meta: Two Worlds - The Power of Three
Some long meta on The Power Of Three, looking at Amy and Rory's choice as a manifestation of the Monomyth/Hero's Journey; Eggs, Christmas and Bulbs (again); what lies on the other side of the Looking Glass; the power of numbers; other recurring motifs and symbolism.
This is my second go at this as LJ ate a portion of my original post. Grrr. This has been a real labour of love and I think it's the longest meta I've written so far this series. Who knew I'd find so much in it?
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I've talked many times before about how much of Moffat era Who is not concerned with a clear cut battle between forces of good and evil, but is instead focused around the idea of polarites and their unification. Usually there is some sort of break or disconnection between two polarities, and a healing or a symbolic union of the poles needs to take place before order/harmony can be restored. We see this in the finales of both series five and series six, in the form of Tardis/Pandorica (Above/Below) and Doctor/River (Order/Disorder, Life/Death and Love/Fear.)
In the Pond's penultimate episode, we see precisely this idea again. Amy is at at the centre, as the two forces of life in the stars (Above) and life on earth (Below) pull her in opposite directions. At the start of the episode these two lives are seen as mutually exclusive by Amy and Rory, they are split between the two and they have reached the point where they feel they cannot co-inhabit both worlds.
The Two Worlds
The issue of the boxes and the Shakri is secondary in this episode to the choice that Amy and Rory feel they have to make - the choice between travelling with the Doctor or living their ordinary lives. It is set as a key theme early on in the episode, with dialogue from Rory and with the symbolic presence of X motifs in the garden in the form of the trellis and the table legs. The X symbol is present at many different times throughout Moffat's Who, and when it appears it represents some type of mirroring event, a crossing over of forces, or the meeting of two opposites. Here it reflects the two lives of the Ponds in opposition (see my meta on Dinosaurs for further discussion of use of the the X motif, and also janie_aire's meta on Asylum here.)
Rory: We have two lives. Real life, and Doctor life. It's a bit like real life doesn't get much of a look in.
Amy: What do we do?
Rory: Choose.
In the idea of the Ponds being torn between Two Worlds, there are many many links to Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, or Monomyth. (In fact, it is possible to track Amy's entire journey with the Doctor with the Hero's Journey, but I will leave that to other wiser people). If you aren't familiar with the concept of the Monomyth, Campbell argues that myths from different cultures and across different time periods all share elements of a fundamental structure. This structure describes stages that the Hero, or protagonist of a story or myth passes through during the course of the story, and reflects different aspects of human experience and the human journey through life. All stories and myths contain some stages of the Journey, but not necessarily all of them. Moffat is a master of telling the stages of the Heroic Journey out of order. (I will just take a moment here to do a cheeky pimp of my analysis of the Hero's Journey as found in the film Labyrinth which isn't entirely irrelevant, as it contains a decription of the different stages of the Heroic Journey at the start ;)
So, in a very very short and inadequate summary of the structure - the Hero (Amy) will undergo a process where they step into some sort of Otherworld or supernatural realm, or into a new and completely unfamiliar stage or territory in their life (the Doctor's world). Once there, there are various stages that they pass through and many challenges to be met (see:the whole of series five and six), and ultimately they will emerge transformed back into the Ordinary World. With Amy, she is now reaching the end of her Heroic Journey with the Doctor. She emerged back into the Ordinary World at the end of last series, symbolised by the Doctor giving her and Rory the house with the blue doors, and telling her there was a bigger adventure to be had there on Earth. Now series seven has shown her struggle to adapt and balance these two worlds. In Campbell's structure he calls the penultimate stage of the journey the Master of Two Worlds. This stage of the Journey is where the Hero has returned home from the Otherworld to their everyday reality. Their challenge is to reconcile the wisdom they have gained in the Otherworld/the new and unfamiliar territory they negotiated, with the Ordinary World they now live in. Campbell says this:
Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the causal deep and back-not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other-is the talent of the master.
They key to this, as Campbell suggests, is to strike a balance between these two worlds, to be able to pass freely between one and the other while at the same time participating and living happily in both. The trick is to not see the worlds as mutually exclusive. Or in terms of Moffat's Who, to unite the two polarities into one whole. For a long time now, Rory has represented the pull of home life for Amy, and the Doctor has represented the pull of real life, so let's explore that idea.
Rory's Choice
Rory has always been a grounding force in Amy's life. He is her green anchor (The Girl Who Waited), the one who desires to settle down with a family (Amy's Choice). If the Doctor is the stars, then Rory is the Earth. Rory represents home, stillness, the pull of the everyday, just as the Doctor represents the vast universe out there, the unfamiliar and the pull to journey onwards. Rory has always been the more reluctant of the two Ponds, and we saw this play out in the last series, when his disillusionment grew with the Doctor's life and he ended up wanting to leave. I've been reading Rory as still disillusioned this series, as wanting to stop again, as wanting Amy to settle. But I see now that I had him all wrong. Rory has been on his own journey lately.
