![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Assorted meta (Deep Breath, Into the Dalek, Robot of Sherwood)
As I hurt my foot rather badly Saturday morning, and thus had to sit still with my foot up, I finally bring you Doctor Who thoughts… Scattered and incomplete, but better than nothing hopefully. Pretty much written in one go, so apologies for being somewhat unpolished.
(‘Listen’ will be dealt with in a separate post. ETA: Possible spoilers [for Listen] in the comments, but none in the post itself.)
Assorted meta
I am Clara
(Clara’s reaction to the new Doctor)
I have *one* RL friend who watches Doctor Who. I shall call her ‘A’ and she is one of my work colleagues. (Well I know others, but none that I would ever really talk to about it.)
A likes Eleven best, and was apprehensive about the new guy.
(She is about as un-fannish as possible. She just watches the show and enjoys it, that’s as far as her involvement goes. So I find her a good touchstone for ‘average audience’ - she’ll have seen none of the interviews, the madness in the run-up to the launch, the speculation, the leaked spoilers etc. She just knew it was back on, and watched.)
On the Monday after Deep Breath aired I naturally asked her what she thought.
She hesitated a little, saying that she wasn’t quite sure about the new guy.
“Like Clara?” I asked, and she nodded eagerly: “Yes! That’s probably why they did it that way…”
“Her reaction was like ours,” I expanded, "so she helped us to get used to him.”
“That’s it!” A replied.
So, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it. I said that I was Clara, and I think most people were. Those of us in fandom of course had months and months to speculate and to soak up all information we could find - we pored over pictures of the new costume, read about how Twelve was going to be darker and fiercer and more like the old Doctors. We were prepared.
Most of the ‘audience’ will only have caught snippets of all this, yet by the very token of being watchers of Doctor Who they know the drill. New face, new personality, we’ve seen them come and go.
And Clara, too, knows the drill. Has met three Doctors, seen how they differ, seen all of them through her echoes. (Although it’s hard to tell how much she remembers.) Yet, why is she so thrown, people have asked. Why is she finding it so hard accept?
Well, I know that for me (like for A), it’s not easy. Eleven will always be my Doctor, and the short glimpse of him at the end nearly did me in. Of course the Doctor is the Doctor is the Doctor, but when something familiar is suddenly taken away, is it not normal to feel unsettled? There is a difference between knowing and understanding.
Remember, Clara did not have months and months to prepare. Didn’t get any memos about how the Doctor would change his personality quite so drastically. What Clara had was Christmas Day, which started out worrying about how her turkey wasn’t cooked. This segued into Trenzalore, which she knew was where the Doctor died… And she was left behind not once, but twice. She watched him age, from youthful face, to withered old man, who really looked about two thousand years old. All this in the space of a day.
She then solves the millennia old standoff, answers The Question, which leads to Gallifrey intervening, saving the day, and the Doctor.
And then the Doctor changes. The one thing she has held onto is suddenly a stranger who can’t tell her apart from a Sontaran. The person who came to find her, specifically, who asked her to travel with him because she was the one person in the whole universe that he wanted… That person is gone. (Or so it seems, at first.)
Eleven is my Doctor because he is Eleven.
I am beginning to like Twelve, he is different and interesting and I’m enjoying watching him. But he’s not ever going to be Eleven, and I will never love him in the same way.
I hope this explains things. At least explains where Clara is coming from, and why her reactions ring very true to me.
Eyes/Looking
If you missed my Clara meta (Schrödinger’s Companion) you might want to read that first. Because looking is very important…
If we try to delve into all the eye imagery, we have to go back to The Eleventh Hour and the Atraxi (an eye peering through a crack in a wall…), but I don’t think I have the energy to do that. There have been a LOT of eyes, a lot of observing. Just in Deep Breath we have the droid, taking a man’s eyes, and later burning the dinosaur for something valuable in its optic nerve.
But in terms of Clara and the Doctor the most important point comes at the end, after Eleven’s phone call:
“Well, he asked you a question. Will you help me?”
“You shouldn’t have been listening.”
