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Sep. 22nd, 2011 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taleyaSo I stop spamming the lovely ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ryttu3k's LJ
Themes, mirrors and potted crap on DW.
Been reading GoldenMoonRose's episodic essays of late. They're fantastically done. And came across a random screencap I'd missed somehow on first viewing of AGMGTW that made me go "Oh shit that's brilliant"
Note the placement of the chains
Considering the whole theme of AGMGTW is the corollary that "demons run when a good man goes to war" because a good man has the capacity to become even more monstrous than demons themselves when they abandon their morals.... weeeeeeeeeeeee
Been rewatching the whole ep now...Fuck me, there's a lot of great images in that directing. Nothing quite as dramatic as the chains, (Some we already noticed - like the musical slice on the discretionary shot of the fat gay married marine getting initiated into the headless monks) but there's lots of lovely little mirror imagery being continued on and on, mostly plotwise. Every damned ep has had some sort of mirror in it - some of them really physically overt (DOTM, COTBS, RF/AP) some of them really character-driven(eg: AGMGTW had Rory the Nurse become Warrior meeting Strax, the Warrior become Nurse, River and the Doctor giving each other their names - and where she takes on the one he gives her as an act of redemption, FOTD is the beginning of Tennant's slide into monstrosity), and some of them really subtly done - the shot in Let's Kill Hitler where you see the Doctor with Rory behind him, and a divide between those two and River and Amy in the same positions.
"
And then there's the overriding arc regarding the Doctor and his unspoken fear that he's becoming the monster, and his inability to face the fact that he can be the monster and still be himself (see rant in TBB, and then re-watch the end of AGMGTW) - 11's always screaming in frustration that he's missing something that's "staring him in the face" What stares at your own face in the mirror? Yourself.
And in Night Terrors the Monsters parallel is there *again* - the boy can't face his own powers and nature, and is terrified of rejection - what does he do with the "monsters"? Puts them in the cupboard.
...that hilarious line just became ffffuuuuu territory.
(there is also, even more terrifying, the imagery of the Time Lord distress boxes in the cupboard in TDW)
Quite a few of these go back and forth across seasons. Mirror parallel? Sneaks in at the end of Amy's Choice with the Doctor seeing the Dream Lord in his reflection. Rory's Dream!Death, also in Amy's Choice, is followed by an eerily similar one in Cold Blood (right down to the dissolution). The Beast Below - the entire episodic name is actually a reference not only to the poem uttered by the inhabitants of Starship UK but also a paralell of the Monster Within - something that the Doctor not only struggles with when he believes the only course of action is to Euthenise the starwhale, but also runs repeatedly with the series.
Layers upon layers upon layers.
ryttu3k pointed out the following:
"Rory mirroring the Doctor (and then openly rejecting that). They've been doing it... heaps and heaps. Amy's plea in DOTM, when everyone INCLUDING Rory thinks she's talking about the Doctor. The intro to AGMGTW, where everyone assumes she's talking about the Doctor until she says 'the Last Centaurion'. And it gets explicitly mentioned in TGWW - "You're turning me into you!"
Actually, hell, just the two Amys in TGWW is a mirror. Mirrors and doubles EVERYWHERE."
Most staggeringly of all, is Moffat's also worked in quite a large Nietzsche reference throughout the entire series (not just his eps as showrunner) He has the Doctor very often touted as "The man monsters are afraid of" "The one who fights the monsters." He also introduced the beginning of the Doctor's descent into monstrosity in Forest of the dead.
The quote is, of course He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. (Completed with And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. This is important.) And so in season six we see the confusion between the man he thinks he is, and the man he actually is - 11 has issues facing his faults. If corrected, his response is telling someone to shut up. His own mistakes are "stupid, stupid" - it's actually at the point where the most merciful action in what he sees as a no-win situation (TBB) becomes a point where he can no longer call himself the Doctor. 10 became quite monstrous towards the end. And 11 is still struggling to accept that part of himself. To the point where Amy is his companion - a woman he sees perpetually as a child, with a childlike belief in his goodness, but even then he can't acknowledge that until the events of God Complex.
