meta: The Fate of All is Always Dust - The Name of the Doctor (part 1 of 2)
In which the use of words, and names are very important; there is a big difference between knowledge/information/wisdom/myth; the Akashic Records, the Astral Plane and the Golden Ratio make a mystical appearance; there is a lot to say about form/emptiness, what the soul is made of and how things are more than the sum of their parts; the Doctor can never escape his shadow; the Tardis is the castle at the heart of the enchanted forest; and the Doctor himself becomes the World Tree.
It’s taken me a while to get this out - but there was just sooo much to say. I considered splitting it into several parts, but mostly it all wound together. So, as it is, it's going to be two parts. This is the main meta looking at the ep overall. A meta focusing specifically on Clara and River will follow in a few days time (or in a couple of weeks, depending if i have time to polish it up before i go away to Scotland). Because the girls really do deserve a whole one to themselves.
Here we are at the end of it. Amazing finale was utterly and totally amazing. Some things that were hinted at, or that appeared as themes never came to pass. I was convinced for a long time that Clara and 11 were related due to the recurrent theme of family - but no. I think Moff might have trolled me. Some of the stuff was carried right through. This meta might be long, but then again they’ve all been this series, because, I tell you, series 7b has been an absolute dream to analyse - it’s just so damn dense with layers and layers stacked up on each other and a very conscious use of symbolism.
First let’s take a moment to appreciate how much fan-service was going on in this episode. Gallifrey. Tardis repair factory. Citadel. All the Doctors. Bessie. The Doctor's whole life and death. I mean...wow.
Let’s also take a moment to love the ridiculous amount of rhyming couplets in this episode. For me, this brought a sort of whimsical and fairytale feel, and made me strongly think of Shakespeare. It also linked into the themes of song, sound, silence, whispers, the said and the unsaid that are strewn through this series. These couplets are mostly uttered by the Whispermen....
*
Words and Myth
Whispermen:The trap is set, the Doctor’s friends
Will travel where the Doctor ends
GI: His friends are lost forevermore, unless he goes to Trenzalore.
De Marco: Can you hear the whisper men, the whisper men are here
If you hear the whisper men then turn away your ear
Do not hear the whisper men whatever else you do
For once you hear the whisper men they’ll stop and look at you.
Words have power. Naturally, in the case of writing a show or a book, this is obvious. Stories have power (and they are - after all - what the soul is made of, as we are explicitly told in this series). But in current Who, words really really have a huge power. There's the use of certain character names to tell us important things. There's the idea that the words and the hearing of them are a dangerous act -and that’s a theme we can relate to, with much of this series (and the anniversary) being linked to the speaking of names and hidden knowledge. There's the idea that speaking words/telling stories can be the difference between life and death.
De Marco: One word from you can save me from the rope.
Vastra: Then you may rely on my silence.
De Marco: I have information
Vastra: Are you bargaining for you life? Yous have the blood of 14 women on your hads, there are no words that can save you.
De Marco: The Doctor….ah yes, your dangerous friend. I know all about him.
Vastra: How?
De Marco: In the babble of the world there are whispers, if you know how to listen. The Doctor has a secret you know.
Vastra: He has many.
De Marco: He has one he will take to the grave - and it is discovered.
Overall, this series has told us that words have tremendous power - and idea of words having power within the show, for me speaks of the idea that the show has a power beyond its own internal world - that it is power as a myth when we interact with it. Because in Moffat's era, we can always read the show as myth - this is something we have known since the very beginning, when 11 began.
I love the idea of the Whispermen as agents of the GI. The GI, as he says himself is information, and these whispers are threaded throughout the Universe, for those who can hear them. There’s a link here to the ides of the Akashic Records - a spiritual idea that there is a layer of mystical knowledge that exists on a non physical plane of existence known as the astral plane. The Akashic Records are composed of all the knowledge of human experience and of information about of the nature of the Universe. Traditionally, the way to access the Akashic Records is through shamanic journeying, psychic abilities or through a dream state by visiting the Astral Plane. The astral plane is a non-physical plane of existence that we can visit in Dreams, is not only peopled by the forces of “good” but is seen as also being filled with dangerous entities, and the Akashic Records are neither fundamentally good or bad - connecting with the whispers in the Universe leads to knowledge, but it is what one does with the knowledge that is the important thing.
The thing with the GI is that he is presented as embodying the antithesis of an experience of mystical growth in some ways - in the opening episode of this half of the series, we see the people who have been uploaded to the WiFi as living in a sort of afterlife, that is not really an afterlife (in many ways it’s analogous to the afterlife River lives in CAL, but it’s a dark mirror of that, as it’s not presented as a positive thing.) As he says - he is information - but it’s the application of that information that really counts. Also, importantly - information is not stories. Information is just that - information. It's the was we/our characters interact with the infmraiton they come across that weaves it into their won personal story and allows it to become wisdom, rather than information. This will be important in something i'll talk about later.
With the Whispermen we have their monstrous mouths - a motif that we have seen often in Moffat’s Who. So they can speak the information they have - however, they do not have the eyes to see and to interpret/perceive, to turn it into a story (again, eyes are often seen as a motif in Moffat’s Who.) So words/whispers/knowledge (hidden and apparent) are important - but how the story unfolds both in the show and in life all in the way tha the whispers are perceived and acted upon. We are urged, right in the first words of the episode - NOT to listen to the (dis)information of the Whispermen, not to listen to those who do not have the eyes to see/interpret.
