Other Spoons
Doctor Who: The Bells of Saint John
meta, spoons, mirrors, trees and chairs
Other notes to Saint John
Part Two
Hatches and Trees
In my previous post, I made the rather bold claim that there's a subversion of traditional religious conceptual frameworks as indicated by the imagery and juxtapositions employed in the text. Here's some additional material in line with such thinking, along with a possibly alternative way to conceiving of such concerns, such as is appropriate for Doctor Who and how it typically conceives of the world.
First, I just want to reiterate how much religious imagery is employed in The Bells of Saint John. I mean, obviously it's right there in the title. And those titular bells turn out to be coming from TARDIS, through a phone that's hidden behind a hatch in the door.
If you never noticed before, the St John Ambulance symbol is on the other door of the TARDIS, and as mentioned in previous meta, this comes from a religious organization that has embodied, over a thousand years, the Warrior/Healer dichotomy that first came to light in A Good Man Goes To War. And while it's true that Moffat got the symbol on the TARDIS when he took over from Davies, this is not really something new. The original TARDIS from the original programme back in 1963 also featured this symbol, and appropriately: these kinds of Police Boxes were in simultaneous service to St John Ambulance as they were to the police. This dichotomy has been embedded in the symbolism of the show from the very beginning.
Hatches, on the other hand, only began to feature prominently in the current era. We saw Amy looking at Madame Kovarian through a hatch through the first half of Series Six, only to have her own "near death experience" and end up in a hellish version of the afterlife, confined to giving birth while the Hatch Lady looks on. In Let's Kill Hitler, young Melody is constantly being rescued from rooms with hatches in the door -- the principal's office, the police station -- and in the Wedding the Doctor's big Reveal of escaping via the Tesselecta comes as he reappears from behind a Hatch-door as well, not to mention he's asking a "monk" to help him out.
Here we see The Monastery has a hatch in its door, too -- but look at the torches! They're attached to the stone walls via an inverted iron cross.
We descend into the bowels of the Order and find the Doctor, hooded and dressed as a Monk. Again, this harkens back to A Good Man Goes To War, where the Doctor gets out of control in his zealous to wreak vengeance on those who've hurt him. In the Asylum prequel he's visited by a Monk in a dream; in the eyestalk of a giant Dalek statue, it's Darla who tricks him while garbed in a monk's robes.
DOCTOR: Monks are not cool!
It's as a vainglorious monk that the Doctor is rejected by Clara. A change in outfits was definitely called for. And where will he find the means to effect this transformation? Why, behind a Hatch, that's where!
It's at this point we should probably step back and talk about alternative spiritual frameworks. In many myths around the world, there's a version of what's called The World Tree, an axis mundi that connects Above and Below, and Past and Future, to the Here and Now, in the Center. It's usually a Tree, like Yggdrasil in Norse mythology, but it could also be a Mountain, like Mount Olympus was to the Greeks. So, the top of the axis mundi reaches the Heavens, while the bottom digs down into the Underworld. From a psychological point of view, the Heavens represent our aspirations, our conscience, our ability to fly high and look at the big picture. The Heavens are where our Gods and Goddesses reside. The Underworld, on the other hand, is the place of the Subconscious, a place for monsters and our deepest desires -- but it's not necessarily "Hell" in the Christian sense, just a place where the "baser" aspects of the Self can find a home.
The TARDIS is often juxtaposed with World Tree imagery; as a vehicle that go any time and any place and make it "here and now" it certainly qualifies as fulfilling this function. Now, when the Doctor goes to change, he's trying to effect a change at the subconscious level -- he goes to the "underworld" of the TARDIS, below the console, which is the axis mundi of the TARDIS itself. Here, deep down, the axis mundi is Green, and the doors to the inner compartments were precious things like Bowties are kept are made of Wood. Even the box holding the Bowtie is made with wood, but lined with Gold fabric -- Gold being a color of Divinity.
Anyways, getting back to The Bells -- while Clara's making her call, we see a map of the London area done in blue, but with creeping red patches encroaching, vaguely leaf-shaped patches, calling back to the opening imagery of the episode where the whole world turns red. We then cut immediately to a shot of the Doctor getting off his horse, still in his Monk attire -- and what's foregrounded is bunch of roots and greenery cut up in a pile, begging for a juxtapositional reading: In both cases, we see the breaking of the World Tree, of it being cut away from its function as the source of connection.
On the one hand, we have The Great Intelligence, a disembodied consciousness, taking over the WiFi network and sticking people into a Cloud, which is likened to "immortality" or some kind of hellish afterlife. On the other hand, we have Christian monks amidst broken roots, the sort of men who cross their hearts at the mention of a "woman" as if she were some kind of "evil spirit."
