meta: The Soul Is Made of Stories - The Rings of Akhaten...
...in which Who is totally aware of itself as myth, the World Tree is in play, the Leaf is life and death and life again, Clara eats the fruit of the Otherworld and is a contradiction, and the Doctor is a Sun God.
*
Wow. I loved this episode so much, because it links so strongly into something I believe about Who and the way that I read it: Who is myth, and is self-aware of itself as a modern myth. Right from the first episode with the 11th Doctor we are told that we are to read this era of Who as myth.
There is still a need for myth in the modern world today - stories that hold up a mirror to us so we can see ourselves more clearly, that hold up a looking glass so we can step through and be initiated into new ways of being; yarns that hold our history and our memories; tales that reflect back the world around us, so we can understand it better. These stories that act as modern myth are multi-layered, as Elisi explains in this fantastic post, that digs down through the different layers of meaning in Doctor Who
Here we have an episode, where more than ever before we are being told that stories, myths, memories are the very thing that we are made up of, and like for the people of the planetary system, they are the most valuable currency we have. The Doctor himself is explicit about this:
Doctor: The soul is made of stories.
The Leaf and the World Tree
For quite a while now we have seen the mythic symbol of the World Tree employed in Moffat’s Who. The World Tree is a symbol present in the mythologies of many cultures, usually as a cosmological model for understanding the whole of reality. In many cultures it is seen as being comprised of the polarities of an Above/Upperworld and Below/Underworld, along with all the associations which we tie into those ideas. Moffat's Who has often been concerned with the idea of disconnection between the opposite ends of the Tree, and the idea of polarities needing to be unified - the union of opposites.
So, knowing we are working with the symbol of the World Tree, the Leaf itself is a powerful symbol. As janie_aire says in her meta on The Bells of Saint John, the last outing of a leaf as a symbol was in A Good Man Goes to War, with the prayer leaf given by Lorna Bucket to Amy. The leaf in AGMGTW is a talisman for Amy’s journey to find Melody and it is a tool of realisation. Here it facilitates the revelation of previously secret knowledge; bringing Amy and Rory from unknowing into knowing as the means by which they learn River is their daughter. So as Janie says:
“The leaf is the symbol of the kind of connection needed to travel between the worlds.”
The first three shots of the show are of leaves, so we know from the start it's vitally important;here are the shots: in the road, on the grass, blowing past a tree.
The Leaf is born from the tree and is a part of the tree, however it is also able to be separate from the tree and die while the tree itself still lives. This makes it a fantastic symbol for a life/a soul; if reality can be conceived of as a huge tree, then we are the leaves upon it. When we die, our leaf falls from the branch to the ground where it rots away and breaks down into leaf mulch. However, this isn't all that happens - the leaf mulch provides nourishment for the roots of the tree itself, sustaining its growth, its energy being recycled and reborn in the growth of the tree.
So, the Leaf represents the cycle of life, of birth and growth coming out of death, it represents the journey of the soul - and as such it's a symbol of unification of the two fundamental opposites, Life and Death. It's also a near death experience that brings Clara's parents together, resulting in her life. The lesson of the Leaf, as we will see later in the episode, is that Death is not an end. It tells us that in fact Death opens the Doorway to another realm of possibility - and infinite realm (in this case the energy of Clara's mother's life unlived.) All this, we are told with the first 4 shots of the show, the leaves that have fallen, the tree they came from and here we have the fourth shot of the show: the gateway opening, symbolising the gateway from life to death to life.
So, as janie said, the Leaf is also a symbol of the connection needed to travel between the worlds. Here Leaf is the symbol of the journey made between Life and Death, between Past and Future, between memory and potential, between the created and the uncreated. And what is this Leaf full of? Stories.
Clara: Still hungry? Well I’ve brought something for you.. This. The most important leaf in human history. It’s full of stories, full of history, and full of a future that never got lived. Days that should have been but never were. Passed on to me. This leaf isn’t just the past, it’s a whole future that never happened. There are millions and billions of unlived days for every day we live, an infinity, all the days that never came - and these are all my mum’s
What does myth do? It helps us to make the journey.
