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.
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