There's another axis mundi in The Bells of Saint John. It's The Shard, a Mirror Mountain that stretches up to a cloud, where the souls of the lost are held. This axis mundi is not made of wood, not something that's alive and growning, but a thing of glass and metal, cold and lifeless, which dominates the London skyline.
Clouds, by the way, have been getting a bad rap as of late. In The Bells, the Cloud is a hellish afterlife for disembodied consciousness, all "made" in the "image" of The Great Intelligence, who's just as much a "head in a box" of a television screen as the people who've been hoovered up by the Spoonheads. Back at Christmas, the Doctor's Cloud is a place he retires to, to disengage from humanity and relationship, watching over us like a disinterested god -- and it's from this cloud that Clara falls to her death. In the Asylum, it's a Nano-Cloud that rewrites people into Dalek-puppets, a malaise that afflicts Amy until the Doctor helps fix her marriage.
The Cloud, which is separate from all below, is insufficient for an Afterlife metaphor in Doctor Who. To do it right, you need a Forest.
Charlotte Abigail Lux is at the heart of the Forest of the Dead in the Library, the Little Girl who would save everyone, no questions asked, while Madge Arwell is the Mother who can take an entire forest in her head and spread that life force out across the Milky Way, bringing her husband back from the dead -- or at the very least, from the lost.
Of the two, The Library is the more significant, because while the Androzani Forest is an abundant source of fuel, once it's melted down by acid rain, the Library is the repository of all books, all stories, and as we're all stories in the end the Library is where we'll end.
The Doctor says that the Cloud is a "living hell" for the mind trapped there, a fate worse than death, so one might think it's the concept of "afterlife" in the first place that's getting the bad rap here. I don't think so, considering what we know of the Library. The souls in the Cloud -- represented by boxes against a black wall -- don't know where they, they are separated from each other, stuck like flies in a web, crying out for help. Basically like Twitter.
The Library, on the other hand, is a place rendered in soft whites and golds at the end, where everyone knows where they are, with beloved friends, and all the books in the Universe to keep themselves occupied.
After Clara's first death and rebirth, the Doctor carries her upstairs to her bed, setting out cookies and flowers and water, almost as if she were Santa Claus, but mostly in a way that's reminescent of tucking in Amelia Pond at the end of The Big Bang.
While he's up in her Attic (another Upperworld motif) he finds her Travel Journal, colored Red and Blue, a place for her to store the memories of all the places she wants to see. The First Page is a Leaf, a token of the World Tree -- and the same kind and color of leaves we saw by the swingset in the Prequel, when Clara, as a Little Girl, meets the Doctor -- and where the Doctor gets the idea to cloister himself in a monastery until he hears from her!
The Leaf is a symbol of the kind of connection needed to travel between the worlds. It's last prominent appearance was in A Good Man Goes To War (the Headless Monk episode) where Lorna Bucket gave Amy a "prayer leaf" to reunite her with her daughter.
When Clara wakes up, she pops her head out a Hatch-like window, in the Attic, reaffirming the same motifs noted earlier.
It's also a callback to The Snowmen. In that episode, Clara waves the Doctor in from an upper-story window, bathed in golden light, and he agrees despite his intentions not to. Notably, he bites his thumb in spite of his hand, but what's interesting about that is that the gesture evokes Romeo and Juliet -- and don't forget, Clara called herself "Miss Montague" in that story, making her Romeo.
Now, however, the Doctor's got the upper hand, and their faux-balcony chat ends with Clara having to bite the bullet and come downstairs to chat up the Doctor. And yet, she's able to maintain control of the narrative, for the Doctor had intended to "play guard" outside the Blue Box while she slept, not for her to flirt her way downstairs.
Now, given that Clara's just had a rebirth, and is taking control of her story, I want to step back a second and focus on the other recurring symbol for "Ascension" in Doctor Who...
The Chair Agenda
"Everybody knows that everybody dies" -- River, voice-over on this shot
The Chair is a symbol of Ascension, which is likened to an experience of death and rebirth. This is where River sacrificed herself to save the 4,023 living people stuck in the Library, not to the mention the Little Girl, the Doctor, Lux, and the Library itself. Each of those people are reborn into the material world (with the exception of Donna they all wear black) while River and her crew are reborn into the matrix of the Library itself.
Interestingly, River's wearing a white astronaut suit and a black "crown of thorns" when she gives it up in the Chair.
But this wasn't even the first use of Chair symbolism in the story:
"Where am I?" -- Miss Evangelista's ghost
Another "death" and "afterlife" -- but here, Evangelista has not offered herself up in sacrifice; this was just an accident. She gets caught in the Wifi (yes, the Library has "Wifi") and brought to CAL -- where she's reborn. But it's messed up -- she's not dressed in white, but black, and her attributes have changed; it's an ascension gone wrong. "Evangelista" is of course a word with religious connotations.