*
A couple of things before I get into the rest of this, things that are important to point out as I'll come back to them at a couple of points:
Squaring the Circle and Song/Sound
Believe me now when I say that the symbol of the circle in the square is all over Moffat era Who. Really, it is, from the very beginning, and it’s everywhere in this episode too. Squaring the circle is something that is a mathematical impossibility, it's a symbol of doing the impossible. It represents doing the seemingly impossible, unifying the opposites.
The symbol is all over the place in the market. In the second shot below, a lantern pints - arrow like - to the very centre of the circle.
The Sun Singers of Akhet stand on a circle in a square while singing to the God. The invite to the event contains the symbol.
This union of opposites will become an idea very much in play during the final battle with the Sun God.
Sound is also important in this episode. Lullabies are sung to the Old God in order to keep him asleep - we have a whole religious order devoted to continuing the Long Song - The Sun Singers of Akhet.
Doctor: They’re singing to the mummy in the temple, they call it the Old God, sometimes Grandfather.
Clara: What are they singing?
Doctor: An old song, a lullaby without end. To feed the old god, keep him asleep. It’s been going for millions of years, chorister handing over to chorister, generation after generation after generation.
Songs are also a means of transmitting stories, Merry knows all the songs of her people. The whole of the Temple is based on sound - it's a place of song and it works to channel the sound to keep the God asleep. The door lock works on the basis of sound - changing pitch/frequency in order to keep locked to intruders work on the basis of sound. The Vigil fire some sort of energy wave out of their mouths, which has the power to knock a person off their feet. Songs feature prominently as a central part of the episode.
*
Clara
Clara is a mirror of both the Doctor and Merry. Interesting shot here….two hearts are visible on Clara’s dress, one either side of her chest. Later the Doctor crosses both his hearts.
We are back with the colour scheme of red and blue for our companions, just like in the Amy and Rory era. Clara is reminiscent of Amy in a few ways. The grown up Clara wears a duffel coat like the child Amelia. The child Clara also wears red wellies like the young Amelia. Just like in Amy’s era, the Docotr is a force that has been in Clara’s life since very very early on - although in this case, since even before her conception.
Clara's mother is called Ellie Ravenwood. Names are important in Who and the maiden name is especially interesting here. The raven, being a carrion eater, is a symbol of Death in many many cultures. As such it is seen as a creature that straddles 2 worlds, because it literally has the ability to create its own life out of the death of other things, within its own body. It is a creature that is seen to occupy both the world of the Living and of the Dead - and that has the ability to pass between them freely. Of course the second part of the name - wood - links in with the world tree idea. It’s also linked to the afterlife - janie_aire points out in her meta on the first episode, the use of the forest as an afterlife metaphor as per the wallpaper in Cal’s world, the idea of the Forest of the Dead and in the forest in The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe where the Souls of the trees ascend to their own afterlife. There is also the forest of the series 5 Angels episodes, where the Crack opens in the forest on board the ship, and the clerics literally walk into the light. So, bearing in mind the role of the leaf in vanquishing the Sun God through both the life and death of Ellie Ravenwood, it's a really apt name.
But...back to Clara and the journey she's on. She's now taken the step of travelling with the Doctor, and on the planet, the Doctor offers her a fruit from a basket. This is reminiscent of the offering of the apple to Eve, and the first step taken towards self-knowledge (remember in my Bells of Sain John meta I was talking about the idea of Know Thyself in relation to Clara). It also has links to the adult Amy Pond's first meeting with the Doctor, him offering her the apple which reminded her of her mother in order to win her trust.
