Discursive Essay: Doctor Who S8.05 - Time Heist

The Time:            2000 + some more years

The Place:           Karabraxos Bank

The Situation:   Starlight Robbery

RECAP

Skip to the TARDIS picture if you don’t need a recap.

The Doctor and Clara are discussing an adventure. The Doctor answers his phone, and ends up in a room with Clara and two other members of a team who have been enlisted in a bank heist. A mysterious ‘Architect’ gives them vague details about the heist. Their memories have been wiped, but there is a recorded message which lets them know they have consented to the wipe. They have little choice but to carry on with the heist.

Their team (Team Not-Dead) includes:

• An augmented cyborg named Psi, an expert hacker who has to deal with ‘dry glitches’. Facing interrogation in prison, he deleted his own memories to protect his friends and family. For robbing the bank, he is promised a reboot drive that can make him regain his memories.

• A shapeshifter named Saibra. Her mutant genes force her to transform into anyone who touches her, making it impossible for her to be intimate with anyone without being freaky. For robbing the bank she will receive a gene suppressant that allows her to touch others without triggering her ability.

• Clara, a ferocious high school English teacher from the planet Earth. Seriously though, if you don’t know the kind of shit she deals with on a day to day basis, watch Skins and you’ll have some idea. Undoubtedly one of the toughest explorers in outer space.

• Last and certainly not least, The Doctor, an enigmatic Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. He is face-blind and has cross eyebrows. An egomaniacal needy game-player.

As soon as the heist starts, they are introduced to The Teller, an imprisoned alien with mind-reading and mind-eating capabilities. The Teller is commanded by the bank’s manager, a cheery sociopath named Delphox, who is acting under the orders of the bank’s director, the eponymous Karabraxos. The Teller is the reason Team Not-Dead has been memory wiped: it uses its mind-reading ability to sniff out guilt in the bank’s patrons (who are career criminals, and must therefore be guiltless in their own minds if not in reality), and then crushes those who pose a threat to the bank. The only safety from this introspection is to lose self-awareness (Don't Think).

Team Not-Dead is led through the bank, placing faith in the plan of the Architect. They are provided with an ‘exit strategy’ (assumed at first to mean a lethal poison) and with the select information and tools which the Architect provides. The Doctor takes charge, and conducts the mission with his usual grumpy charm.

“Underneath it all, he isn’t really like that.”

“It’s very obvious that you’ve been with him for a while.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re really good with the excuses.”

~Clara and Psi

The first time they face The Teller in the vault it hones in on Saibra, who has the greatest ‘guilt’, or as it may be termed, ‘Self-Hatred’, which has its basis in to her mutant nature. She uses the exit strategy to avoid becoming a semi-conscious soup bowl.

The Teller pursues them as they sneak their way through the lower levels of the vault. It finds Clara and starts to attack her, but Psi saves her by way of self-sacrifice. This is important because Clara is a relative stranger, and he still values her life more than his own, which is a second example of Self-Hatred. Psi uses the exit strategy to avoid becoming a soup bowl.

When they encounter an obstacle that can only be breached during an unpredictable solar event, The Doctor determines that the Architect must be in the future, planning the heist at a point vulnerable in the past. They recover the reboot drive and gene suppressant before they are captured by Delphox and The Teller. Delphox reveals that she has assured The Teller’s loyalty, claiming that everything has its price.

Psi and Saibra are revealed to be alive, masquerading as guards. The ‘exit strategy’ was really a teleport device that takes them to a ship in planetary orbit. The team continues on with the heist, toward the private vault in Karabraxos’ office.

Karabraxos is revealed to be a tyrannical ruler of a criminal empire, cloning many ‘Delphox’s from her own genes to act as her managers, replacing them when they fail her.

“She hates her own clones. She burns her own clones. Frankly, you’re a career break for the right therapist.”

The Doctor hates the Architect, and this gives him a clue to the Architect’s identity: as someone overbearing, manipulative, and far too clever, he suddenly realizes that he is the Architect. He has been plotting the course of the whole episode.

More, he realizes that the one with the greatest motive to act against Karabraxos is Karabraxos herself, as she is self-hating, and in the future she has come to regret her past. He gives her his phone number. The Karabraxos Bank faces imminent destruction from the solar storm, and Karabraxos leaves.

In the far future, she calls up the Doctor to act against the part of herself she hates the most – the part that imprisoned The Teller by threatening to kill the one other of its kind still in existence.

Meanwhile, in the past/present/future, The Teller scans The Doctor and doesn’t destroy him. Its telepathy lets him see the memories erased at the beginning of the episode, and The Teller realizes that The Doctor has come to set it free.

The Teller releases its companion and escapes the bank with the Doctor and his team. He drops them off on a solitary planet, and sends the team home.

ANALYSIS

The theme of this episode rests solidly on trans- states, and judgement as it exists through Self-Hatred and Self-Love.

Self-Hatred: The Transformation

“Would you trust someone looking back at you out of your own eyes?”

~Saibra

This concept is much less scary than it first sounds. All the main characters in the story except The Teller have their self-hate pointed out to some degree:

• Saibra hates herself because of her nature, how she was born a mutant.
• Psi hates himself because of his circumstances, which made him give up his memories.
• The Doctor hates himself because he acts as an officer, giving orders to others which he himself won’t follow.
• Clara hates herself because of her nurture, as she sees herself slowly becoming like The Doctor.
• Karabraxos hates herself because of her own imperfection, and because her aspiration for perfection consumes her.

In all these instances except one, the characters successfully manage to externalize their hatred. This means that they have severed one part of their identity from their active self with the intention of destroying it:

•  Saibra separates her identity from her body.
• Psi separates his identity from his amnesia.
• The Doctor separates the ‘officer’ identity of himself from the ‘soldier’.
• Clara separates her identity from The Doctor, hence her pivoting love/hate for him – and the pivoting love/hate for herself which prevents The Teller from locking onto her thoughts.
• Karabraxos doesn’t. She is truly self-hating, meaning that she cannot separate her faults from her central self. Thus, she destroys her whole self by implementing clones, and destroys part of herself (the decisions she made) by implementing time travel.

In the practice of Self-Hatred, it is important to pinpoint what is being selected for the active, hating self, and what is being externalized as the passive, hated self. For this the nature of ‘hate’ need be divulged:

Put simply, ‘hate’ is an inseparable species of judgement. When a person loves something, it means that they recognise its worth, and feel pleasure at attaining its value. Hate is the concordant opposite – to recognise worthlessness, and feel pleasure at being rid of it.

So it can be said that what hates is what judges, the part of identity that is aware of value, and pursues worth.