"I can see the stars, the worlds beyond,
the Vortex of Time itself, and the whole of infinity.
Oh, but this is glorious!"
This is literally what the Cybermen were referring to in The Next Doctor when they talked about "Ascension." But what that "means" has been reversed -- Miss Hartigan looks for liberation and power, the opposite of self-sacrifice for the greater good. But still she rises, in a Dreadnaught class of Cybership, and it's only when the Doctor ascends in his Blue Balloon (the "Tardis") to hold a proverbial mirror to her face that she gives up the ghost and dies in a glorious act of salvation.
Earlier, as Hartigan first takes to the Chair, the Doctor says "the software is rewriting itself." She then speaks of this "machine of Joy" outside the parameters of Cyber-philosophy, which underlines the transcendent qualities of The Chair.
That this story is called "The Next Doctor" may be an indication it's taking a prophetic role in describing the era to follow. There's an awful lot here on memory and identity, including a scene where the Cyber-data-core is played back through a mirror.
RIVER: The Tardis is still burning. It's exploding
at every point in history. If you threw the Pandorica
into the explosion, right into the heart of the fire--
AMY: Then what?
RIVER: Then let there be Light.
The Pandorica Chair is a chair of rebirth. The Doctor is "reborn" here after getting killed by a Dalek, and Amy is "reborn" here after getting killed by Rory. By flying the Pandorica into the heart of the exploding TARDIS, the entire Universe is reborn. That's an act of alchemy, by the way -- a fusion of cube and sphere ("circling the square" it's called) as well as Reds and Blues to bring all the stars back into existence.
MADGE: Oh, this is marvellous. Oh, this is really quite wonderful.
Madge's Ascension takes place in the Chair that's made from the Forest itself -- the whole tower is grown. And sitting in that Chair, the shining crown on her head, all the stars pour into her head, and then they fly out into the Vortex, a literal ascension from a melting forest to give rebirth elsewhere in the Universe.
There's a beat earlier in the story pointing to this, when the Doctor takes the kids to the Sitting Room to show off the chairs he's "repaired" -- making them mobile, like chariots, since they don't have a television.
When the Arwell first get to Uncle Digory's, the Doctor shows them around, which is really a way of showing off the "repairs" he's made. The first place he takes them is the Sitting Room, but it's a bit pointless because there's no television. So what does he do? He populates the room with chairs that move. Movable chairs.
A Christmas Carol features the Doctor observing the chairs to figure out what Sardick's all about. The chairs all point away from the painting of the Father, because Sardick doesn't want to be like the Father, he wants to sing and play with the Fish. He wants stories. And, interestingly enough, it's from that big red chair that Sardick sees his life being rewritten, flashing before his very eyes.
Not so for Rory -- he and his father occupy twinned-chairs, and together they pilot a spaceship away to save the Earth. Afterwards, their roles are transposed: Brian becomes the traveler, while Rory ascends ladders to fix light bulbs. Not every transformation afforded by the Chair is completely mind-shattering.
(Also, the fact that the Doctor calls Rory's father "Pond" -- assigning him Amy's name, just like with Rory -- indicates that both Brian and Rory serve as "mirrors" in this story, insofar as Still Water is Nature's Mirror, thanks to The Curse of the Black Spot. So, these chair aren't just twinned, they're mirrored.)
Which brings us to Clara's chairs. In the Asylum, she has a Chair that's positioned under an aperture that represents an Eye -- and it's from this Chair that she sacrifices herself to save the Doctor, Amy and Rory in the end, all the while affirming her Identity as Oswin, not to mention her very humanity. It's from this chair that she first says "Run, you clever boy, and remember," just before looking straight into the camera and breaching the Fourth Wall. It's a great chair -- the same one used in The Doctor's Daughter, actually, when Jenny flew off to the stars after her death and rebirth.
The chair on the right, from The Snowmen, is more subtle. Clara's just awakened to church bells after her first ascent to the Doctor's cloud, dressed in white as for a proper rebirth. Sitting on the Chair (which has rungs like a ladder) is the bag holding her Governess dress, which she will use to effect her own transformation.
So, with all this in mind, what's just about the first thing Clara does after death and rebirth from getting spooned?
She lugs a Chair out to chat with the Doctor!
It's during this conversation that the Doctor realizes that Clara's not quite the same person she used to be. No longer computer-illiterate, she's now making Twitter jokes as a metaphor for the Monster of the Week. (I think Moffat made Clara computer-illiterate just to make a Twitter joke the basis for the Doctor's realization that Clara's been changed. The revelation that joke entails wouldn't work unless Clara really was almost completely unfamiliar with computers... as if she were lifted right out of the Victorian era.) And meanwhile, Clara's getting control of the narrative, as the Doctor is put in the position of explaining what the hell is going on in the first place.