The first time we see the Doctor in this episode too, he has a mouth to speak - yet he cannot see - he is mirrored to the Whispermen. (note the towel tied over his eyes which is covered with the X motif - a symbol of mirroring.) With the Doctor, he's the one who knows the hidden knowledge- both about the nature of Clara, and about himself (his name his secret incarnation.) It has been his conscious decision to put on the blindfold - to keep Clara blind to her true nature, to not acknowledge or own his name or his secret self.
Conference Call
The concept of the astral plane as a placer that we can journey to in dreams, and as a place where one can access different eras of history is one that is invoked again in the conference call. There's a few things that are interesting about this conference call.
Vastra: Time Travel has always been possible in dreams.
Vastra says that the conference calls were previously held in the Taj Mahal. This is very fitting as the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum that Emporer Shah Jahan had built in honour of his third wife after she died. Her tomb is the focal point. This links into the idea of the huge Tardis as the Doctor’s mausoleum.
Chairs are important in Who. The chairs that they sit upon for the conference call are the Argyle chair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The oval head of the chair has a silhouette on which is a stylised bird in flight - birds are an often used symbol of transcendence, of leaving the physical world behind - just as they are doing in this conference call.
There’s also a fun link to Strax having just been in Glasgow, as Mackintosh designed this chair specifically for the Argyle tearooms in Glasgow. Also - while we’re at it - note that the stained glass windows of the bar in which Strax is fighting feature the Cadeuceus/the staff of Hermes which is often used today - mistakenly - as the symbol of the medical profession, due to being confused with the Rod of Asclepius. More properly, its associations are with death. SO it can be read here- along with the bit of X like stained glass - as representing the dual roles of healer/warrior, a role that the Docotr occupies and that comes full circle at the end of the episode when we meet the previously unknown incarnation of our Timelord.
The table is in the shape of a pentagon. This is really important - though it is to do with maths, which is really not my strong point.
The pentagon is a shape with much symbolism associated with it, as it outlines the structure of the pentagram - or 5 sided star which has been used in many spiritual/mystical religions. It’s important due to its link to the Golden Ratio. The internal geometry of the pentagon as it extends into a pentagram within it demonstrates a ratio of 1:1.618. This ratio is also known as the “sacred mean” or “golden ratio.”, or as phi. This is a very special number, that appears in art, architecture geometry, nature - it has also been found to be present at the atomic scale. For example, the spirals found in the face of a sunflower are based upon the golden ratio, and it is intimately linked to the Fibonacci sequence.
The basic math behind the golden ration is that if you divide a line into two parts so that the longer part divided by the smaller part is also equal to the whole length divided by the longer part, then you have the golden ratio. Did you follow that? I’m not sure I did, so have a look here instead. This concept of the whole being divided into its parts, which will always come back to the hole again is also very important when it comes to River and Clara, as I will talk about later.
Anyway, the point is that the table they are sat around is linked to the golden ratio. It is a shape that speaks of the geometry of the most fundamental structures in the Universe - it is a structure which underlies many many things. So it’s a really appropriate symbol of connection between people dispersed across space and time, and is also appropriate for the revelation of mystical knowledge- the location of the Doctor’s death.
*
The sum of all parts
Clara: I don’t know where I am. It’s like I’m breaking into a million pieces and there’s only one thing I remember. I have to save the Doctor. He always looks different, I always know it’s him. Sometimes I think I’m everywhere at once, running every second just to find him, just to save him. But he never hears me. Almost never. I blew into this world on a leaf… I’m still blowing - I don’t think I’ll ever land. I’m Clara Oswald The Impossible Girl. I was born to save the Doctor.
The idea of the golden ration, of division of one into many parts links strongly with Clara’s fate and the explanation of why she is the impossible girl.
We saw the idea of form out of nothingness in Nightmare in Silver, and at the time, I puzzled over this. In that episode, there was the focus on the void in the sky created by the destroyed galaxy, there was talk of being able to reconstruct the Doctor’s identity from the gaps he had left in erasing himself from the history of the Universe, there was the gun which turned the cybermen into nothingness, the bomb which would make the planet implode. The idea was, that even if there is a nothingness, the very shape of that nothingness describes the shape of what was once there, or what could be there. It’s a bit like the role of leaf in The Rings of Akhaten really, where it holds both the power of nothingness in the form of a life cut short, but also the power of infinite potential of a life unlived. It is the shape of the thing which remains - even when the composite parts of a thing are gone, the shape that is left describes more than those individual bits in isolation could.
Clara: I don’t know where I am. I just know I’m running. Sometimes it’s like I’ve lived a thousand lives in a thousand places .I’m born, I live, I die, and always there’s the Doctor. Always I’m running to save the Doctor - again and again, and again. And he hardly ever hears me - but I’ve always been there. Right from the very beginning (shot of her as a Gallifreyan), right from the day he started running. Run you clever boy - and remember me.
