The literal stepping through the looking glass. The stars on the ceiling. The Doctor working in a toyshop. Not to mention that Craig saved the world with LOVE... (Gareth Roberts, the writer, makes NO EXCUSES for this. I like him a lot.) Anyway, the whole thing gave me flashbacks to ‘Doctor Who and the Daemons’, wherein Jo saved the world with LOVE (and the Daemon exploded because of it), and it was ALL VERY LOVELY AND DAFT. Love my show.
Also, Craig is the most wonderful counterpoint to all the harsh accusations that the Doctor has taken onboard this season. Craig is under no illusions as to how dangerous the Doctor is, but he also sees clearly that the Doctor is a good person, that his heroism saves the world a lot, and that he’s worth it.
Which reminds me that, for some reason (did anyone else think this?) Eleven, when saying “I’m old and selfish and I always have been” reminded me hugely of One. Or maybe it’s just that he really always has been selfish (because One certainly was). Anyway, having Craig around was delightful, and just what was needed - esp as he was someone who had gained from the Doctor’s influence.
And what does the Doctor do in the end? Spend his last few hours before going off to die tidying Craig’s house. Nicest man in the universe! QED
The Girl Who’s Tired of Waiting
This is one of the cleverest things I’ve come across:
It says an awful lot in a single image, and the sheer elegance of it pleases me immensely.
Not only is it saying that Amy has ‘moved on’ from the Doctor, but she’s actually done something with her life. (Are people happy yet?) Because given the name and the tag line of the perfume, it’s very clearly her own product. Now who could have foreseen that? No longer Amy Pond, kissogram, but Amy Pond, business woman. Very nice. As for Rory, then owlsie found this on Tumblr and I nearly broke something:
Anyway, it’s obviously not Amy in the spacesuit on the beach (well, never say never, but... River is a walking, talking Chekov's gun). Yes, Amy was mirrored very heavily with the Doctor, but it was to show us the fact that she shouldn’t go down that route. (Darn mirrors, I got all turned around.) Her role is a different one... Which brings me to the next part.
Melody Pond is a superhero.
It occurred to me the other day that Melody has three mothers. Amy of course, her actual mother, but I’ll get to her in a moment.
- The first one to bring Melody up is Kovarian, and Mels is very much her creation. Wild, dangerous, deadly. ‘I’m the woman who kills the Doctor’ is her refrain, and there isn’t much else to her. She’s a weapon, designed to kill. We see it in the astronaut suit - even the cradle she is put in looks like that suit.
- Which brings us to the TARDIS, who shows Mels a different way and helps her to see that there is much more to life. She has layers and skills she didn’t know. And I think it’s very much the TARDIS’s child which goes to Luna University to study (mirrored by the old, old crib the Doctor brought out). It’s a remote place, and River looks almost ascetic in her robes - quiet, studious, careful. She becomes a scholar, without a hint of the wildness that once reigned supreme.
But then Kovarian returns...
My thinking is that in the finale River will learn to ‘marry’ these two sides of her personality, which will create the woman we know she becomes. (I once wrote meta on S6 of Buffy, and how Spike and Dawn could be seen as different sides of Buffy’s personality which she needed to merge. The same very much applies to River, except it’s all contained in one person.) Anyway - crucial to this (I predict) will be Amy (and Rory). River has been moulded by others, but not by her actual parents, and becoming their daughter, properly, will be what helps her become whole.
It is possible that this will mean literally re-writing her story and letting Amy and Rory have their baby back, but I suspect not. Here, let me look at the season so far.
We’re all stories in the end
I think there are three story strands. Or rather, one main story but within that two strands:
The overarching story is the one about the Doctor and the Ponds.
This story is then split up into the parts about Melody/River (all the Moffat episodes), and the standalones, all of which centre around children and their parents and acceptance in their resolution.
[Sidebar: Apart from The Doctor’s Wife, which is the season In a Mirror, Darkly. We still have the family theme, but twisted (House is like an evil TARDIS, and smaller on the inside, as well as being a dark mirror of the Doctor), and we have the patchwork family of Auntie, Uncle, Nephew and Idris, all of them dependent on House and unable to escape him, Idris sacrificed without a second thought.]
ANYWAY, would you look at those standalones. The only ones without actual children are The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex, both of which deal with Amy waiting for the Doctor and moving beyond that, as well as confirming her love for Rory. Otherwise, it’s wall-to-wall parent/child bonding, with either the father feeling inadequate, or the child being different and needing acceptance. Do you think maybe that the show has a theme going on here, and that somehow this will apply to the larger story of the Ponds and their daughter? I think so. Oh yes I do.