“I wasn’t, I didn’t need to, that was me talking…. You can see me, can you? You- you look at me, and you can’t see me. Do you have any idea what that’s like? I’m not on the phone, I’m right here. Standing in front of you. Please just… Just see me.”
And she looks - and declares that yes, he is the Doctor.
Like I said in my Clara meta: To be seen is to exist.
He needs her to see him, to make him him.
(DOCTOR: Because you were the first. The first face this face saw. And you're seared onto my hearts, Amelia Pond. You always will be.)
From![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
the_royal_anna’s meta on ‘Damage’ (Angel episode, from oh so long ago):
We don't stop being human when we lose our hearts; nor when we lose our heads. And every last vestige of humanity can be drained from us, but as long as somebody, somewhere cares, we are not dust.
Doctors are defined by their Companions - something Eleven took further than most when he became Amy’s ‘Raggedy Man’ (and he was always her Raggedy Man, from first to last) - but this is heightened by Clara, who of course has been there right from the First Doctor left Gallifrey. So she, more than anyone, should be able to detect inherent ‘Doctor-ness’, even though he has shifted sharply from Eleven to the opposite end of the spectrum.
Of course from his point of view Clara is endlessly mutable (Clara Who <- this is funny and accurate), so it’s no wonder that he’s a little confused.
The difficult thing is that the dynamic has been reversed. (Both for the characters and the audience.)
When we first met Clara Eleven was the known quantity and Clara was the mystery (quite literally). The second part of S7 was about unravelling the Clara mystery, and the Doctor’s focus (and ours) was on The Impossible Girl.
Then we had the two very heavily Doctor-centric episodes of Day of the Doctor and Time of Doctor, one dealing with his past, the other with his regeneration. In both, Clara plays somewhat of the ‘ur-Companion’ - smart, bright, capable, supportive and insightful. (There’s more to it of course - see my Clara meta - but for the point I’m making here, it’ll do.)
And then - Twelve. And abruptly the tables have turned. Now Clara is our point of reference, and the Doctor the unknown. Plus, he is no longer focussed on her the way he was. Oh he still needs her, but the energy is flowing in the opposite direction.
Our reference point is now Clara, not the Doctor - and this might be one of the reasons people suddenly seem to take to her more. (Also, of course, the dynamic has changed drastically. Their argument in the restaurant is one of my favourite things ever.)
I will try to get back to the seeing theme another time (Clara’s shirt full of EYES is screaming for some sort of discussion/interpretation), but I think I need to wait.
Also - for all those who say that Clara is so much more interesting *now* - go watch Bells of St John! (She hasn't changed - the Doctor has.) Which also contains the following charming parallel:
CLARA: You've hacked the lower operating system, yeah? I'll have their physical location in under five minutes. Pop off and get us a coffee.
DOCTOR: If I can't find them, you definitely can't.
CLARA: They uploaded me, remember? I've got computing stuff in my head.
DOCTOR: So do I.
CLARA: I have insane hacking skills.
DOCTOR: I'm from space and the future with two hearts and twenty seven brains.
CLARA: And I can find them in under five minutes plus photographs. Twenty seven?
DOCTOR: Okay, slight exaggeration.
CLARA: Coffee, go get. Five minutes, I promise.
Bells of St John
DOCTOR: Do you want to go get some coffee? Or chips? Or chips and coffee?
CLARA: Coffee. Coffee would be great. You're buying.
DOCTOR: I don't have any money.
CLARA: You're fetching then!
DOCTOR: I'm not sure I'm the fetching sort.
CLARA: Yeah. Still not sure you get a vote.
Deep Breath
A Good Man?
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
Marcus Aurelius.
This is what Clara is writing on the board at the very start of Day of the Doctor. The theme is not new - indeed it is one deeply embedded in the show. Focussing solely on Moffat Who, in S5 we wondered who the ‘Good Man’ was that River killed. S6 brought it into focus with ‘A Good Man Goes To War’, where the Doctor rejected the title. (“Good men don’t need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”) Following on from S6 he went on to erase himself…
Actually, let’s have a look at that.
In ‘Into the Dalek’ the Doctor asks Clara “Am I a good man?”
