With any
luck, the relationship between the Doctor and Clara in series 9 will be significantly
different than the one we got last season. The Christmas special gave me hope of a
near-total reset, which, honestly, would be such a relief that I wouldn’t mind the
retcon. In short, my fingers are crossed
that this post will be obsolete in nine months or so, but in the meantime, here
are some further ponderings about Twelve and Clara’s uneasy dynamic.
During
series 8’s business about Twelve being a “darker” Doctor, with Clara saying she
doesn’t know who he is anymore and can’t bring herself to call him a good man
(yep, still bitter,) I was reminded of Mr. Beaver’s description of Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia: “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.” It struck me that the Doctor is much the
same. Despite his sometimes
loudly-touted nonviolence stance, he’s done hard things over his many
lives. He’s lied, manipulated, and, when
necessary, killed. It’s not for nothing
that the Daleks call him the Oncoming Storm, and those who run with him are
often in danger. However, as Ten tells
Donna at Pompeii, he has to make the
impossible decisions, or people will die.
The way Twelve puts it, even when your only choices are bad, “you still
have to choose.”
The
thing is, there are many moments in series 8 where “unsafe” keeps Clara from
seeing “good.” An even stronger literary
parallel, for me, comes in J.D. Salinger’s Franny
and Zooey, when Zooey takes Franny to task for her perception of Jesus
(honestly, I’m not trying to make the Doctor into a Christ figure – it’s just a
good fit for what I think is going on here.)
In the book, Zooey reminds Franny of a childhood episode in which she
decided she was done with Jesus on the grounds that He 1) threw the money-changers
out of the temple and 2) said, “Are ye not much better than [the fowls of the
air]?” He points out that Franny prefers
someone like St. Francis, someone with a “consistently winning personality” who
preaches to the birds and never gets his hands dirty. Franny wanted – expected – Jesus to be a St.
Francis, a “sticky, adorable, divine personage”
who never did anything that made her uncomfortable, and when He didn’t match
those expectations, she turned away from Him.
Zooey, however, understands that Jesus was better than the cozy, safe
persona that people tend to set up for Him, and no one should want a Jesus “the
least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament.”
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