Fear is the Mind-Killer

[promethia_tenk]

Hello, flist! Long time, no see. In answer to your questions: yes, I have been avoiding you. Have also been avoiding Doctor Who and watching Fringe at a frankly unhealthy rate (Mini rxn: Fringe! <3 <3 <3). I have lots of lovely posts queued up for reading, though, and shall be trying to catch up with you all as soon as possible.

I'm back, though, because I have finally had a eureka moment on a question that's been eating at me ever since Let's Kill Hitler: What the frak did they do to Melody? And I know I'm not the only one who had a hard time seeing any River in Mels or who was dissatisfied with Moffat slapping a "psychopath" label on her and counting that as explanation enough. So here's my theory:

Basically, it's all about fear: I think the essence of what the Silence did to her is to make her terrified of the Doctor (He's gonna get me! Gonna eat me!) and leave her with no tools for recognizing it or expressing it or addressing it but to kill him. The sort of omnipresent fear that shadows everything else, clouds judgment, makes every moment about trying to manage the fear, somehow . . . So, the end of LKH wasn't about letting go of anger, or a vendetta of some sort, but about facing a fear, which is why the turn-around seems so sudden. And fear, not hatred, is a catalyst for love (chemically, this is true: falling in love involves massive quantities of anxiety hormones--hence the butterflies. Also where Stockholm Syndrome comes from).

I think it's basically an Occam's Razor kind of thing. They didn't have to make a psychopath--they just had to make her irrationally afraid of the Doctor. It's like what they talk about in Inception: to plant an idea in someone's head and make them accept it as their own, you have to reduce that idea to its simplest emotional form and let them build it themselves from there. Why does she want to kill the Doctor? Because she's afraid of him (The Silence may be the stuff of nightmares, but young Melody didn't actually run away until the Doctor showed up . . .). They plant the fear . . . they use the Silence to do it . . . which means she can't remember why she's afraid of him . . . which is like a perpetual motion machine for crazy. And from there she'll pretty much do all the work for them: learn everything she can about him, soak up any skill that might help her neutralize him, think about him all the time because she doesn't know why she's afraid of him and doesn't know how to stop it. She can't feel anything else because she's afraid all the time, but she can't be afraid because she doesn't have a reason to be afraid . . . so she won't be afraid. She'll test herself against every scary, dangerous thing she can find to prove to herself that she's not afraid. She'll come up with flimsy alternate excuses for everything she does (psychopath?) because she's certainly not motivated in everything by fear. She'll go over everything about it over and over to try to come to grips with it. She'll basically tear herself apart at the seams trying to cope with a fear that she can't feel because it doesn't have a reason.

But then, as they also point out in Inception, negative emotions are less potent and less durable than positive ones. And fear is not so different from falling in love. So how do you "trick" programming like that? Love is a more stable, more desirable state than perpetual fear.  And of course she fell in love too quickly. What holds people back from falling in love? Ultimately, it's fear. And she'd already spent her whole life afraid.

I think this explanation also makes more sense of how quickly she seems to recover all her normal faculties as River than if you assume she had much more involved brainwashing: once she faces her fear, all the parts of her that had been misdirected trying fruitlessly to manage that fear would be freed up to do what they were meant to.

ETA: All y'all should probably go read kaffyr's lovely meta River Song is Not a Psychopath, which I would say helped get my head moving on this.

Comments

[owlboy]

IA. I've thought for a while that the "spaceman" she was talking about was actually the Doctor, but I hadn't seen how that could apply to her reactions in LKH. Makes perfect sense. And it's something a lot of kids experience, I think - being terrified, and not knowing why. Just feeling like SOMETHING is out there in the dark, that wants to eat you. And Moffat is always pulling from childhood stuff like that.

[promethia_tenk]

I've thought for a while that the "spaceman" she was talking about was actually the Doctor, but I hadn't seen how that could apply to her reactions in LKH.
Yeah, me either! I feel like maybe Moffat meant for us to make the connections but he was just a little too oblique about it? Holes! This season has too many holes! And I think most everybody got that her childhood was meant to be scary and scarring but pinpointed the Silence as the focus of that fear, rather than the Doctor himself.

And it's something a lot of kids experience, I think - being terrified, and not knowing why. Just feeling like SOMETHING is out there in the dark, that wants to eat you. And Moffat is always pulling from childhood stuff like that.
That's a good point. And as much of a fail as it was on the show's part not to make any explicit parallels between Melody and George from "Night Terrors," the connection was pretty obvious anyway. And the point with George was that all the chaos he caused was a product of fear.

[owlboy]

idk, her fear being the Doctor seemed pretty easy to me - why would she be afraid of the suit eating her, if she was already in it and using it to call the White House? And the fact she bolted when he showed up despite calling for help, which everyone else seemed to think were plot holes. I just hadn't thought about how growing up with that fear of him might affect her as an adult, but now you've explained it it seems really obvious.