In the case of Karabraxos, constructive hatred is impossible because what she actually hates is her poor judgement. She makes terrible, superficial choices, locking herself away in a vault with stolen treasures, enslaving and controlling the beautiful and unique rather than seeing it thrive, and devoting her administrative talents to the protection of thugs and criminals. In Karabraxos’ case, Self-Hatred feeds a self-destruction to which the only release is true death.

In the case of Team Not-Dead, however, the effect is the reverse. They actually see their judgement as the best part of themselves, and arrange their identity according to its dictations. The amnesiac state they find themselves in is included to intensify this, and to establish judgement as a sort of ‘soul’: a higher existence deprived of their immediate worldly identity (their choices). Self-awareness is an awareness of their motives and judgements; they instead have to base choices on something beyond identity, what might be called their own Self-Esteem. Four Karabraxos clones wiped of their memories and placed in the same situation would never make it to the heart of the vault, even should they have the same abilities as Team Not-Dead – they would lack the self-esteem to judge the situation correctly, trusting neither themselves nor those around them.

What this teaches is that there is a very important difference between ‘Self’ as Judgement and ‘Self’ as Identity. Identity is fluid – facets of identity actually exist in one of three states, which are called Ultra-, Trans-, and Cis-:

Ultra- (Latin, ‘The Far Side Of’) is a state in which everything that encounters this facet of Identity is expected to conform to it. This is a state adopted by extremists, often those who hold together an identity by force, as Karabraxos does by militantly ruling over her bank and its management.

It isn’t entirely forceful, and isn’t always nonconsensual. An Ultra- may simply believe that all identity will conform to their own in time as a matter of rightness. But they’d be an asshole to say as much every time they met you.

It also encompasses the idea that facets of identity ‘pull’ toward a certain alignment. Karabraxos, who is Ultraggressive, may find that other facets of her identity become trans- in an attempt to exemplify that ultra- state. Suppositionally (and only as an example) she may become transmedicated in the search for medication that lets her control her body. She may also be considered something along the lines of ‘transingular’, in that she is attempting to produce perfect clones of one genetic reality.

The Doctor is predominately an Ultra- outside of this episode. It’s probably why he’s manipulative, meddlesome and controlling. He’s a special kind of Ultra-, though: one that exists as a counterforce to other Ultra-s. This kind of Ultra- action is seen as acceptable – even admirable – more than any other: if someone uses force on ‘the far side of’ identity, it requires someone on the opposite end of the spectrum, also a ‘far side’, to maintain balance.

Cis- (Latin, ‘The Near Side Of’) is a state in which an Identity is consistent with a judgement of worthwhile values. Cis- can be seen as an end-state to a facet of personal Identity, if an end-state is even conceivably possible.

In its regular sense, the term ‘cis-’ relies on an external judgement on the combinations of facets that are ‘normative’, which is to say they are aligned to reflect with the values of other facets that relate to them (or are seen to relate to them). The most common example of this is in sexuality and gender: we presume Clara is a woman, and the cisgender relative to this is ‘female’. But, ultimately, a completely regular sense of the cis- notion establishes permanent ideals of norms based on external judgements, not on internal, self-motivated judgements. In an internal, individual sense, a person may only feel the value of the ‘symmetry’ of their facets when they do not resemble the external cis- model at all; their parts are only ‘on the near side’ of one another when they are in a state that external judges would call ‘trans-’ (which implies a state of change). This is why those who are comfortable with their identity but still outside of ‘normative’ structures are labeled differently from other cis- types, as ‘queer’.

Cis- is often mistaken as a sign of sound judgement or concrete self-esteem, but is actually more than often a sign that people believe they cannot possess the values they deem worthwhile, or that they are incapable of judging a way in which they might more fully possess their identity.

This episode doesn’t deal with Cis- characters, but rather with characters attempting to attain internally valued Cis- identities.

Trans- (Latin, ‘To Go Beyond’) is a state in which an Identity is inconsistent with a judgement of worthwhile values. Trans- is the state we find Team Not-Dead in; they are all there to change a facet of their identity to something they value, and are all in a process of personal and actual struggle.

It is important to note that not all struggles for the attainment of a valued identity are the same, even though they are trans-. This can be because of actual physical barriers, but also because of immense social pressures.

For example, in this episode Psi is the closest interpretation of a Cis- character: he has been something he values, and he has had his cis- identity before. He doesn’t want to become something new, he wants to recover what he was in the beginning. No-one objects to this, they all believe it is a good, ‘brave’ decision.

Saibra on the other hand is the closest interpretation of a trans- character who is likely to be identified by others as queer for the remainder of her life: the group automatically questions her decision, believes she is wrong for ‘not accepting herself as she is’, and sees her choice as one more cowardly in ‘running away’ from her birth identity.

They are both trans-, but there is a double standard in the way they are perceived. This mainly has to do with direction – it’s always easier to go with the flow than against it, to remain what people expect rather than change.

So: ‘Self’ as Identity is fluid across Cis-, Ultra- and Trans- states. The episode shows this by having its characters quest for a different identity, and attain it.

But what about ‘Self’ as the vital, judging, ‘soul’ part?

Karabraxos is our interpretation in this case, as the one whose soul is inherently flawed. Right up until the end of her life, we see her lashing out at her whole self, not at externalized facets of her identity but at the rational, judging part of it that makes consistently bad decisions: at the identity’s managers. It’s not lazy writing, that both the bank and the villain share the name ‘Karabraxos’. Her character is locked in a continuous struggle to manage herself.

She does at least try to change the quality of her judgements at the end, and the method chosen is Remorse. Remorse in its truest sense is to go back on one’s decisions, to seek not to change the identity, but the soul. To reassess one’s values is the purest form of guilt-driven self-destruction. And yes, it is possible to hate the soul, and let it liquefy and become something better. But when you love it – when you have self-esteem – then it is very solid indeed.

Self-Love: The Tale of the Teller(s)

The story of the Tellers is told so that at the end, the message of Self-Love (not like that) is pulled into the spotlight, where Self-Hatred has been dancing all the while. It’s important to note the anatomy of the Teller, particularly its stalked eyes. In the process of mind-crushing its victims, its eyestalks twist so as to look at one another, symbolically an indication of Self-Awareness. In this act of reflection, the Teller itself survives while those around it are scoured for guilt (self-hatred) and are destroyed should they reveal any. The idea behind this is that, juxtaposed, the perfection of one thing can cause the destruction of the facets around it, just as it does with Ultra- states. This really just says that existence requires love, which seems a pretty obvious conclusion. The trick is that change requires hate. If a person is forbidden to hate, they can’t change. If they are stuck as something they can’t love, they can’t exist. Which is a cultural example of a viral reaction called lethal aggression, and the very basis of ‘Normative Culture’.

 The Tellers walk into the sunset as the only two of their kind left in existence, practically mirror images (Cis-), accompanying themselves down into an Eden as a united Judgement and Identity.

The message is that in the end, having split yourself into Subject and Observer, you are two of a kind that never was and will never be again.

