Point of Order
8 Sep 2011 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
promethia_tenkJust to remind myself, because it bears reminding, and because I do manage to forget it: Moffat doesn't write good and evil. Sure, he plays with the vocabulary sometimes (generally to deconstruct and undermine it), but that's never what it's about. The real struggle, the real dynamic, the real juxtaposition on which everything hinges is CHAOS and ORDER. Those are the forces we're dealing with.
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Date: 8 Sep 2011 08:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8 Sep 2011 08:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8 Sep 2011 08:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8 Sep 2011 08:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8 Sep 2011 10:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8 Sep 2011 10:13 pm (UTC)ngh I ship it so hard and forever. ;_; I WILL GO DOWN WITH THIS SHIP./
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Date: 8 Sep 2011 08:39 pm (UTC)And this was quite an interesting thought to have in mind while reading your Amy/Rory essay--because they rather embody chaos and order themselves.
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Date: 8 Sep 2011 08:44 pm (UTC)*nods a lot* And it's why Amy copes so much better.
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Date: 8 Sep 2011 10:06 pm (UTC)So really all this is about sorting out the Doctor's order/control axis, and doing that will require him to give up control on the beach . . .
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Date: 8 Sep 2011 10:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8 Sep 2011 10:22 pm (UTC)I knew something was bugging me about all this. Ok, I can actually like this episode now <3
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Date: 8 Sep 2011 10:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 9 Sep 2011 06:59 am (UTC)And actually, this of course fits with the whole Trickster thing - I'm thinking of the fact that he always turns up 'where there's trouble' (oh hai there Gandalf parallels!), or he brings chaos himself (like in Night Terrors) and what he does is ride the chaos (because he's chaos himself) and then reorganises it into a new order. Does that make sense?
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Date: 9 Sep 2011 04:23 pm (UTC)But when the Doctor gets too ARRRGH I AM THE HIGHEST AUTHORITY ALL MUST BEND TO MY WILL he really can't do that properly and ends up causing all sorts of trouble even though he consistently *means* well. So the Doctor doesn't need a dark mirror, he needs a chaotic mirror to show him how domineering he's become, and the rest of the story will be about returning River (and the Pond family) to greater order and the Doctor to greater chaos/more natural control (Time Lord Victorious ----> rambling space wanderer).
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Date: 8 Sep 2011 08:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8 Sep 2011 08:40 pm (UTC)Spanner in the works
Date: 9 Sep 2011 03:16 am (UTC)With Eleven more than any other Doctor, we see him actively putting himself in the place of the monster, and we see an awful lot of monsters who are just like him, in somewayshape or form. His first glimpse in a "mirror" is when he sees himself (and Amelia) reflected in Prisoner Zero.
He's identified with the star whale by Amy. His identity reboots the Daleks. Both he and the angels are space-time events significant enough to close a Crack. He sits on the throne of Signora Calvierri. He *is* the Dream Lord. And so on. He saves Kazran because he finds empathy in Kazran -- and he damns the sexy fish vampires for not remembering a name.
I wonder if the real juxtaposition that everything hings on is juxtaposition itself. Order and chaos, good and evil, man and monster, fire and water, red and blue. The light and the dark. Isn't everything crossed with its opposite on this show?
Re: Spanner in the works
Date: 9 Sep 2011 04:08 am (UTC)I think it's boring to say that something is just 'evil' – it's bad writing. 'Evil' is just someone who has reasoning you don't understand, and I think it's bad for the Doctor to oppose that – the Doctor is able to decode the universe from the other guy's perspective and understand what it means from his point of view. [...] Very few people are really cynical, we just accuse other people of cynicism because we don't agree with their particular take on the world. So dramatically it's much more interesting to have two people with opposing views, each of whom thinks he is the hero of the story and the other guy is the villain. That's interesting.
He frequently sets us up what looks like an issue of evil and and it becomes an issue of understanding--if he seems to have set up a dichotomy of good and evil, the surrest thing is that by the time he's done it will be conflated, undermined, or unified, frequently through empathy, as you say, or simply through building a more complete understanding of the situation.
I think what I'm trying to say is that, he may, though his stories, build up a picture of what is good, but his stories never come down to a struggle between good and evil, and his stories tend to hinge on understanding more than anything: beginning from a chaotic situation and finding or creating order within it (which is almost always also good). "Evil," though, essentially never proves to be a propelling force behind his stories.
Re: Spanner in the works
Date: 9 Sep 2011 01:29 pm (UTC)But I wonder if the chaos/order axis you're suggesting (a *great* insight, btw) is also a dichotomy that will get undermined. That is to say, is *dichotomy* itself being undermined? I wonder. Am I dichotomizing dichotomy? (*jane scratches her head.*)
The Chaos to Order dynamic you describe is also meta! The Doctor comes in and finds a thread of order in the chaos, but this is also true for the story itself. *We* come into a story filled with chaos, told out of order, and through the Doctor and his Companions we get to "make sense" of all these images and archetypes.
I think this is the underlying structure of The Reveal. The Reveal is that final nugget of understanding that illuminates the entire text.
Re: Spanner in the works
Date: 9 Sep 2011 09:31 pm (UTC)