Back when I wrote meta on Asylum, I was somewhat stumped by the fact that when they are transported down to the planet Rory is symbolically marked as on a different journey to Amy and the Doctor. This is by virtue of the fact that he is transported upside down unlike the other two, and ends up in the depths of the Asylum (the symbolic Underworld) - before Amy and the Doctor. Things have been happening fast for Rory this series. He's the first down into the Asylum, and has to negotiate it alone, symbolically confronting the issue of Amy's fertility ("eggs?"). After this Underworld experience, in Dinosaurs, he's split up from Amy and ends up acting as the Doctor's primary companion. He exhibits understanding of a number of concepts and he explains things to his father - who takes the place that Rory once occupied, just as Rory steps into the place Amy once occupied (while Amy gets companions of her own.) Amy has long been a mirror of the Doctor, and in Dinosaurs we see Rory also mirrored to the Doctor as they stand on either side of the X Motif doors to Solomon's ship, each manifesting their healer/warrior sides. In A Town Called Mercy, Rory's reaction to the issue of Kahler-Jex is to let the gunslinger have him. This also had me stumped as it seems so very out of character. However, his reaction, which actually comes before the Doctor's similar reaction - like a premonition - makes Rory a mirror of the dark side of the Doctor as well as the healer/warrior side. Not to mention the kissing, something Amy and the Doctor have long shared as a symbol of affection and trust, with their forehead kisses. Need I mention that kisses are symbolised in writing by the letter "X"?
So, through all of this, Rory has made a mini-journey this series; he's journeyed into the Underworld alone, acted as primary companion, been mirrored to the healer, warrior and dark sides of the Doctor, is sharing intimacy with the Doctor that is a sign of trust - and has finally caught up with Amy in this respect in terms of the journey she has taken in her relationship with the Doctor. It culminates in his response to Amy at the start of the episode when he agrees that they don't have to choose between the Doctor and real life today.
Something else to note; you'll probably have noticed an awful lot of lens flare in this episode. The majority of the lens flare occurs in the hospital, in the scenes with Rory, and considering the journey Rory has been on it's very reminiscent of this moment in the Eleventh Hour when Amy makes the decision to trust the Doctor.
So the lens flare visually nods back to that moment and suggests Rory has arrived at a place where he trusts the Doctor. Then at the climax of the episode in the spaceship, he admits to Amy "I'm gonna miss this". Rory has now arrived at the same place as Amy - he doesn't want to give up the travelling, he too is torn between the two worlds.
The Doctor's Choice
But it's not just Rory who needs to change something, who needs to reach out. As the other pole, the side representing Amy's desire to journey to the stars, the Doctor also has work to do. Rory has moved towards the Otherworld of the Doctor, and now the Doctor needs to move towards the Ordinary World. In previous episodes, we have seen the Doctor really beginning to manifest his dark side, due to the lack of a constant companion - he has lingered too long alone in his Otherworld, and he needs to re-ground himself in the world of companions who can mirror back to him what is really important. We see, early in the episode, his struggle to do this, to adapt to normal life. He runs away at first, for months on end, because he isn't ready. Then he takes Amy and Rory away with him for several weeks. It's only after he looks into the mirror of Brian and is confronted with the truth, that he is able to stay. Brian mirrors back to him the truth of what happened to his previous companions - what always happens to his companions. Then the Doctor must realise that he doesn't know how, when or why Amy and Rory will finally leave him, leading to the conversation with Amy in her garden where tells her that he misses her and would like to stay with them for a while.
He is aware now that Amy is coming to the end of her journey with him, and recognises the need to compromise, to step into her world for a while now that Amy and Rory cannot travel with him all the time. It's this act of the Doctor reaching out from his own world, along with the place Rory has finally arrived at that allows both the Doctor to regain his persepctive and stop manifesting his dark side (we don't see it in this ep,) and allows Amy to choose both worlds at once.
Amy's Choice
Amy: I don't know if I can have both
Doctor: Why?
Amy: Because they pull at each other. Because they pull at me. And because the travelling is starting to feel like running away.
In Dinosaurs, Amy was mirrored to Nefertiti a number of times, and Nefertiti named herself as "The Lady of Two Lands." Amy has always been torn between her two worlds, right from series five where we see this issue particularly played out in her relationship with Rory and in Amy's Choice. As the two poles, the Doctor's and Rory's actions, enable Amy to do what she has always really wanted to do, and what - as the Hero of the journey - is her destiny; to reconcile the two worlds and to choose them both, to hold both of them in balance.