It is about definitions. The Eleventh Doctor declares himself to be ‘A Mad Man with a Box’, and Amy names him her ‘Raggedy Man’. But in Victory of the Daleks he defines himself in relation to the Daleks:
DALEK: I am your soldier.
DOCTOR: Stop this. Stop now. Now, you know who I am. You always know.
[...]
DOCTOR: You are my enemy! And I am yours. You are everything I despise. The worst thing in all creation. I've defeated you time and time again. I've defeated you. I sent you back into the Void. I saved the whole of reality from you. I am the Doctor. And you are the Daleks.
DALEK: Correct. Review testimony.
DOCTOR [OC]: I am the Doctor. And you are the Daleks.
DOCTOR: Testimony. What are you talking about, testimony?
DALEK 2: Transmitting testimony now.
The Doctor and the Daleks are so interdependent that they need each other in order to define themselves:
DOCTOR: But why? I get it. Oh, I get it. I get it. Oh ho! This is rich. The Progenitor wouldn't recognise you, would it? It saw you as impure. Your DNA is unrecognisable as Dalek.
DALEK: A solution was devised.
DOCTOR: Yes, yes, yes. Me. My testimony. So you set a trap. You knew that the Progenitor would recognise me, the Daleks' greatest enemy. It would accept my word. My recognition of you. No. No, no. What are you doing?
The Daleks are evil, so the Doctor is ‘good’. (This is why the Dalek’s words in ‘Dalek’ are so devastating: “You would make a good Dalek” - the Dalek sees in the Doctor the same destruction that Daleks excel at.)
We see this quite a bit on RTD Who (Daleks are the main enemy in the finales of S1, 2 and 4), and it is easy to understand why the Ninth and Tenth Doctors (so very scarred from the Time War) are eager to grasp this simplified binary: They are not Daleks, so they must be ‘good’. But with the dawning of Eleven’s era, things get more complicated. The ‘enemy’ during Eleven’s run is The Silence, yet The Silence fights for peace. It wants to silence the Doctor because he is dangerous, and although the Kovarian faction is clearly using despicable methods, their aim is not evil. ‘Good’ becomes something far more tricky to define… River names the Doctor ‘the best man I have ever known’, yet she was created as a weapon to kill him. AGMGTW showed the duality, showed River pointing out how he had become ‘A Great Warrior’, how fearful people were. And all because of… stories.
The Eleventh Doctor was in many ways a fairy tale (sometimes a dark one) - he was stories, rippling across the universe, yet he couldn’t control them.
Every regeneration is a reaction against the previous one, so is it any wonder he reacts so badly to Robin Hood? From Asylum of the Daleks:
DARLA [OC]: First, there were the Daleks. And then, there was a man who fought them. And then, in time, he died. There are a few, of course, who believe this man somehow survived, and that one day he will return. For both our sakes, dearest Hannah, we must hope these stories are true.
When you are written by other people… What does that make you? When your very self-definition (in many ways) is that you are NOT a Dalek - what does the prospect of a ‘good’ Dalek mean, except a complete panic that the whole world is destabilised?
Note: ‘Good’ has two meanings: ‘Fit for purpose’ and ‘Morally good’. A chair cannot be good in the second sense, as a chair isn’t sentient. When The Last Dalek speaks to Nine, it is speaking in the first sense. When Rusty speaks to Twelve, it means the second. The Last Dalek sees the Doctor’s destruction, but Rusty sees the Doctor’s righteousness.
Of course there is also Asylum of the Daleks, where we saw another ‘good’ Dalek. The music is always important, and the moment when the Doctor revealed to Oswin what she really was has a score of its own - The Terrible Truth:
But that’s not all… The music at 41 minutes [of Into the Dalek] - when Rusty decides to act on the Doctor's hatred and turns on the other Daleks - is the same track! (1:34 minutes in)
Both Oswin and the Doctor had to face that what they thought they were might not be the reality. And in both cases (to tie back to the previous section) it’s about being seen. Eleven sees Oswin, and Rusty sees Twelve. The thing is, that’s not the end. Oswin fights the Dalek impulses (as does Tasha Lem later), and so - similarly - does the Doctor.