Christian mythlogy aside, this idea of eating the fruit of a strange world is a very fairytale idea. In fairy stories where the protagonist ends up in the Otherworld or the Land of Faery, whether accidentally or on a Quest, to eat of the fruit of these worlds means that they become trapped there, either for a short or long time, or sometimes forever, and it always always changes them. This offering of the fruit to of Clara is a moment of initiation; she has taken the step into the strange Otherworld of the Doctor, and now she needs to decide whether she will stay. He decision is already made though, because she bites into the fruit before he even confirms it is safe - her trust has already been offered and she doesn't think of the consequences of this decision for her life. Because the thing is, once you enter the world of Faery and eat of the fruit, you never really leave - even if you manage to physically leave. In stories of people trapped in the world of Faery, sometimes they return to find that years and years have passed by in the real world and everything they have ever known has died away. Even for those who do escape into their own time, the Otherworld never really leaves them and they pine for it. In the end, eating the fruit can change you forever (Martha), it can trap you in another world or time (Rose, Amy/Rory), it can take you to your death (River) or else it can leave you with a legacy inside your very body that you will carry until you die (Donna). Clara doesn’t like the taste of the fruit and puts it back in the basket - but the bite has been taken.
The Doctor, meanwhile, munches on the fruit easily later - because he belongs to this Otherworld where the fruit grows - it's his world.
After this initiation, Clara begins to take on the role of the Doctor - as the person who cannot stand by and watch children cry. She sees a child, scared and running away and goes after her to help. However, she soon becomes a mirror of Merry as well. They hide behind the Tardis together, and Clara shares her story of being a frightened little girl with Merry, who is also a frightened little girl.
Thing is, Merry was a child chosen from birth for a very special task - to be a vessel for stories and history, and to sing the Song that makes the God sleep. There are further links to Christian iconography here, her name is reminiscent of Mary, and she is robed and wears a halo-like crown.
So, if Clara is mirroring her, what does this say about Clara? She too, was “chosen” from before her birth, as we see in this ep, for the special task of being the Doctor’s companion, by the Doctor. She is a vessel for the stories of her mother. All this ties into my idea that there is a reversal going on this series; where the Doctor has previously been presented as the one who is Divine, as the Saviour he is now the one who clears the way for Clara.
It's kind of confirmed by this; there’s a very interesting shot of Clara and Merry reaching out to each other which is reminiscent of this piece of art, The Creation of Adam. It’s the hand of the divine touching the hand of Adam, imparting the spark of life. The power to control the God is symbolically passed on from Merry to Clara.
Later, as the Doctor battles the Sun God, Merry and Clara stand together in the amphitheatre. Merry’s song at this stage is a song about waking up - the polar opposite to the earlier song of going to sleep. Waking up is somewhat akin to the idea of remembering - we are said to awaken from forgetfulness. After Merry has sung the Song and the Sun God dies and is reborn, Clara remembers the story of the Leaf, she wakes up into her memories of her parents and into the knowledge of how to save everyone.
Why Clara worries me
See, my feelings about Clara are so very mixed. I feel like I'm being presented with all this this symbolism around her to do with the divine, the messiah, turning the role of the Doctor on its head. However, the plotty hints and the framing of some shots are suggesting that there is something dark, wrong, off about her - I’m becoming more convinced that Clara could be a weapon, or means by which the Doctor is led into a trap. Talk about a unification of opposites.
Her 23rd year is missing - could she have been taken away, blueprints made of her and thrown backwards and forwards in time in order to lead the Doctor to the real Clara? Remember the moment in The Snowmen when he looks right at her as he talks about the Ice Woman being "just a blueprint."? Is this Clara herself a blueprint? The real Clara held captive somewhere, a parallel to Amy's story in series 6a?
We get an unusual framing of a shot, with Clara seen through some piping when she looks for Merry in the abandoned building. Not long after The Vigil are also framed through the piping as they pass by. The Vigil are merely tools, puppets of a greater power - puppets of something God-like.
There’s the Tardis too. Clara can’t get in - not unusual in and of itself - we haven’t seen this Clara be given a key yet. But we are given a shot framed very deliberately so that the Tardis looms threateningly.
And then Clara states
I don’t think it likes me.
Lastly: the Tardis isn’t translating alien voices for Clara. Remember how I said sound was very important in this episode. Listen to the marketplace. It’s filled with the sounds of alien voices - we cannot understand them, and neither can she until the Doctor translates for her.
So what is she? She's impossible.