Appreciate yourself. Set yourself free. Do whatever it takes, to make sure Self & Self remain united.

The Architect: The Doctor as Transitive

This episode integrates very well into the arcing parable of officers and soldiers, and Clara’s slow evolution into an equal of The Doctor. This is because within the theme of self-hatred, the ‘Soul’ and ‘Identity’ form the same kind of dualistic relationship as the ‘Soldier’ and ‘Officer’.

The Soul, as a sense of judgement and value, is sibling to the Officer (the Governess, the Superego, the Ideology). It is Directive – a moral conscience which tells people what they should do. It should not be mistaken for something inherently rational, or declared inferior if intuitive (there are good intuitive thinkers, and bad intuitive thinkers). It may tell a person that their world is wrong or their body is vile without explaining why, and without that explanation the rest of the identity is still expected to follow along.

The Identity, as an amalgamation of characteristics and decisions, is the Soldier. It is Active, following the plan devised by the directive Self. This means that it has to deal with all the rules of the game, dig the proverbial trenches and face the reality of the decisions the Soul makes. The Directive part feels love and hate – the Identity feels strife and pain. Sometimes without even knowing why.

“I still don’t understand why you’re in charge.”

“Basically, it’s the eyebrows.”

~ Psi & The Doctor

In the planning phase of the break-in, The Doctor strategically manages the plan as himself, a united Soul and Identity. He is not one or the other.

In the execution, he must follow the plan as a different person, not his unified, Ultra- self, but one whose Soul and Identity have entered an unaligned, Trans- self state.

During the execution he is forced to be the Soldier, or ‘Identity’. He isn’t party to any of the reasons behind his identity, or the Officiated decisions made by his Soul. He still has his judgement, but its only available choice is that of any soldier: to follow a commanding officer, or reject it. He can’t see the full picture, which means he risks judging wrongly at any point. This is the root of his self-hatred: he is a curious person who wants all the details. He’s been denied all the details by the Architect. Therefore, he hates the Architect for denying him the curiosity that is his identity. But the judgement he trusts – what pulls him along – is his own self-esteem. He knows from the recording at the beginning of the heist that he chose to undertake it as a willing participant. He trusts himself, even though his identity – curiosity & control – has been compromised.

Tower Mythos?

There are certain clear distinctions I’d immediately draw between this episode and elements of The Tower Mythos, most particularly the ‘Wizard of Oz’ interpretation. In it we have our tin man (Psi, the cyborg who deleted his heart), a cowardly lion (Saibra, who has claws and would not use them), a brainless scarecrow (The Doctor, removed from his own rationale) and of course Clara as Dorothy, our unifying protagonist. Karabraxos is naturally our wicked witch (or witches, as it may be), and the bank – practically a gold brick depository. The Architect may be interpreted as the Wizard, as he is a shadowy figure who promises to dish out hearts, brains, and courage to those who do as he says.

This is distinctly Tower Mythos because it deals with anti-heroes: ones who hate themselves throughout the story in the course of unifying what they have constructed in their mind with what actually exists in the physical world.

Discursive Essay: Doctor Who S8.04 - Listen

The Time:            Bedtime.


The Place:           All over the place.

The Situation:    Something under the bed is drooling.

“Question: Why do we talk out loud when we know we’re alone?

Conjecture: Because we know we’re not.”

This episode deals primarily with the idea of fear. The Doctor is always afraid: it is fear that made him run away from Gallifrey, and what keeps him alive each episode to run again.

But is fear itself justified? Panic, anxiety, nervousness – are these things, which govern so much of who we are, legitimate parts to recognise in ourselves? The Doctor descends into paranoia, believing that he has discovered evidence of an “Evolutionary Hider” that has only ever revealed itself to sleepers.

As he deals with his fear of the unknown, Clara and Danny deal with their more horrifying fear of dating (also known as the fear of discovery), and are initially conquered by it. The Doctor picks up Clara and they hurry off to investigate Fear, using the TARDIS’ psychic interface to pinpoint a moment in time when the ‘Hider’ appears. They find themselves at the orphanage where Danny Pink grew up, and help him confront a night terror.

“Let me tell you about ‘scared’; your heart is beating so hard I can feel it through your hands. There’s so much blood and oxygen pumping through your brain, it’s like RrrrROCKET FUEL! Right now, you could run faster and you can fight harder, you can jump higher than ever in your life. And you are so alert it’s like you can slow down time. What’s wrong with ‘scared’? Scared is a superpower. It’s your superpower. There is danger in this room. And guess what? It’s you.”

~The Doctor to Rupert Danny Pink

The Doctor determines that the way to survive the night terror is to give it what it wants; for it to be unknown. To surrender curiosity to the primeval, and walk away without an answer. This is because to him, not knowing is the greatest terror. And to let fear win, he must not know.

The Doctor also respect the rights of living beings (well, mostly), and one of those rights is privacy. As much as he wants an answer to his theories, he would no more get them against the will of a Hider than we would vivisect a human being. He infers that a Hider does not want to be seen, and is respectful of that right. An odd thing, for one so curious. But it helps establish the hierarchy of the Doctor’s moral code. He places the comfort of living beings above scientific curiosity.

Clara returns to confront her own fear with Danny. And messes it up, again. The lesson hasn’t been learned yet, or possibly the wrong lesson has been learned. Connection to a person doesn’t just come from knowing them better, or even admitting your own unknowing. There’s something else elusive still left to realize about Fear.

The Doctor and Clara go to the end of the universe (temporally or directionally unclear, just on the ‘last’ planet) and meet a time traveller. They spend a night listening to the clanking of his timeship, wondering if there is something moving outside in the barrens of the planet, or if they are imagining things.

What’s that in the mirror

Or the corner of your eye?

What’s that footstep following, but never passing by?

Perhaps they’re out there waiting

Perhaps when we’re all dead

Out they’ll come a-slithering

From underneath the bed.

When they leave, The Doctor is out cold and Clara psychically links to his distant past, where a young Doctor is crying in a barn on Gallifrey, afraid of the Time War, alone and terrified of the unknown. Clara hides beneath his bed to avoid being seen, and instinctively reaches out to grab his foot when he gets out of bed. This fulfills the features of the dream that triggered the Doctor’s paranoia in the first place.

But then Clara repeats what the Doctor told a young Danny Pink, and adds:

“Fear doesn’t have to make you cruel or cowardly. Fear can make you kind.

So listen. If you listen to nothing else, listen to this:  You’re always going to be afraid. Even if you learn to hide it. Fear is like… a companion. A constant companion, always there. But that’s okay. Because fear can bring us together. Fear can bring you home.

Fear makes companions of us all.”

~ Clara Oswald

Which is quite beautiful.