After the Doctor has decided to stay with them for a while, we see the three of them sharing a meal of fishfingers and custard. The meal is very important - it's a type of communion meal, the first one after his regeneration that the Doctor shared with little Amelia. It has since become a symbol of the trust and the relationship between them. Amy swears on fishfingers and custard in The Impossible Astronaut; in Let's Kill Hitler, the little Amelia of the Tardis Voice Interface mentions it as something that will make the Doctor better, thus giving him the key to understanding that River can save him with her regenerative energy. So it's highly significant that here the meal is shared between the three of them rather than just two; it says that now the bond of trust and of relationship is fully sealed between them, and it foreshadows the full unification of their two worlds at the end of the episode. Appropriately, it's also a meal of combining opposites.
Doctor: Pudding, yet savoury. Sound familiar?
This is the real power of three, mastery of both the otherworld and the ordinary world into one state of being, where both Amy and Rory can now decide to pass freely between the two of them. The power of three is unifying the two poles into something that is much more than the sum of its parts. They break the fourth wall to tell us this.
But what next if we follow the Hero's Journey? The final stage of the Monomyth is called the Freedom to Live. After the Hero has mastered both worlds, they are able to live fully in the moment, they understand the nature of what they have gained from their journey. There is no fear of death, and no fear of what either the past or the future may bring. What final act of fearlessness will we see from Amy and/or Rory? How will they express their freedom from the fear of death?
Brian: Go save every world you can find.
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Eggs, Christmas and Bulbs
The three themes of eggs, lights and christmas are in this episode again. There's an egg box on the mantlepiece, on the left hand side under the photo of Amy, Rory and the Doctor (an image I will come back to later, as there's other important things about it as well.) We also have an egg-headed baddie in the form of the Shakri interface - doesn't his head look very much like a cracked egg?
We also have a mention of eggs, with Brian suggesting "alien eggs" as one of the things the cubes could be. We also get dialogue from the Doctor that is suggestive of the cubes being eggs:
Doctor: I need to use your kitchen as a lab, cook up some cubes, see what happens.
And the cubes are eggs of sorts - they have a gestation period, a set countdown until they release their contents. The Ponds, the Doctor and UNIT wait anxiously as they gestate, waiting to see what they will birth. What they birth in the end is not life, but death. We have seen the idea of eggs being broken/destroyed throughout the series so far, that idea of life in death/death in life.
We've got Christmas again - part of the episode actually occurs in December, and we get a physical image of a Christmas tree and Christmas music playing. The Christmas section of the ep is the first time where we see the little girl, along with the medical staff with black cubed mouths (healers/warriors.) So it's at the Christmas part of the episode that we discover that the boxes have another agenda.
Then there's the lights. We've had flickering blubs, exploding bulbs and broken bulbs. Now we have flashing bulbs in the form of fairy lights in the Pond's home. There are non-flashing ones in various places around their home too, but the flashing ones are most prominent in the scene where Brian acts as a mirror of the truth when he asks the Doctor to tell him what happened to his other companions. We see them in the background of both shots, Brian's and the Doctor's, and also in the shot of the Ponds framed in-between them.
Then, out in the garden, as the Doctor tells Amy he wishes to stay with them, there are flashing lights in the background.
Are the flickering lights linked to revelation of truth? Note, there were flickering lights around the mirror in Asylum before Amy saw the truth of what her make-up artist was; a broken bulb takes Brian to the truth of what Amy and Rory's life is like; bulbs provide the Doctor with the clue that things aren't right in Mercy. It seems counter intuitive that darkness should represent truth, because we always talk of shining a light onto things when we want to see things clearly. But Moffat era Who has shown time and time again that the most profound truth can be found by looking into the darkness within.
The Time Vortex of the opening credits is now undeniably getting darker and darker each week. The lights are flickering. Is it foreshadowing the end of the Ponds, their lights going out, the final truth to be found in death, the revelation of the final truth of their destiny?
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The Ship On the Other Side
Through the Looking Glass, over on the Other Side is the Shakri ship. Filled with the bodies of hospital patients unconscious on slabs, it could be a mortuary, a tomb. The colours are dark, the baddie looks like death. Amy, Rory, the Doctor and Brian have passed over to the Other Side.
In the centre of the ship is an interesting symbol. It has twelve spokes, with three prongs at the end of each one. The fact that it has twelve spokes is suggestive of a clock, of Time lying at the centre of the ship. It is suggestive of someone else with a blue ship, who travels the Universe dispensing justice of a sort, with Time at the centre of that ship. Someone who symbolically looks into the mirror and sees the Shakri (reminiscent of the moment in The God Complex, where the Doctor looks in the mirror through a sheet of glass with water running down it, and into the face of the Minotaur.) Someone who is also a myth, a legend told in fairy tales (A Good Man.) So, the Shakri is the Doctor.
