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.
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