The Doctor, by the way, has his own Chair. It's spotted by the Spoonhead across the street, tipping off Miss Kizlet and her minions.
And once that happens, everything goes crazy. All the lights in the neighborhood go on -- and as we all know, turning on the lights by turning on the people is a symbol of Enlightenment. Clara's rebirth and transformation is a form of Enlightenment.
But then all the other lights in London go out -- the world is being put to sleep -- in order to squash this nascent bright light, drastic measures have been taken. And therefore drastic measure have to be taken.
The Doctor and Clara are threatened by a Plane Crash, which is not a recurring motif in Doctor Who. Is it, however, a recurring motif in popular culture, especially since 9/11. My favorite, of course, is the "plane crash" over The Island, but there's also a lovely plane of the dead in Fringe, in Sherlock, and most recently in Revolution, which also features all the lights going out.
Now comes Clara's training!
They race into the box, and the Doctor explains in as few words as possible: It's a spaceship, bigger on the inside, yadda yadda. Clara wants to know if they've flown away from the plane. Not quite! They race down the aisle, but all the people in their chairs are unconscious.
CLARA: This is the plane, the actual plane! Are they all dead?
Which is great! Another play on the themes of afterlife and Ascension.
CLARA: What is going on? Is this real? Please tell me what is happening!
What's neat about this scene is how it functions metaphorically, on several levels. Of course there's an Ascension motif going on, a short hop up to a ship full of chairs filled with "dead people" (the astral plane) but it also gives the Doctor a chance to explain his identity, Clara a taste of flying by the seat of their pants, and even a bit of repetition of Oswin's dialogue from the Asylum. The Doctor turns off the WiFi, and all the people on the plane wake up (resurrected) while the Plane flies over a World Tree motif outside Clara's house, which is now a black spot on an island of light in a sea of darkness.
Clara's world has been turn upside-down.
For the Doctor's next trick, he shows off the Ship's ability to time-travel. Clara demands an explanation, and is told she'll get it over breakfast, but unlike certain Ponds she won't have to wait:
They materialize in the late morning, pass the hat, and take off for coffee and crumpets. (I love the guy in white, doing that whole "statue" schtick right next to the TARDIS, and how he's so put out by getting upstaged! And look at his top hot -- it's just like the Doctor's back in The Snowmen. He's a snowman-statue.) And then it's time to face off against their foes.
Oddly, Clara doesn't actually confront Kizlet, or the Great Intelligence for that matter. Well, oddly for other companions, but not necessarily for Clara. In Asylum she doesn't interact with the other Daleks, the Dalek Supreme, or the Emporer Dalek, and she doesn't interact with Simeon or the Great Intelligence in The Snowmen. She's been sidelined in all three of her appearances so far -- just facing off "henchmen" like Snowmen and Spoonheads, both of which are "mirror monsters."
Amy, on the other hand, interacted directly with Prisoner Zero, the Smilers and the "police state" in Beast Below, the Angels in Byzantium, and with Daleks, Bracewell and Churchill (yes, I know) in Victory -- but not the New Paradigm Daleks. In her last quintet she's interacting directly with Angels, the Shakri, Kahler Jex (but not the Gunslinger) and makes token appearances across the Dalek Parliament and Solomon, just like Rory.
On the other hand, at least Clara's not being called "The Girl." As in "The Girl Who Waited," or even "The Boy Who Waited" in the case of Rory at the end of The Big Bang. No, Clara's "The Woman Twice Dead," and I'm especially liking the "died twice" aspect of her epithet, not only because of the resurrection/rebirth theme, but also because it's not directly in relationship to The Doctor.
Oh, by the way, Clara's died twice in each of her first three episodes! In the Asylum she's converted into a Dalek, and then sacrifices herself to blow the place up. In The Snowmen she dies from falling off the cloud, then dies again after a brief medical intervention, on the heels of an earlier metaphorical "rebirth" when she transformed into Miss Montague, Governess.
So, when all is said and done, Clara's faced with a choice. Will she run away with the Doctor?
The decision is framed by reflections, featuring the appropriate imagery:
Clara's face, twinned against the TARDIS doors. The TARDIS and Leaves, superimposed over Clara's face, and numerous light bulbs. Here is true travel between the worlds, granted by the World Tree, the connection between Above and Below, Past and Future, into the Here and Now.
Remarkably, Clara chooses to stay. But in so doing, she has held a mirror up to the Doctor -- she's not waiting for him, he's waiting for her. As he has been since the beginning of the story, seeking out a quiet place where he could remember.
He waited in a religious setting. He made Art. Art that hangs over a Chair.