Ultimately, there never was an ‘Evolutionary Hider’ existing outside of the conceptual world. The Doctor has been driven by his fear of the unknown to discover the unknown. It has helped him become the Time Lord that terrified him as a young boy.

Clara returns to Danny one last time, and confesses her nerves got the better of her. She faces her fear of discovery, and snogs him.

The ultimate lesson is that fear is entirely legitimate, if you work with it, and confront it, and examine everything it clings to. It’s the best friend you’ll ever have, if you don’t push it away.

The Materialised Id

*

The episode also compounds on the nature of the Doctor-Companion relationship. Not only because it links the companion with the Doctor’s fear, and suggest that he is afraid of loving and keeping something beautiful and temporary with him through danger, but because it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Doctor is engaged in a vital struggle between the part of him that is a soldier and the part that is a Doctor. This exchange is particularly revealing:

“I don’t take orders, Clara.”

“Do as you’re told.”

Clara is, from the moment we meet her and in several incarnations to follow, a Governess, put in charge of other people – frequently naughty children. It is her responsibility to command, officiate, and give orders.

As such she (and many other companions) act as the Doctor’s commanding officer, as someone who he respects being in command. In his war against soldiers, he has identified the true reason he dislikes them: they follow bad orders. Military orders. The doctrine of destruction, over the doctrine of investigation.

So he determines that for the part of him that is a soldier to be a good soldier, it needs a good officer: a companion/commander who negates the doctrine of war he learned under the Time Lords with a directive to be as the rest of him is; a scientist.

His second companion, Fear, is not an executive officer. It gives two orders whenever it appears: Discover, or Shut Your Eyes. Understand, or Destroy. 12/13^th’s of him know the right answer. The part that is a soldier doesn’t, and needs a human companion to enforce the correct directive.

The Psychoanalytical Model:

This episode really lends itself to psychoanalysis, particularly the fundamental Id–Ego–Superego model that plays such a huge role in that framework. The episode uses Time to establish a ‘ladder’ of sorts on which to place these mental personas, in typical fashion with the Super-Ego on the ‘top’ of Time (the future) and the Id at the ‘bottom’ of Time (the childhood past).

At the bottom of the ladder is the Id, the unconscious realm of unexplored desires, anxieties and impulses. This realm is a place of fluctuation and whim, not yet settled into a structure of established rules or contextual understanding. It is seen as being most active in a child, who has not yet gained the experience of reality necessary to grow a healthy skeletal frame to flesh with percepts. In Listen we are told that it is in childhood we are most open to the evolutionary Hider, and that it is from childhood that we dredge up the memory of its hand grasping an ankle. The episode takes us into the lives of two children, Danny and Doctor Who, both plagued by anxiety over this invisible monster. 

The natural assumption is that because fear arises from the Id, the 'monster' must originate from the Id, too. But Clara’s metamorphosis into the monster proves otherwise – a child’s fear is of not knowing, and while fear originates from the Id what it does not know is actually the Super-Ego, the elaborate ‘Governess’ of contextual ideas that resides on the other side of the mental spectrum.

The Materialised Super-Ego

We approach the Super-Ego at the end of the temporal universe, where the ultimate consequences of the framework of material things comes to light. The destination is bleak and fatalistic – there is no life, no apparent governing order or promise of continuity. Just an endless desert, and death. But faced with the demolition of the idea that ‘life succeeds’, The Doctor is not convinced. He still holds to the idea that there is life Hiding, waiting until it has outlasted all others so that it might claim the universe and assert its supremacy. In a way he needs the 'Hider' at the end of time more than anything, because it will justify his own support of life, his hatred of the Daleks, and his immortal explorations, by asserting that there is a universal will and not simply an atheistic disintegration of the universe. He is willing to face his fear to confirm this, needing this hidden companion, his Super-Ego, to justify the actions fear has driven him to. Fear is what makes him seek out the unknown.

The Doctor is knocked out before there is a definite answer to the nature of the Super-Ego and the story returns to the Id so Clara can play her part, filling in for the fact that the Super-Ego is absent. The lesson we learn in the barn is that while the Super-Ego may never be known, the Ego will perpetuate its own hierarchical one-upmanship over the Id, demanding that the response to fear can be courage and investigation. In something of a twist, this asserts the importance of a subjective attitude to objectives. Egos must continue to fight the flux of nightmares and anxieties even should the Super-Ego at least superficially appear to act against them, because in the course of narrative it may come to pass that the actions of the Ego create the Super-Ego.

Clara Super-imposed as the Super-Ego

Following on from the discovery that there is no Super-Ego, Clara attempts to hide it, fulfilling the final requirement for the establishment of a False Doctrine. Clara commands, “Do as you are told”, which can be rephrased as “Have Faith”, hiding the truth about the Evolutionary Hider from The Doctor and creating the schism between transcendence and discovery which resigns him to his place of perpetual Ego. In this sense it becomes a profoundly religious episode, featuring the classic narrative creation of an Ideology:

• The personality of a young boy is forever shaped during a childhood nativity – born in a barn, if you will – when he as an Idiot is visited by a higher power, becoming aware of the Super-Ego and ascending to the Ego median.

• The higher power then commits to a false doctrine in order to ensure the obeisance of its follower. (“Do as you are told.”/ There is a God.)

• The higher power thus establishes a conditional rule which is unachievable, and must be broken in order to experience subjective freedoms (to exist).

• A moment comes when it is impossible to identify the existence or validity of the higher power and, forsaken by God, the character of the narrative must either turn to blind faith or become an atheist.

Accepting or denying the Higher Power at the end of the narrative is a crucial point in the story. In the case of subjugation to faith, a religious doctrine is formed. In the case of atheistic denial, a personal doctrine is formed around the idea that there is nothing provably greater than the Ego. The Doctor does as he is told and can be seen therefore to be accepting subjugation – but it is important to stress this is only subjugation in 1/13^th of his personality, the part he knows to be a soldier. The rest of him has its own God Complex, asserting itself as a righteous universal dictator (It has a dominant Ego). In short he believes in ‘God’, or in his companion, who he elevates to the level of a ‘God’ by marking them out as his equal.

Harkening back to the part about The Soldier needing a good Officer, this means The Doctor is only willing to follow a good religious doctrine. But he also has his personal Doctrine, which might be viewed as equally important. In terms of the psychoanalytic model this means the episode concludes on middle ground, speaking out both for the benefits of Ideology and for the liberation of the Ego, and suggests they are not mutually exclusive.

Fear as the Companion

It is interesting that Clara is the one who inspires this ideology, and then compares the fear to a companion and by extension to herself*.

*I do sometimes wonder if the companions see The Doctor as their companion. That they never mention it seems to accept that The Doctor is the central figure of the story, which is a decidedly unhuman thing to do – we generally see ourselves as the central character in our own lives.

What do Fear and other Companions have in common?

