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

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.