Now in ‘Asylum’ Oswin erased the Daleks’ memory of him, and for a while the Doctor was free - free to define himself however he wanted (Doctor Who?), except Trenzalore was waiting. And on Trenzalore the Doctor spent a thousand years fighting the Daleks. That is half his life. Is it any wonder his hatred is still burning brightly?
But as Clara says - it’s not what you are, but what you try to be. Facing hard truths about yourself is important, but that can only ever be a starting point.
The Promised Land
I like the theory that Missy is the Master. It would fit rather well, and be a very nice spin on the Master’s continued search for everlasting life. The past few seasons have focussed a lot on death (avoiding it, accepting it), so where do you go from there? Heaven, obviously. ;)
I don’t have a lot to say, really, but I didn’t want to leave it out…
So far, there are mostly unanswered questions. What does Missy want? How is she connected to the Doctor? (I don’t mean personally - if she’s the Master, then that’s obvious.) But what does she mean that she wants to ‘keep his [the Doctor’s] new face’? What sort of power does she have? Was she the person in the shop that gave Clara the Doctor’s number? Was she the one placing the advert? (Was she the person hacking the Doctor’s dream in the prequel to ‘Asylum’? Leading to the Doctor meeting Oswin…)
If the answer to these questions is yes, then why is she so keen to keep the Doctor & Clara together? (If you see my Clara meta, then you’ll notice that there are still unanswered questions - like, why is there what looks like a Time Beetle on a tree? Why is Clara’s leaf so important?)
But if someone might be using Clara (for whatever purpose we do not know), then that would explain a lot…
Also there is the question of which people are saved? Is it the Doctor’s victims/those who sacrifice themselves?
Plus, given Missy’s talk about Twelve’s face, I’m sure this is the part that ties into ‘Where do the faces come from?’ Which will be interesting. Did the Doctor ‘choose’ Caecilius’s face on purpose, and if so - why? What’s he trying to tell himself? (No idea where they are going with it, these are all rhetorical questions.)
But I shall leave you with this image, created bypromethia_tenk after Deep Breath aired (her brain has been working better than mine):
(‘Listen’ will be dealt with in a separate post. ETA: Possible spoilers [for Listen] in the comments, but none in the post itself.)
I am Clara
(Clara’s reaction to the new Doctor)
I have *one* RL friend who watches Doctor Who. I shall call her ‘A’ and she is one of my work colleagues. (Well I know others, but none that I would ever really talk to about it.)
A likes Eleven best, and was apprehensive about the new guy.
(She is about as un-fannish as possible. She just watches the show and enjoys it, that’s as far as her involvement goes. So I find her a good touchstone for ‘average audience’ - she’ll have seen none of the interviews, the madness in the run-up to the launch, the speculation, the leaked spoilers etc. She just knew it was back on, and watched.)
On the Monday after Deep Breath aired I naturally asked her what she thought.
She hesitated a little, saying that she wasn’t quite sure about the new guy.
“Like Clara?” I asked, and she nodded eagerly: “Yes! That’s probably why they did it that way…”
“Her reaction was like ours,” I expanded, "so she helped us to get used to him.”
“That’s it!” A replied.
So, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it. I said that I was Clara, and I think most people were. Those of us in fandom of course had months and months to speculate and to soak up all information we could find - we pored over pictures of the new costume, read about how Twelve was going to be darker and fiercer and more like the old Doctors. We were prepared.
Most of the ‘audience’ will only have caught snippets of all this, yet by the very token of being watchers of Doctor Who they know the drill. New face, new personality, we’ve seen them come and go.
And Clara, too, knows the drill. Has met three Doctors, seen how they differ, seen all of them through her echoes. (Although it’s hard to tell how much she remembers.) Yet, why is she so thrown, people have asked. Why is she finding it so hard accept?
Well, I know that for me (like for A), it’s not easy. Eleven will always be my Doctor, and the short glimpse of him at the end nearly did me in. Of course the Doctor is the Doctor is the Doctor, but when something familiar is suddenly taken away, is it not normal to feel unsettled? There is a difference between knowing and understanding.
