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promethia_tenkWarnings: Includes spoilers for Pyramid at the End of the World and the next time trailer for Lie of the Land. So long. So very long. Not properly edited. Seven years of accumulated symbolism is such an unwieldily thing, guys, I'm sorry.
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Bill started out on this show, I thought, remarkably devoid of symbolism. Clara and River and even Amy, to an extent, all entered the show dripping in symbolism. With names that begged to be analyzed and new veins of metaphoric imagery flowing from them.
Amy was about fairy tales and growing up. Apples and stories. She and the Doctor were lost children, running away together, learning how to grow up.
River was about life and the power of grace and the flow of time. She was associated with water and forests and music, life and death and renewal. Her appearance told us the Doctor was going to grow and heal and and again be a force for life and wellbeing.
Clara was about clarity and power and rules, and about mirroring the Doctor. She brought with her flowers and eggs and birds: symbols of fruitfulness, rebirth, and freedom. On her first appearance she symbolically healed the Time War by severing the Doctor’s connection to the Daleks.
Missy came in and co-opted all the symbolic threads the others had established and made them evil: a twisted mother figure. Queen of no natural forces, but of the undead. And her influence twisted up Twelve and Clara and spread over their whole era, as they gripped tighter and tighter to each other, unwilling to let time and nature run their course.
To see even an episode or two of any of these women was to understand, quite quickly, major things about what they would mean.
This did not happen with Bill. Bill was remarkably, intriguingly, and somewhat reassuringly . . . flat.
As I exclaimed toelisi quite early in the season: ‘Don’t catch the symbolism, Bill! You’ll just get stolen or made a member of the living dead!’ To be too closely entwined with the symbolism on this show is to wield immense power. And to be subject to immense pain.
Let’s start with her name: Bill Potts. Remarkable only in being a boy’s name, and thus probably not her given one. William (or Wilhelmina, potentially?) comes from the German words for will/desire and protection—which is suddenly far more interesting in light of the most recent episode, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. My point here is that her name is almost forcibly banal. Not something one would ever think to look up were she not a character on a show where the meaning of names is regularly a plot point and most people’s names come loaded heavy with meaning.
And the only thing I have to say about Potts is that they’re found in kitchens. Like I said: forcibly banal. Much like Bill’s life.
The other notable thing about names on this show is everyone, absolutely everyone, has at least two. Sometimes three. And usually several epithets as well. And the distinctions between these names are major points of character development. Amelia Pond, Amy Pond, Amy Williams. Rory Williams, Rory Pond. Melody Pond, Mels Zucker, River Song. Clara Oswald, Clara Oswin Oswald, Oswin Oswald. The Doctor and . . . whatever his other name is (Basil, he tells one of the Osgoods). Rupert Pink and Danny (the Soldier Man) Pink. Kate Stewart (she leaves the ‘Lethbridge’ out, to avoid appearances of favoritism). Missy, the Mistress, the Master. I could go on, but you probably take my point. Bill hasn’t gotten herself an epithet yet either, something like The Impossible Girl or The Last Centurion. She hasn't even got a nickname, not nothing. She’s just ‘Bill.’
The obvious question is, what is Bill’s other name?
And then there’s the symbolism. For the first several episodes of this season, it’s been there. Ambient in the environment, but not seeming to do much. There’s all the normal suspects: eyes and water and fish and flowers and trees and birds and music. Bill’s got a bit of a greatest hits collection of necklaces (jewelry is always important): a guitar, some birds, and my favorite: a blue crystal.
For awhile I was feeling like Bill did not have any particular symbolism associated with her. Hadn’t brought anything along as Clara did flowers and birds. But thinking about what the crystal meant made me realize a major symbolic thread that we had way, way back in season five, which disappeared and which, only very recently, has slipped back in, stealthy: earth.
Season five had a major trope of the earth and the heavens. These showed up in the use of red (earth) and blue (heavens). Circles (heavens) in squares (earth). Rory’s name meant red, meant earth, meant grounding. He was contrasted with that ephemeral sky-creature, the Doctor. We had caves in the Angels episodes and a whole underground civilization in The Hungry Earth. The finale centered around the alchemy of uniting the earth and heavens to recreate the universe—which is the central symbol of renewal on the show, returned to again and again in pure and twisted forms.
Since season five, however, earth has . . . rather slipped out of the equation, it feels to me anyway. Brought up mostly in association with death, and the show has spun off-center the farther we’ve gotten from that essential balance, culminating in Twelve and Clara’s mirrored spiral: unmoored, unearthed, undead.