Look at you! You’re young.
So, here’s where I go all out in my comparisons between End of Time and Closing Time. I am going to be VERY GOOD and look at everything from a very objective point of view, but I have to mock, just a little, so a small comparison before we start, since (apart from all the other parallels I am going to pull out) we have the Doctor doing a farewell-tour before he dies:
Bless you Ten. Guess everyone has an emo phase, even a Timelord. (OK, shutting up now and getting to the meta. He was so young... *pets him*)
Now my first point is that when under pressure, the Doctor will throw his life away for a good cause without blinking. Look at Nine saving Rose's life, or Ten in the Library, or Eleven in TBB...
He sees the solution, and the fact that it's his life in the balance is less important than 'This will work!' Also, in Parting of the Ways, and in the Library, and in TBB, he's in a good place - he's travelling with the perfect companion(s), that he loves dearly, and his sacrifice is partly (or wholly) to save them.
And - as Promethia reminded me - the Doctor is always happiest when he has something to fight for rather than against... Dying for Rose (or Donna, or Amelia) he’ll do with a smile on his face.
But the situation in the Specials, and now in S6, is very different. He has been running from death for a long time. He knows it is coming, knows that he in some measure deserves it (breaking The Laws of Time/losing Melody etc), and he's travelled on his own for a long time - yet there are huge, vast differences.
Firstly (just to get it out there) the glimpsed Ginger Companion(s). Ten sees Donna, Eleven sees Amy and Rory, both of them overcome with longing. But where Donna is ‘making do’, unaware of what she’s lost, Amy and Rory are rebuilding their life, no longer looking back. The Doctor is wistful, but knows that he tried his best to do right by them, and they are no longer pining.
We have a Companion who is not really a companion, since he doesn’t go travelling with the Doctor - he's just an old friend who runs about the place with the Doctor and helps him investigate, and whom the Doctor can unburden himself onto.
There is also the ‘goodbye tour’, which I’ve already touched on. Ten is of course dying already, and doesn’t have much time, but his pain is palpable. Former companions stop and just watch him walk away in the distance, deeply affected by his pain. Eleven - although his predicament is much worse - is focussed out, unable to stop himself from noticing things. “I’m done with saving them,” he tells himself, but is utterly unable to stop. (Again: Ten needed people, Eleven needs to help people.)
Now before I go any further I’m going to juxtapose two images/speeches/scenes, which beautifully sum up these two characters and how they deal:
Now a lot of this is due to personality, not to mention age. Ten was never going to go gently into that good night. Ten was Ten - beautiful and brilliant and exquisitely damaged. Despite all his years, he was young by nature - Rose imprinted on him, and that bright, youthful joy was his birth right, and he felt the loss keenly. When Ten reached for age it was always in the context of loss and pain, and when he reached for power it led to The Timelord Victorious.
He went to his death having held the Laws of Time in his hands, able to do anything, and - despite there never being the slightest doubt that he’d sacrifice himself to save the universe/Wilf - he resented the hell out of it. Which of course means that he really needed to die, because he was a clear and present danger who thought (or liked to think) himself above the laws of the universe. Given the relentless misery and loss that had been thrown at him over the preceding years, this was not surprising.
Now Eleven... Eleven was always effortlessly old. Eternally young of spirit, but just old. And where Ten got an old man to rant at, someone with whom he didn’t need to hold back, Eleven got a baby to talk to... And we see that he's turned into Wilf. He’s old, he’s had his time. He looks at Alfie and sees that the world is full of young people, just beginning. And that is good. Life continues, life will always continue, even when he's no longer there, and he (metaphorically) hands over to little Alfie. Death is a part of life, and that is emphasised here beautifully. The Doctor’s acceptance, his acknowledgment that he’s had a good life, that he’s lived his dream and more besides, is very important.
Also important is the snippet from the trailer, where the Doctor asks why he has to die. Because unlike Ten he isn’t sacrificing himself for someone, and whilst he certainly has enough blood on his hands, who has decided to appoint themselves his judge, jury and executioner, and why? Vigilantes are not a good thing, and I don’t think the Doctor is very keen to be a pawn in someone else’s game.
He is at peace with dying, but the why, I think, is going to be pivotal. Because he's the Doctor, and he's here to help.
Please no spoilers beyond this episode (and the trailer)!!!