The Doctor Who Waited.
meta, spoons, mirrors, trees and chairs
Other notes to Saint John
Part Two
Hatches and Trees
In my previous post, I made the rather bold claim that there's a subversion of traditional religious conceptual frameworks as indicated by the imagery and juxtapositions employed in the text. Here's some additional material in line with such thinking, along with a possibly alternative way to conceiving of such concerns, such as is appropriate for Doctor Who and how it typically conceives of the world.
First, I just want to reiterate how much religious imagery is employed in The Bells of Saint John. I mean, obviously it's right there in the title. And those titular bells turn out to be coming from TARDIS, through a phone that's hidden behind a hatch in the door.
If you never noticed before, the St John Ambulance symbol is on the other door of the TARDIS, and as mentioned in previous meta, this comes from a religious organization that has embodied, over a thousand years, the Warrior/Healer dichotomy that first came to light in A Good Man Goes To War. And while it's true that Moffat got the symbol on the TARDIS when he took over from Davies, this is not really something new. The original TARDIS from the original programme back in 1963 also featured this symbol, and appropriately: these kinds of Police Boxes were in simultaneous service to St John Ambulance as they were to the police. This dichotomy has been embedded in the symbolism of the show from the very beginning.
Hatches, on the other hand, only began to feature prominently in the current era. We saw Amy looking at Madame Kovarian through a hatch through the first half of Series Six, only to have her own "near death experience" and end up in a hellish version of the afterlife, confined to giving birth while the Hatch Lady looks on. In Let's Kill Hitler, young Melody is constantly being rescued from rooms with hatches in the door -- the principal's office, the police station -- and in the Wedding the Doctor's big Reveal of escaping via the Tesselecta comes as he reappears from behind a Hatch-door as well, not to mention he's asking a "monk" to help him out.
Here we see The Monastery has a hatch in its door, too -- but look at the torches! They're attached to the stone walls via an inverted iron cross.
We descend into the bowels of the Order and find the Doctor, hooded and dressed as a Monk. Again, this harkens back to A Good Man Goes To War, where the Doctor gets out of control in his zealous to wreak vengeance on those who've hurt him. In the Asylum prequel he's visited by a Monk in a dream; in the eyestalk of a giant Dalek statue, it's Darla who tricks him while garbed in a monk's robes.
DOCTOR: Monks are not cool!
It's as a vainglorious monk that the Doctor is rejected by Clara. A change in outfits was definitely called for. And where will he find the means to effect this transformation? Why, behind a Hatch, that's where!
It's at this point we should probably step back and talk about alternative spiritual frameworks. In many myths around the world, there's a version of what's called The World Tree, an axis mundi that connects Above and Below, and Past and Future, to the Here and Now, in the Center. It's usually a Tree, like Yggdrasil in Norse mythology, but it could also be a Mountain, like Mount Olympus was to the Greeks. So, the top of the axis mundi reaches the Heavens, while the bottom digs down into the Underworld. From a psychological point of view, the Heavens represent our aspirations, our conscience, our ability to fly high and look at the big picture. The Heavens are where our Gods and Goddesses reside. The Underworld, on the other hand, is the place of the Subconscious, a place for monsters and our deepest desires -- but it's not necessarily "Hell" in the Christian sense, just a place where the "baser" aspects of the Self can find a home.
The TARDIS is often juxtaposed with World Tree imagery; as a vehicle that go any time and any place and make it "here and now" it certainly qualifies as fulfilling this function. Now, when the Doctor goes to change, he's trying to effect a change at the subconscious level -- he goes to the "underworld" of the TARDIS, below the console, which is the axis mundi of the TARDIS itself. Here, deep down, the axis mundi is Green, and the doors to the inner compartments were precious things like Bowties are kept are made of Wood. Even the box holding the Bowtie is made with wood, but lined with Gold fabric -- Gold being a color of Divinity.
Anyways, getting back to The Bells -- while Clara's making her call, we see a map of the London area done in blue, but with creeping red patches encroaching, vaguely leaf-shaped patches, calling back to the opening imagery of the episode where the whole world turns red. We then cut immediately to a shot of the Doctor getting off his horse, still in his Monk attire -- and what's foregrounded is bunch of roots and greenery cut up in a pile, begging for a juxtapositional reading: In both cases, we see the breaking of the World Tree, of it being cut away from its function as the source of connection.
On the one hand, we have The Great Intelligence, a disembodied consciousness, taking over the WiFi network and sticking people into a Cloud, which is likened to "immortality" or some kind of hellish afterlife. On the other hand, we have Christian monks amidst broken roots, the sort of men who cross their hearts at the mention of a "woman" as if she were some kind of "evil spirit."