*
The Doctor
The Doctor is usually reluctant to talk about his family, yet here he identifies himself as a Grandfather - and this is in an episode where the central foe is referred to as “grandfather”.
Clara: You’ve been here before?
Doctor: Yes yes yes, I came here a long time ago with my granddaughter.
So we have a mirroring between the Doctor and the God who is actually a Sun God - because he's literally the sun that the system revolves around. We've seen Egyptian symbology already this series - remember how Clara’s necklace is reminiscent of the symbol of the Sun God (I talked about it in my meta for the first ep.) ? It's appropriate then that the temple itself is a pyramid. To the ancient Egyptians, the shape of the pyramid symbolised the rays of the sun, and many of their pyramids were named in ways that referred to its light. Their primary God, Ra, was the God of the Sun.
Anyways, we have the Doctor presented as a mirror to the Sun God through him naming himself as a grandfather, and this is further confirmed by the way we get the sphere of the Sun God reflected in the eye of the Doctor.
There are parallels here - unpleasant ones for the Doctor This is a being that lives on the memories and feelings of others, that consumes them in its greed. Long ago, in The Doctor the Widow and the Wardrobe, we heard the Doctor talk about how he can’t really feel any more, at least not like he used to. His companions are the ones who he sees the wonder of the Universe reflected in - in a way their lives, their emotions, their experiences, their emotions nourish him. When he doesn't travel with a companion he withers away, becomes a shadow of himself and forgets his purpose.
He attempts to feed the Sun God with himself, in a speech which is all about convergence of opposites, about unifying them as one (as with the circle in the square symbol.)
Doctor: You feed on them, on the memory of love and loss, and birth and death, and joy and sorrow, so…so…come on then - take mine. Take my memories. I hope you’ve got a big appetite, because I’ve lived a long life and I’ve seen a few things. I walked away from the last great Time War, I marked the passing of the Time Lords, and I saw the birth of the Universe and I watched as Time ran out, moment by moment until nothing remained. No time, no space, just me. I walked in Universes where the laws of physics were devised by the mind of a madman. I watched Universes freeze and creations burn. I have seen things you wouldn’t believe, I have lost things you will never understand, and I know things - secrets that must never be told, knowledge that must never be spoken, knowledge that will make parasite gods blaze. So come on then! Take it! Take it all baby! Have it! You have it all!
The Doctor outlines different emotional experiences that we usually see as the opposite of each other, but that this God takes all of, love and loss and birth and death, joy and sorrow. He speaks of the death of the Time Lords and the death of Time, but also of the birth of the Universe. He talks of both freezing and burning, of something logical (laws of physics), created by the illogical (a madman.) These contradictions are held in his memories, and he offers them to the Sun God from his hearts.
However, this is nothing new to this God - the Doctor as a mirror of him, as a Lonely God himself, as something akin to him cannot offer the God anything that can overcome it. In a Big Bang/Big Crunch like moment, the Sun God collapses in on itself but is reborn again hungrier than ever.
What Clara offers this God is also a contradiction in itself. Her leaf is the symbol of chance occurrences leading to one precise moment and one life lived. It is the symbol of her mother’s death. The Doctor, while he manifests the life/death dichotomy as a being that can self resurrect, is also immortal due to his regenerations (I think we can safely assume he won’t be limited in them and that the series will continue long after his final regeneration.) He doesn't truly know Death itself. The Sun God is also, in theory, immortal as long as it can continue to feed. However, mortal Clara offers the God something that has both Life and Death bound up in it, something that symbolises both her mother’s life and her mother’s death. It's something that contains the essence of a very definite ending, however as I spoke about in the section about the symbol of the Leaf way up there at the top of this piece, it also contains the idea of rebirth and the afterlife. What Clara tells the Sun God is that Death confers a sort of immortality itself, because all the days unlived are endless and infinite in their possibility. This is what lies on the other side of the door that we see opening at the start of the episode - an endless realm of possibility. Clara is the only one of the two of them who can vanquish the God, because she holds the symbol of true death and true rebirth, something the Doctor cannot have until he lets go and dies completely She is the Saviour, and in this act she sidelines the role of the Doctor as Saviour God. Again.