General Thoughts
People are, not surprisingly, comparing this to The Lodger. Now I loved The Lodger, and it was my squishy. But The Lodger can’t hold a candle to this. Humorous observations on how alien the Doctor is in human society, a companion trapped in the TARDIS, and a will-they-won’t-they romance is fabulous. But compared to bromance, fatherly love saving the day, and the Doctor’s quiet musings on the eve before his death? No comparison, sorry. And before you start arguing - this episode HAD A BABY. All your arguments are invalid. :)
Anyway, there were lots of marvellous touches, Stormageddon not the least. And the fact that Auntie Mabel was in it... (She has a dog called Pippin and a spotty plane. The Doctor would ADORE her.) The shushing. The literal stepping through the looking glass. The stars on the ceiling. The Doctor working in a toyshop. Not to mention that Craig saved the world with LOVE... (Gareth Roberts, the writer, makes NO EXCUSES for this. I like him a lot.) Anyway, the whole thing gave me flashbacks to ‘Doctor Who and the Daemons’, wherein Jo saved the world with LOVE (and the Daemon exploded because of it), and it was ALL VERY LOVELY AND DAFT. Love my show.
Also, Craig is the most wonderful counterpoint to all the harsh accusations that the Doctor has taken onboard this season. Craig is under no illusions as to how dangerous the Doctor is, but he also sees clearly that the Doctor is a good person, that his heroism saves the world a lot, and that he’s worth it.
Which reminds me that, for some reason (did anyone else think this?) Eleven, when saying “I’m old and selfish and I always have been” reminded me hugely of One. Or maybe it’s just that he really always has been selfish (because One certainly was). Anyway, having Craig around was delightful, and just what was needed - esp as he was someone who had gained from the Doctor’s influence.
And what does the Doctor do in the end? Spend his last few hours before going off to die tidying Craig’s house. Nicest man in the universe! QED
The Girl Who’s Tired of Waiting
This is one of the cleverest things I’ve come across:
It says an awful lot in a single image, and the sheer elegance of it pleases me immensely.
Not only is it saying that Amy has ‘moved on’ from the Doctor, but she’s actually done something with her life. (Are people happy yet?) Because given the name and the tag line of the perfume, it’s very clearly her own product. Now who could have foreseen that? No longer Amy Pond, kissogram, but Amy Pond, business woman. Very nice. As for Rory, then owlsie found this on Tumblr and I nearly broke something:
Anyway, it’s obviously not Amy in the spacesuit on the beach (well, never say never, but... River is a walking, talking Chekov's gun). Yes, Amy was mirrored very heavily with the Doctor, but it was to show us the fact that she shouldn’t go down that route. (Darn mirrors, I got all turned around.) Her role is a different one... Which brings me to the next part.
Melody Pond is a superhero.
It occurred to me the other day that Melody has three mothers. Amy of course, her actual mother, but I’ll get to her in a moment.
- The first one to bring Melody up is Kovarian, and Mels is very much her creation. Wild, dangerous, deadly. ‘I’m the woman who kills the Doctor’ is her refrain, and there isn’t much else to her. She’s a weapon, designed to kill. We see it in the astronaut suit - even the cradle she is put in looks like that suit.
- Which brings us to the TARDIS, who shows Mels a different way and helps her to see that there is much more to life. She has layers and skills she didn’t know. And I think it’s very much the TARDIS’s child which goes to Luna University to study (mirrored by the old, old crib the Doctor brought out). It’s a remote place, and River looks almost ascetic in her robes - quiet, studious, careful. She becomes a scholar, without a hint of the wildness that once reigned supreme.
But then Kovarian returns...
My thinking is that in the finale River will learn to ‘marry’ these two sides of her personality, which will create the woman we know she becomes. (I once wrote meta on S6 of Buffy, and how Spike and Dawn could be seen as different sides of Buffy’s personality which she needed to merge. The same very much applies to River, except it’s all contained in one person.) Anyway - crucial to this (I predict) will be Amy (and Rory). River has been moulded by others, but not by her actual parents, and becoming their daughter, properly, will be what helps her become whole.
It is possible that this will mean literally re-writing her story and letting Amy and Rory have their baby back, but I suspect not. Here, let me look at the season so far.
We’re all stories in the end
I think there are three story strands. Or rather, one main story but within that two strands:
The overarching story is the one about the Doctor and the Ponds.
This story is then split up into the parts about Melody/River (all the Moffat episodes), and the standalones, all of which centre around children and their parents and acceptance in their resolution.
[Sidebar: Apart from The Doctor’s Wife, which is the season In a Mirror, Darkly. We still have the family theme, but twisted (House is like an evil TARDIS, and smaller on the inside, as well as being a dark mirror of the Doctor), and we have the patchwork family of Auntie, Uncle, Nephew and Idris, all of them dependent on House and unable to escape him, Idris sacrificed without a second thought.]
