Time of the Doctor Analysis

DOCTOR: It all disappears, doesn't it? Everything you are, gone in a moment, like breath on a mirror. We all change, when you think about it. We're all different people all through our lives. And that's OK, that's good, you've got to keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of this. Not one day. I swear.

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Death is a mirror. Life flashes before your eyes, and you realize that what made you "you" was the people you spent your time with. The "time" of the Doctor was exactly this.

The show has been about the convergence of death and memory for a while now. The Doctor brought back to life from the Crack because Amy Pond remembered. The Crack itself being the worst sort of death, a death with no memory, for you or anyone else. The Silence -- a religious order that makes you forget. The Great Intelligence coming from snow that remembers, which is snow that acts like a mirror.

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The Mirror, of course, is a portal to The Other Side, a place of death and mythology -- hence "through the looking glass" quoted in Power of Three, before the Doctor and Amy go to the Shakri mothership.

There's exactly one physical mirror in the whole show -- the Doctor's stopped a Weeping Angel. The Angels are angels of death, of course. They are, however, largely superfluous to the story. Their primary function, then, isn't to act at the level of plot, but at the level of theme, of metaphor.

The Angels first appear in a convergence of these metaphors:

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The Doctor and Clara have beamed down to a Forest. The Forest was first introduced in Silence in the Library, where the second part of that story is called Forest of the Dead. The Library, a metaphor for the afterlife, is the forest of the Vashta Nerada, which is darkness, shadow, death. We're all stories in the end. Since then, we had a Forest of Angels at the Crash of the Byzantium, the Androzani Forest as a place of Ascension in The Wardrobe, and the Forest in Hide where a ghost is brought back to life.

And then there's the Snow, which in the Snowmen was the aforementioned genesis of the Great Intelligence, a false God and mirror of the subconscious -- snow, of course, being frozen water -- frozen time -- and "water is nature's mirror." Here we see Angels in a Forest of Snow, with Clara and the Doctor mirroring each other, back-to-back not unlike the Doctor and River in Day of the Moon.

Hopefully you know where I'm going with this.

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Surprised?

This shot is, of course, self-conscious. We know that Smith sheared his head for another role, and had to wear a wig to do the filming of this piece. Clara is so shocked she covers her mouth -- silence has fallen, but it's the angels who point at light bulbs, as well as people before they go. If death is a mirror, it's also quite a moment of self-consciousness, the revelation of your life one last time before you go.

The thing is, Smith wasn't the only one who shaved his head. Don't forget, Karen Gillan shaved hers, too. Which makes her a mirror to Smith in this respect.

But truly, for her to come back as Amy Pond is to be death's mirror to the Doctor. She's dead, which means she is, in some respect, frozen. She's a Pond, and water is nature's mirror. She surrounded by a forest of drawings. She's wearing the outfit she wore in Mercy -- this is, after all, a moment of grace.

Amy isn't just a Mirror to the Doctor as he bows out. She's an Angel.

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The World Tree connects Above and Below to the Here and Now -- it marks the Center, the axis mundi of the world that unifies the pair of opposites.

We get two World Trees in this story. The first is Clara's Christmas Tree, which graces her apartment, sitting in front of the Book-shelves. This is the Ordinary World, the place where reality happens, where the mundane aspects of life have the potential to be charged with meaning.

There are "two worlds" along this axis -- Clara's apartment, where she spends time with family, and the field at ground level. One is above, and one is below -- the one below is the one that grants her access to the TARDIS and from there the worlds beyond.

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The other World Tree is the Tower in the center of the town called Christmas.

This is also a tree with two worlds, but unlike Clara's world of the mundane, here we get words charged with the Mythic. Before we get to that, there's the nature of the Tower -- it compels one to tell the truth. The Doctor can't lie here, and neither can Clara.

It gets to the core of who someone "is."

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In the basement of the Tower we have an Underworld. This is a place of Memory -- it's in the ground of Trenzalore, which is a place of death. It's filled with brik-a-brak, not unlike the rooms in the TARDIS that Clara visited during Journey. It's where the Doctor fixes toys, indulging in his childlike nature; it's no mistake that his workshop is covered in children's pictures, which reminds him of the first face his face ever saw.

It's also where Clara gets down on her knees and prays to the Lords of the ancient past, through a Crack in the skin of the Universe that has to power to wipe all memory. We have all the Doctor's inciting traumatic incidents captured in this Underworld.

There's also a Cross and a Chair, long-running ascension symbols.

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As below, so above.

The top of the clock tower also has a Chair. It's got a Bell -- and the ringing of bells has recently become a meme, too: The Doctor wondering why the Great Intelligence "rings a bell" in The Snowmen, which goes all the way back to Abominable and the Buddhist bell of awakening; the church bells that waken Clara after her first trip up the ladder, and the Xmas bells taht usher in her death. There's the Bells of St John, which connects the Doctor to Clara. Ahkaten as an Alarm Clock -- and again with the theme of Awakening.

Trenzalore is a place of death -- the sky is filled not just with enemy spaceships, but a Church, and a Papess whose face peers down through the clouds like a Goddess. It's here that the Doctor begins his regeneration, as the prayer below is recapitulated above: a crack opens up in the sky, his arms become spread wide, and then all that energy shoots straight above, taking out an Emperor Dalek's ship (remember, the Emperor once claimed he too was God) and up into the night -- the Doctor himself became an axis mundi through his sacrifice.

The Doctor becomes an axis mundi. Compare this shot to the Doctor being fired at planet in Asylum.

Silence will fall... the Doctor and Clara, mirrored.

Looks like Prisoner Zero.

Clara prays.

**

The child Barnable mirrors the child Amelia.

The Doctor promises both that he will return. And with Barnable, the Doctor keeps that promise.

But keeping that promise has a cost. The Doctor and Barnable stay together full-time. And Barnable ages and dies. When the Doctor is old, on his last day, he asks a townsman if he is Barnable, but he isn't. Barnable died centuries before, and is long forgotten by everyone except the Doctor.

But Clara he first sends away, and then leaves behind. So she is able to stay with him. On the day he dies, hundreds of years after he met her, Clara is with him, not a day older than the last time he saw her.

The Doctor makes this reason for his change in travel arrangements explicit. He specifically tells Clara, when she returns the first time, that he sent her away to save her. If he hadn't, she'd have died of old age and been buried centuries before.

***

Clara is best understood as a teacher, and a good one. A natural teacher, even. Her role is to protect and guide others. She connects easily with people on an emotional level, and understands their motivations. She also has the leadership skills of teaching, which is what allowed her to, say, take charge of a platoon of soldiers even though she had no military training. She expects her instructions to be followed.

Clara travels with the Doctor because she likes to travel, and also because she's fascinated with him as a person. And it is the same interest in people that draws her to the Doctor that also keeps her from running away with him. She values the people around her at home. Her friends, her family, her students.

Because Clara's skills are emotional and personal rather than physical or technical, it seems as if a lot of people don't see those skills, or value them.

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In Clara's house there's a pair of pictures -- the Shard, the landmark of her first adventure with the Doctor, and the London Eye, the landmark of Rose's first adventure with the Doctor.

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So, the Papal Mainframe. Here we get the convergence of Red and Blue that we've noted throughout Moffat's run -- this is the union of opposites, but not necessarily the fusion of opposites.

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Tasha's private chapel is mirrored -- the same painting is on both the left and right sides of the confessional booths, which are also twinned.

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Speaking of twins...

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