Remember, Clara did not have months and months to prepare. Didn’t get any memos about how the Doctor would change his personality quite so drastically. What Clara had was Christmas Day, which started out worrying about how her turkey wasn’t cooked. This segued into Trenzalore, which she knew was where the Doctor died… And she was left behind not once, but twice. She watched him age, from youthful face, to withered old man, who really looked about two thousand years old. All this in the space of a day.
She then solves the millennia old standoff, answers The Question, which leads to Gallifrey intervening, saving the day, and the Doctor.
And then the Doctor changes. The one thing she has held onto is suddenly a stranger who can’t tell her apart from a Sontaran. The person who came to find her, specifically, who asked her to travel with him because she was the one person in the whole universe that he wanted… That person is gone. (Or so it seems, at first.)
Eleven is my Doctor because he is Eleven.
I am beginning to like Twelve, he is different and interesting and I’m enjoying watching him. But he’s not ever going to be Eleven, and I will never love him in the same way.
I hope this explains things. At least explains where Clara is coming from, and why her reactions ring very true to me.
If you missed my Clara meta (Schrödinger’s Companion) you might want to read that first. Because looking is very important…
If we try to delve into all the eye imagery, we have to go back to The Eleventh Hour and the Atraxi (an eye peering through a crack in a wall…), but I don’t think I have the energy to do that. There have been a LOT of eyes, a lot of observing. Just in Deep Breath we have the droid, taking a man’s eyes, and later burning the dinosaur for something valuable in its optic nerve.
But in terms of Clara and the Doctor the most important point comes at the end, after Eleven’s phone call:
“Well, he asked you a question. Will you help me?”
“You shouldn’t have been listening.”
“I wasn’t, I didn’t need to, that was me talking…. You can see me, can you? You- you look at me, and you can’t see me. Do you have any idea what that’s like? I’m not on the phone, I’m right here. Standing in front of you. Please just… Just see me.”
And she looks - and declares that yes, he is the Doctor.
Like I said in my Clara meta: To be seen is to exist.
He needs her to see him, to make him him.
(DOCTOR: Because you were the first. The first face this face saw. And you're seared onto my hearts, Amelia Pond. You always will be.)
From
the_royal_anna’s meta on ‘Damage’ (Angel episode, from oh so long ago):We don't stop being human when we lose our hearts; nor when we lose our heads. And every last vestige of humanity can be drained from us, but as long as somebody, somewhere cares, we are not dust.
Doctors are defined by their Companions - something Eleven took further than most when he became Amy’s ‘Raggedy Man’ (and he was always her Raggedy Man, from first to last) - but this is heightened by Clara, who of course has been there right from the First Doctor left Gallifrey. So she, more than anyone, should be able to detect inherent ‘Doctor-ness’, even though he has shifted sharply from Eleven to the opposite end of the spectrum.
Of course from his point of view Clara is endlessly mutable (Clara Who <- this is funny and accurate), so it’s no wonder that he’s a little confused.
The difficult thing is that the dynamic has been reversed. (Both for the characters and the audience.)
When we first met Clara Eleven was the known quantity and Clara was the mystery (quite literally). The second part of S7 was about unravelling the Clara mystery, and the Doctor’s focus (and ours) was on The Impossible Girl.
Then we had the two very heavily Doctor-centric episodes of Day of the Doctor and Time of Doctor, one dealing with his past, the other with his regeneration. In both, Clara plays somewhat of the ‘ur-Companion’ - smart, bright, capable, supportive and insightful. (There’s more to it of course - see my Clara meta - but for the point I’m making here, it’ll do.)
And then - Twelve. And abruptly the tables have turned. Now Clara is our point of reference, and the Doctor the unknown. Plus, he is no longer focussed on her the way he was. Oh he still needs her, but the energy is flowing in the opposite direction.
Our reference point is now Clara, not the Doctor - and this might be one of the reasons people suddenly seem to take to her more. (Also, of course, the dynamic has changed drastically. Their argument in the restaurant is one of my favourite things ever.)
I will try to get back to the seeing theme another time (Clara’s shirt full of EYES is screaming for some sort of discussion/interpretation), but I think I need to wait.