The Doctor basically crash-landed, however, and has come back down to . . . earth. To watch Heaven Sent, to really watch it, the Doctor’s chief antagonist would seem to be rock: the entrapping walls of the castle, the grave he digs up, the charred remains of his former self he scoops up at the beginning of each cycle (remember you are dust, to dust you shall return), the ever-growing pile of skulls, the Doctor’s body slowly becoming the very fabric of the world, and then that wall of harder-than-diamond he punches his way through in grief and contrition. The Doctor does not, when he can possibly avoid it, tangle with earth in this way. It is not naturally his element. It represents, generally, everything he runs from.
His reward is he returns to Gallifrey, he walks again in the dirt of his home world. And what a very red, desolate, dusty wasteland it is. But, crucially, it is his, and it is safe, and the Doctor once again has a home.
Then comes The Husbands of River Song. Hands up who thought that the Singing Towers of Darillium would be rock formations? I didn’t. I half did a double-take at the end of that episode because when has rock ever figured in the Doctor/River symbolism? Which is odd, when you think of it, as River’s job is literally digging in the dirt. And yet there the towers were: hard and solid and with the Doctor saying ~meaningful things about them and promising twenty four years in one place, on one planet. Durability, steadfastness, grounding.
Both THoRS and The Return of Doctor Mysterio center around rocks as well: the diamond in THoRS and the gemstone from the most recent Christmas special whose name I can’t be bothered to look up right now: the Halassi something or other, the Ghost of Love and Wishes. The common point between earth and a star is a crystal.
Which brings us back to this season and Bill’s necklace with the blue crystal. Earth has yet to . . . assert itself the way it did at the end of season nine and the Christmas specials, but it is referenced everywhere. The Doctor’s study is crammed full with spheres and globes. There’s a crystal ball on his desk in between River and Susan’s portraits. In Thin Ice he plays with a solar system model in the industrialist’s parlor. All the spheres suggest celestial bodies, planets. Bill meets a girl with a star in her eye. The Doctor isn’t ‘from space’: he’s from a planet like everybody else. He’s grounded.
And the Doctor has been on earth for seventy years, we learn, guarding a vault that is underground. It’s another cube, like the Pandorica, which was also underground and was crucial in the uniting of earth and heavens back in season five. Season five had such a nice, round completeness to it, in the storyline and in the symbolism. It’s something I’ve been missing and something, I very much hope, is back.
Now, is all this earth, all this grounding, really to do with Bill? Or is it the Doctor’s symbolism and she just stumbled along at the right time? I’d like to think she’s tied to it. She gives him a rug, as a present. It’s a lovely, red, earth-y color and lies on the ground, juxtaposed with the blue of the TARDIS, and it’s covered with crosses, which are a central symbol in American Indian cosmology, referencing the four elements and the four seasons, the cycles of life, the four directions, the unity of the sun and the earth, balance, and all the kind of good things you’d want out of a final season of Moffat Who.
She also has some sort of mandala tapestry hanging in her flat, with elephants circling the center. Centering, grounding, completeness.
The other little thing about Bill, which I nearly brushed off for feeling trite, is that she has little peace sign earrings she wears in The Pilot. An over-used symbol, perhaps, but a very good one.
Now, in the past few episodes, things have started to get a little interesting.
Knock, Knock: I’ve already written about how this episode folds Bill into the network of symbolism of the women in this show, and gives her a warning, in a classic gothic manner, of the dangers of over-protectiveness, which leads to stasis (a true evil, unlike death, which is a part of life).
Oxygen: The previous week’s warning is well-timed as the Doctor sacrifices his eyesight to save Bill and, more worryingly, also tries to protect her from the knowledge of what he’s sacrificed. This is also Bill’s first time dying and, like Amy’s journey through the underworld in Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone and Clara’s trials in Cold War, serves as her true initiation into the Doctor’s world. She is now far more inextricably bound to him than she was before this episode.
Extremis: What a beautiful episode. Head over to elisi’s meta for better composed thoughts than these, but two things I want to point out:
1) The execution scene by the lake is extensively mirrored to the Doctor’s execution in The Wedding of River Song, with both Twelve and Missy mirroring Eleven and River in different ways. There's the lake. A prison rising out of a lake. Someone being executed (note the misdirect at the beginning of the scene that makes it seem the Doctor is the one to die, again). Someone refusing to execute the other person. Someone who has to go in a box to protect the get out of death free clause. An assertion of relationship (marriage/friendship). Missy's saying that she needs to tell the Doctor that she is his friend, even if it doesn't save her echoes River's 'I can't let you die without knowing you are loved.'
