Jane Campbell

So I was wondering what I was going to write for this week’s essay. I knew it would be on Doctor Who symbolism, but what? The TARDIS as a Religious Object? The Circle in the Square? Eyes? Something on Mirrors, perhaps? I eventually decided I’d let Saturday’s episode decide it for me. As such, I was rather taken with the fact that the opening image was a close-up of a singular Eye. Upside down. In an episode which features a Mirror reflection and an invocation of the TARDIS as a vehicle of the gods at its emotional climax (which was distinct from the Faux Resolution of defeating the Mire). But the Eye came first, so the Eyes have it.

It turns out there’s a wealth of Eye imagery to examine in The Girl Who Died. There’s the aforementioned opening image—the first time we’ve had an Eye closeup turned upside down. There’s a closeup of the wooden dragon’s eye, we’ve got Odin to cover, and of course the cleaving of the Sonic Sunglasses such that they become like an eyepatch.

Interestingly, there’s plenty of context to choose from. I mean, this season has already featured a variety of “eye” symbolism, in an era that’s regularly played with the imagery, which was already established since the beginning of the Revival, not to mention the fact that there are implications from the Classic series and filmography in general. And, of course, the Eye is a symbol that precedes all this. So first, let’s go back and look at the Eye’s semiotics, and then survey its use in Doctor Who before returning to The Girl Who Died.

Eye See You

First off, unlike The Chair Agenda, the symbolism of the Eye is relatively straightforward. The eye is one of the most important sense organs. So of course it’s used to mean “perception,” but it goes further than that. Vision itself is one of our primary metaphors for “knowing.” We see what other people mean, for example. In asking for clarification on something, we want some light shed on the subject. To communicate is to show something. We talk about knowing something from someone else’s perspective as seeing from their point of view. The attempt to gain knowledge is looking for the truth. Ignorance, on the other hand, is not being able to see, to be blind. To keep someone from learning something is to hide it, to cover it up, perhaps even to pull the wool over their eyes.

The metaphor of Knowing Is Seeing is so intrinsic, it informs all kinds of “knowing.” For Descartes, it was all about “the light of reason.” In this extended metaphor, Reason is like a Homunculus sitting in the mind, looking at all the Ideas therein as if they were objects on a screen. While indeed it’s quite likely that the visual cortex in the brain handles some of what we call thinking – from pulling up a picture of an old memory to visualizing the future – the truth is much more complex.…

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“The Chair Agenda” refers to the symbolic use of a Chair to indicate a process of Ascension. But this rather begs the question of what we mean by “ascension” and what, if anything, chairs have to do with it. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything about chairs in of themselves that would lead us to associate them with Ascension, is there?

Which is to say, there’s nothing inherently metaphoric about this association. Unlike, say, the implicit underlying metaphor embedded in our very conception of “time-travel”: Time is conceived as a dimension of Space, and our experiences of moving through space are subsequently used to inform our relationship to time—we imagine traveling through time much like we move through space. Not that this is the only metaphor we have for understanding time. We also conceive of it as a Resource, as something to divide up, manage, and use, save, or waste.

Going back to chairs, though, there’s no obvious metaphor here.  We sit in them.  That’s it.  We can’t even say that the form of a chair motivates an interpretation of Ascension, like an Eye in the middle of a forehead easily symbolizes “insight”—of thoughtfulness, creativity, intuition, the Divine, what have you.

So why Chairs? And what, pray, tell, is Ascension? Actually, it might be easier to start with how chairs, namely the body of evidence that employs the Chair in the context of ascension. For our purposes we’ll be focusing on Doctor Who, but this particular esoteric association is not limited to the favorite text of Eruditorum Press, as we’ll see. Thankfully, the first few examples will serve to highlight the association and lay bare the rather esoteric concept behind it.