There's a similarity to this symbol below, that doesn't have loads of significance but that I can't let pass, because I love all things runic. While this symbol below is eight spoked rather than twelve spoked, there is a definite resemblance here. This is the Aegishjalmr, translated as the Helm of Awe or Helm of Terror. It is what's known as a bind-rune, that is several runes bound together into one symbol. It is supposed to confer invincibility, and invisibilty.
We see the three pronged symbol in other places on the ship too. Obviously, this refers back to the idea of the the power of three, of Amy, Rory and the Doctor. But the symbol also a trident. The trident was the tool used by Poseidon/Neptune in order to create water sources, or to whip up storms, and so it has a strong association with the element of water. The Earth as viewed from the dimension the Shakri ship is in, is surrounded by a blue shimmer like water. The Looking Glass they pass through in the lift/portal shimmers like water when touched.
Water is nature's mirror, and we have seen water used in mirroring events before in Moffat's Who - in the still point of Lake Silencio, and in The God Complex. The ship is, again, a mirror.
So what to make of all this? The mirroring here is strong enough to equate the Shakri to the Doctor. If all this symbolism is read as foreshadowing for the mid-series finale...well it doesn't look good. The Doctor is death - he will bring death - travelling with him in his ship is to be in a house of death. Rory crosses over first to the Other Side, with Amy following afterwards, hand in hand with the Doctor.
Doctor: I stole your childhood and now I've led you by the hand to your death.
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The Power of Seven
What is it with the number seven? Rory comes from behind door number seven in Day of the Moon. In the God Complex, Amy's room is number seven.
Asylum, the exit from the room of zombies is through door number seven (look closely.). There's a seven on the wall just after the Doctor sets off to rescue Oswin. Kudos goes to janie_aire for spotting these.
In this ep, the cubes count down from seven. There are seven transmitters located across the world, and the Shakri always travel in groups of seven. Seven ships work to coordinate the attack on Earth.
Doctor: Seven stations, seven minutes. Why's that important?
Doctor: A worm-hole bridging two dimensions. Seven of them hitched onto this planet.
So from the occasions above, seven is the door to death/rebirth, the door to the deepest fears, the door to the Underworld and the path to revelation of (unpleasant) truth. It's the number of our antagonist in this ep. An antangonist woh is mirrored to the Doctor. Seven isn't good. But it's the only pathway through to the next bit of the journey - suffering/death have to be endured in order to progress.
Doctor: Seven wonders of the world. Seven streams of the River Ota. Seven sides of a cube.
It's worth mentioning here that Hiroshima is located on the River Ota, and that "Seven Streams of the River Ota" is a play about Hiroshima by Robert Lepage. It mention is deliberate. Its key themes are death and survival. One critic has this to say about it:
His drama is about survivors. But it is also about the way in which the loneliness of the survivors, the impossibility of telling others what it was like to be where they have been, has permeated all sensory experience with uncertainty and melancholy.
A survivor. Sound familiar?
Other symbolism and odds and ends.
This is just all the bits I couldn't tie up neatly into the other sections.
We've had boxes before in Moffat era Who.There's the black boxes of the Pandorica, the perfect prison the American government is building for the Doctor in Day of the Moon. There's the little boxes that contain the Timelord distress signal in The Doctor's Wfe. And there's the both empty and full boxes used to contain the heads of the Headless Monks in A Good Man and The Wedding. Here we've got the black cubes, and we see the pattern repeated over and over in the ep in tesselated squares of the clinmbing frame, the TV, the shelves in Rory and Amy's room (containing masks within), and at UNIT.
Oh, and remember how in series 5 a Doctor in a box provided the resolution to saving Amy by putting her in a box? Here's a Brian in a box breaking the fourth wall, who will later provide the resultion to the episode, by vocalising what the Ponds all know - that they can have both worlds at once.
We have the theme of eyes again, particularly the image of one of the Doctor's eyes being either highlighted or obscured. I thought it was interesting that we have seen a lot of the Doctor closing one eye this series, but the last time he used some sort of magnifier was when he also stayed with someone on earth and tried to live the normal human life - in Closing Time.
We see the idea of a lift as a gateway between two different realities in Night Terrors and Closing Time in series 6. Here it's the Looking Glass, the doorway between the worlds. It's covered in the X motif, symbolising that we are about to cross from one dimension to another.
The mantlepiece...so often seen as the heart of the home by virtue of it surrounding the hearth, here we see links to other previous episodes and themes There's a mirror - mirroring being one of the key themes of the Moffat era. We've got a clown - representing the trickster archetype that the Doctor often manifests. There's a dinosaur for Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, a snow globe like the Doctor's in The Rebel Flesh. We also have a red and blue bottle - key colours of the Moffat era. Lastly, there's an egg box and some decorative eggs right underneath the photo of Amy, Rory and the Doctor.
Lastly, a box, a hand and fire. All symbols in Moffat era Who.
That's it folks. Thanks for reading.