And then both Missy and Twelve repeat the words we've just heard from River's diary. And later when computer!Twelve is remembering those words to give him strength to fight the Monks, he first remembers Missy saying them. All the women on this show mirror all the other women at different times. Missy first came on as a Clara mirror, but twisting her around to now mirror River is entirely appropriate. As The Moment in The Day of the Doctor notes, through the voice of Rose, ‘Caught between a girl and a box. Story of your life, Doctor.’ Missy, the madwoman in a box, is the repressed Id of all of Moffat’s women.
2) When Missy came on to the show, she co-opted the existing symbolism and made it evil. Water was now evil water. Flowers were evil flowers. Birds were evil [Cyber] birds. She took over the earth as a malevolent mother figure, with an army of undead babies hatching out of evil eggs. And Clara who, up to that point, has been a near infallible symbol of hope and renewal, who seemed to float over the show, sprinkling fairy dust and fixing the most fundamental of catastrophes, had now gone Victorious, ready to tear the universe apart to bring Danny back from the dead, her wishes fulfilled by Missy, her dark mirror, in the most horrific manner possible.
It was an entirely arresting moment. Like a switch had been thrown and this whole magic show with its sprawling network of fertility symbolism and its alchemy and its salvation through stories had been inverted in the course of one episode. The question, I immediately felt, was how do you fix this?
I’m still waiting for an answer. I feel like we’ve more drifted, stumbling, back into a grey in-between area and are hovering there, unresolved. The end of season nine, with an undead Clara racing off through the stars and an amnesiac Twelve carrying on without her managed to feel both celebratory and deeply, profoundly wrong. The solution, I’m starting to feel, will not be to throw the switch back but to find a way, again, to unite the opposites. The good symbolism of change and growth and renewal and the evil symbolism of stasis and stagnation and forgetfulness somehow resolved. So I’m going to work on the assumption that this season will be finding a way to do that. Extremis, though, does provide an interesting signpost for us:
I think it is safe to say that it is the most flora-encrusted episode we've ever had. A probably incomplete list of things with flowers and/or vines on them:
Missy's bow
Pretty much every fabric surface in Bill's flat, and all the art on the walls
Penny's earrings, necklace, and jacket
The lace on Bill's dress
The wall behind Nardole when he comes to the execution
The fabric on the inside of the lid of the box that the Doctor takes his eyesight restoring doohickey out of
The glass globes around the lights in the Hereticum
The fretwork around the lock of the Veritas cage
The cover of the Veritas
The table runner underneath it
The reading chair behind it, both in the woodwork and the upholstery
The translator's gun
The drapes in the Oval Office
And, perhaps most interestingly, the primary Monk's robes.
All of this in an episode about forbidden knowledge that contains death. Here we are, then, in the Garden of Eden.
The thing that really grabs me about all these flowers and plants--symbols of fruitfulness and rebirth--is that they show up in both the ‘good’ symbolism context and the ‘bad’ context. The good notably in Bill’s flat on her date with Penny. The bad with Missy, the Veritas, and the Monks. One symbol, both polarities, same episode.
*deep breath* Hang on, folks, almost done:
So. The Pyramid at the End of the World. Fantastically boring episode, fantastically interesting conclusion.
The only thing I want to talk about is Bill’s decision at the end, because whoo, boy.
Here’s the thing that I had to watch twice to fully sink in: the Doctor’s plan of blowing up the lab to sterilize the contagion . . . was working. Yes, he was going to die, but so do so many people in so many episodes and we move on. The lab could have blown up with the Doctor in it and everything would have been fine. Bill here is not making a foolhardy decision in the eleventh hour in the hopes that keeping the Doctor alive will allow him to save them all. The day was saved already.
Bill just couldn’t let the Doctor die, and because of that, she doomed the whole world. While standing in a pyramid.
Let us be clear: Bill has gone from zero to full River Song in seven episodes.
So much for avoiding the symbolism.
Next week in an alternative universe (Wedding of River Song) Bill will apparently shoot the Doctor in order to fix the world (Wedding of River Song). And she will meet Missy who, again, was elaborately mirrored with River in Extremis, is the repressed Id of all the women on this show, and from whom the whole network of evil symbolism flows. (If you’re new here and you've never read elisi’s masterpiece meta on TWoRS, now would probably be a good time to do that.)