A good example of this is the stark contrast in physical contact. the Doctor is very huggy. Big, giant hugs like you'd give to a kid, always hugging Amy every chance he can get. And then you have that scene in Amy's Choice after Rory dies - Amy is no longer a child. She's a woman. a woman grieving her husband - And the Doctor can't bring himself to touch her.
You see it again in AGMGTW. Now the Doctor has no problems whatsoever comforting a grown woman in distress - compare those two moments to how readily he runs to and touches Sexy in TDW. But Amy, he can't handle in an adult situation, where she's presenting as an adult. In these situations, the illusion is broken and he sees her for what she really is. She is no longer his little Amelia Pond, the girl who waited.
Combine that with the end of God Complex where he finally stops seeing her as the child, but as the woman, the adult, and lets her go. (even that scene is very peppered with the touch of an adult to a child, and it's the child Amy he walks away from and out of the hotel room.)
And in the final farewell scene, it's Amy who takes him into her arms for their farewell hug. And he rests his head on her shoulder in a gesture of need that crazily parallels the end scene of TBB, where it's her childlike belief "if you were very old and very kind, you couldn't sit there and watch a child cry and do nothing" that saves the day.
Remember that important thing I told you about the other end of the Nietzsche quote? Hold onto your hats, because this is where shit becomes bananas.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. is very clearly a parallel and cautionary tale for the Doctor. In fact, I would not be surprised if at the end it turns out the Doctor is the one in the space suit. The struggle with ego was very starkly driven at the end of Tennant's era, and is creeping far more subtly into Eleven. You see it turned up to the Nth degree with the Time Lords and their war against the Daleks (who are repeatedly described as “Monstrous”) - by the end of the Time War, they’re outright unrecognisable to an old school canon fan . Which dovetails into....
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
The Nietzsche quote becomes a parallel not only for the Doctor, but for the entire goddamn series with the Master completing the quote. With no only the long known and long touted mirror imaging of the Doctor and the Master, but the concept taken to the friggin' Nth degree.
(You can also argue that this applies to the Weeping Angels, which then gets even more disturbing, as personally they’ve always reminded me of Blaise Pascal’s quote “Who wants to play the angel make of themselves the beast.”)
ryttu3k's LJBeen reading GoldenMoonRose's episodic essays of late. They're fantastically done. And came across a random screencap I'd missed somehow on first viewing of AGMGTW that made me go "Oh shit that's brilliant"
Note the placement of the chains
Considering the whole theme of AGMGTW is the corollary that "demons run when a good man goes to war" because a good man has the capacity to become even more monstrous than demons themselves when they abandon their morals.... weeeeeeeeeeeee
Been rewatching the whole ep now...Fuck me, there's a lot of great images in that directing. Nothing quite as dramatic as the chains, (Some we already noticed - like the musical slice on the discretionary shot of the fat gay married marine getting initiated into the headless monks) but there's lots of lovely little mirror imagery being continued on and on, mostly plotwise. Every damned ep has had some sort of mirror in it - some of them really physically overt (DOTM, COTBS, RF/AP) some of them really character-driven(eg: AGMGTW had Rory the Nurse become Warrior meeting Strax, the Warrior become Nurse, River and the Doctor giving each other their names - and where she takes on the one he gives her as an act of redemption, FOTD is the beginning of Tennant's slide into monstrosity), and some of them really subtly done - the shot in Let's Kill Hitler where you see the Doctor with Rory behind him, and a divide between those two and River and Amy in the same positions.
"
And then there's the overriding arc regarding the Doctor and his unspoken fear that he's becoming the monster, and his inability to face the fact that he can be the monster and still be himself (see rant in TBB, and then re-watch the end of AGMGTW) - 11's always screaming in frustration that he's missing something that's "staring him in the face" What stares at your own face in the mirror? Yourself.
And in Night Terrors the Monsters parallel is there *again* - the boy can't face his own powers and nature, and is terrified of rejection - what does he do with the "monsters"? Puts them in the cupboard.
"Put Hitler in the cupboard!"
...that hilarious line just became ffffuuuuu territory.