This is the meaning of the soufflé ,and this is the mystical knowledge which gives Clara the strength to step into the Doctor's timestream and save him. Her constituent parts will still make up her whole - even when the ingredients of the souffle are separate, bring them together in the form of the recipe and they will still form the souffle. It tells us that identity is a composite thing - that all the bits of us combined together in the recipe still make us who we are.
Clara: This time I will get it right, this time I will be Souffle girl.
Artie: How can it be your mum’s soufflé if you’re making it?
Clara: Because, Artie, my mum always said, the souffle isn't the souffle, the souffle is the recipe.
So what of the GI and how there is a mirror of him in this idea? I think we're talking about the Soul here, and about the power of myth. First off, the souffle philosophy tells us why they couldn't kill him and why he could take form again. The GI is also nothingness given form. He is pure information, and has no essential substance within - but he is able to gather together the bits of this information into a form. His existence is based in something which is able to present physical manifestations - just like information as presented in the form of a book or a website - but at core he is made up of nothingness - here is the difference again between information and the ability to absorb that into one's personal story and thus convert it into Wisdom.. The vessel he occupies is the likeness of a dead person, and when that external appearance is ripped away, his suit falls empty to the floor. Information is not stories. Information is not wisdom. The GI works to wipe out the Doctor's timeline by unwriting his story thruogh the force of destruction, by undoing the things the Doctor has done. The soul is made of stories- and the GI is soul-less.
Clara - on the other hand - has a soul that is made of stories. She can survive, and because at core is more than emptiness - there the recipe/story that makes up Clara, and so she is able to be the creative force in his life -rewriting what the GI had over/re-rewritten. We've known since the start that she had a tremendous power over the narrative. From the first episode where she symbolically erased the legacy of the Time War by making the Daleks forget, where she stepped into the Doctor's role of Saviour, and where she broke the fourth wall by looking directly at the audience and telling us to remember her - to the Christmas special where is became clear that she was a mirror of the Doctor as dying/resurrecting Saviours and that she represented the show's question of Doctor/Clara Who. Here her power over the narrative and history of Who comes full circle in her correcting his entire timeline, in her becoming the one who has saved the Doctor over and over since the beginning. Clara has changed the entire history of the show, by writing herself into his life since the day he left Gallifrey.
*
To the Grave
Death and the Doctor
This is where the whole series, and the whole of the Doctor’s journey has been leading us -and it's also, thematically. the only place it could ever have ended.
Clara, in her journey through this series, has faced her own mortality many many times over. Life and death has been woven into her story from the start, as the girl who died and was apparently reborn.For me, her story has been a mirror of the journey the Doctor needs to be making. First of all, just a quick recap thruogh Clara's lessons about mortality during this series.
The reason why the Doctor could not defeat the Sun God, even when he told it his whole life story, the reason why he could not understand Clara’s distress at discovering she was a ghost to him, the reason why he concealed the nature of the monsters in Journey from her....it’s because the Doctor cannot truly die. Yes, he regenerates, but on a symbolic and mythic level, in this series death is necessary in order to ascend to the next stage of understanding, in order to move, in order to grow. Previously in the series, regeneration has fulfilled this function, but his mirror - Clara Who - is someone who has experienced true death and rebirth many times over, so the mythic stakes have been upped in this series and the lesson for the Doctor is a new one. Regeneration alone could no longer fulfill this lesson.
This has been frightening to him. He has concealed Claras’ identity as the girl who lived and died and lived and died from her for this whole series. He has not been the best mentor, not led her towards self knowledge, because of the frozen part of his heart has kept him from his own self knowledge - the knowledge that a symbolic facing of his own death, the place where the secret of his name unlocks the place where he dies, was the only logical way for him to complete this current mythic journey. Looking back now, this was the only way it ever could have ended.
After the Doctor finds out he has to go to Trenzalore if he wants to save his friends, his grief is apparent. He goes to the Tardis and sits in the Tardis Underworld -underneath the Console Platform at the base of the Time Rotor. The Doctor has often played the role of Hades - god of death/the Underworld, and we often see him underneath the Console platform when this is going on - so this is an appropriate place for him to have the bit of this conversation.
I don't think it's just the fact of his death and the danger of going there that is upsetting him though. I think there is a deep fear of the circumstances of his death. - not a fear for himself that his death was painful or prolonged, but a fear of how the circumstances he dies within impacted on others. Remember, the symbolic Underworld (underneath the console) is not just a place related to death, but the Underworld/Below is also strongly lined to the concept of the subconscious and the shadow self that dwells there. The Doctor embodies the healer/warrior dichotomy, but the concept of himself as warrior is one that he rejects - and one we will see come full circle by the end of the ep. Interestingly River had been one of the people who has called him out on this dichotomy and very much brought it home to him, especially in A Good Man Goes to War - so it's interesting here that he says:
Always suspected what it was and never wanted to find out myself. River would know though, River always knew.
And Trenzalore is not pretty at all - it's a battlefield filled with graves. It embodies the aspect of himself that the Doctor doesn't really want to own.
GI: It was a minor skirmish by the Doctor’s blood soaked standards. Not exactly the Time War, but enough to finish him. In the end it was too much for the old man.
Jenny: Blood soaked?
Vastra: The Doctor has been many things, but never blood soaked.
