Written by Katherine Murray.
Clara Oswald finally made her exit from Doctor Who, and it was all the things that it could be – aggravating, thought-provoking, overdue, sad, confusing, and amazing.
To recap: there’s an overall pattern on New Who where women who travel with the Doctor end up being destroyed in some way, and Clara Oswald, the Doctor’s companion from mid-season seven to the end of season nine, is no exception. Clara was first introduced as The Impossible Girl, a woman who kept showing up in the Doctor’s timeline and dying while she tried to save him. The reason for this was revealed in “The Name of the Doctor,” where we learned that Clara’s special destiny was/is/will be to throw herself into the Doctor’s time stream so that she can be torn apart and reappear as various women whose only purpose in life is to help him.
After witnessing this heroic sacrifice, the Doctor rescues Clara from the time stream so that she can stop dying forever and be his real companion. Thus begins a long story-arc in Doctor Who that’s unofficially titled, “We don’t know what to do with Clara anymore.”
In season eight, there’s a new Doctor in town and Clara’s story line is that – unlike Amy, who gradually drifted away to lead a normal life (up until she was past-zapped by aliens, because no one can ever be happy) – Clara gradually spends more and more time in the TARDIS, leaving her normal life behind. Her boyfriend, Danny Pink, is worried about the influence the Doctor is having on her, but then he dies, and Clara’s got nothing to keep her tied to her life on Earth.
By season nine, Clara’s fast-talking the aliens and coming up with clever, reckless plans as if she is the Doctor. The bells of foreshadowing start to toll as the Doctor talks about how he wouldn’t know what to do if he lost her, but, no matter how often he says they should be more careful, he can’t resist her when she wants to go on an adventure. At this point, it starts to become clear that, despite the murky character development in season eight, the new point of Clara is that she and the Doctor are a Bad Influence on each other, and that this is probably why the Doctor’s arch frenemy, the Master, played match-maker by introducing them.
Things finally come to a head in “Face the Raven,” when Clara tries to cheat her way out of an alien contract she doesn’t understand and ends up marked for death. The Doctor can’t do anything to save her, and, after a protracted goodbye speech, he’s left to watch as Clara gets killed by a magic tattoo bird of some kind.
Clara’s death got a mixed reaction from fans, with some thinking this was a stupid way for the character to go out, and some just glad to see her gone after she’d overstayed her welcome. I’ve never had strong feelings one way or the other about Clara (besides finding her a little bland in season eight), but I was willing to accept “Face the Raven” as the end of her story. Even if she had to die again, and even if her time with the Doctor had to destroy her, just like it destroyed all of his other companions, at least this ending offered us something different than we’d seen before, as well as a new perspective on the Doctor/companion dynamic.
When you watch a TV show like this, it’s normal to imagine yourself in the same situation as the characters and wonder what you would do. Clara’s character arc, such as it was, was a nice way of addressing the daydreams we have of being Really Good at Time Travel and underscoring the difference between the Doctor – who’s basically a god, in this story – and the mortals he travels with. Clara was, for a while, Really Good at Time Travel, and as close to being a Time Lord as anyone can be – but she was still human in the end – still mortal and fallible; still part of a story that can’t last for billions of years. It was annoying that she had to be destroyed like all the others, but it was a thoughtful, interesting destruction all the same.
Except, then she came back from the dead.
The penultimate episode of the season, “Heaven Sent,” delivers one of the best Hell Yeah moments we’ve had in long, long time, when the Doctor spends four billion years punching his way through a wall to escape a Time Lord holding cell and return to his home world, Gallifrey. The season finale, which aired this past weekend, reveals that he did this, in part, so that he could use their technology to violate the laws of space and time and undo Clara’s death.
His plan doesn’t work as well as he’d hoped, though. He’s able to snatch Clara out of time at the moment she before she dies, but she isn’t really alive. She’s walking and talking, but her heart is stopped, and she will ultimately have to return to the day she faced the raven, so that she can die for real. In other words, she’s kind of a time zombie four billion years in the future. Realizing that the Doctor plans to wipe her memory and leaver somewhere safe, Clara out-Doctors him and reverses his mind-wiping device so that it wipes his mind instead. He forgets everything about her, except that she existed, and she visits him one last time, disguised as a diner waitress, to confirm that he has no memory of who she is. And then zombie diner waitress Clara flies away in her own stolen TARDIS with Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones, and goes to have adventures before she has to die.
I’m not gonna lie – that’s pretty amazing.
As a TV viewer, there’s part of me that instinctively feels ripped off that Clara didn’t really die in “Face the Raven,” especially after all the hullaballoo that was made about it in the episode, and the long, protracted goodbye speech she got to give. But, as someone who’s on record as being bummed out that all the women on this show meet such horrible ends, I’m really happy at this surprisingly positive turn of events. In a way, it’s even more satisfying that’s it’s Clara, the girl who died again, and again, and again, and again during her time with the Doctor, who gets to live forever, through this weird, cosmic loophole, with everything she ever wanted. This wasn’t a story about how trying to be like the gods destroyed a mortal after all – it was a story about how, after she suffered so much for so long, Clara got to be amazing.
The turnaround where Clara escaped the memory wipe is also a really interesting call-back to one of the most brutal companion disposals thus far, in which the Doctor’s companion, Donna, saved the world by downloading his knowledge into her brain, only to discover that that meant he had to erase all her memories of him to stop her mind from imploding. While the general level of pessimism and tragedy in that ending may ring more true to life than the ending we get in “Hell Bent,” this reversal also drives home the point that Clara escaped the fate of all the companions before her – that she escaped even the story’s expectation that attempts to be more than she was would end in tragedy.
Speaking in general terms, season nine wasn’t always strong on story, but its presentation of women was unusually rad. Aside from Clara and Maisie Williams’ character (an immortal who appears in four episodes and is frequently both sympathetic and up to no good), this season also featured really outstanding work from Michelle Gomez as a female regeneration of the Master, Doctor Who’s first deaf character, played by Sophie Stone, and the return of a fan-favourite named Osgood whom I’m not all that into, but everyone else seems to like. What all these characters have in common is that they were cool and interesting and well-acted but didn’t, like, ruin their lives and kill themselves to save the Doctor from his sad existence. In many cases, they were, instead, the characters who made the story happen through their choices, and that was refreshing to see.
This season and last have also taught us that it’s normal for Time Lords to change gender when they regenerate, opening up the possibility of a female Doctor one day. It’s an important step for the franchise to take, not because there’s anything wrong with the Doctors we’ve seen, or because casting a woman will automatically make the show better, but because it’s one really good way to undo the uncomfortable undercurrents in the series so far, where the power dynamic always shakes out to Omnipotent Man – Vulnerable Woman.
Until that day comes, though, I’m very pleased that Clara is an honorary Time Lord. Even if she is a zombie waiting to get killed by magic birds.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.