They exist as an undeniable Other. The Doctor continually puts his Companions in positions of power, over the TARDIS, and sometimes over himself. They are there as a sort of sentinel against purely selfish action, because he puts someone different to himself on the same level as him. Having a friend like this forces him to admit there are opinions that matter other than his own. Rephrased, he acknowledges he is not the only one in the world. Both Fear and Companions are reminders that there are things he doesn’t understand and must always fight to be aware of.

Another implication is that fear is relatively constant, rather than a fleeting emotion that only exists for the extent of a situation. Placed in these terms it is something that can have a relationship built with it, even be understood, predicted, and directed. It becomes less of a liability and more of an asset when viewed in this way, as it gains narrative continuity. It can be seen as a relationship that gains strength and complexity over time. This is a particularly interesting quality because it allows Fear to gain a kind of personality, but forces us to recognize that the personality is purely based on our responses to its presence, not to its actual nature. Fear becomes a Hider because we hide it. Fear becomes a monster because we feel inferior to it. Fear can thus become a companion because we choose to accept and trust it.

How often do we really make up a person’s personality based on our reactions to their mere presence? We see people as brave because we ourselves are timid. We see them as vain, and enforce that belief by refusing to learn more about something that appears to reveal all of its qualities immediately. We see people as flirtatious because we ourselves desire them, and want their actions to have deeper, romantic meanings. In the end that’s all us, broadcast onto others to make them something we can more readily comprehend.

This is something particularly evident over the course of Clara and Pink’s date. They keep clashing because of the assumptions they have made in order to deal with the fact that they are strangers. Clara immediately boots up Pink in her assumptions about soldiers. Pink in return coats her in his assumptions about civilians. Both Clara & Pink cloak the date itself with the ‘personality’ of dating, and what it’s ‘supposed’ to be. They struggle with the idea of secrets and honesty, when the time comes to probe those false personalities. Clara makes the fatal assumption that Danny will not be able to understand the complex truth of her time-travelling double life. It is only at the very end, when they choose to combat their own assumptions and accept that they are strangers that they stand any chance of becoming each other’s companions.

Fear is a lot like that. You have to abandon denial and delusion and fear intensely before there can be any hope in understanding it.

The Psychic Interface

Aside from being a convenient plot device, the TARDIS’ Psychic Interface is a metaphoric symbol for the slightly yucky task of delving into the Id. Oddly foamy, presumably slimy and squelchy, the interface is immediately identified in the mind as something disgusting that could be dangerous to touch, like the body of a jelloid sea-creature washed up on a beach. This is an important association often made with the Id, something usually suppressed, ‘pushed down’ or flushed away on account of it holding those associations with the uncivilized and unclean. Clara has to touch the Id in order to find the answers the Doctor is looking for. The interface then proves its danger by latching on to Clara’s unconscious desires and bringing them out in the open. As is often the case when delving into the Id, there is no control and usually embarrassment or shame attached to that lack of control.

The deep and lovely Dark. We’d never see the stars without it.

Discursive Essay: Doctor Who S8.02 - Into the Dalek

The Time:            2000 + more years AD

The Place:           A Dalek

The Situation:    Mapping the Anatomy of Good and Evil

In this episode the Doctor meets up with the Combined Galactic Resistance on the medical ship Aristotle where they are hiding from a force of Daleks. They have captured an injured Dalek who by all appearances is ‘good’ – in the sense that he wishes to exterminate Daleks rather than regular people. But his injuries are killing him. Knowing what a difference having even one good Dalek might make, the Doctor agrees to be shrunk and sent into the Dalek’s body to locate and fix the damage.

“Fantastic idea for a movie. Terrible idea for a proctologist.”

~The Doctor

The main conflict in this episode is the classic one of good and evil. What is ‘Good’? What is ‘Evil’?

The contrast is placed between two morally dubious characters: The Doctor, and his patient.

The Doctor is conflicted because he is one of the most dangerous people in the universe: a justified racist. Every encounter he has had with the Daleks has asserted their genocidal, single-minded nature, their disrespect for life and individuality. This is his first encounter with one who does not fit into that mold, and so he is now left in the difficult position of overcoming his own racial hatred. It’s a kind reminder that all judgment is technically prejudice, because things can always change tomorrow. After seeing a stone fall a thousand times, we are certain – and right – to act on the notion that gravity will intervene the next time the stone is dropped. But that does not mean that it can’t float when dropped. It is just highly improbable. For The Doctor to see a floating Dalek after 2000 years of seeing them fall, it is the most improbable thing in the world. He needs one who has has not felt the gravity of the Daleks so deeply.

Knowing that he needs a companion at his side to govern his nature and hold him back when his prejudice blinds him, he fetches Clara.

“Yeah, my carer. She cares so that I don’t have to.”

The Doctor and his Dalek, Rusty, are greatly similar in the sense that both hate Daleks. In Rusty this is a malfunction, and to an extent it is also a malfunction in The Doctor. The racism they share is described as a ‘block’ in their memory filters that discounts any evidence to the contrary of what they have been told to believe. In The Doctor it is a malfunction for this block to exist. It the Dalek it is a malfunction for the block to be removed.

In light of this, is ‘function’ something that can be an indicator of morality? Is a ‘good’ Dalek one who behaves like a Dalek? Do we only see The Doctor as ‘good’ when he functions as we expect humans to behave, even if he is not human?

This is the idea of morality as a social construct. It is very often seen as being the case in real life, too. Only in very close-minded communities is sex now seen as a sin if done as an act of pleasure, but even two centuries ago this ban on pleasure was an idea of the mainstream, and an indication of morality. There are other constructs we have that allow us to make assertions on people’s moral nature that are almost certainly a product of social norms, from judgment passed on piercings to hairstyles to blood types. The question is, is the moral relativity between the Daleks and everyone else a matter of social norm, or is there a deeper, more universal measure of morality to direct it?

We get to see the Doctor portrayed in the light of evil as the Aristotle’s crew descends through the Dalek’s body. He tells a lie of convenience to a soldier who is about to be killed by antibodies. He does not mourn the soldier’s death even when swimming in his digesting proteins. He distrusts and belittles the Dalek as they converse. The Doctor is always like this, of course, but it is doubly important in the context of this episode because it strips away what might be termed as Superficial Morality. It is very easy to judge people as ‘good’ because they are sweet, or polite. But in the end, are these really the qualities that make a ‘good’ person? Especially a good Doctor? Or do we rather judge the goodness of a Doctor on its ability to deal with that wonderfully impossible vow, ‘To do no harm’, and to cure any patient who asks for their aid?

Bedside manner isn’t really worth all that much. Treating a patient’s feelings rarely takes preference over treating their wellbeing.

