elisi | DW 8.10. Forest of the Night

Am trying to post something before Saturday... This could be longer, and I might come back to edit, but at least I've got SOMETHING out there. (For the William Blake connections, see this review: Tyger tyger, burning bright

PLEASE DO NOT POST ANY SPOILERS FOR THE FINALE!!!

Forest of the Night

likethewolfClara

Greenworld - literally
(I’m lost and I’m found)
Well, this one was pure fairy tale. We’ve had fairy tales before, but usually they’ve been set in a fairy tale world - or ‘greenworld’. Both The Big Bang and The Wedding of River Song are set in greenworlds, where ordinary logic and rules don’t apply. The Doctor (a Trickster character) belongs in the greenworld - f.ex. TARDIS is, quite literally, a different dimension.

Or, to quote Dr Sandifer (italics mine):

And so the moral heart of the Moffat era stands, for a moment, revealed - an understanding and principle we can take forward in reading everything else that he does. It is an observation that stems inexorably from the history of alchemy within the series and from the underlying imagery of this story. “As above, so below,” the injunction goes - a declaration that manipulating symbols and manipulating objects is, in some sense, the same thing. That a symbol and a thing are in some sense interchangeable.
From The Alchemists of the Middle Ages Made Transmutation Their Main Aim in Life (The Beast Below)

But here the greenworld has broken through, the symbols manifesting in the real world, and the Doctor is… helpless, pretty much. He accepts what is going to happen with barely a murmur once he works it out.

Instead Maebh takes his traditional role. Having tapped into the otherworldly, she becomes proactive in controlling the world, all manners of fairy tale characters rolled up into one - f.ex. we have specific mentions of Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel.

The little girl becomes the Champion - she both calls forth the trees, and is also the one to instruct people to leave the trees alone. Of course such powers come at a price. She is constantly walking in two worlds simultaneously, seeing and hearing things others can’t. The Doctor - himself a greenworld character walking in the ‘real world’ - understands her predicament, and is able to help translate/reveal what she can perceive, just like his TARDIS is able to convey her message far and wide. But he is only the helper, Maebh is the driving force of the narrative.

And what a narrative - you can’t get much more fairy tale than a forest. It's worth noting that the other forest we've had this season - in Robot of Sherwood - was also somewhat 'unreal', and the Doctor was very distrustful. Also we have an awful lot of characters named after forests... Ellie Ravenwood (Clara's mother), Courtney Woods, PC Forrest, Maebh Arden (the Forest of Arden is the setting for Shakespeare’s As You Like It). Trees have always been a big theme, but they're really pushing the boat out this time.

I’ve seen people say that because this one was all imagery they just sat back and didn’t engage their brain. (I will never understand this.) As

malsperanza once put it, back during early S5:

This is Tolkien country, where there is a willow grows aslant a brook not in order to be picturesque and pastoral, but to eat you if you are so foolish as to come too near. As Gandalf says, there are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world. And deep space is one of those places; the human heart is another. In Rivendell, Frodo notes, there is the memory of ancient things; in Lorien the ancient things still live on in the waking world. And as Hamlet remarks (perhaps because he is familiar with the ways of willow-trees), there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of a rationalist. Moffat knows that the scariest things are not chainsaws and tentacles but shadows and cracked plaster, and that the scariest things are also the most wonderful, wonderful and yet again wonderful. He knows because like most good British writers, he learned about enchanted forests from Arden and the woods near Athens; about trees that imprison mysteries from a cloven pine; about the magical transformations that occur in the deep places from the tolling of a sea-nymph's bell. The Shakespearean echoes are all over Doctor Who.

The interesting thing is that even with the greenworld taking over, the basic structure of the world still stands:

Danny (along with humanity) stays put on Earth itself. But Missy watches from Below (Nethersphere) and Clara and the Doctor watch the solar flare strike Earth from Above (the Heavens).

Doctor Clara
This episode can be seen as Clara’s final step in Doctor-y-ness. She manipulates him as if born to it (and who’s to say she wasn’t?), and he doesn’t suspect for a moment. And then - she rejects becoming him completely (“I don’t want to be the last of my kind.”). But she could have been.

The role swap is wonderful. Usually the Doctor is the one to save the Companion, even at the expense of his own life, and the Companion then - in turn - tends to come up with some sort of plan and save the day. (See… oh, Parting of the Ways for a perfect example.)

This time she sends him away to keep him safe. There is also the wonderful mirrored dialogue from Kill the Moon - this time he claims the Earth as his also, using the exact words she threw at him so angrily, yet she kindly but firmly tells him thank you, but no.

Of course Kill the Moon had another instance of the greenworld crossing over to the ‘real’ world wholesale - the Moon is an egg! - and there too Clara faced a similar sort of dilemma. Not that there is much of a choice this time, and she decides to let them all die (the children included) rather than live on with the kind loss she sees crippling the Doctor every day. (Not to mention her own trauma of losing her mother - when she says the children will never stop missing their parents, she is speaking of herself also.)