There's another axis mundi in The Bells of Saint John. It's The Shard, a Mirror Mountain that stretches up to a cloud, where the souls of the lost are held. This axis mundi is not made of wood, not something that's alive and growning, but a thing of glass and metal, cold and lifeless, which dominates the London skyline.
Clouds, by the way, have been getting a bad rap as of late. In The Bells, the Cloud is a hellish afterlife for disembodied consciousness, all "made" in the "image" of The Great Intelligence, who's just as much a "head in a box" of a television screen as the people who've been hoovered up by the Spoonheads. Back at Christmas, the Doctor's Cloud is a place he retires to, to disengage from humanity and relationship, watching over us like a disinterested god -- and it's from this cloud that Clara falls to her death. In the Asylum, it's a Nano-Cloud that rewrites people into Dalek-puppets, a malaise that afflicts Amy until the Doctor helps fix her marriage.
The Cloud, which is separate from all below, is insufficient for an Afterlife metaphor in Doctor Who. To do it right, you need a Forest.
Charlotte Abigail Lux is at the heart of the Forest of the Dead in the Library, the Little Girl who would save everyone, no questions asked, while Madge Arwell is the Mother who can take an entire forest in her head and spread that life force out across the Milky Way, bringing her husband back from the dead -- or at the very least, from the lost.
Of the two, The Library is the more significant, because while the Androzani Forest is an abundant source of fuel, once it's melted down by acid rain, the Library is the repository of all books, all stories, and as we're all stories in the end the Library is where we'll end.
The Doctor says that the Cloud is a "living hell" for the mind trapped there, a fate worse than death, so one might think it's the concept of "afterlife" in the first place that's getting the bad rap here. I don't think so, considering what we know of the Library. The souls in the Cloud -- represented by boxes against a black wall -- don't know where they, they are separated from each other, stuck like flies in a web, crying out for help. Basically like Twitter.
The Library, on the other hand, is a place rendered in soft whites and golds at the end, where everyone knows where they are, with beloved friends, and all the books in the Universe to keep themselves occupied.
After Clara's first death and rebirth, the Doctor carries her upstairs to her bed, setting out cookies and flowers and water, almost as if she were Santa Claus, but mostly in a way that's reminescent of tucking in Amelia Pond at the end of The Big Bang.
While he's up in her Attic (another Upperworld motif) he finds her Travel Journal, colored Red and Blue, a place for her to store the memories of all the places she wants to see. The First Page is a Leaf, a token of the World Tree -- and the same kind and color of leaves we saw by the swingset in the Prequel, when Clara, as a Little Girl, meets the Doctor -- and where the Doctor gets the idea to cloister himself in a monastery until he hears from her!
The Leaf is a symbol of the kind of connection needed to travel between the worlds. It's last prominent appearance was in A Good Man Goes To War (the Headless Monk episode) where Lorna Bucket gave Amy a "prayer leaf" to reunite her with her daughter.
When Clara wakes up, she pops her head out a Hatch-like window, in the Attic, reaffirming the same motifs noted earlier.
It's also a callback to The Snowmen. In that episode, Clara waves the Doctor in from an upper-story window, bathed in golden light, and he agrees despite his intentions not to. Notably, he bites his thumb in spite of his hand, but what's interesting about that is that the gesture evokes Romeo and Juliet -- and don't forget, Clara called herself "Miss Montague" in that story, making her Romeo.
Now, however, the Doctor's got the upper hand, and their faux-balcony chat ends with Clara having to bite the bullet and come downstairs to chat up the Doctor. And yet, she's able to maintain control of the narrative, for the Doctor had intended to "play guard" outside the Blue Box while she slept, not for her to flirt her way downstairs.
Now, given that Clara's just had a rebirth, and is taking control of her story, I want to step back a second and focus on the other recurring symbol for "Ascension" in Doctor Who...
The Chair Agenda
"Everybody knows that everybody dies" -- River, voice-over on this shot
The Chair is a symbol of Ascension, which is likened to an experience of death and rebirth. This is where River sacrificed herself to save the 4,023 living people stuck in the Library, not to the mention the Little Girl, the Doctor, Lux, and the Library itself. Each of those people are reborn into the material world (with the exception of Donna they all wear black) while River and her crew are reborn into the matrix of the Library itself.
Interestingly, River's wearing a white astronaut suit and a black "crown of thorns" when she gives it up in the Chair.
But this wasn't even the first use of Chair symbolism in the story:
"Where am I?" -- Miss Evangelista's ghost
Another "death" and "afterlife" -- but here, Evangelista has not offered herself up in sacrifice; this was just an accident. She gets caught in the Wifi (yes, the Library has "Wifi") and brought to CAL -- where she's reborn. But it's messed up -- she's not dressed in white, but black, and her attributes have changed; it's an ascension gone wrong. "Evangelista" is of course a word with religious connotations.