As the Dalek is explored further, the reason for its conversion becomes clear. It has witnessed and processed the memory of the birth of a star – undeniable proof that the universe itself creates life, and will perpetuate the conditions under which life will arise. This is an example of another type of morality: Universal Law. If the universe has an objective contrary to that of any of its internal forces, that internal force puts itself in competition with the universe, and is doomed to fail. There is in fact an objective, universal morality which exists outside of social construct. Is it then moral to side with the will of something so large and undeniable that it is godlike? Is ‘the will of the universe’ morality?

"Resistance is futile. Life returns. Life prevails. Resistance is futile.”

Ultimately, the Dalek cannot be saved. As soon as its injury is healed, the electronic filters in its memory kick in and it forgets the star birth which led it to conclude that the Daleks were evil. It’s back to what it always was, led by the chains of its species and social morality. Exterminate. Exterminate. Exterminate.

The significance of this is to point out that there are no ‘fixes’ to make us good or evil. It isn’t an on-off switch, and even when we are healthy and at our best, we are still capable of being evil because prejudice is part of our nature, something in our brains that blurs experiences together to make a firm operating code. It is never a war that can be fought passively. It is based on active choice.

The Doctor gives up hope for a little while, until his external conscience reminds him not to be a racist.

“Is that really what we’ve learned today? Think about it. Is that what we’ve learned?

~The Inestimable Clara Oswald

What they learn inside the Dalek is that Dalek’s are capable of independent thought, but that independent thought has been stripped from them to make the perfect soldiers. They have been forced to hold one particular belief, no matter what changes they perceive in the world around them. They have an engineered prejudice, an inner code which overwrites their reason and forbids choice.

So long as they cannot act on their own initiative or learn from the memories incarcerated in their Cortex Vaults, they remain evil beings. Evil, in other words, is to take perceptions on the level that they are presented: as orders, as motivators of instinct, without thinking about them and reaching new conclusions. Evil is the unthinking prejudice of a soldier, the absence of free will.

“Am I a good man?”

The Doctor reveals that after going to Scaro and meeting the Daleks, he realized who he was by knowing he was not them. He positioned himself in direct opposition to them, knowing that everything they were was everything he hated. This is yet another type of morality in being the morality of opposition. In a sense it is an instinctive morality, because it judges right and wrong based on feelings. But most importantly, it is Subjective morality. It is the act of deciding on what is right not as social propriety, or as deference to a superior force of nature, but rather from the perspective of an individual actor set against all of these things. An individual’s morals are based on choices that are made despite the pressure of these external forces.

But there’s a problem that comes with subjectivity: it marks all choices as equal. It presents the notion that choices are little more than personal opinion, whim and emotion. If The Doctor’s nature was primarily based on hatred, could he honestly say his choice was any better than a Dalek’s?

“I see beauty. I see endless, divine perfection.”

“Make it a part of you. Put it inside of you, and live by it.”

“I see into your soul, Doctor. I see beauty. I see divinity. I see… HATRED. Hatred of the Daleks. And it is good.”

Here we see the war between the subjective hate The Doctor has nurtured, and the objective acceptance of the perfection of the universe. Both are fighting within him. The Doctor does hate. By seeing beauty, he admits love. Love and hate are inside of him simultaneously, fighting for supremacy. He makes a conscious effort to choose love over hate; peace over war. Understanding over obliteration. In this the nature of morality cannot be more clear: it is choice. Not only having a choice, or producing choices, but in making a choice you can live with. The Doctor’s choice is to unite his subjective morality with an objective morality, claiming one as the other and through it holding himself up to something higher than race or emotion; he is a scientist. He sees the perfection of the universe as his own personal perfection.

But Rusty does not. Even turned into a tool against the Dalek empire, it lets hate dominate over beauty. It fails to become good, even though it fights evil, because extermination is more important to it than perfection. It makes the wrong subjective choice, falling to the trap of believing an objective will has no relevance.

“I am not a good Dalek. You are a good Dalek.”

~Rusty

It doesn’t really matter that the Doctor is flesh and time and the Daleks are pus and metal: in a similar way that we could speak of Daleks as humane or inhumane, and endow them with the potential of humanity, they speak of The Doctor as Dalek, having inside of him the potential for both good and evil. It is individual choice that makes a person good or evil. Not their race.

A bad wolf follows the orders of her stomach. A good man chooses its own orders.

Miniaturization?

Symbolically this looks at the idea of what happens when a body becomes a person’s universe, the objective “Universal Law” that is one component in choosing moral behavior. The intention of this is to point out that moral objectivity isn’t only something that operates out in the world, but inside people, too. The Doctor, if taken as a follower of objective morality, believes in beauty and perfection because everything in the world around him gravitates towards beauty and perfection. But in entering a universal body of a Dalek, everything around him instead gravitates to disgust and extermination. If he were purely objective, he would adopt these policies as his guiding laws. Good becomes the subjective decision to act against the will of the universal Dalek. It is questionable whether The Doctor would succeed in fighting against this evil universe if he had not brought his own external (objective) conscience with him in the form of Clara. He himself sees that his subjective will towards the Daleks is to commit evil, and if the objective decision too is evil, he has lost sight of all possibility of good.

Companions as Conscience

A recurring theme in Doctor Who is in that he lacks the moral centre needed to make good judgments. This is why he chooses human companions, and debatably, female companions. Being an immensely ancient and powerful being, there are times when his bedside manner is truly deplorable, as he has the power to do anything – anything – and none of the awareness of how it might impact an individual life, governed by fragmented perceptions (feelings) of what he sees clearly. While he tackles the big problem of fixing wounds in the galaxy, his companion acts as a nurse and treats the individuals affected by the problem, just as when combatting a plague a doctor investigates and fights the symptoms while the nurse keeps the patients alive long enough to benefit from a cure. Because of this, they often arise as his best resource for acquiring important details he may have overlooked in the course of diagnosis, such as in this episode when Clara points out that when liberated from anatomy, Rusty would act against the Daleks.

Humans, perishing little things that we are, imperfect in sense and sensibility, are the perfect companions for The Doctor, being the emotional or ‘subjective’ component functioning in a universe where he plays as an objective god. Females are selected over males because they are seen to be more in tune with the emotional, more likely to use diplomacy and understanding over ‘Soldiering’ when confronted with the unknown. They stand up to him when he is losing his ‘humanity’ rather than blindly following his orders.

This is the function of a conscience: a con-sci-ence: a complete condition of knowledge, or a regard of all things. To have an awareness of all factors of the universe, both very complex and very basic. While The Doctor has a knowledge of complex things, he could never be accused of being basic. He needs a human for that. Together they form conscience, making good decisions for the patient and for their condition.