Also - for all those who say that Clara is so much more interesting *now* - go watch Bells of St John! (She hasn't changed - the Doctor has.) Which also contains the following charming parallel:
CLARA: You've hacked the lower operating system, yeah? I'll have their physical location in under five minutes. Pop off and get us a coffee.
DOCTOR: If I can't find them, you definitely can't.
CLARA: They uploaded me, remember? I've got computing stuff in my head.
DOCTOR: So do I.
CLARA: I have insane hacking skills.
DOCTOR: I'm from space and the future with two hearts and twenty seven brains.
CLARA: And I can find them in under five minutes plus photographs. Twenty seven?
DOCTOR: Okay, slight exaggeration.
CLARA: Coffee, go get. Five minutes, I promise.
Bells of St John
DOCTOR: Do you want to go get some coffee? Or chips? Or chips and coffee?
CLARA: Coffee. Coffee would be great. You're buying.
DOCTOR: I don't have any money.
CLARA: You're fetching then!
DOCTOR: I'm not sure I'm the fetching sort.
CLARA: Yeah. Still not sure you get a vote.
Deep Breath
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
Marcus Aurelius.
This is what Clara is writing on the board at the very start of Day of the Doctor. The theme is not new - indeed it is one deeply embedded in the show. Focussing solely on Moffat Who, in S5 we wondered who the ‘Good Man’ was that River killed. S6 brought it into focus with ‘A Good Man Goes To War’, where the Doctor rejected the title. (“Good men don’t need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”) Following on from S6 he went on to erase himself…
Actually, let’s have a look at that.
In ‘Into the Dalek’ the Doctor asks Clara “Am I a good man?”
It is about definitions. The Eleventh Doctor declares himself to be ‘A Mad Man with a Box’, and Amy names him her ‘Raggedy Man’. But in Victory of the Daleks he defines himself in relation to the Daleks:
DALEK: I am your soldier.
DOCTOR: Stop this. Stop now. Now, you know who I am. You always know.
[...]
DOCTOR: You are my enemy! And I am yours. You are everything I despise. The worst thing in all creation. I've defeated you time and time again. I've defeated you. I sent you back into the Void. I saved the whole of reality from you. I am the Doctor. And you are the Daleks.
DALEK: Correct. Review testimony.
DOCTOR [OC]: I am the Doctor. And you are the Daleks.
DOCTOR: Testimony. What are you talking about, testimony?
DALEK 2: Transmitting testimony now.
The Doctor and the Daleks are so interdependent that they need each other in order to define themselves:
DOCTOR: But why? I get it. Oh, I get it. I get it. Oh ho! This is rich. The Progenitor wouldn't recognise you, would it? It saw you as impure. Your DNA is unrecognisable as Dalek.
DALEK: A solution was devised.
DOCTOR: Yes, yes, yes. Me. My testimony. So you set a trap. You knew that the Progenitor would recognise me, the Daleks' greatest enemy. It would accept my word. My recognition of you. No. No, no. What are you doing?
The Daleks are evil, so the Doctor is ‘good’. (This is why the Dalek’s words in ‘Dalek’ are so devastating: “You would make a good Dalek” - the Dalek sees in the Doctor the same destruction that Daleks excel at.)
We see this quite a bit on RTD Who (Daleks are the main enemy in the finales of S1, 2 and 4), and it is easy to understand why the Ninth and Tenth Doctors (so very scarred from the Time War) are eager to grasp this simplified binary: They are not Daleks, so they must be ‘good’. But with the dawning of Eleven’s era, things get more complicated. The ‘enemy’ during Eleven’s run is The Silence, yet The Silence fights for peace. It wants to silence the Doctor because he is dangerous, and although the Kovarian faction is clearly using despicable methods, their aim is not evil. ‘Good’ becomes something far more tricky to define… River names the Doctor ‘the best man I have ever known’, yet she was created as a weapon to kill him. AGMGTW showed the duality, showed River pointing out how he had become ‘A Great Warrior’, how fearful people were. And all because of… stories.