I know there's loads more, but I'm going to leave it here. Thank you for reading.
*
Wow. I loved this episode so much, because it links so strongly into something I believe about Who and the way that I read it: Who is myth, and is self-aware of itself as a modern myth. Right from the first episode with the 11th Doctor we are told that we are to read this era of Who as myth.
There is still a need for myth in the modern world today - stories that hold up a mirror to us so we can see ourselves more clearly, that hold up a looking glass so we can step through and be initiated into new ways of being; yarns that hold our history and our memories; tales that reflect back the world around us, so we can understand it better. These stories that act as modern myth are multi-layered, as Elisi explains in this fantastic post, that digs down through the different layers of meaning in Doctor Who
Here we have an episode, where more than ever before we are being told that stories, myths, memories are the very thing that we are made up of, and like for the people of the planetary system, they are the most valuable currency we have. The Doctor himself is explicit about this:
Doctor: The soul is made of stories.
The Leaf and the World Tree
For quite a while now we have seen the mythic symbol of the World Tree employed in Moffat’s Who. The World Tree is a symbol present in the mythologies of many cultures, usually as a cosmological model for understanding the whole of reality. In many cultures it is seen as being comprised of the polarities of an Above/Upperworld and Below/Underworld, along with all the associations which we tie into those ideas. Moffat's Who has often been concerned with the idea of disconnection between the opposite ends of the Tree, and the idea of polarities needing to be unified - the union of opposites.
So, knowing we are working with the symbol of the World Tree, the Leaf itself is a powerful symbol. As janie_aire says in her meta on The Bells of Saint John, the last outing of a leaf as a symbol was in A Good Man Goes to War, with the prayer leaf given by Lorna Bucket to Amy. The leaf in AGMGTW is a talisman for Amy’s journey to find Melody and it is a tool of realisation. Here it facilitates the revelation of previously secret knowledge; bringing Amy and Rory from unknowing into knowing as the means by which they learn River is their daughter. So as Janie says:
“The leaf is the symbol of the kind of connection needed to travel between the worlds.”
The first three shots of the show are of leaves, so we know from the start it's vitally important;here are the shots: in the road, on the grass, blowing past a tree.
The Leaf is born from the tree and is a part of the tree, however it is also able to be separate from the tree and die while the tree itself still lives. This makes it a fantastic symbol for a life/a soul; if reality can be conceived of as a huge tree, then we are the leaves upon it. When we die, our leaf falls from the branch to the ground where it rots away and breaks down into leaf mulch. However, this isn't all that happens - the leaf mulch provides nourishment for the roots of the tree itself, sustaining its growth, its energy being recycled and reborn in the growth of the tree.
So, the Leaf represents the cycle of life, of birth and growth coming out of death, it represents the journey of the soul - and as such it's a symbol of unification of the two fundamental opposites, Life and Death. It's also a near death experience that brings Clara's parents together, resulting in her life. The lesson of the Leaf, as we will see later in the episode, is that Death is not an end. It tells us that in fact Death opens the Doorway to another realm of possibility - and infinite realm (in this case the energy of Clara's mother's life unlived.) All this, we are told with the first 4 shots of the show, the leaves that have fallen, the tree they came from and here we have the fourth shot of the show: the gateway opening, symbolising the gateway from life to death to life.
So, as janie said, the Leaf is also a symbol of the connection needed to travel between the worlds. Here Leaf is the symbol of the journey made between Life and Death, between Past and Future, between memory and potential, between the created and the uncreated. And what is this Leaf full of? Stories.
Clara: Still hungry? Well I’ve brought something for you.. This. The most important leaf in human history. It’s full of stories, full of history, and full of a future that never got lived. Days that should have been but never were. Passed on to me. This leaf isn’t just the past, it’s a whole future that never happened. There are millions and billions of unlived days for every day we live, an infinity, all the days that never came - and these are all my mum’s
What does myth do? It helps us to make the journey.
