A Few Notes on Clara Variations

It won’t be long until the Christmas special, and hopefully, not much longer after that before series 10 – and with it, our new companion.  In the meantime, I’m looking back at the first “Claras” we saw, before Original Recipe Clara with Eleven and the many (at times aggravating) faces of Clara with Twelve.  Back when we hadn’t met the “girl” yet.  Back when we’d only seen the “impossible” part (a few spoilers for “Asylum of the Daleks” and “The Snowmen.”)

Oswin was our first “Clara,” and while I see how she could grate long-term, she might be my favorite Clara variation the show gave us (including the assorted writing reboots as well as the timesteam versions.)  Had we been with Oswin for an extended period, I’d have liked more context on her “geniusness,” so it would’ve felt like part of her character instead of plot convenience.  (I’d also have liked her to be actually LGBTQ, or barring that, to omit the “going through a phase” remark.)  But I like Oswin.  She’s definitely perky and hyper-competent in ways that don’t always feel organic, and one could call her “too good to be true” (I’m actively avoiding the term “Mary Sue” in this post,) but I can see how those traits could have been more naturally engrained into her character.  That’s because I can see the cracks.  This episode might feature my favorite Who acting from Jenna Coleman – even when the writing leaves her a bit of a cartoon, Coleman makes Oswin a person.  I see the cheery façade falter when Oswin looks at the boarded-up door to her pod.  I hear the wistfulness (regret?) in her voice when she talks about always wanting to see the universe but the Alaska crashing on her “first time out.”  I feel the staggered impact of her expression as she thinks, this is it – I’m really getting out of here.  Enough that I see how the show might have made Oswin a real character if they’d wanted to.

Victorian Clara, on the other hand, doesn’t work for me as well.  Even though she isn’t necessarily more too-good-to-be-true than Oswin, I think she feels that way.  It’s just how the character strikes me.  Maybe it’s the more artificial-sounding dialogue – the snappy replies to absolutely everything feel really unnatural – or the overall “cutesy” feeling that surrounds her, but I get very little sense of how Victorian Clara could have been made into a real character.  I only get a few glimpses at any “real” Clara beneath the fluff, such as her expression as she climbs the invisible staircase and sees the TARDIS on a cloud, or her voice when she says “kindness” in the one-word test, and again, it’s about the strength of Coleman’s acting more than anything else (the best thing about the timestream Claras is that they remind me how good Coleman can be, because the haphazard writing on Clara prime can be pretty trying to watch.)  That said, I still could’ve been open to the hope that Victorian Clara could’ve been written in a more “settled” manner long-term, if only because I was so ready for a companion from the past.

But while the timestream Claras we initially meet have an air of too-muchness about them, they leave Original Recipe Clara paling in comparison.  Oswin crackles through “Asylum of the Daleks” like a lightning bolt, and Victorian Clara and the Doctor feel like they’re grappling for top billing throughout “The Snowmen,” but Clara prime in “The Bells of Saint John” is just sort of… there.  She doesn’t really do much or have a lot to recommend her – as I’ve said before, the Doctor takes her on the TARDIS more for the mystery about her than any merit of her own.  After two highly-specific (albeit artificially-ZOMG-Amazing!!) incarnations of the character, it seems like a poor choice to introduce the actual day-to-day companion as someone who, while pleasant, doesn’t leap off the screen or have any of the uniqueness of her predecessors.