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

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.