ANYWAY, would you look at those standalones. The only ones without actual children are The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex, both of which deal with Amy waiting for the Doctor and moving beyond that, as well as confirming her love for Rory. Otherwise, it’s wall-to-wall parent/child bonding, with either the father feeling inadequate, or the child being different and needing acceptance. Do you think maybe that the show has a theme going on here, and that somehow this will apply to the larger story of the Ponds and their daughter? I think so. Oh yes I do.
Look at you! You’re young.
So, here’s where I go all out in my comparisons between End of Time and Closing Time. I am going to be VERY GOOD and look at everything from a very objective point of view, but I have to mock, just a little, so a small comparison before we start, since (apart from all the other parallels I am going to pull out) we have the Doctor doing a farewell-tour before he dies:
Bless you Ten. Guess everyone has an emo phase, even a Timelord. (OK, shutting up now and getting to the meta. He was so young... *pets him*)
Now my first point is that when under pressure, the Doctor will throw his life away for a good cause without blinking. Look at Nine saving Rose's life, or Ten in the Library, or Eleven in TBB...
He sees the solution, and the fact that it's his life in the balance is less important than 'This will work!' Also, in Parting of the Ways, and in the Library, and in TBB, he's in a good place - he's travelling with the perfect companion(s), that he loves dearly, and his sacrifice is partly (or wholly) to save them.
And - as Promethia reminded me - the Doctor is always happiest when he has something to fight for rather than against... Dying for Rose (or Donna, or Amelia) he’ll do with a smile on his face.
But the situation in the Specials, and now in S6, is very different. He has been running from death for a long time. He knows it is coming, knows that he in some measure deserves it (breaking The Laws of Time/losing Melody etc), and he's travelled on his own for a long time - yet there are huge, vast differences.
Firstly (just to get it out there) the glimpsed Ginger Companion(s). Ten sees Donna, Eleven sees Amy and Rory, both of them overcome with longing. But where Donna is ‘making do’, unaware of what she’s lost, Amy and Rory are rebuilding their life, no longer looking back. The Doctor is wistful, but knows that he tried his best to do right by them, and they are no longer pining.
We have a Companion who is not really a companion, since he doesn’t go travelling with the Doctor - he's just an old friend who runs about the place with the Doctor and helps him investigate, and whom the Doctor can unburden himself onto.
There is also the ‘goodbye tour’, which I’ve already touched on. Ten is of course dying already, and doesn’t have much time, but his pain is palpable. Former companions stop and just watch him walk away in the distance, deeply affected by his pain. Eleven - although his predicament is much worse - is focussed out, unable to stop himself from noticing things. “I’m done with saving them,” he tells himself, but is utterly unable to stop. (Again: Ten needed people, Eleven needs to help people.)
Now before I go any further I’m going to juxtapose two images/speeches/scenes, which beautifully sum up these two characters and how they deal:
Now a lot of this is due to personality, not to mention age. Ten was never going to go gently into that good night. Ten was Ten - beautiful and brilliant and exquisitely damaged. Despite all his years, he was young by nature - Rose imprinted on him, and that bright, youthful joy was his birth right, and he felt the loss keenly. When Ten reached for age it was always in the context of loss and pain, and when he reached for power it led to The Timelord Victorious.
He went to his death having held the Laws of Time in his hands, able to do anything, and - despite there never being the slightest doubt that he’d sacrifice himself to save the universe/Wilf - he resented the hell out of it. Which of course means that he really needed to die, because he was a clear and present danger who thought (or liked to think) himself above the laws of the universe. Given the relentless misery and loss that had been thrown at him over the preceding years, this was not surprising.
Now Eleven... Eleven was always effortlessly old. Eternally young of spirit, but just old. And where Ten got an old man to rant at, someone with whom he didn’t need to hold back, Eleven got a baby to talk to... And we see that he's turned into Wilf. He’s old, he’s had his time. He looks at Alfie and sees that the world is full of young people, just beginning. And that is good. Life continues, life will always continue, even when he's no longer there, and he (metaphorically) hands over to little Alfie. Death is a part of life, and that is emphasised here beautifully. The Doctor’s acceptance, his acknowledgment that he’s had a good life, that he’s lived his dream and more besides, is very important.
Also important is the snippet from the trailer, where the Doctor asks why he has to die. Because unlike Ten he isn’t sacrificing himself for someone, and whilst he certainly has enough blood on his hands, who has decided to appoint themselves his judge, jury and executioner, and why? Vigilantes are not a good thing, and I don’t think the Doctor is very keen to be a pawn in someone else’s game.
He is at peace with dying, but the why, I think, is going to be pivotal. Because he's the Doctor, and he's here to help.