Character Highlight: Clara Oswald (Doctor Who)

I know, I’ve already written about Clara ad nauseum, but my completist tendencies need to give all major Whoniverse characters either a Favorite Characters or Character Highlight writeup, so here we are.  Trying to sort through the various permutations of Clara (some spoilers.)

Things get off to a dubious start when Clara 1.0 is actually the third one we meet, and of the three, she’s the most unremarkable.  She’s a kind young woman who longs to travel but has been waylaid by her own caring.  The Doctor takes her along because he’s trying to work out the “Impossible Girl” mystery, and as such, she spends her first half-season not quite feeling like a companion.  She’s more of a puzzle than a person, she doesn’t get to do a lot in the adventures, and she feels flat and nonspecific compared to her splinter-self predecessors.  And yet, I do like her.  She’s caring, she seems clever, and she’s brave in a quiet way – not guns-blazing, but she’s good at keeping her head in a crisis and holding it together when she’s scared.  When she prepares to sacrifice herself for the Doctor at the end of series 7, I buy it.  The whole “I was born to save the Doctor” thing is grossly reductive, but that’s more a case of the writer putting unfortunate words in her mouth.  I believe that, seeing the Doctor suffering and, furthermore, knowing how the universe will suffer without him, she would jump into his timestream.  Of all of Clara’s potential exits and/or possible deaths on the show, this one remains the most organic and the most affecting for me.  If this was how she bowed out, I would have been sad.

But that’s not how Clara goes.  Clara 1.0 has a couple more episodes with Eleven, in which time (we don’t know how much) her occupation changes from nanny to English teacher and she has a few more strong emotional scenes with the Doctor.  Twelve comes onto the scene right in time for series 8 and Clara 2.0.  This Clara, as I’ve documented extensively, is by far my least favorite.  She often feels like she can’t be bothered with all this annoying time-and-space business, she hardly seems to have any faith in the Doctor anymore (except when she needs to give a Stirring Emotional Speech according to the writers’ need for it,) and she lies frequently, seemingly without much reason for actually doing so.  Mostly, she leaves me wondering why she keeps traveling on the TARDIS if it’s such a disruption to her life and she thinks the new Doctor is so lacking.  That said, Clara 2.0 is much more proactive in adventures than the previous version, although it’s sometimes, irritatingly, at the expense of the Doctor’s own competence.

In series 9, Clara 3.0 feels like a course-correction, an unspoken admission that series 8 took the show down a bad, sad road and something had to be done.  I still have my “Argh – why?!” moments, especially toward the end of the season, but overall, I think this version takes good elements from both prior iterations while discarding a lot of the unfortunate aspects.  She remains useful, contributing to adventures, and she feels like she actually cares about the Doctor again, noticing when something’s up with him and trying to help.  She’s still more of a part-time companion (boo!), but when she’s there, she clearly wantsto be there and is invested in going on adventures (true, there’s some hinting/anvil-dropping that this behavior is unhealthy, possibly a response to the trauma she suffers at the end of series 8, but I’m not going to complain about a companion acting like she wants to be there.)  While things dip pretty sharply again shortly before her departure from the show, it’s more about the plot surrounding her than the character herself.  Unfortunately, though, that plot stuff is annoying enough that, in the end, I was ready to toss her out of the door myself.  Not exactly what they were going for.