GI: Tell that to the leader of the Sycorax, or Solomon the trader, or the Cybermen, or the Daleks. The Doctor lives his life in darker hues, day upon day. He will have other names before the end: Storm, the Beast, the Valeyard.
The colours in the sky are reflective of this in fire/water colours, and are similar to the depiction of the the internal battle he went through with the monster within in Nightmare in Silver.
We are at the crux here of the dichotomy that lies within the Doctor, the place of the two opposing aspects of himself: warrior/healer, saviour/bringer of death. The fact that his death takes place at a huge battle is a reversal of everything he wants to be; it’s a betrayal of his name, as much as the John Hurt Doctor betrayed his name. Thousands of dead, fighting in his final battle. As the Tardis dies, she too undergoes a type of reversal - the bigger on the inside starts leaking to the outside, everything is turned on its head.
By the end of the episode, when Clara is trapped within the Doctor's timestream, and he tells her that everything that is in there is him - it's telling that although the landscape around her is unclear, what can be discerned is that there are gravestones around her similar to those found on the fields of Trenzalore. This is an afterlife of sorts, the Doctor even tells her it is peopled with his own ghosts.
And when we come to the crux of the Doctor's shadow self, the secret part of him that he wants to keep hidden from the world - it's all linked into the idea of naming and the power of naming. The Doctor makes explicit here the names that we choose (and, by extension, the names that the writers of the how choose for their characters) are incredibly important. He says that the name tells us something, it's a measure of the character, it's a promise. The secret is not the name itself - he tells us this directly - that his real name isn't the point. The point is the betrayal of the name - this is the part of himself that hhe doesn't want to own, the shadow self that he keeps stashed away in his own personal underworld/subconscious.
Clara: Who’s that?
Doctor: Never mind. Let’s get back.
Clara: But who is he?
Doctor: He’s me. There’s only me here, that’s the point, now let’s get back.
Clara: But I never saw that one. I saw all of you, eleven faces, all of them you. You’re the eleventh Doctor.
Doctor: I said he was me, I never said he was the Doctor.
Clara: I don’t understand.
Doctor: My name, my real name, that is not the point. The name I chose is the Doctor. The name you choose…it’s like…it’s like a promise you make. He’s the one who broke the promise…he is my secret.
(John Hurt): What I did, I did without choice,
Doctor: I know.
(John Hurt): In the name of peace and sanity.
Doctor: But not in the name of the Doctor.
Are we all pretty much agreed that this is the incarnation that committed the Time War genocide?
The Tardis as Fairytale Castle
The Control Room, the heart of the ship, has been covered with vegetation. There’s a few things going on here. Firstly the idea that we are all only dust, that we belong to nature, and that in the end nature will reclaim everything we were and everything we cared about.
Whispermen: This man must fall as all men must
The fate of all is always dust….
Next, there is the idea of fairytales. This is the enchanted fairytale castle, surrounded by briars; the castle of Sleeping Beauty. In the myth of Sleeping Beauty, the enchanted sleep can be read as a representation of the cycle of the seasons, and thus of the cyclical nature/ of all of life (there are strong parallels between Sleeping Beauty and the story of Persephone in the Underworld.) The sleep is a symbol of death, but a death from which one is ultimately reborn, like the seasons. Love is the thing that conquers death in both the fairytale and in this story. In the fairytale, the kiss of true love awakens Sleeping Beauty.(It isn’t a ghost story, it’s a love story.) In Who, River’s love for the Doctor has brought her to a place where she opens the doorway to the Enchanted Castle; Clara’s affection for the Doctor leads her to save him through all of time and space, so he can awaken from his sleep. She kneels over the almost unconscious form of the Doctor like the Prince about to awaken Sleeping Beauty in the heart of the Castle.
The core theme of the tale of Sleeping Beauty is that true love conquers all, and this is appropriate when fitting with Moffat’s themes of Love and Death that we often find within his work.
There’s also the continual linking of the concept of the forest with death and the afterlife. Regularly in Moffat’s Who, we see the symbol of the Forest as representing a post-death state, a state in which one lives on after the death of the physical body, a state of being where the need for a physical body is transcended. Or else, the Forest is a mirror/echo/ghost of the real world. Here, the forest within the Tardis is the tomb, it’s the place where the tracks of the Doctor’s life are held safe within its core.
The link is here to the World Tree too, of course. Within the Tardis, the heart of the Control Room- the Console and the Time Rotor - usually represents the World Tree. Here the Doctor himself becomes the World Tree in his death. In Journey to the Centre of the Tardis, we heard voices echoing out of the time rotor as Bram started to deconstruct the console - here the Doctor pints his sonic and amplifies the voices echoing out of his own timestream. This is his afterlife - the glowing tracks of his tears - and it is linked together in a branching pattern that is reminiscent of arteries, branches, lightening, the veining on leaves - and fractals. It's one of the fundamental structures found within nature (a bit like the use of the pentagon table as a manifestation of the Golden Ratio earlier on.)
Just as the World Tree, mythically, connects the worlds and can be journeyed along in order to access different worlds and time periods, so the Doctor as World-Tree can be stepped into. In his death, he embodies one of the central symbols of the show in the Moffat era.
Thanks for reading, apologies for typos - meta on Clara and River to follow.