Aristotle: Medicine & Ethics

The medical spacecraft where this episode takes place is called the Aristotle, named (presumably) for the forefather of the scientific movement. Aristotle did not make his mark on medicine so much as he did on ethics. But it is important to note how deeply the two are entwined. Who is put in the position of doing more good or harm to an individual life than a doctor? Doctors blur the line between good and evil, hurting others in the process of healing them. Sometimes they are even called upon to fix things that are not broken, and are faced with the ethics of changing a person’s nature to be socially acceptable, even if doing so is against that person’s will. This episode cleverly portrays the obscurity of morality through the practice of medicine.

Particular to this episode, Aristotle’s concept of Ergon is exhibited, the idea that all things have a proper function and are judged as ‘good’ by adhering to it. A good pencil writes marvelously without splintering or needing to be sharpened regularly. A good poison kills efficiently and with the required amount of suffering. Ergon is goodness as functionality. In this sense, Daleks are good by exterminating efficiently. The Doctor’s haunting question, “Am I a good man?” takes on a darker edge: does he possess any of the qualities of a functional human being? Can he even pretend to be one? Or is he so utterly alien as to be unable of even knowing what is right by other species?

To continue the course in Aristotelian ethics we have Logos, or Reason, which is taken as the correct framework for the animating spirit of man. In a sense this spirit it the ‘objective’, or the ‘form’ common to all men, oftentimes contradicted by the ethics of contextual decisions. An ideal human does not hack off people’s limbs. But a doctor might, to stop an infection. This is Phronesis, practical wisdom under which decisions can be made in the grey between Logos and Ergon.

Recap on Subjectivity and Objectivity:

Subjectivity   – The belief that the Subject of the universe is the Self, or the Observer, or the Decision-Maker (in brief, You, reader). All other things in existence are objects on which the Subject acts.

Objectivity     – The belief that the Subject of the universe is external to the Self. The self and other things in existence are all objects, acting according to the will of a conceptual Subject.

While some might say “Well it’s all perspective, innit?” it really isn’t. Yes, we all make decisions. But who we are to begin with is entirely a sum of nature and nurture, determined by contact with objects around us and our ability to reason out their meaning. Rebellion to an Objective Subject is based on the failure to reason, and while it is entertaining resistance is ultimately futile and a predetermined failure, just as if at this very moment you chose never to urinate again. Objects act against others until logic forces an assertion of universal will. While an illusory freewill gives us all an impression of being a Subjective Subject, it is an awareness of the limitations of choice that offer a counterexample, and an ultimate truth: what is Subjective and acts askew to the Objective is suicidal, whether as an individual or as a society, such as in the Dalek Empire. What is done from a Subjective vantage aligned with the Objective may temporarily fail but will ultimately succeed, promoting life, longevity, and perfection.

PINK

Clara is joined in this episode by a new love interest: ‘Rupert’ Danny Pink, who ironically enough used to be a soldier. The Doctor hates soldiers for the same reason he hates Daleks: they kill indiscriminately, following orders rather than making choices themselves, and they destroy things they do not fully understand (most soldiers die in Doctor Who, and in many cases are killed by things acting in self-defense. Many, but not all. When they shoot at things they don’t understand that really are trying to kill them, the Doctor is reasonably quiet.)

Pink is an interesting mess of emotions. On the one hand he respects soldiers (markedly distinct from the officers who direct them), and on the other he is wracked by guilt for accidentally shooting a civilian in the war. He rejects the idea that the only purpose soldiers serve is killing, and makes it known that he spent much of the war digging wells in drought areas.

Discursive Essay: Doctor Who S8.01 – Deep Breath

The Time:           The Victorian Era, 1800s

The Place:           London Town.

The Situation:    Dinosaur Misplacement.

This is the first episode in which we get to see The Doctor in his 12^th incarnation. This is important because the Doctor’s personality subtly (or at least superficially) changes when he regenerates. The Doctor does of course experience true changes to his personality (see the pilot episode from 1963 for an idea of this), but these changes are more gradual, and more important. Particularly, we are at a time when The Doctor has stopped running from The Time War. He has realized that he wishes to find Gallifrey and return it to the temporal flow.

”I am alone. The world which shook at my feet, the trees, the sky, have gone. And I am alone now. Alone. The wind bites now, and the world is grey and I am alone. Can’t see it… I can’t see…”

~ A Dinosaur

The primary theme of this episode is Change. The Doctor’s Companion Clara feels that she has lost her old friend when the Doctor regenerates. More than this, she has lost a man who she felt comfortable falling in love with. In the guise of a young man, The Doctor was ‘flirtatious’, even desirable. But by changing his face, becoming someone far older, he is at once different: no longer flirtatious, no longer ‘fun’. But perhaps the most unnerving is that his outward body more keenly reflects the man inside, making the former, 11^th Doctor, seem like a lie, a passing illusion. The implication is that the Doctor feels safe enough with Clara to be more like himself around her, and still be accepted.

The dinosaur in London is a metaphor for the Doctor: a comparatively ancient, wild and powerful being lost in a new world [body] it does not understand.

The Paternoster Gang (Strax, Jenny and Vastra) are in this episode to highlight the importance of accepting change, and the superficiality of an outer appearance. Strax is Soltaran, a warrior species more commonly associated with causing conflicts than solving them, and yet Strax is allied with Vastra, a reptilian Silurian who uses her detective skills to solve crimes. Jenny is by no means an ordinary figure among them, an outspoken and radical adventuress in the body of a woman of the Victorian Underclass, perhaps one of the most oppressed species in Earth history. Vastra and Jenny’s romantic relationship is about much more than showmanship here – it is a reminder that Love, a concept, is more important than its material composite; more than race, or sex, or face. This is something Clara has yet to learn, though she denies it.

“I wear a veil as he wore a face, and for the same reason. To be accepted.[…] I wear a veil to keep from view what many are pleased to call my disfigurement. I do not wear it as a courtesy to such people, but as a judgment on the quality of their hearts.”

~ Madame Vastra

Vastra responds to Clara’s discomfort with the metamorphosed Doctor with a prejudice of her own: that Clara, as a person who has difficulty dealing with perspective change (facing the truth), will reject it. Vastra is used to being judged herself, and sees the smallest show of discomfort as a slight against her differences. Her automatic hostility and dismissal of those who are not immediately accepting is a sort of prejudice, too. This is a deliberate hypocrisy, as she is a detective: detectives who accept what is immediate without further investigation are ‘bad’ detectives.

Her response (in wearing a veil) stems from the judgment that she will never be accepted for what she is, and that society will never be able to overcome its own prejudice – so much so that she hides behind privacy, and does not give people a chance to recognize her for what she really is: and this is the source of Clara’s discomfort, and anger. The Doctor lied to her about his true nature out of the belief that she and others would only accept a pretty young man, rather than an ancient, scarred and terrifying dinosaur. He prejudged her along with humanity as superficial.

Fruitless anger, ultimately. Everyone wears a veil, by being bigger on the inside. Being angry at something for not being obvious is screaming at the wind for blowing.

