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Inspired by this meta by the lovely @the-lazy-cat-bakes-souffles, I went to re-watch ‘Flatline’, and as to be expected, I was completely blown away. But this time, something else caught my eye.
The major themes of series 8 are death and corruption. It started right from the strikingly dark reading of regeneration in ‘Deep Breath’ and went all the way to ‘Death in Heaven’, resolving itself in ‘Last Christmas’. Now if we look at what we’ve got in this episode:
We’ve got remains of people on the walls - a blown-up image of human skin, or a scaled drawing of a human nervous system - a shrine of flowers and pictures and soft toys, and a mural of missing people among more graffiti on an estate wall being wiped out with white paint. Also, we’ve got Clara looking at a shrine for the dead, bringing back the Doctor from his temporarily tomb-like TARDIS, and having her own companion in the Doctor, Danny, and Rigsy - who goes on to paint a mural for her in ‘Face the Raven’, series 9, turning the TARDIS into a shrine for her after her death.
In a series preoccupied with death and corruption, of bodies and stories, ‘Flatline’ fits right in with its motif of memorial pictures, pictures of the dead we hang on walls and put on shrines. Of course, the pictures are all corrupted because this time, we’ve got monsters who’re trying to force people into pictures, into two-dimensional representations that can’t speak and are literally lifeless images only. Worse, they weaponise those images against the living - using dead people so that they may have faces of their own.
However, corrupting pictures and removing their sacrosanct quality also means the pictures become open to everyone to corrupt, since that’s the way corruption usually works. So it becomes open to Doctor Clara playing with them as well. She corrupts the corrupted material to use them against the corrupting agents, in a move that’s classically Doctor-y, exactly as genre-savvy and ruthless as something we might expect from Clara. (Tangentially, she also takes back command as the heroine in a narrative which often forces women into two-dimensional chirpy companion roles, utilising them for their faces, because they make a pretty picture.) It’s a perfect balance, all the more dazzling because it’s so precarious.
It’s a bit ironic then, how those who force the living people into lifeless 2D pictures think they’ll find meaning, purpose, a path in another picture. They believe themselves to be completely in control of the picture themselves. So when they invest too much energy (literally) in something dying (the Doctor in his TARDIS), they accidentally bring it back alive in a way they couldn’t have predicted. Considering how the theme of bringing back the dead to life plays out to its horrifying end in ‘Dark Water’ and ‘Death in Heaven’, and lingers like a pall over all of this series, this episode starts bringing up - still in subtext, of course - this issue. Bringing back the dead is possible if one invests enough energy in them and in the process; but is one quite sure that’s what they really want?