Point of Order

[promethia_tenk]

Just 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.

Comments

[elisi]

Well young!River certainly is chaos incarnate...

[owlboy]

The Doctor is chaotic as well. Put the two together and you strangely cancel out their chaos.

[promethia_tenk]

Eh, I think they both play with the order/chaos dynamic. What is saving the day, after all, but finding new order? But you also need chaos for growth and to stir things up so that you can return to order. Yeah: it's a dynamic.

[owlboy]

True. I think they heal the most chaotic parts of each other though, and humanize each other. While still causing serious consternation for everyone around them

[promethia_tenk]

THIIIIISSSS.

[owlboy]

:DDDDDDD

ngh I ship it so hard and forever. ;_; I WILL GO DOWN WITH THIS SHIP./

[promethia_tenk]

And that's what was bugging me. Because that was so much worse than dark!River. A dark!River would have been a more ordered River.

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.

[elisi]

because they rather embody chaos and order themselves.
*nods a lot* And it's why Amy copes so much better.

[promethia_tenk]

I've got it! Because people tend to conflate good/evil and order/chaos, but actually they're two different measures, like two perpendicular axes (you can have ordered evil, for example). RTD tended to make everything about morality, but really, goodness was never the Doctor's problem: he is the good man, that's who he is, he always wants to do the right thing, he always has to help. Even his fall in WoM had to be because he just couldn't stand not to help. The real issue was that his sense of control had been thrown all out of wack and the order/chaos axis kept screwing him up. And the Doctor does conflate good and control quite a lot--Ten had to be in control to be right, there's that whole exchange between Eleven and Kovarian about whether good men need rules . . . The Doctor doesn't need so many rules because he's not a good man--he needs them because he's not actually in control. But the more he tries to clamp down on his control, the more destruction he ends up causing, until finally his forceful bending of the universe to his will spawned chaos (in Melody) to rear up and devour him (mirroring! but not dark mirroring . . .).

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 . . .

[owlboy]

YEESSSSS<3

[promethia_tenk]

*fist pump*

I knew something was bugging me about all this. Ok, I can actually like this episode now <3

[owlboy]

I have gone from being nonplussed/apathetic to loving it to itty bitty pieces and omg River's whole story is the best thing ever!!1 I feel sad for people who gave up on it.

[elisi]

Oooooh.

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?

[promethia_tenk]

Yes, exactly that! And that's how Comedy works and how the green world works (and the whole "go with the flow" idea): there's a problem (disorder) but trying to *force* a solution to it (pushing towards what seems to be greater order) doesn't work because really the problems are deeper than they look. So the solution is actually to cause *more* chaos so as to get down to the root of things and see how they really work and find the more fundamental and stable order.

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).

[bendingwind.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[promethia_tenk]

=D

Spanner in the works

[janie-aire.livejournal.com]

Moffat does write about good and evil, not just to undermine it, but to focus in on what good and evil really entail. The Doctor's morality isn't about rules so much as it is about empathy.

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

[promethia_tenk]

Fair enough, I do overstate. I think he addresses the idea of evil very differently from the ways in which people expect and are used to (leading to criticism from many sides). I basically love this quote from him:

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

[janie-aire.livejournal.com]

Yes, he's really good at destroying the either/or dichotomy of good and evil. Good writers know that compelling characters have both light and dark inside them. That's what generates internal conflict, these competing forces for what to do next.

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

[janie-aire.livejournal.com]

Oh, something else! The Doctor arrives amidst the chaos and made sense of it, but at the same time he introduces an element of chaos into the order of the monsters. Like in Day of the Moon, just bopping in on the Silents and making a huge mess of things. The Doctor is practically Chaos incarnate, which makes him inherently unpredictable.