| |
|
Whoops. This part of the recap actually comes from "The Long Game." Still, very nicely done.
The second story -- and I'd advise you that there's a reason we named the baby "Sophia" -- goes like this: in most versions of the Gnostic myth, Sophia births the world that Plato called the demiurgos, or for a single deity, the Demiurge, an entity responsible for the creation of the universe. Sometimes he's benevolent, leonine, like Mithras, and just got caught in the trap of his own creation. Elsewhere, though, he's not so nice. He has three names, like gods usually do: Ialdabaoth, meaning "Suffer the little children to come unto me"; Samael the Blind; and Saklas the Fool. He doesn't even know that there's a better god out there because he's so caught up in his own creation. Generally, he creates some archangels, or "Archons," Editors, who rule the material realm and usually do the whole Pilgrim's Progress deal on those of us inside it. If you're wondering why this episode seems to owe so much to The Matrix, well, it's little show of faith in Russell Davies to say that the source material's all there and quite old. Or maybe it's all because of that Elvis Costello song. In any case, the Gnostic belief is that there's a certain kind of spiritual light lodged in the material world, symbolized by knowledge, of a specific kind, that the redeemer figure retrieves and gives back to God -- individual redemption as the restoration of the divine. So you've got Ahriman, who destroys the cage, and Sophia, who takes it apart, and they're both looking for the information, and they both mean the end of the world, and the start of something unimaginably beautiful. Maintenance of the divine becomes your Cartesian problem, as an active mover -- like the alchemists. The thing about these stories, where the Creator isn't necessarily the same guy as regular old helpful God, is that the focus is more on information, and less on who's better or worse off -- white hat or black hat, you and your information are just the stuff in the zit between them. Yeah, "Dalek" is better. I like this one more. See the distinction? |
|
|