The Eleventh Doctor was in many ways a fairy tale (sometimes a dark one) - he was stories, rippling across the universe, yet he couldn’t control them.
Every regeneration is a reaction against the previous one, so is it any wonder he reacts so badly to Robin Hood? From Asylum of the Daleks:
DARLA [OC]: First, there were the Daleks. And then, there was a man who fought them. And then, in time, he died. There are a few, of course, who believe this man somehow survived, and that one day he will return. For both our sakes, dearest Hannah, we must hope these stories are true.
When you are written by other people… What does that make you? When your very self-definition (in many ways) is that you are NOT a Dalek - what does the prospect of a ‘good’ Dalek mean, except a complete panic that the whole world is destabilised?
Note: ‘Good’ has two meanings: ‘Fit for purpose’ and ‘Morally good’. A chair cannot be good in the second sense, as a chair isn’t sentient. When The Last Dalek speaks to Nine, it is speaking in the first sense. When Rusty speaks to Twelve, it means the second. The Last Dalek sees the Doctor’s destruction, but Rusty sees the Doctor’s righteousness.
Of course there is also Asylum of the Daleks, where we saw another ‘good’ Dalek. The music is always important, and the moment when the Doctor revealed to Oswin what she really was has a score of its own - The Terrible Truth:
But that’s not all… The music at 41 minutes [of Into the Dalek] - when Rusty decides to act on the Doctor's hatred and turns on the other Daleks - is the same track! (1:34 minutes in)
Both Oswin and the Doctor had to face that what they thought they were might not be the reality. And in both cases (to tie back to the previous section) it’s about being seen. Eleven sees Oswin, and Rusty sees Twelve. The thing is, that’s not the end. Oswin fights the Dalek impulses (as does Tasha Lem later), and so - similarly - does the Doctor.
Now in ‘Asylum’ Oswin erased the Daleks’ memory of him, and for a while the Doctor was free - free to define himself however he wanted (Doctor Who?), except Trenzalore was waiting. And on Trenzalore the Doctor spent a thousand years fighting the Daleks. That is half his life. Is it any wonder his hatred is still burning brightly?
But as Clara says - it’s not what you are, but what you try to be. Facing hard truths about yourself is important, but that can only ever be a starting point.
I like the theory that Missy is the Master. It would fit rather well, and be a very nice spin on the Master’s continued search for everlasting life. The past few seasons have focussed a lot on death (avoiding it, accepting it), so where do you go from there? Heaven, obviously. ;)
I don’t have a lot to say, really, but I didn’t want to leave it out…
So far, there are mostly unanswered questions. What does Missy want? How is she connected to the Doctor? (I don’t mean personally - if she’s the Master, then that’s obvious.) But what does she mean that she wants to ‘keep his [the Doctor’s] new face’? What sort of power does she have? Was she the person in the shop that gave Clara the Doctor’s number? Was she the one placing the advert? (Was she the person hacking the Doctor’s dream in the prequel to ‘Asylum’? Leading to the Doctor meeting Oswin…)
If the answer to these questions is yes, then why is she so keen to keep the Doctor & Clara together? (If you see my Clara meta, then you’ll notice that there are still unanswered questions - like, why is there what looks like a Time Beetle on a tree? Why is Clara’s leaf so important?)
But if someone might be using Clara (for whatever purpose we do not know), then that would explain a lot…
Also there is the question of which people are saved? Is it the Doctor’s victims/those who sacrifice themselves?
Plus, given Missy’s talk about Twelve’s face, I’m sure this is the part that ties into ‘Where do the faces come from?’ Which will be interesting. Did the Doctor ‘choose’ Caecilius’s face on purpose, and if so - why? What’s he trying to tell himself? (No idea where they are going with it, these are all rhetorical questions.)
But I shall leave you with this image, created by
promethia_tenk after Deep Breath aired (her brain has been working better than mine):
no subject
no subject
Are there screencaps of the Aztec brooch shared between Cameca and One somewhere? Because I really wanted the brooch Clara was wearing to be referencing that somehow, but my Google-fu was insufficient.
no subject
And... I don't know. I've yet to see more than a tiny handful of One's adventures, so I can't help you, sorry.