*
A couple of things before I get into the rest of this, things that are important to point out as I'll come back to them at a couple of points:
Squaring the Circle and Song/Sound
Believe me now when I say that the symbol of the circle in the square is all over Moffat era Who. Really, it is, from the very beginning, and it’s everywhere in this episode too. Squaring the circle is something that is a mathematical impossibility, it's a symbol of doing the impossible. It represents doing the seemingly impossible, unifying the opposites.
The symbol is all over the place in the market. In the second shot below, a lantern pints - arrow like - to the very centre of the circle.
The Sun Singers of Akhet stand on a circle in a square while singing to the God. The invite to the event contains the symbol.
This union of opposites will become an idea very much in play during the final battle with the Sun God.
Sound is also important in this episode. Lullabies are sung to the Old God in order to keep him asleep - we have a whole religious order devoted to continuing the Long Song - The Sun Singers of Akhet.
Doctor: They’re singing to the mummy in the temple, they call it the Old God, sometimes Grandfather.
Clara: What are they singing?
Doctor: An old song, a lullaby without end. To feed the old god, keep him asleep. It’s been going for millions of years, chorister handing over to chorister, generation after generation after generation.
Songs are also a means of transmitting stories, Merry knows all the songs of her people. The whole of the Temple is based on sound - it's a place of song and it works to channel the sound to keep the God asleep. The door lock works on the basis of sound - changing pitch/frequency in order to keep locked to intruders work on the basis of sound. The Vigil fire some sort of energy wave out of their mouths, which has the power to knock a person off their feet. Songs feature prominently as a central part of the episode.
*
Clara
Clara is a mirror of both the Doctor and Merry. Interesting shot here….two hearts are visible on Clara’s dress, one either side of her chest. Later the Doctor crosses both his hearts.
We are back with the colour scheme of red and blue for our companions, just like in the Amy and Rory era. Clara is reminiscent of Amy in a few ways. The grown up Clara wears a duffel coat like the child Amelia. The child Clara also wears red wellies like the young Amelia. Just like in Amy’s era, the Docotr is a force that has been in Clara’s life since very very early on - although in this case, since even before her conception.
Clara's mother is called Ellie Ravenwood. Names are important in Who and the maiden name is especially interesting here. The raven, being a carrion eater, is a symbol of Death in many many cultures. As such it is seen as a creature that straddles 2 worlds, because it literally has the ability to create its own life out of the death of other things, within its own body. It is a creature that is seen to occupy both the world of the Living and of the Dead - and that has the ability to pass between them freely. Of course the second part of the name - wood - links in with the world tree idea. It’s also linked to the afterlife - janie_aire points out in her meta on the first episode, the use of the forest as an afterlife metaphor as per the wallpaper in Cal’s world, the idea of the Forest of the Dead and in the forest in The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe where the Souls of the trees ascend to their own afterlife. There is also the forest of the series 5 Angels episodes, where the Crack opens in the forest on board the ship, and the clerics literally walk into the light. So, bearing in mind the role of the leaf in vanquishing the Sun God through both the life and death of Ellie Ravenwood, it's a really apt name.
But...back to Clara and the journey she's on. She's now taken the step of travelling with the Doctor, and on the planet, the Doctor offers her a fruit from a basket. This is reminiscent of the offering of the apple to Eve, and the first step taken towards self-knowledge (remember in my Bells of Sain John meta I was talking about the idea of Know Thyself in relation to Clara). It also has links to the adult Amy Pond's first meeting with the Doctor, him offering her the apple which reminded her of her mother in order to win her trust.