"I can see the stars, the worlds beyond,
the Vortex of Time itself, and the whole of infinity.
Oh, but this is glorious!"
This is literally what the Cybermen were referring to in The Next Doctor when they talked about "Ascension." But what that "means" has been reversed -- Miss Hartigan looks for liberation and power, the opposite of self-sacrifice for the greater good. But still she rises, in a Dreadnaught class of Cybership, and it's only when the Doctor ascends in his Blue Balloon (the "Tardis") to hold a proverbial mirror to her face that she gives up the ghost and dies in a glorious act of salvation.
Earlier, as Hartigan first takes to the Chair, the Doctor says "the software is rewriting itself." She then speaks of this "machine of Joy" outside the parameters of Cyber-philosophy, which underlines the transcendent qualities of The Chair.
That this story is called "The Next Doctor" may be an indication it's taking a prophetic role in describing the era to follow. There's an awful lot here on memory and identity, including a scene where the Cyber-data-core is played back through a mirror.
RIVER: The Tardis is still burning. It's exploding
at every point in history. If you threw the Pandorica
into the explosion, right into the heart of the fire--
AMY: Then what?
RIVER: Then let there be Light.
The Pandorica Chair is a chair of rebirth. The Doctor is "reborn" here after getting killed by a Dalek, and Amy is "reborn" here after getting killed by Rory. By flying the Pandorica into the heart of the exploding TARDIS, the entire Universe is reborn. That's an act of alchemy, by the way -- a fusion of cube and sphere ("circling the square" it's called) as well as Reds and Blues to bring all the stars back into existence.
MADGE: Oh, this is marvellous. Oh, this is really quite wonderful.
Madge's Ascension takes place in the Chair that's made from the Forest itself -- the whole tower is grown. And sitting in that Chair, the shining crown on her head, all the stars pour into her head, and then they fly out into the Vortex, a literal ascension from a melting forest to give rebirth elsewhere in the Universe.
There's a beat earlier in the story pointing to this, when the Doctor takes the kids to the Sitting Room to show off the chairs he's "repaired" -- making them mobile, like chariots, since they don't have a television.
When the Arwell first get to Uncle Digory's, the Doctor shows them around, which is really a way of showing off the "repairs" he's made. The first place he takes them is the Sitting Room, but it's a bit pointless because there's no television. So what does he do? He populates the room with chairs that move. Movable chairs.
A Christmas Carol features the Doctor observing the chairs to figure out what Sardick's all about. The chairs all point away from the painting of the Father, because Sardick doesn't want to be like the Father, he wants to sing and play with the Fish. He wants stories. And, interestingly enough, it's from that big red chair that Sardick sees his life being rewritten, flashing before his very eyes.
Not so for Rory -- he and his father occupy twinned-chairs, and together they pilot a spaceship away to save the Earth. Afterwards, their roles are transposed: Brian becomes the traveler, while Rory ascends ladders to fix light bulbs. Not every transformation afforded by the Chair is completely mind-shattering.
(Also, the fact that the Doctor calls Rory's father "Pond" -- assigning him Amy's name, just like with Rory -- indicates that both Brian and Rory serve as "mirrors" in this story, insofar as Still Water is Nature's Mirror, thanks to The Curse of the Black Spot. So, these chair aren't just twinned, they're mirrored.)
Which brings us to Clara's chairs. In the Asylum, she has a Chair that's positioned under an aperture that represents an Eye -- and it's from this Chair that she sacrifices herself to save the Doctor, Amy and Rory in the end, all the while affirming her Identity as Oswin, not to mention her very humanity. It's from this chair that she first says "Run, you clever boy, and remember," just before looking straight into the camera and breaching the Fourth Wall. It's a great chair -- the same one used in The Doctor's Daughter, actually, when Jenny flew off to the stars after her death and rebirth.
The chair on the right, from The Snowmen, is more subtle. Clara's just awakened to church bells after her first ascent to the Doctor's cloud, dressed in white as for a proper rebirth. Sitting on the Chair (which has rungs like a ladder) is the bag holding her Governess dress, which she will use to effect her own transformation.
So, with all this in mind, what's just about the first thing Clara does after death and rebirth from getting spooned?
She lugs a Chair out to chat with the Doctor!
It's during this conversation that the Doctor realizes that Clara's not quite the same person she used to be. No longer computer-illiterate, she's now making Twitter jokes as a metaphor for the Monster of the Week. (I think Moffat made Clara computer-illiterate just to make a Twitter joke the basis for the Doctor's realization that Clara's been changed. The revelation that joke entails wouldn't work unless Clara really was almost completely unfamiliar with computers... as if she were lifted right out of the Victorian era.) And meanwhile, Clara's getting control of the narrative, as the Doctor is put in the position of explaining what the hell is going on in the first place.