Now Clara is also mirrored in Maebh - Maebh is lost and found, just like Clara was when she was little. And being ‘lost’ is one the touchstones of Clara’s story (“I don’t know where I am” - from Asylum of Daleks, The Bells of St John and The Name of the Doctor), and in The Rings of Akhaten she tells Merry Gejelh about how she got lost when she was only little. But her mother found her…

CLARA: Everyone's scared when they're little. I used to be terrified of getting lost. Used to have nightmares about it. And then I got lost. Blackpool beach, Bank holiday Monday, about ten billion people. I was about six. My worst nightmare come true.
MERRY: What happened?
CLARA: The world ended. My heart broke. And then my mum found me. We had fish and chips, and she drove me home and she tucked me up and she told me a story.
ELLIE [memory]: It doesn't matter where you are, in the jungle or the desert or on the moon. However lost you may feel, you'll never really be lost. Not really. Because I will always be here, and I will always come and find you. Every single time. Every single time.

Just like Maebh is found by her mother in this episode. And not only that, but her sister returns also: the completion of a family the conclusion of the story. This bodes well for the future. :)

Now, even though Clara rejected becoming the Doctor fully, she is still drawn to his world - to the wonder and the terror and the difficult choices. But Danny...

Danny
(not one man in ten thousand)
The other day I came across a comment wondering why Danny was just letting Clara go off on her own like that. Surely if he really cared about her he would go along - if nothing else to try to keep her safe, considering how dangerous life with the Doctor is. I’m sure there are many other comments along the same lines out there. How can he be so calm letting his girlfriend go off like that?

It took me a moment, but then I realised that this reminded me of one of my favourite passages of any book ever. The book is ‘Gaudy Night’ by Dorothy L. Sayers, one of her series of Peter Wimsey novels. The main character in this (and several of the other novels) is Harriet Vane, who is in this book trying to unravel a mystery on her own. She has for five years been pursued by the ‘great detective’ Peter Wimsey (and he IS great! If I had a choice, I’d without a shadow of a doubt choose him over any other fictional detective) and has here just received a letter from him; they know each other well, and he proposes with great regularity. She has so far always turned him down (let’s just say it’s complicated..) This is her reaction to what he writes:

[...] More generously still, he had not only refrained from offers of help or advice which she might have resented; he had deliberately acknowledged that she had the right to run her own risks. “Do be careful of yourself”; “I hate to think of your being exposed to unpleasantness”; “If only I could be there to protect you”; any such phrase would express the normal male reaction. Not one man in ten thousand would say to the woman he loved, or to any woman: “Disagreeableness and danger will not turn you back, and God forbid they should.” That was an admission of equality, and she had not expected it of him. If he conceived of marriage along those lines, then the whole problem would have to be reviewed in that new light; but that seemed scarcely possible. To take such a line and stick to it, he would have to be, not a man but a miracle.

Our Mr Pink seems cut from the same cloth. So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen - Moffat has created one of the most feminist' love interest since Peter Wimsey. (And Dorothy L Sayers was a feminist, even if she might not have used the word. See this book.)

I don’t think this means he’ll stay passive, come what may. If she were in danger I’m sure he’d rush to save her (like he did in The Caretaker).

He has so far deliberately rejected the rush and thrill to be able to focus what’s in front of him. (But what if that was taken away?) He said he left the army because of ‘a bad day’... This all sounds very Doctor-y to me (echoes of ‘No More’ all over his statements), so who knows what hidden depths he might contain?

It also occurred to me that he'll probably turn out to have been mirrored in Captain Quell - the old soldier in charge of the Orient Express who had lost his taste for battle. The one who springs into action after the third person was killed. I think Danny might have a similar arc. He is so deliberately laid back and unconfrontational (except when pushed), but with Clara herself on the line, I think he might snap into action again. And it looks like the finale might push just the right sorts of buttons... Yes, it could just be that we’ll once more see a good man go to war.

Dark Water Trailers
(and I’m hungry like the wolf)

I could write speculation forever…

Missy, Cybermen, UNIT, Kate Stewart, Osgood, Clara - ‘Clara Oswald has never existed’.

Of course this is the trailer for part one of the finale, so I’m sure there’ll be twenty three more twists, but even so I feel that I was right… There is a reason she’s been monster’d so many times. Clara isn’t what she seems (even as she’ll be exactly what she is - she is always two opposites simultaneously).

I am of course hoping that Missy will turn out to be the Master, because I love the Master. This would also (presumably) tie the whole story arc into Gallifrey, which seems likely in any case. Clara has Gallifreyan symbols written all over her. (Not that there aren’t other ways of achieving this. But the Master would be so much FUN.) Plus of course the whole idea of cheating death is right up the Master’s alley…

Mind you, I am hesitant to wonder too much, but I figure that the invasion of our world by another (like how the trees turned up from fairy tale land - but in this case it’s the Nethersphere) is pretty obvious, and that it’ll all end with a family reunion is almost a given. After all, that is how Moffat resolves most of his plots. It’s working out how the people are related that’s the issue… Both the Doctor and Missy have referred to Clara as ‘theirs’ ("Clara, my Clara...") - my prediction is that she’ll belong to both of them. After all she has been a Doctor mirror since she first appeared - but the darker mirror must come from somewhere else. And that ‘else’ is clearly Missy, whoever she is:

"Why do you have three mirrors?"

Three is obviously the magic number. As I've tried to show in my header, both Twelve and Clara have worn their faces three times. And we will undoubtedly get another trio now: The Doctor, Clara and Missy. ETA: By the way, it looks as if Missy stole Eleven's Christmas outfit.

DW 8.10. Forest of the Night

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