The Library

We start with the Library, because it’s in the Library that Doctor Who first starts to make use of this symbolism relatively unambiguously. In the first episode, Silence in the Library, we get the first death of the story, that of Miss Evangelista (oooh, what a name!) She wanders into a reading room, where several chairs take the center stage, and one in particular looks almost like a throne, with upholstery in TARDIS blue. The camera pans behind the chair, behind some books… and then a scream. Our heroes come racing into the room, and discover a skeleton sitting in the high-backed chair.

We then get one of the most heartbreaking scenes of the story, if not the season. Miss Evangelista isn’t just dead… she’s “ghosting.” A technobabble explanation is given, but the important thing is that her consciousness has been freed from her body, and yet is still present. It is a sobering experience for the others, especially Donna, and eventually Evangelista moves on… and when she does, the camera itself rises high above the tableau, its point of view delineating a literal ascension.

But Evangelista isn’t quite dead. Instead she’s been uploaded to the Library’s mainframe, which puts her through a queer looking glass. Before she died, she was pretty, but stupid. After, her features are grossly distorted, but her intelligence has gone through the roof.…

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Phil, once again atop someone else’s post to announce the second episode of the Eruditorum Press Doctor Who Series 9 podcast, this time featuring a conversation between me and Jane on The Witch’s Familiar. You can grab that here, and I hope you enjoy. Meanwhile, here’s Jane with her own take on the episode in our very own Eruditorum Press version of her famed mirror threads at GallifreyBase.

Jane’s Thoughts

First and foremost, I look at the various mirror-shots within an episode as a skeleton key for unlocking my interpretations. So, for The Magician’s Apprentice we start with shots of Missy reflected in her compact, and Clara reflected in the Doctor’s sunglasses; in The Witch’s Familiar we have both the Doctor and Davros reflected in an eye-shaped window in the Infirmary on Skaro.

Given the titles of these episodes, the mirror shots are strangely reversed. We’d expect the pairing of the Doctor and Davros in reference to The Magician’s Apprentice, in no small part because Bors refers to the Doctor as “Magician,” while the shots of Missy and Clara most easily translate to The Witch’s Familiar, both given the contemporary gendering associated with “witch” and how Missy likens Clara to a couple’s puppy, as pets are generally consider the “familiars” of witches.

But there are all kinds of student/pupil relationships in this episode, depending on your point of view. Clara could be the Doctor’s apprentice. So could Missy, given she steps into a Doctorly role here. Or maybe Kate is an apprentice to the Doctorly Clara. Hell, the Doctor could be Davros’s apprentice, given the cliffhanger, with the Doctor now wielding the Dalek equivalent of a sonic screwdriver. Colony Sarff, partaking of an animal motif, could be a “familiar” to Davros. And so it goes. All this is to say that I don’t think there’s any singular correspondence to elicit; rather, the general aesthetic of the Magician/Apprentice and Witch/Familiar relationships are highlighted here. Relationships which are rooted in a particular power dynamic, which we’ll get to eventually.

Anyways, the word “apprentice” is rather interesting, given the new monster that appears at the beginning of The Alchemist’s Pupils (my title for the two-parter as a whole). Here we see Hands with Eyes in their palms, which is actually a rather ancient symbolic motif: the Hamsa, primarily from Middle Eastern culture, is considered a talisman that wards off or protects against the Evil Eye. It’s particularly notable for being a matricentric symbol to ensure a healthy and successful childbirth. But in this episode of Doctor Who the monster is demonstrably portrayed as malevolent, sucking a soldier down into the ground.

But in mythology, which Doctor Who most certainly is, a trip under the earth isn’t synonymous with death. Rather, it’s symbolic (or more properly metaphoric) of a journey through the subconscious mind. So it’s in this context that I’m interpreting the story’s exploration of, for lack of a better word, nostalgia. For the story is obviously concerned with the past, from the plethora of continuity references to a classic time-travel trope whereby the Doctor is presented with the opportunity to kill boy-Davros well before the creation of the Daleks.…

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