TL;DR: Bill has a weird relationship to the symbolism on this show. Tune in next week: it’s gonna be a whopper.
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Bill started out on this show, I thought, remarkably devoid of symbolism. Clara and River and even Amy, to an extent, all entered the show dripping in symbolism. With names that begged to be analyzed and new veins of metaphoric imagery flowing from them.
Amy was about fairy tales and growing up. Apples and stories. She and the Doctor were lost children, running away together, learning how to grow up.
River was about life and the power of grace and the flow of time. She was associated with water and forests and music, life and death and renewal. Her appearance told us the Doctor was going to grow and heal and and again be a force for life and wellbeing.
Clara was about clarity and power and rules, and about mirroring the Doctor. She brought with her flowers and eggs and birds: symbols of fruitfulness, rebirth, and freedom. On her first appearance she symbolically healed the Time War by severing the Doctor’s connection to the Daleks.
Missy came in and co-opted all the symbolic threads the others had established and made them evil: a twisted mother figure. Queen of no natural forces, but of the undead. And her influence twisted up Twelve and Clara and spread over their whole era, as they gripped tighter and tighter to each other, unwilling to let time and nature run their course.
To see even an episode or two of any of these women was to understand, quite quickly, major things about what they would mean.
This did not happen with Bill. Bill was remarkably, intriguingly, and somewhat reassuringly . . . flat.
As I exclaimed to
elisi quite early in the season: ‘Don’t catch the symbolism, Bill! You’ll just get stolen or made a member of the living dead!’ To be too closely entwined with the symbolism on this show is to wield immense power. And to be subject to immense pain.Let’s start with her name: Bill Potts. Remarkable only in being a boy’s name, and thus probably not her given one. William (or Wilhelmina, potentially?) comes from the German words for will/desire and protection—which is suddenly far more interesting in light of the most recent episode, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. My point here is that her name is almost forcibly banal. Not something one would ever think to look up were she not a character on a show where the meaning of names is regularly a plot point and most people’s names come loaded heavy with meaning.
And the only thing I have to say about Potts is that they’re found in kitchens. Like I said: forcibly banal. Much like Bill’s life.
The other notable thing about names on this show is everyone, absolutely everyone, has at least two. Sometimes three. And usually several epithets as well. And the distinctions between these names are major points of character development. Amelia Pond, Amy Pond, Amy Williams. Rory Williams, Rory Pond. Melody Pond, Mels Zucker, River Song. Clara Oswald, Clara Oswin Oswald, Oswin Oswald. The Doctor and . . . whatever his other name is (Basil, he tells one of the Osgoods). Rupert Pink and Danny (the Soldier Man) Pink. Kate Stewart (she leaves the ‘Lethbridge’ out, to avoid appearances of favoritism). Missy, the Mistress, the Master. I could go on, but you probably take my point. Bill hasn’t gotten herself an epithet yet either, something like The Impossible Girl or The Last Centurion. She hasn't even got a nickname, not nothing. She’s just ‘Bill.’
The obvious question is, what is Bill’s other name?
And then there’s the symbolism. For the first several episodes of this season, it’s been there. Ambient in the environment, but not seeming to do much. There’s all the normal suspects: eyes and water and fish and flowers and trees and birds and music. Bill’s got a bit of a greatest hits collection of necklaces (jewelry is always important): a guitar, some birds, and my favorite: a blue crystal.
For awhile I was feeling like Bill did not have any particular symbolism associated with her. Hadn’t brought anything along as Clara did flowers and birds. But thinking about what the crystal meant made me realize a major symbolic thread that we had way, way back in season five, which disappeared and which, only very recently, has slipped back in, stealthy: earth.
Season five had a major trope of the earth and the heavens. These showed up in the use of red (earth) and blue (heavens). Circles (heavens) in squares (earth). Rory’s name meant red, meant earth, meant grounding. He was contrasted with that ephemeral sky-creature, the Doctor. We had caves in the Angels episodes and a whole underground civilization in The Hungry Earth. The finale centered around the alchemy of uniting the earth and heavens to recreate the universe—which is the central symbol of renewal on the show, returned to again and again in pure and twisted forms.
Since season five, however, earth has . . . rather slipped out of the equation, it feels to me anyway. Brought up mostly in association with death, and the show has spun off-center the farther we’ve gotten from that essential balance, culminating in Twelve and Clara’s mirrored spiral: unmoored, unearthed, undead.
