Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments: Clara Oswald (Doctor Who)

It might have been better to hold off on this post until I rewatched all of series 9, but whatever.  As it is, my choicest Clara moments are pretty frontloaded.  I feel like a lot of her big-ticket stuff from the Twelve era either 1) feels manufactured as a Big Moment rather than a natural action born from her character, or 2) comes at the expense of the Doctor’s competence, which just annoys me from a writing standpoint.  So, here’s what we have instead (spoilers.)

Comforting Merry (Series 7, Episode 8 – “The Rings of Akhaten”)

Not flashy, not world-saving, but wonderful.  On her first adventure to an alien planet, overwhelmed and temporarily on her own (the Doctor is off doing something else,) Clara sees a young girl in distress and helps her, just because she can.  Clara does more than just help Merry evade the shady-looking guys who are searching for her; she sits down, talks with Merry, learns what’s upsetting her, and shares a warm personal story to help reassure her.  Lovely.

Telling the Old God a Story (Series 7, Episode 8 – “The Rings of Akhaten”)

Here’s how much I love Clara in “The Rings of Akhaten” – two-and-a-half seasons on the show, and two of my favorite moments of hers come from this one episode.  True, Clara is probably just looking for more cherished memories to “feed” the Old God when she presents the leaf, hoping to turn its hunger away from the Doctor, but because she is offering it the potential futures lost when her mother died young, she’s able to glut it and make it destroy itself.  I love her strength in sacrificing something so precious to her, especially because her mom is not longer with her.

Jumping into the Doctor’s Time Stream (Series 7, Episode 14 – “The Name of the Doctor”)

An obvious one, and the story does feel pretty heavily steered to get her to this point, but I buy it.  Seeing the Doctor suffer, Clara can’t stand by and do nothing, and she knows the universe will be better with the Doctor in it.  So, she leaps.  If they had laid off the unpleasant “I was born to save the Doctor” stuff, it could have been a really compelling end for her character.

Interrogating with the Half Man (Series 8, Episode 1 – “Deep Breath”)

I like Clara’s smarts here, doing some quick thinking under a lot of pressure to turn the tables on the Half Man and make him answer some of her questions.  I especially like how visibly afraid she is throughout the whole thing, digging deep to push through her fear instead of being unrealistically untouched by it.

Recovering the TARDIS (Series 8, Episode 9 – “Flatline”)

Clara does a nice job “playing the Doctor” in this episode, and when she and the others are cut off from the Doctor, she really comes through.  In a pretty despairing moment, she figures out how to use the available resources to exploit the aliens’ power and restore the TARDIS to its full size, allowing the Doctor to come out and finish them off.

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.

The Time Lord and the Impossible Girl

 

Although today’s review is about a fictional relationship, it’s not exactly a Relationship Spotlight post.  More than anything, it’s my thoughts on the very uneasy Doctor-companion dynamic we wound up with this season and wondering What’s It All About.

 

Back when I posted my Whovian wish list last Christmas, I hoped for no romance and good friendship.  Well, my first wish definitely came true, although not entirely the way I would have liked.  I’ve mentioned this before, but it really annoys me that Twelve so frequently criticizes Clara appearance, as if the show needs to explain why he’s no longer interested in being her “boyfriend.”  She looks old!  She has a wide face!  She wears too much makeup!  (And, point of interest, this unfortunate quirk seems to appear most often in Moffat-penned episodes.)  I don’t know what the show’s goal is with this – to show how alien Twelve is that he doesn’t recognize Clara’s a beautiful woman?  To show how brusque, dismissive, and unfiltered he is?  To show, “See, he’s not into her anymore!  Hey, do you see how not into her he is?  ‘Cause he’s not!”  The whole thing is really unpleasant, and that’s not something I like thinking about the Doctor.

 

And of course, Clara no longer has any interest in him “that way” either.  I kind of wonder how the Doctor feels about that.  Even though he doesn’t want that from her, does it hurt to see her looking at him with the same eyes and such a different expression?  It’s probably easier for Clara to reconcile his altered feelings; since he has a new body and personality (and I don’t think, despite the big scene at the end of “Deep Breath,” that she quite equates him with Eleven,) it makes sense that he wouldn’t necessarily feel the same way.  The change is a reflection of him, not her.  Whereas, for the Doctor, Clara is the same as she’s always been, but she doesn’t treat him the same way.  In her case, the change is definitely about him.

 

Unfortunately, my second wish was even further from the mark.  The Doctor obviously still cares about Clara a great deal, and she waxes poetic about their friendship whenever the show needs her to for Teh Angst, but for the most part, she really doesn’t feel like his friend anymore.  She only wants to travel with him when it’s convenient for her (it’s painful to watch him follow her around her flat trying to convince her to go on an adventure with him,) she keeps secrets and tries to manipulate him rather than talking things through, and she doesn’t seem to particularly like who he is (I’m pretty sure Clara would’ve never said she “didn’t know” if Eleven was a good man.)

 

On the wish list, I mentioned my hope that Clara wouldn’t feel saddled with Twelve after losing “the young, cute one,” and although they seem to mainly get past the age thing in “Deep Breath,” I think there is at least a hint of that.  Apart from his youthful appearance and oddly appealing looks, Eleven has a young, cute personality that Twelve just doesn’t.  Not that Eleven is cuddly all the time – he can go scary-angry with the best of them, and when he makes the hard decisions, it’s with world-weary gravitas – but his default setting is a puppy with ADHD and a genius-level IQ.  He’s fun and silly and easy to love.  In contrast, Twelve is prickly, a bit misanthropic, and not one to make a great first impression.  There’s still a lot of warmth in him, but he keeps it below the surface, and Clara doesn’t seem terribly interested in looking for it.  With their interactions, I sometimes get the feeling that he desperately wants her to, maybe even needs her to, but he can’t say it and she’s not picking up on it.