Christian mythlogy aside, this idea of eating the fruit of a strange world is a very fairytale idea. In fairy stories where the protagonist ends up in the Otherworld or the Land of Faery, whether accidentally or on a Quest, to eat of the fruit of these worlds means that they become trapped there, either for a short or long time, or sometimes forever, and it always always changes them. This offering of the fruit to of Clara is a moment of initiation; she has taken the step into the strange Otherworld of the Doctor, and now she needs to decide whether she will stay. He decision is already made though, because she bites into the fruit before he even confirms it is safe - her trust has already been offered and she doesn't think of the consequences of this decision for her life. Because the thing is, once you enter the world of Faery and eat of the fruit, you never really leave - even if you manage to physically leave. In stories of people trapped in the world of Faery, sometimes they return to find that years and years have passed by in the real world and everything they have ever known has died away. Even for those who do escape into their own time, the Otherworld never really leaves them and they pine for it. In the end, eating the fruit can change you forever (Martha), it can trap you in another world or time (Rose, Amy/Rory), it can take you to your death (River) or else it can leave you with a legacy inside your very body that you will carry until you die (Donna). Clara doesn’t like the taste of the fruit and puts it back in the basket - but the bite has been taken.
The Doctor, meanwhile, munches on the fruit easily later - because he belongs to this Otherworld where the fruit grows - it's his world.
After this initiation, Clara begins to take on the role of the Doctor - as the person who cannot stand by and watch children cry. She sees a child, scared and running away and goes after her to help. However, she soon becomes a mirror of Merry as well. They hide behind the Tardis together, and Clara shares her story of being a frightened little girl with Merry, who is also a frightened little girl.
Thing is, Merry was a child chosen from birth for a very special task - to be a vessel for stories and history, and to sing the Song that makes the God sleep. There are further links to Christian iconography here, her name is reminiscent of Mary, and she is robed and wears a halo-like crown.
So, if Clara is mirroring her, what does this say about Clara? She too, was “chosen” from before her birth, as we see in this ep, for the special task of being the Doctor’s companion, by the Doctor. She is a vessel for the stories of her mother. All this ties into my idea that there is a reversal going on this series; where the Doctor has previously been presented as the one who is Divine, as the Saviour he is now the one who clears the way for Clara.
It's kind of confirmed by this; there’s a very interesting shot of Clara and Merry reaching out to each other which is reminiscent of this piece of art, The Creation of Adam. It’s the hand of the divine touching the hand of Adam, imparting the spark of life. The power to control the God is symbolically passed on from Merry to Clara.
Later, as the Doctor battles the Sun God, Merry and Clara stand together in the amphitheatre. Merry’s song at this stage is a song about waking up - the polar opposite to the earlier song of going to sleep. Waking up is somewhat akin to the idea of remembering - we are said to awaken from forgetfulness. After Merry has sung the Song and the Sun God dies and is reborn, Clara remembers the story of the Leaf, she wakes up into her memories of her parents and into the knowledge of how to save everyone.
Why Clara worries me
See, my feelings about Clara are so very mixed. I feel like I'm being presented with all this this symbolism around her to do with the divine, the messiah, turning the role of the Doctor on its head. However, the plotty hints and the framing of some shots are suggesting that there is something dark, wrong, off about her - I’m becoming more convinced that Clara could be a weapon, or means by which the Doctor is led into a trap. Talk about a unification of opposites.
Her 23rd year is missing - could she have been taken away, blueprints made of her and thrown backwards and forwards in time in order to lead the Doctor to the real Clara? Remember the moment in The Snowmen when he looks right at her as he talks about the Ice Woman being "just a blueprint."? Is this Clara herself a blueprint? The real Clara held captive somewhere, a parallel to Amy's story in series 6a?
We get an unusual framing of a shot, with Clara seen through some piping when she looks for Merry in the abandoned building. Not long after The Vigil are also framed through the piping as they pass by. The Vigil are merely tools, puppets of a greater power - puppets of something God-like.
There’s the Tardis too. Clara can’t get in - not unusual in and of itself - we haven’t seen this Clara be given a key yet. But we are given a shot framed very deliberately so that the Tardis looms threateningly.
And then Clara states
I don’t think it likes me.
Lastly: the Tardis isn’t translating alien voices for Clara. Remember how I said sound was very important in this episode. Listen to the marketplace. It’s filled with the sounds of alien voices - we cannot understand them, and neither can she until the Doctor translates for her.
So what is she? She's impossible.
*
The Doctor
The Doctor is usually reluctant to talk about his family, yet here he identifies himself as a Grandfather - and this is in an episode where the central foe is referred to as “grandfather”.
