The Eyes Have it (Doctor Who/The Girl Who Died)
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.…