“You can’t see me, can you? You look at me and you can’t see me. Do you have any idea what that’s like? I’m right here, standing in front of you. Please just… just see me.”

The enemy in this episode is a group struggling against their own Actual change. Crash-landing on Earth in the Jurassic Era, the ship’s automated crew found themselves running short on the supplies necessary to keep them functioning for long enough to achieve their mission – reaching ‘The Promised Land’. This mission is an important question – is it part of what the droids were originally programmed for, or was it one that came along with the flesh they consumed, just a part of the veil? Either way, the droids are programmed to follow a fundamental doctrine and are willing to sacrifice everything they are to uphold that doctrine. Unlike the doctor, who has removed a veil from his character, the Droid Pilgrims add veils of flesh to keep themselves in working condition and access the resources to repair their ship. But as they do so, they find themselves becoming less machine and more human; less their original selves, and more alike to the parts they have used to repair themselves across the ages, until they lose their original purpose entirely.

Clearly this is designed to draw a parallel with The Doctor who, by his 12^th incarnation, is in a body without a scrap of the original in it. At least physically – the question is, what about the doctrine? Has that too been replaced, or is it the same as it ever was? Is the change superficial, or actual?

The clever climax of this encounter puts The Doctor up against the Droids’ captain, and the Doctor diagnoses the Droids with losing their basic programming. He suggests that they have become hollow and lost any purpose other than to survive and that this this purpose alone is worthless. He prescribes the Droids with suicide, which the Droid captain refuses, saying that that is against its basic programming.

The Droid counters that the Doctor will need to kill him, which is seemingly against The Doctor’s basic programming. In order to end the conflict, one of them must abandon their doctrine and prove that they have lost their original self entirely.

We never find out who did. The Droid’s body is shown impaled on St. Paul’s Cathedral, and it is unclear if he jumped or was pushed. But perhaps more importantly, we have a new question:

The Doctor is a killer. He conducts the act through diplomacy, command, and neglect – but he does kill, albeit coldly. Are diplomacy, command, and necessity part of his doctrine, or a veil he has developed because killing people outright would be too horrific even for himself to accept? Has he continued to distance himself from the act, or is he willing to accept responsibility for the fact that he is a murderer? The Doctor’s nature is to run, even from himself. But we are told he isn’t running away any longer…

“What do you think of the view?”

“It is beautiful.”

“No it isn’t. It’s just far away, everything looks too small. I prefer it down there – everything is huge. Everything is so important, every detail, every moment, every life clung to.”

The Doctor kills the droids because they lose sight of what their hollow ideal is doing to those around them – their doctrine has become a conflict between reaching The Promised Land, and survival. They profess to want to reach The Promised Land, but do not seek it out. As The Promised Land is culturally seen as a place where murderers do not go, they are distancing themselves from it by surviving through murder. Their doctrine is a paradox. It is by solving the paradox, the prime conflict of their existence, that they at last enter Paradise.

This brings about the question of whether the Droids changed or not; was their goal to reach The Promised Land caused by their imbibing organic parts, and their original Doctrine ‘Survival’? Or were they always pilgrims, whose doctrine changed to ‘Survival’? Did they legitimately change by suicide, or did they revert to their original doctrine by committing it?

The Kiss

There was a lot of talk about the kiss shared by Jenny and Vastra in this episode, and the regular nutters saw it as something problematic and ‘immoral’. They were right, but for the wrong reasons. It is, of course, entirely natural for homosexuals to kiss on a public forum, and for xenosexuals to kiss on a public forum, and technically as Vastra is from Earth and what we term an animal, for bestials to kiss on a public forum.

But it is not okay, after spending an episode talking about how veils separate us from our true natures – and how putting up a veil in contempt of humanity in general is prejudiced – –  AND how we can accept changes while holding on to doctrine – – – to go an pass off a kiss as essential, strictly necessary CPR. That’s a veil. And it isn’t in keeping with the message of the episode to have it there.

For shame, BBC. For shame. Give us proper kisses.

Aesthetics vs. Concept

First Sight

Love at first sight is compared to spontaneous combustion by Jenny. In a way this is a mention of the dangers of prejudice; ‘love at first sight’ is to reach an immediate conclusion about a person’s nature without grounding it on firmly investigated premises. Declaring an act as “spontaneous combustion” is likewise observing a conclusion without investigating or acknowledging its premises. There is no spontaneous combustion, only fires with an unidentified propellant. Just as there is no love at first sight, only another sort of fire with a different unidentified propellant.

This is a second reason why the Paternosters are in this episode: to press the importance of investigation and detection above platitude and generalization. Change is in a conceptual sense a flux in information. But this flux comes in different forms.

For an example of these, look at the androids. They are a mechanical species that change metallic parts for organic ones. They remain mechanical, because both metal and flesh are a mechanical medium. This is what is called a superficial or aesthetic change.

They are also programmed service robots. This is their Doctrine. At first sight, we only see them as robotic killers. But after consideration, we learn that they kill in service of a ‘higher’ cause. This is a perceptive change, which happens in the observer, not the observed.

Lastly, they are pilgrims. Part of their original Doctrine was to travel the universe, but this Doctrine was abandoned in favour of a second doctrinal aspect, survival. The androids reached a point where the one part of their Doctrine completely displaced the other. This is an Actual change.

These three changes are clearest in different characters of the episode. The Doctor has undergone Aesthetic change. Clara undergoes Perceptive change. The Droid Captain undergoes Actual Change.

All of these are a sort of flux out of an original state, be it morality, ignorance, or material.

Aesthetic change is seen as positive so long as it removes the veils between it and Doctrine, essentially an affirmation of the principles of materialism – finding a physical expression of an internal concept.

Perspective change is seen as a positive when it roves towards an understanding of concept, not blindness to it, and not putting up veils of censorship around it.

Actual change is pictured as less positive, as something that must only happen when it is put in conflict with its parts. It is also the most climactic, destructive sort of change, and thus the focal point of the episode.

What’s with the heavy Breathing?

Aside from the fact that Moffat likes to turn children’s games into adult ‘do or die’ situations (Perhaps harkening to man’s greatest fear as a loss of innocence, imagination, and youth), breathing is a metaphor for the inevitability of change. Holding your breath is depicted as a way to ‘pause’ and hide from an imminent event (doom), keeping things in an anticipant state. But just as we cannot survive without breathing, we cannot exist without an exhale of change. What is achieved in the moment when breathing has stopped? It can only be taken to prepare, to acclimatize, to gather the resources necessary to cope. In this way, Episode 8.01 is itself a Deep Breath, a moment where we see the familiar face of Eleven for one last time, surrounded by the faces of the Paternosters and Clara. Change is inevitable. It’s here.

But there’s time for one last gasp before it arrives.