It’s taken me a while to get this out - but there was just sooo much to say. I considered splitting it into several parts, but mostly it all wound together. So, as it is, it's going to be two parts. This is the main meta looking at the ep overall. A meta focusing specifically on Clara and River will follow in a few days time (or in a couple of weeks, depending if i have time to polish it up before i go away to Scotland). Because the girls really do deserve a whole one to themselves.
Here we are at the end of it. Amazing finale was utterly and totally amazing. Some things that were hinted at, or that appeared as themes never came to pass. I was convinced for a long time that Clara and 11 were related due to the recurrent theme of family - but no. I think Moff might have trolled me. Some of the stuff was carried right through. This meta might be long, but then again they’ve all been this series, because, I tell you, series 7b has been an absolute dream to analyse - it’s just so damn dense with layers and layers stacked up on each other and a very conscious use of symbolism.
First let’s take a moment to appreciate how much fan-service was going on in this episode. Gallifrey. Tardis repair factory. Citadel. All the Doctors. Bessie. The Doctor's whole life and death. I mean...wow.
Let’s also take a moment to love the ridiculous amount of rhyming couplets in this episode. For me, this brought a sort of whimsical and fairytale feel, and made me strongly think of Shakespeare. It also linked into the themes of song, sound, silence, whispers, the said and the unsaid that are strewn through this series. These couplets are mostly uttered by the Whispermen....
*
Words and Myth
Whispermen:The trap is set, the Doctor’s friends
Will travel where the Doctor ends
GI: His friends are lost forevermore, unless he goes to Trenzalore.
De Marco: Can you hear the whisper men, the whisper men are here
If you hear the whisper men then turn away your ear
Do not hear the whisper men whatever else you do
For once you hear the whisper men they’ll stop and look at you.
Words have power. Naturally, in the case of writing a show or a book, this is obvious. Stories have power (and they are - after all - what the soul is made of, as we are explicitly told in this series). But in current Who, words really really have a huge power. There's the use of certain character names to tell us important things. There's the idea that the words and the hearing of them are a dangerous act -and that’s a theme we can relate to, with much of this series (and the anniversary) being linked to the speaking of names and hidden knowledge. There's the idea that speaking words/telling stories can be the difference between life and death.
De Marco: One word from you can save me from the rope.
Vastra: Then you may rely on my silence.
De Marco: I have information
Vastra: Are you bargaining for you life? Yous have the blood of 14 women on your hads, there are no words that can save you.
De Marco: The Doctor….ah yes, your dangerous friend. I know all about him.
Vastra: How?
De Marco: In the babble of the world there are whispers, if you know how to listen. The Doctor has a secret you know.
Vastra: He has many.
De Marco: He has one he will take to the grave - and it is discovered.
Overall, this series has told us that words have tremendous power - and idea of words having power within the show, for me speaks of the idea that the show has a power beyond its own internal world - that it is power as a myth when we interact with it. Because in Moffat's era, we can always read the show as myth - this is something we have known since the very beginning, when 11 began.
I love the idea of the Whispermen as agents of the GI. The GI, as he says himself is information, and these whispers are threaded throughout the Universe, for those who can hear them. There’s a link here to the ides of the Akashic Records - a spiritual idea that there is a layer of mystical knowledge that exists on a non physical plane of existence known as the astral plane. The Akashic Records are composed of all the knowledge of human experience and of information about of the nature of the Universe. Traditionally, the way to access the Akashic Records is through shamanic journeying, psychic abilities or through a dream state by visiting the Astral Plane. The astral plane is a non-physical plane of existence that we can visit in Dreams, is not only peopled by the forces of “good” but is seen as also being filled with dangerous entities, and the Akashic Records are neither fundamentally good or bad - connecting with the whispers in the Universe leads to knowledge, but it is what one does with the knowledge that is the important thing.
The thing with the GI is that he is presented as embodying the antithesis of an experience of mystical growth in some ways - in the opening episode of this half of the series, we see the people who have been uploaded to the WiFi as living in a sort of afterlife, that is not really an afterlife (in many ways it’s analogous to the afterlife River lives in CAL, but it’s a dark mirror of that, as it’s not presented as a positive thing.) As he says - he is information - but it’s the application of that information that really counts. Also, importantly - information is not stories. Information is just that - information. It's the was we/our characters interact with the infmraiton they come across that weaves it into their won personal story and allows it to become wisdom, rather than information. This will be important in something i'll talk about later.
With the Whispermen we have their monstrous mouths - a motif that we have seen often in Moffat’s Who. So they can speak the information they have - however, they do not have the eyes to see and to interpret/perceive, to turn it into a story (again, eyes are often seen as a motif in Moffat’s Who.) So words/whispers/knowledge (hidden and apparent) are important - but how the story unfolds both in the show and in life all in the way tha the whispers are perceived and acted upon. We are urged, right in the first words of the episode - NOT to listen to the (dis)information of the Whispermen, not to listen to those who do not have the eyes to see/interpret.
The first time we see the Doctor in this episode too, he has a mouth to speak - yet he cannot see - he is mirrored to the Whispermen. (note the towel tied over his eyes which is covered with the X motif - a symbol of mirroring.) With the Doctor, he's the one who knows the hidden knowledge- both about the nature of Clara, and about himself (his name his secret incarnation.) It has been his conscious decision to put on the blindfold - to keep Clara blind to her true nature, to not acknowledge or own his name or his secret self.
