Some More Thoughts on Twelve and Clara

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.”

In series 8, I think Clara spends a lot of time in Franny’s place.  She has this image in her head of what the Doctor ought to be, and when his new regeneration doesn’t conform to that ideal, she can no longer see him as “her” Doctor.  Even though Eleven isn’t “safe” either – he spends most of his time with Clara lying to her about why he wants them traveling together – Clara sees his good and gives tremendously of herself in order to keep him in the world.  With gruff, unsentimental Twelve, though, she focuses, not on the people he protects, but on the niceties he ignores, the machinations he works, and the apparent callousness he adopts.  She doesn’t see the way he allows his hearts to be stained so that others can be saved; in “Deep Breath,” the Doctor tells the Half-Face Man, “I do not expect to reach the Promised Land,” and it’s because of the morally compromised things he’s done for Clara and those like her.  That may not be endearing, but it’s admirable, and it’s why it kills me when the Doctor does something not on the up-and-up and Clara gapes at his seeming ruthlessness.  She doesn’t want to see the Doctor’s demons.  She expects him to stop monsters while remaining cuddly and virtuous, and in doing so, she’s missing out on the much more complex, compelling Doctor she actually has.