Clara: You’ve been here before?
Doctor: Yes yes yes, I came here a long time ago with my granddaughter.
So we have a mirroring between the Doctor and the God who is actually a Sun God - because he's literally the sun that the system revolves around. We've seen Egyptian symbology already this series - remember how Clara’s necklace is reminiscent of the symbol of the Sun God (I talked about it in my meta for the first ep.) ? It's appropriate then that the temple itself is a pyramid. To the ancient Egyptians, the shape of the pyramid symbolised the rays of the sun, and many of their pyramids were named in ways that referred to its light. Their primary God, Ra, was the God of the Sun.
Anyways, we have the Doctor presented as a mirror to the Sun God through him naming himself as a grandfather, and this is further confirmed by the way we get the sphere of the Sun God reflected in the eye of the Doctor.
There are parallels here - unpleasant ones for the Doctor This is a being that lives on the memories and feelings of others, that consumes them in its greed. Long ago, in The Doctor the Widow and the Wardrobe, we heard the Doctor talk about how he can’t really feel any more, at least not like he used to. His companions are the ones who he sees the wonder of the Universe reflected in - in a way their lives, their emotions, their experiences, their emotions nourish him. When he doesn't travel with a companion he withers away, becomes a shadow of himself and forgets his purpose.
He attempts to feed the Sun God with himself, in a speech which is all about convergence of opposites, about unifying them as one (as with the circle in the square symbol.)
Doctor: You feed on them, on the memory of love and loss, and birth and death, and joy and sorrow, so…so…come on then - take mine. Take my memories. I hope you’ve got a big appetite, because I’ve lived a long life and I’ve seen a few things. I walked away from the last great Time War, I marked the passing of the Time Lords, and I saw the birth of the Universe and I watched as Time ran out, moment by moment until nothing remained. No time, no space, just me. I walked in Universes where the laws of physics were devised by the mind of a madman. I watched Universes freeze and creations burn. I have seen things you wouldn’t believe, I have lost things you will never understand, and I know things - secrets that must never be told, knowledge that must never be spoken, knowledge that will make parasite gods blaze. So come on then! Take it! Take it all baby! Have it! You have it all!
The Doctor outlines different emotional experiences that we usually see as the opposite of each other, but that this God takes all of, love and loss and birth and death, joy and sorrow. He speaks of the death of the Time Lords and the death of Time, but also of the birth of the Universe. He talks of both freezing and burning, of something logical (laws of physics), created by the illogical (a madman.) These contradictions are held in his memories, and he offers them to the Sun God from his hearts.
However, this is nothing new to this God - the Doctor as a mirror of him, as a Lonely God himself, as something akin to him cannot offer the God anything that can overcome it. In a Big Bang/Big Crunch like moment, the Sun God collapses in on itself but is reborn again hungrier than ever.
What Clara offers this God is also a contradiction in itself. Her leaf is the symbol of chance occurrences leading to one precise moment and one life lived. It is the symbol of her mother’s death. The Doctor, while he manifests the life/death dichotomy as a being that can self resurrect, is also immortal due to his regenerations (I think we can safely assume he won’t be limited in them and that the series will continue long after his final regeneration.) He doesn't truly know Death itself. The Sun God is also, in theory, immortal as long as it can continue to feed. However, mortal Clara offers the God something that has both Life and Death bound up in it, something that symbolises both her mother’s life and her mother’s death. It's something that contains the essence of a very definite ending, however as I spoke about in the section about the symbol of the Leaf way up there at the top of this piece, it also contains the idea of rebirth and the afterlife. What Clara tells the Sun God is that Death confers a sort of immortality itself, because all the days unlived are endless and infinite in their possibility. This is what lies on the other side of the door that we see opening at the start of the episode - an endless realm of possibility. Clara is the only one of the two of them who can vanquish the God, because she holds the symbol of true death and true rebirth, something the Doctor cannot have until he lets go and dies completely She is the Saviour, and in this act she sidelines the role of the Doctor as Saviour God. Again.
I know there's loads more, but I'm going to leave it here. Thank you for reading.