Fear = chaos is also a thing in AGMGTW- Colonel Manton tries to talk up the soldiers and tell them the Doctor is just some dude they'll defeat easily, but then he appears, and they freak and start shooting into the Monks. And during River's verbal spanking later on she makes the point that it's about fear - "you make them so afraid." "all this ... in fear of you." Doubtless, if they're doing this out of fear, that's what they're going to brainwash Melody with.

So I don't think it's a hole, really, we just have to go looking for all the pieces, and there's so much STUFF in these episodes that it's easy to overlook stuff.

[promethia_tenk]

Ok, maybe not holes--but I think this season he's stretched all the connections out a little too tenuously :-\

Fear = chaos is also a thing in AGMGTW- Colonel Manton tries to talk up the soldiers and tell them the Doctor is just some dude they'll defeat easily, but then he appears, and they freak and start shooting into the Monks. And during River's verbal spanking later on she makes the point that it's about fear - "you make them so afraid." "all this ... in fear of you." Doubtless, if they're doing this out of fear, that's what they're going to brainwash Melody with.
Yes! I'd remembered the mentions of fear in her speech, but that's a very good point too about the scene with Manton and the troops. Melody was the concentrated expression of everything Kovarian and Co were.

Also, Fringe really helped me in thinking about this (I feel like we got only the barest outline of River's story this season, so I'm having to go find it in other shows where it's better developed and apply the insights?). Because the key to Olivia's conditioning was also fear, and a lot of the stuff about her learning about Olive and her past and how adult Olivia wasn't afraid of anything anymore and the role fear played in the LSD episode seemed very reminiscent of River to me.

[owlboy]

Oh yeah, I agree that the story is kind of a bare outline - I figured out my problem with LKH is that it feels more like a hasty sketch, and not a fully realized piece of work. I think it REALLY would have benefited from being two episodes, or if we'd at least got another episode with Melody Pond.

Olivia's story is so Moffatty it makes me wonder if JJ Abrams is a Doctor Who fan, or if they're hiding him back there somewhere.

[promethia_tenk]

Yeah, LKH was . . . ugh, I'm still so conflicted. At least it was good fun, but so insanely much that you have to write in for yourself, and usually I'm a huge fan of making the audience work for it. And I think Amy and Rory's roles in all this are even sketchier than River's. Which is saying something!

Olivia's story is so Moffatty it makes me wonder if JJ Abrams is a Doctor Who fan, or if they're hiding him back there somewhere.
I think there are . . . sets of ideas or themes that go naturally together and that certain people are drawn to and work at over and over. Like RTD and Joss Whedon are definitely playing in the same sandbox a lot of the time. Probably Moff and JJ are the same, in a different sandbox. Anyway: mmmmm, Fringe <3

[owlboy]

I am having Polivia withdrawals ;_;

[elisi]

Re. the season having holes etc. I've been sort-of pondering this, and I think it's partly that it's so ambitious, yet trying to fit into a rather specific format. All the other New Who seasons have a rather loose structure - there *is* arc, but it's simple, and doesn't draw together until the finale. With S6 there is HUGE amounts of arc, yet they also cram in a lot of standalones, and it's an awkward fit. So I appreciate that it's so ambitious, even though the execution isn't what it could have been, because of the clash of formats. But the fact that he told a story like River's (and through that fixed the Doctor) - it's quite something.

[promethia_tenk]

Icon! <3

Agreed. The story he tells, it really wants to be a 6-10 episode, highly serialized drama season. But it can't be. And I think TIA/DotM in particular seemed to promise that we would be getting something a lot more developed than what we got (the tone of those episodes is so different--subtler, more mysterious, more obviously adult, with lots of substantial character moments and dangling mysteries). And the rest of the season just could not deliver on that promise. I find myself wishing again that Moff could have begun at least this season if not his entire run in the fantastical, baroque fairy-tale form we ended up with, so that we wouldn't have been expecting the rest of whatever show might have followed on from TIA/DotM.

Anyway, I get why we got what we did (mostly), and I can respect the ambition of it. But it's still frustrating. It's a flawed season, and I think River, Amy, and Rory took it square in the characterization. Which is when it becomes hard to be forgiving.

[elisi]

Icon is the BEST! <3 <3 <3 (Love yours too, btw.)

And I think TIA/DotM in particular seemed to promise that we would be getting something a lot more developed than what we got (the tone of those episodes is so different--subtler, more mysterious, more obviously adult, with lots of substantial character moments and dangling mysteries).
*nods* It would probably have worked better as the old format - the 4 episodes of 25 minutes each, where the story had more room to breathe. (Too tired to say something more indepth. And considering what I put up with on Buffy, I can forgive this season its flaws because of where it goes.)