Conference Call
The concept of the astral plane as a placer that we can journey to in dreams, and as a place where one can access different eras of history is one that is invoked again in the conference call. There's a few things that are interesting about this conference call.
Vastra: Time Travel has always been possible in dreams.
Vastra says that the conference calls were previously held in the Taj Mahal. This is very fitting as the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum that Emporer Shah Jahan had built in honour of his third wife after she died. Her tomb is the focal point. This links into the idea of the huge Tardis as the Doctor’s mausoleum.
Chairs are important in Who. The chairs that they sit upon for the conference call are the Argyle chair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The oval head of the chair has a silhouette on which is a stylised bird in flight - birds are an often used symbol of transcendence, of leaving the physical world behind - just as they are doing in this conference call.
There’s also a fun link to Strax having just been in Glasgow, as Mackintosh designed this chair specifically for the Argyle tearooms in Glasgow. Also - while we’re at it - note that the stained glass windows of the bar in which Strax is fighting feature the Cadeuceus/the staff of Hermes which is often used today - mistakenly - as the symbol of the medical profession, due to being confused with the Rod of Asclepius. More properly, its associations are with death. SO it can be read here- along with the bit of X like stained glass - as representing the dual roles of healer/warrior, a role that the Docotr occupies and that comes full circle at the end of the episode when we meet the previously unknown incarnation of our Timelord.
The table is in the shape of a pentagon. This is really important - though it is to do with maths, which is really not my strong point.
The pentagon is a shape with much symbolism associated with it, as it outlines the structure of the pentagram - or 5 sided star which has been used in many spiritual/mystical religions. It’s important due to its link to the Golden Ratio. The internal geometry of the pentagon as it extends into a pentagram within it demonstrates a ratio of 1:1.618. This ratio is also known as the “sacred mean” or “golden ratio.”, or as phi. This is a very special number, that appears in art, architecture geometry, nature - it has also been found to be present at the atomic scale. For example, the spirals found in the face of a sunflower are based upon the golden ratio, and it is intimately linked to the Fibonacci sequence.
The basic math behind the golden ration is that if you divide a line into two parts so that the longer part divided by the smaller part is also equal to the whole length divided by the longer part, then you have the golden ratio. Did you follow that? I’m not sure I did, so have a look here instead. This concept of the whole being divided into its parts, which will always come back to the hole again is also very important when it comes to River and Clara, as I will talk about later.
Anyway, the point is that the table they are sat around is linked to the golden ratio. It is a shape that speaks of the geometry of the most fundamental structures in the Universe - it is a structure which underlies many many things. So it’s a really appropriate symbol of connection between people dispersed across space and time, and is also appropriate for the revelation of mystical knowledge- the location of the Doctor’s death.
*
The sum of all parts
Clara: I don’t know where I am. It’s like I’m breaking into a million pieces and there’s only one thing I remember. I have to save the Doctor. He always looks different, I always know it’s him. Sometimes I think I’m everywhere at once, running every second just to find him, just to save him. But he never hears me. Almost never. I blew into this world on a leaf… I’m still blowing - I don’t think I’ll ever land. I’m Clara Oswald The Impossible Girl. I was born to save the Doctor.
The idea of the golden ration, of division of one into many parts links strongly with Clara’s fate and the explanation of why she is the impossible girl.
We saw the idea of form out of nothingness in Nightmare in Silver, and at the time, I puzzled over this. In that episode, there was the focus on the void in the sky created by the destroyed galaxy, there was talk of being able to reconstruct the Doctor’s identity from the gaps he had left in erasing himself from the history of the Universe, there was the gun which turned the cybermen into nothingness, the bomb which would make the planet implode. The idea was, that even if there is a nothingness, the very shape of that nothingness describes the shape of what was once there, or what could be there. It’s a bit like the role of leaf in The Rings of Akhaten really, where it holds both the power of nothingness in the form of a life cut short, but also the power of infinite potential of a life unlived. It is the shape of the thing which remains - even when the composite parts of a thing are gone, the shape that is left describes more than those individual bits in isolation could.
Clara: I don’t know where I am. I just know I’m running. Sometimes it’s like I’ve lived a thousand lives in a thousand places .I’m born, I live, I die, and always there’s the Doctor. Always I’m running to save the Doctor - again and again, and again. And he hardly ever hears me - but I’ve always been there. Right from the very beginning (shot of her as a Gallifreyan), right from the day he started running. Run you clever boy - and remember me.
This is the meaning of the soufflé ,and this is the mystical knowledge which gives Clara the strength to step into the Doctor's timestream and save him. Her constituent parts will still make up her whole - even when the ingredients of the souffle are separate, bring them together in the form of the recipe and they will still form the souffle. It tells us that identity is a composite thing - that all the bits of us combined together in the recipe still make us who we are.
Clara: This time I will get it right, this time I will be Souffle girl.
Artie: How can it be your mum’s soufflé if you’re making it?
Clara: Because, Artie, my mum always said, the souffle isn't the souffle, the souffle is the recipe.