The Doctor basically crash-landed, however, and has come back down to . . . earth. To watch Heaven Sent, to really watch it, the Doctor’s chief antagonist would seem to be rock: the entrapping walls of the castle, the grave he digs up, the charred remains of his former self he scoops up at the beginning of each cycle (remember you are dust, to dust you shall return), the ever-growing pile of skulls, the Doctor’s body slowly becoming the very fabric of the world, and then that wall of harder-than-diamond he punches his way through in grief and contrition. The Doctor does not, when he can possibly avoid it, tangle with earth in this way. It is not naturally his element. It represents, generally, everything he runs from.
His reward is he returns to Gallifrey, he walks again in the dirt of his home world. And what a very red, desolate, dusty wasteland it is. But, crucially, it is his, and it is safe, and the Doctor once again has a home.
Then comes The Husbands of River Song. Hands up who thought that the Singing Towers of Darillium would be rock formations? I didn’t. I half did a double-take at the end of that episode because when has rock ever figured in the Doctor/River symbolism? Which is odd, when you think of it, as River’s job is literally digging in the dirt. And yet there the towers were: hard and solid and with the Doctor saying ~meaningful things about them and promising twenty four years in one place, on one planet. Durability, steadfastness, grounding.
Both THoRS and The Return of Doctor Mysterio center around rocks as well: the diamond in THoRS and the gemstone from the most recent Christmas special whose name I can’t be bothered to look up right now: the Halassi something or other, the Ghost of Love and Wishes. The common point between earth and a star is a crystal.
Which brings us back to this season and Bill’s necklace with the blue crystal. Earth has yet to . . . assert itself the way it did at the end of season nine and the Christmas specials, but it is referenced everywhere. The Doctor’s study is crammed full with spheres and globes. There’s a crystal ball on his desk in between River and Susan’s portraits. In Thin Ice he plays with a solar system model in the industrialist’s parlor. All the spheres suggest celestial bodies, planets. Bill meets a girl with a star in her eye. The Doctor isn’t ‘from space’: he’s from a planet like everybody else. He’s grounded.
And the Doctor has been on earth for seventy years, we learn, guarding a vault that is underground. It’s another cube, like the Pandorica, which was also underground and was crucial in the uniting of earth and heavens back in season five. Season five had such a nice, round completeness to it, in the storyline and in the symbolism. It’s something I’ve been missing and something, I very much hope, is back.
Now, is all this earth, all this grounding, really to do with Bill? Or is it the Doctor’s symbolism and she just stumbled along at the right time? I’d like to think she’s tied to it. She gives him a rug, as a present. It’s a lovely, red, earth-y color and lies on the ground, juxtaposed with the blue of the TARDIS, and it’s covered with crosses, which are a central symbol in American Indian cosmology, referencing the four elements and the four seasons, the cycles of life, the four directions, the unity of the sun and the earth, balance, and all the kind of good things you’d want out of a final season of Moffat Who.
She also has some sort of mandala tapestry hanging in her flat, with elephants circling the center. Centering, grounding, completeness.
The other little thing about Bill, which I nearly brushed off for feeling trite, is that she has little peace sign earrings she wears in The Pilot. An over-used symbol, perhaps, but a very good one.
Now, in the past few episodes, things have started to get a little interesting.
Knock, Knock: I’ve already written about how this episode folds Bill into the network of symbolism of the women in this show, and gives her a warning, in a classic gothic manner, of the dangers of over-protectiveness, which leads to stasis (a true evil, unlike death, which is a part of life).
Oxygen: The previous week’s warning is well-timed as the Doctor sacrifices his eyesight to save Bill and, more worryingly, also tries to protect her from the knowledge of what he’s sacrificed. This is also Bill’s first time dying and, like Amy’s journey through the underworld in Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone and Clara’s trials in Cold War, serves as her true initiation into the Doctor’s world. She is now far more inextricably bound to him than she was before this episode.
Extremis: What a beautiful episode. Head over to elisi’s meta for better composed thoughts than these, but two things I want to point out:
1) The execution scene by the lake is extensively mirrored to the Doctor’s execution in The Wedding of River Song, with both Twelve and Missy mirroring Eleven and River in different ways. There's the lake. A prison rising out of a lake. Someone being executed (note the misdirect at the beginning of the scene that makes it seem the Doctor is the one to die, again). Someone refusing to execute the other person. Someone who has to go in a box to protect the get out of death free clause. An assertion of relationship (marriage/friendship). Missy's saying that she needs to tell the Doctor that she is his friend, even if it doesn't save her echoes River's 'I can't let you die without knowing you are loved.'