(there is also, even more terrifying, the imagery of the Time Lord distress boxes in the cupboard in TDW)
Quite a few of these go back and forth across seasons. Mirror parallel? Sneaks in at the end of Amy's Choice with the Doctor seeing the Dream Lord in his reflection. Rory's Dream!Death, also in Amy's Choice, is followed by an eerily similar one in Cold Blood (right down to the dissolution). The Beast Below - the entire episodic name is actually a reference not only to the poem uttered by the inhabitants of Starship UK but also a paralell of the Monster Within - something that the Doctor not only struggles with when he believes the only course of action is to Euthenise the starwhale, but also runs repeatedly with the series.
Layers upon layers upon layers.
ryttu3k pointed out the following:"Rory mirroring the Doctor (and then openly rejecting that). They've been doing it... heaps and heaps. Amy's plea in DOTM, when everyone INCLUDING Rory thinks she's talking about the Doctor. The intro to AGMGTW, where everyone assumes she's talking about the Doctor until she says 'the Last Centaurion'. And it gets explicitly mentioned in TGWW - "You're turning me into you!"
Actually, hell, just the two Amys in TGWW is a mirror. Mirrors and doubles EVERYWHERE."
Most staggeringly of all, is Moffat's also worked in quite a large Nietzsche reference throughout the entire series (not just his eps as showrunner) He has the Doctor very often touted as "The man monsters are afraid of" "The one who fights the monsters." He also introduced the beginning of the Doctor's descent into monstrosity in Forest of the dead.
The quote is, of course He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. (Completed with And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. This is important.) And so in season six we see the confusion between the man he thinks he is, and the man he actually is - 11 has issues facing his faults. If corrected, his response is telling someone to shut up. His own mistakes are "stupid, stupid" - it's actually at the point where the most merciful action in what he sees as a no-win situation (TBB) becomes a point where he can no longer call himself the Doctor. 10 became quite monstrous towards the end. And 11 is still struggling to accept that part of himself. To the point where Amy is his companion - a woman he sees perpetually as a child, with a childlike belief in his goodness, but even then he can't acknowledge that until the events of God Complex.
A good example of this is the stark contrast in physical contact. the Doctor is very huggy. Big, giant hugs like you'd give to a kid, always hugging Amy every chance he can get. And then you have that scene in Amy's Choice after Rory dies - Amy is no longer a child. She's a woman. a woman grieving her husband - And the Doctor can't bring himself to touch her.
You see it again in AGMGTW. Now the Doctor has no problems whatsoever comforting a grown woman in distress - compare those two moments to how readily he runs to and touches Sexy in TDW. But Amy, he can't handle in an adult situation, where she's presenting as an adult. In these situations, the illusion is broken and he sees her for what she really is. She is no longer his little Amelia Pond, the girl who waited.
Combine that with the end of God Complex where he finally stops seeing her as the child, but as the woman, the adult, and lets her go. (even that scene is very peppered with the touch of an adult to a child, and it's the child Amy he walks away from and out of the hotel room.)
And in the final farewell scene, it's Amy who takes him into her arms for their farewell hug. And he rests his head on her shoulder in a gesture of need that crazily parallels the end scene of TBB, where it's her childlike belief "if you were very old and very kind, you couldn't sit there and watch a child cry and do nothing" that saves the day.
Remember that important thing I told you about the other end of the Nietzsche quote? Hold onto your hats, because this is where shit becomes bananas.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. is very clearly a parallel and cautionary tale for the Doctor. In fact, I would not be surprised if at the end it turns out the Doctor is the one in the space suit. The struggle with ego was very starkly driven at the end of Tennant's era, and is creeping far more subtly into Eleven. You see it turned up to the Nth degree with the Time Lords and their war against the Daleks (who are repeatedly described as “Monstrous”) - by the end of the Time War, they’re outright unrecognisable to an old school canon fan . Which dovetails into....
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
The Nietzsche quote becomes a parallel not only for the Doctor, but for the entire goddamn series with the Master completing the quote. With no only the long known and long touted mirror imaging of the Doctor and the Master, but the concept taken to the friggin' Nth degree.
(You can also argue that this applies to the Weeping Angels, which then gets even more disturbing, as personally they’ve always reminded me of Blaise Pascal’s quote “Who wants to play the angel make of themselves the beast.”)
