Doctor Who Revisit: Spoilery Clara Edition

Let’s talk about Clara, shall we?  Looking at “Face the Raven” through “Hell Bent.”  Complete and total spoilage ahead (mostly for those three episodes, but touching on Clara’s entire tenure.)

I’m of two minds about the ending we get in “Face the Raven.”  On the one hand, it’s interesting how Clara is essentially taken down by her own hubris:  she thinks she can play the game as well as the Doctor, but she doesn’t know what she’s doing and gets burned for it.  Also, I like that once she realizes there won’t be any last-minute saves, she accepts the death and her part in it.  On the other hand, it’s so drawn out, the angst is cranked way up to here, and overall, it feels like a very manufactured Big!  Emotional!  Moment!  Not that other companion exits haven’t been – Who loves its angst – but here, I feel the effort more than the effect.  Plus, the part where Clara insists that the Doctor promises he won’t blame himself, try to take revenge, or be alone for too long just rubs me the wrong way.  Maybe because it feels so “Clara knows how phenomenally important she is to the Doctor and how her death will destroy him.”  I dunno – I just don’t like it.

But this was my big thing with “Face the Raven”:  I needed that to be it for Clara.  I knew the Doctor would spend the rest of the season dealing with it, and I was prepared to see Clara again through flashbacks, hallucinations, further back in her timestream, or one of her splinter selves (just kidding – like Moffat remembers he did that.)  But I did not want Clara to come “back.”  It’s not that I wanted her specifically to be dead.  Despite issues I’ve had with Clara, I’m not that petty, and Clara has worked for me fairly well this year.  But a Clara death is what the show wrote, and, even apart from my disinclination trips to the “underworld” or breaking the laws of time to save her, I needed the show to stick with it.  Because Clara has had enough goodbyes.  Not counting Oswin and Victorian Clara, there’s the for-sure-gonna-die farewell in “The Name of the Doctor,” the break with the Doctor in “Kill the Moon,” the planned final trip in “Murder on the Orient Express,” the parting in “Death in Heaven,” the dream fake-out in “Last Christmas,” the extermination fake-out in “The Magician’s Apprentice,” and the killed-by-Zygon fake-out in “The Zygon Invasion.”  It’s like Moffat couldn’t decide how to write Clara out, so he threw them all in.  Given all that, and knowing the Jenna Coleman wasn’t staying past this season, it’d be wildly sloppy storytelling to give her a huge, dramatic death scene, bring her back, and then write her off again, for good, two episodes later.  Ridiculous, and way too much.

So… guess what we got?  To be fair, there are parts of Clara’s return in “Hell Bent” that I like, especially her conversation with the Doctor in the cloister, and I appreciate that she’s not down with letting the Doctor wipe her memories to “save” her.  But there was no cause to go through the whole teeth-gnashing goodbye again when we literally just did this two episodes ago.  If you didn’t want Clara to be dead, show, then you shouldn’t have killed her.  Also – she gets her own TARDIS and companion and is maybe a tiny bit immortal until she goes back to her timeline?  It’s like her has to have the most tragic companion ending and the happiest, both at once, even though that makes no sense.  It goes back to the Impossible Girl who saved every Doctor at every point in his timestream:  writers piling distinctions on her instead of just writing her as a rich, engaging character.  That doesn’t work for me.  First, you can “see the strings,” so to speak, and second, it does no good to play companion Olympics.  Pretty much every companion should be written as awesome, but when you start writing yours as “the best,” you make enemies of fans who will always have their favorites and won’t appreciate you implying that yours trumps theirs.