So what of the GI and how there is a mirror of him in this idea? I think we're talking about the Soul here, and about the power of myth. First off, the souffle philosophy tells us why they couldn't kill him and why he could take form again. The GI is also nothingness given form. He is pure information, and has no essential substance within - but he is able to gather together the bits of this information into a form. His existence is based in something which is able to present physical manifestations - just like information as presented in the form of a book or a website - but at core he is made up of nothingness - here is the difference again between information and the ability to absorb that into one's personal story and thus convert it into Wisdom.. The vessel he occupies is the likeness of a dead person, and when that external appearance is ripped away, his suit falls empty to the floor. Information is not stories. Information is not wisdom. The GI works to wipe out the Doctor's timeline by unwriting his story thruogh the force of destruction, by undoing the things the Doctor has done. The soul is made of stories- and the GI is soul-less.
Clara - on the other hand - has a soul that is made of stories. She can survive, and because at core is more than emptiness - there the recipe/story that makes up Clara, and so she is able to be the creative force in his life -rewriting what the GI had over/re-rewritten. We've known since the start that she had a tremendous power over the narrative. From the first episode where she symbolically erased the legacy of the Time War by making the Daleks forget, where she stepped into the Doctor's role of Saviour, and where she broke the fourth wall by looking directly at the audience and telling us to remember her - to the Christmas special where is became clear that she was a mirror of the Doctor as dying/resurrecting Saviours and that she represented the show's question of Doctor/Clara Who. Here her power over the narrative and history of Who comes full circle in her correcting his entire timeline, in her becoming the one who has saved the Doctor over and over since the beginning. Clara has changed the entire history of the show, by writing herself into his life since the day he left Gallifrey.
*
To the Grave
Death and the Doctor
This is where the whole series, and the whole of the Doctor’s journey has been leading us -and it's also, thematically. the only place it could ever have ended.
Clara, in her journey through this series, has faced her own mortality many many times over. Life and death has been woven into her story from the start, as the girl who died and was apparently reborn.For me, her story has been a mirror of the journey the Doctor needs to be making. First of all, just a quick recap thruogh Clara's lessons about mortality during this series.
- In the Rings of Akhaten, Clara vanquished the sun god by wielding the leaf which embodied the essence of life and death, the fact of her own mother’s mortality.
- In Cold War, for the first time, she came face to face with the fragility of the human body and the risk of travelling with the Doctor to her own life in a hugely visceral way when they found the people ripped to shreds, and faced her fear of death.
- In Hide, the Doctor took her both the beginning and the end of the earth - she saw both that to the Doctor she had never been born and was also dead to him.
- In her Journey to the Centre of the Tardis, she came face to face in the mirror with her own dead self, and discovered that she had lived and died before.
The reason why the Doctor could not defeat the Sun God, even when he told it his whole life story, the reason why he could not understand Clara’s distress at discovering she was a ghost to him, the reason why he concealed the nature of the monsters in Journey from her....it’s because the Doctor cannot truly die. Yes, he regenerates, but on a symbolic and mythic level, in this series death is necessary in order to ascend to the next stage of understanding, in order to move, in order to grow. Previously in the series, regeneration has fulfilled this function, but his mirror - Clara Who - is someone who has experienced true death and rebirth many times over, so the mythic stakes have been upped in this series and the lesson for the Doctor is a new one. Regeneration alone could no longer fulfill this lesson.
This has been frightening to him. He has concealed Claras’ identity as the girl who lived and died and lived and died from her for this whole series. He has not been the best mentor, not led her towards self knowledge, because of the frozen part of his heart has kept him from his own self knowledge - the knowledge that a symbolic facing of his own death, the place where the secret of his name unlocks the place where he dies, was the only logical way for him to complete this current mythic journey. Looking back now, this was the only way it ever could have ended.
After the Doctor finds out he has to go to Trenzalore if he wants to save his friends, his grief is apparent. He goes to the Tardis and sits in the Tardis Underworld -underneath the Console Platform at the base of the Time Rotor. The Doctor has often played the role of Hades - god of death/the Underworld, and we often see him underneath the Console platform when this is going on - so this is an appropriate place for him to have the bit of this conversation.
I don't think it's just the fact of his death and the danger of going there that is upsetting him though. I think there is a deep fear of the circumstances of his death. - not a fear for himself that his death was painful or prolonged, but a fear of how the circumstances he dies within impacted on others. Remember, the symbolic Underworld (underneath the console) is not just a place related to death, but the Underworld/Below is also strongly lined to the concept of the subconscious and the shadow self that dwells there. The Doctor embodies the healer/warrior dichotomy, but the concept of himself as warrior is one that he rejects - and one we will see come full circle by the end of the ep. Interestingly River had been one of the people who has called him out on this dichotomy and very much brought it home to him, especially in A Good Man Goes to War - so it's interesting here that he says:
Always suspected what it was and never wanted to find out myself. River would know though, River always knew.
And Trenzalore is not pretty at all - it's a battlefield filled with graves. It embodies the aspect of himself that the Doctor doesn't really want to own.
GI: It was a minor skirmish by the Doctor’s blood soaked standards. Not exactly the Time War, but enough to finish him. In the end it was too much for the old man.
Jenny: Blood soaked?
Vastra: The Doctor has been many things, but never blood soaked.