The Doctor, by the way, has his own Chair. It's spotted by the Spoonhead across the street, tipping off Miss Kizlet and her minions.
And once that happens, everything goes crazy. All the lights in the neighborhood go on -- and as we all know, turning on the lights by turning on the people is a symbol of Enlightenment. Clara's rebirth and transformation is a form of Enlightenment.
But then all the other lights in London go out -- the world is being put to sleep -- in order to squash this nascent bright light, drastic measures have been taken. And therefore drastic measure have to be taken.
The Doctor and Clara are threatened by a Plane Crash, which is not a recurring motif in Doctor Who. Is it, however, a recurring motif in popular culture, especially since 9/11. My favorite, of course, is the "plane crash" over The Island, but there's also a lovely plane of the dead in Fringe, in Sherlock, and most recently in Revolution, which also features all the lights going out.
Now comes Clara's training!
They race into the box, and the Doctor explains in as few words as possible: It's a spaceship, bigger on the inside, yadda yadda. Clara wants to know if they've flown away from the plane. Not quite! They race down the aisle, but all the people in their chairs are unconscious.
CLARA: This is the plane, the actual plane! Are they all dead?
Which is great! Another play on the themes of afterlife and Ascension.
CLARA: What is going on? Is this real? Please tell me what is happening!
What's neat about this scene is how it functions metaphorically, on several levels. Of course there's an Ascension motif going on, a short hop up to a ship full of chairs filled with "dead people" (the astral plane) but it also gives the Doctor a chance to explain his identity, Clara a taste of flying by the seat of their pants, and even a bit of repetition of Oswin's dialogue from the Asylum. The Doctor turns off the WiFi, and all the people on the plane wake up (resurrected) while the Plane flies over a World Tree motif outside Clara's house, which is now a black spot on an island of light in a sea of darkness.
Clara's world has been turn upside-down.
For the Doctor's next trick, he shows off the Ship's ability to time-travel. Clara demands an explanation, and is told she'll get it over breakfast, but unlike certain Ponds she won't have to wait:
They materialize in the late morning, pass the hat, and take off for coffee and crumpets. (I love the guy in white, doing that whole "statue" schtick right next to the TARDIS, and how he's so put out by getting upstaged! And look at his top hot -- it's just like the Doctor's back in The Snowmen. He's a snowman-statue.) And then it's time to face off against their foes.
Oddly, Clara doesn't actually confront Kizlet, or the Great Intelligence for that matter. Well, oddly for other companions, but not necessarily for Clara. In Asylum she doesn't interact with the other Daleks, the Dalek Supreme, or the Emporer Dalek, and she doesn't interact with Simeon or the Great Intelligence in The Snowmen. She's been sidelined in all three of her appearances so far -- just facing off "henchmen" like Snowmen and Spoonheads, both of which are "mirror monsters."
Amy, on the other hand, interacted directly with Prisoner Zero, the Smilers and the "police state" in Beast Below, the Angels in Byzantium, and with Daleks, Bracewell and Churchill (yes, I know) in Victory -- but not the New Paradigm Daleks. In her last quintet she's interacting directly with Angels, the Shakri, Kahler Jex (but not the Gunslinger) and makes token appearances across the Dalek Parliament and Solomon, just like Rory.
On the other hand, at least Clara's not being called "The Girl." As in "The Girl Who Waited," or even "The Boy Who Waited" in the case of Rory at the end of The Big Bang. No, Clara's "The Woman Twice Dead," and I'm especially liking the "died twice" aspect of her epithet, not only because of the resurrection/rebirth theme, but also because it's not directly in relationship to The Doctor.
Oh, by the way, Clara's died twice in each of her first three episodes! In the Asylum she's converted into a Dalek, and then sacrifices herself to blow the place up. In The Snowmen she dies from falling off the cloud, then dies again after a brief medical intervention, on the heels of an earlier metaphorical "rebirth" when she transformed into Miss Montague, Governess.
So, when all is said and done, Clara's faced with a choice. Will she run away with the Doctor?
The decision is framed by reflections, featuring the appropriate imagery:
Clara's face, twinned against the TARDIS doors. The TARDIS and Leaves, superimposed over Clara's face, and numerous light bulbs. Here is true travel between the worlds, granted by the World Tree, the connection between Above and Below, Past and Future, into the Here and Now.
Remarkably, Clara chooses to stay. But in so doing, she has held a mirror up to the Doctor -- she's not waiting for him, he's waiting for her. As he has been since the beginning of the story, seeking out a quiet place where he could remember.
He waited in a religious setting. He made Art. Art that hangs over a Chair.
The Doctor Who Waited.