And then both Missy and Twelve repeat the words we've just heard from River's diary. And later when computer!Twelve is remembering those words to give him strength to fight the Monks, he first remembers Missy saying them. All the women on this show mirror all the other women at different times. Missy first came on as a Clara mirror, but twisting her around to now mirror River is entirely appropriate. As The Moment in The Day of the Doctor notes, through the voice of Rose, ‘Caught between a girl and a box. Story of your life, Doctor.’ Missy, the madwoman in a box, is the repressed Id of all of Moffat’s women.
2) When Missy came on to the show, she co-opted the existing symbolism and made it evil. Water was now evil water. Flowers were evil flowers. Birds were evil [Cyber] birds. She took over the earth as a malevolent mother figure, with an army of undead babies hatching out of evil eggs. And Clara who, up to that point, has been a near infallible symbol of hope and renewal, who seemed to float over the show, sprinkling fairy dust and fixing the most fundamental of catastrophes, had now gone Victorious, ready to tear the universe apart to bring Danny back from the dead, her wishes fulfilled by Missy, her dark mirror, in the most horrific manner possible.
It was an entirely arresting moment. Like a switch had been thrown and this whole magic show with its sprawling network of fertility symbolism and its alchemy and its salvation through stories had been inverted in the course of one episode. The question, I immediately felt, was how do you fix this?
I’m still waiting for an answer. I feel like we’ve more drifted, stumbling, back into a grey in-between area and are hovering there, unresolved. The end of season nine, with an undead Clara racing off through the stars and an amnesiac Twelve carrying on without her managed to feel both celebratory and deeply, profoundly wrong. The solution, I’m starting to feel, will not be to throw the switch back but to find a way, again, to unite the opposites. The good symbolism of change and growth and renewal and the evil symbolism of stasis and stagnation and forgetfulness somehow resolved. So I’m going to work on the assumption that this season will be finding a way to do that. Extremis, though, does provide an interesting signpost for us:
I think it is safe to say that it is the most flora-encrusted episode we've ever had. A probably incomplete list of things with flowers and/or vines on them:
Missy's bow
Pretty much every fabric surface in Bill's flat, and all the art on the walls
Penny's earrings, necklace, and jacket
The lace on Bill's dress
The wall behind Nardole when he comes to the execution
The fabric on the inside of the lid of the box that the Doctor takes his eyesight restoring doohickey out of
The glass globes around the lights in the Hereticum
The fretwork around the lock of the Veritas cage
The cover of the Veritas
The table runner underneath it
The reading chair behind it, both in the woodwork and the upholstery
The translator's gun
The drapes in the Oval Office
And, perhaps most interestingly, the primary Monk's robes.
All of this in an episode about forbidden knowledge that contains death. Here we are, then, in the Garden of Eden.
The thing that really grabs me about all these flowers and plants--symbols of fruitfulness and rebirth--is that they show up in both the ‘good’ symbolism context and the ‘bad’ context. The good notably in Bill’s flat on her date with Penny. The bad with Missy, the Veritas, and the Monks. One symbol, both polarities, same episode.
*deep breath* Hang on, folks, almost done:
So. The Pyramid at the End of the World. Fantastically boring episode, fantastically interesting conclusion.
The only thing I want to talk about is Bill’s decision at the end, because whoo, boy.
Here’s the thing that I had to watch twice to fully sink in: the Doctor’s plan of blowing up the lab to sterilize the contagion . . . was working. Yes, he was going to die, but so do so many people in so many episodes and we move on. The lab could have blown up with the Doctor in it and everything would have been fine. Bill here is not making a foolhardy decision in the eleventh hour in the hopes that keeping the Doctor alive will allow him to save them all. The day was saved already.
Bill just couldn’t let the Doctor die, and because of that, she doomed the whole world. While standing in a pyramid.
Let us be clear: Bill has gone from zero to full River Song in seven episodes.
So much for avoiding the symbolism.
Next week in an alternative universe (Wedding of River Song) Bill will apparently shoot the Doctor in order to fix the world (Wedding of River Song). And she will meet Missy who, again, was elaborately mirrored with River in Extremis, is the repressed Id of all the women on this show, and from whom the whole network of evil symbolism flows. (If you’re new here and you've never read elisi’s masterpiece meta on TWoRS, now would probably be a good time to do that.)
TL;DR: Bill has a weird relationship to the symbolism on this show. Tune in next week: it’s gonna be a whopper.
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