GI: Tell that to the leader of the Sycorax, or Solomon the trader, or the Cybermen, or the Daleks. The Doctor lives his life in darker hues, day upon day. He will have other names before the end: Storm, the Beast, the Valeyard.
The colours in the sky are reflective of this in fire/water colours, and are similar to the depiction of the the internal battle he went through with the monster within in Nightmare in Silver.
We are at the crux here of the dichotomy that lies within the Doctor, the place of the two opposing aspects of himself: warrior/healer, saviour/bringer of death. The fact that his death takes place at a huge battle is a reversal of everything he wants to be; it’s a betrayal of his name, as much as the John Hurt Doctor betrayed his name. Thousands of dead, fighting in his final battle. As the Tardis dies, she too undergoes a type of reversal - the bigger on the inside starts leaking to the outside, everything is turned on its head.
By the end of the episode, when Clara is trapped within the Doctor's timestream, and he tells her that everything that is in there is him - it's telling that although the landscape around her is unclear, what can be discerned is that there are gravestones around her similar to those found on the fields of Trenzalore. This is an afterlife of sorts, the Doctor even tells her it is peopled with his own ghosts.
And when we come to the crux of the Doctor's shadow self, the secret part of him that he wants to keep hidden from the world - it's all linked into the idea of naming and the power of naming. The Doctor makes explicit here the names that we choose (and, by extension, the names that the writers of the how choose for their characters) are incredibly important. He says that the name tells us something, it's a measure of the character, it's a promise. The secret is not the name itself - he tells us this directly - that his real name isn't the point. The point is the betrayal of the name - this is the part of himself that hhe doesn't want to own, the shadow self that he keeps stashed away in his own personal underworld/subconscious.
Clara: Who’s that?
Doctor: Never mind. Let’s get back.
Clara: But who is he?
Doctor: He’s me. There’s only me here, that’s the point, now let’s get back.
Clara: But I never saw that one. I saw all of you, eleven faces, all of them you. You’re the eleventh Doctor.
Doctor: I said he was me, I never said he was the Doctor.
Clara: I don’t understand.
Doctor: My name, my real name, that is not the point. The name I chose is the Doctor. The name you choose…it’s like…it’s like a promise you make. He’s the one who broke the promise…he is my secret.
(John Hurt): What I did, I did without choice,
Doctor: I know.
(John Hurt): In the name of peace and sanity.
Doctor: But not in the name of the Doctor.
Are we all pretty much agreed that this is the incarnation that committed the Time War genocide?
The Tardis as Fairytale Castle
The Control Room, the heart of the ship, has been covered with vegetation. There’s a few things going on here. Firstly the idea that we are all only dust, that we belong to nature, and that in the end nature will reclaim everything we were and everything we cared about.
Whispermen: This man must fall as all men must
The fate of all is always dust….
Next, there is the idea of fairytales. This is the enchanted fairytale castle, surrounded by briars; the castle of Sleeping Beauty. In the myth of Sleeping Beauty, the enchanted sleep can be read as a representation of the cycle of the seasons, and thus of the cyclical nature/ of all of life (there are strong parallels between Sleeping Beauty and the story of Persephone in the Underworld.) The sleep is a symbol of death, but a death from which one is ultimately reborn, like the seasons. Love is the thing that conquers death in both the fairytale and in this story. In the fairytale, the kiss of true love awakens Sleeping Beauty.(It isn’t a ghost story, it’s a love story.) In Who, River’s love for the Doctor has brought her to a place where she opens the doorway to the Enchanted Castle; Clara’s affection for the Doctor leads her to save him through all of time and space, so he can awaken from his sleep. She kneels over the almost unconscious form of the Doctor like the Prince about to awaken Sleeping Beauty in the heart of the Castle.
The core theme of the tale of Sleeping Beauty is that true love conquers all, and this is appropriate when fitting with Moffat’s themes of Love and Death that we often find within his work.
There’s also the continual linking of the concept of the forest with death and the afterlife. Regularly in Moffat’s Who, we see the symbol of the Forest as representing a post-death state, a state in which one lives on after the death of the physical body, a state of being where the need for a physical body is transcended. Or else, the Forest is a mirror/echo/ghost of the real world. Here, the forest within the Tardis is the tomb, it’s the place where the tracks of the Doctor’s life are held safe within its core.
The link is here to the World Tree too, of course. Within the Tardis, the heart of the Control Room- the Console and the Time Rotor - usually represents the World Tree. Here the Doctor himself becomes the World Tree in his death. In Journey to the Centre of the Tardis, we heard voices echoing out of the time rotor as Bram started to deconstruct the console - here the Doctor pints his sonic and amplifies the voices echoing out of his own timestream. This is his afterlife - the glowing tracks of his tears - and it is linked together in a branching pattern that is reminiscent of arteries, branches, lightening, the veining on leaves - and fractals. It's one of the fundamental structures found within nature (a bit like the use of the pentagon table as a manifestation of the Golden Ratio earlier on.)
Just as the World Tree, mythically, connects the worlds and can be journeyed along in order to access different worlds and time periods, so the Doctor as World-Tree can be stepped into. In his death, he embodies one of the central symbols of the show in the Moffat era.
Thanks for reading, apologies for typos - meta on Clara and River to follow.