Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2013-01-03 02:49 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2013-01-03 02:49 pm
Entry tags:
Shameless speculation on Clara
The Doctor Who Christmas special was rly rly excellent; okay, the plot was thin as paper, but CLARA. And symbolism run rampant. And Moffat continuing to write himself fix-it fic of RTD era, this time for Martha. (Along with nerdy backstory fic for Troughton monsters-of-the-week and a dash of interspecies lesbian Sherlock Holmes AU. Moff, let yourself be a fanboy more often, it's fun.) I am excite! Half from the guessing game, and half from I JUST REALLY LIKE CLARA OKAY.
Moffat might have just tipped his entire hand, at least regarding the Clara mystery, with that line about dreams outliving their dreamers. I'm 95% certain that's what she is. Not only does it fit nicely with Moffat's preoccupation with the persistence of memory, we've already seen her do it once: in Asylum, human-Oswin is long dead, consumed by the Dalek transformation, but dream-Oswin lives on, is fully human, and is ultimately the one in control. No wait, twice: barmaid-Clara dreams up Miss Montague, and even after she's dead, it's Miss Montague and the family's mourning for her that manage to melt the snow.
Ideas above her station. The junior entertainment manager turned genius hacker. The Dalek dreaming of being human. The barmaid turned governess. Both are true, but the one she really believes in is the one that gets things done, and what Clara believes herself to be is always more than what her outward situation would suggest. She's smaller on the outside. And the dreams within have a funny knack of coming true by sheer force of belief.
One of the companion's jobs is almost always to stay true to herself. To provide an anchor for the Doctor with his thousand (okay, dozen) faces. Amy did that by remembering, cutting through all the alterations to memory and reality to grab onto what she knew she'd experienced. Perhaps it's Clara's job to do that by forgetting whatever her present inglorious circumstances have limited her to being, and imposing her dreams on reality.
What is Clara? Almost certainly an ordinary human girl, and almost certainly something more. Quite possibly she is a dead human girl whose dream of Something More lives on. Quite possibly she's been preserved in a computer somehow (genius hacker, anybody?), and maybe, just maybe, the Something More is Time Lord.
Very probably she will be the one to disentangle the Doctor from all the circumstances and history that have grown up around him, and force him to confront who he really thinks he is, because that's the important thing, not all the burdens of guilt and reputation weighing him down. (Cf. A Town Called Mercy, where the kind of person you think you ought to be dictates what moral choices you should make far more than what you've already done.) Hell, she's already started doing it: she made the Daleks forget him. Forget him.
And here's where the abject tinhattery begins: hamletthemadmanwithabox on Tumblr brought up the question, and like a great big dope I thought it unlikely, but the more I think about it the more it intrigues me: what happens if a Time Lord dies while fob-watched? John Smith was a dream the Doctor invented, but was no less a real person for that; what if Clara, the human girl with dreams above her station, started out as somebody else's dream? It fits with her general inside-outness: John Smith, the man the Doctor dreamed up, dreams at night of being the Doctor. Just because he's made up doesn't mean he isn't real.
So, Speculation Cards on the table here: Clara is, at least in some sense, an ordinary human girl who had something extraordinary happen to her. I would lay down money that the original Clara is already dead and doesn't know it yet. There's a pretty good chance that some great intelligence imprinted on ordinary human Clara and is taking on her form, and doesn't realize it's not actually Clara. (Or is it? There's a question of identity there: if it took on her consciousness as well, it arguably is Clara in some sense.) After fuck knows how many years of the fandom convincing itself of elaborate theories whereby various characters are secretly the Rani/Omega/the Master/the inheritor of the Trouser Press of Rassilon, I'm not fool enough to lay down money that Clara is Romana. But gosh is it fun to speculate that Romana had something go horribly wrong with a Chameleon Arch or died while fobwatched, and wound up stored/copied somewhere still in the guise of her human avatar. And somehow keeps getting written into various time periods unaware that she's anything but Clara-with-ideas-above-her-station.
Moffat might have just tipped his entire hand, at least regarding the Clara mystery, with that line about dreams outliving their dreamers. I'm 95% certain that's what she is. Not only does it fit nicely with Moffat's preoccupation with the persistence of memory, we've already seen her do it once: in Asylum, human-Oswin is long dead, consumed by the Dalek transformation, but dream-Oswin lives on, is fully human, and is ultimately the one in control. No wait, twice: barmaid-Clara dreams up Miss Montague, and even after she's dead, it's Miss Montague and the family's mourning for her that manage to melt the snow.
Ideas above her station. The junior entertainment manager turned genius hacker. The Dalek dreaming of being human. The barmaid turned governess. Both are true, but the one she really believes in is the one that gets things done, and what Clara believes herself to be is always more than what her outward situation would suggest. She's smaller on the outside. And the dreams within have a funny knack of coming true by sheer force of belief.
One of the companion's jobs is almost always to stay true to herself. To provide an anchor for the Doctor with his thousand (okay, dozen) faces. Amy did that by remembering, cutting through all the alterations to memory and reality to grab onto what she knew she'd experienced. Perhaps it's Clara's job to do that by forgetting whatever her present inglorious circumstances have limited her to being, and imposing her dreams on reality.
What is Clara? Almost certainly an ordinary human girl, and almost certainly something more. Quite possibly she is a dead human girl whose dream of Something More lives on. Quite possibly she's been preserved in a computer somehow (genius hacker, anybody?), and maybe, just maybe, the Something More is Time Lord.
Very probably she will be the one to disentangle the Doctor from all the circumstances and history that have grown up around him, and force him to confront who he really thinks he is, because that's the important thing, not all the burdens of guilt and reputation weighing him down. (Cf. A Town Called Mercy, where the kind of person you think you ought to be dictates what moral choices you should make far more than what you've already done.) Hell, she's already started doing it: she made the Daleks forget him. Forget him.
And here's where the abject tinhattery begins: hamletthemadmanwithabox on Tumblr brought up the question, and like a great big dope I thought it unlikely, but the more I think about it the more it intrigues me: what happens if a Time Lord dies while fob-watched? John Smith was a dream the Doctor invented, but was no less a real person for that; what if Clara, the human girl with dreams above her station, started out as somebody else's dream? It fits with her general inside-outness: John Smith, the man the Doctor dreamed up, dreams at night of being the Doctor. Just because he's made up doesn't mean he isn't real.
So, Speculation Cards on the table here: Clara is, at least in some sense, an ordinary human girl who had something extraordinary happen to her. I would lay down money that the original Clara is already dead and doesn't know it yet. There's a pretty good chance that some great intelligence imprinted on ordinary human Clara and is taking on her form, and doesn't realize it's not actually Clara. (Or is it? There's a question of identity there: if it took on her consciousness as well, it arguably is Clara in some sense.) After fuck knows how many years of the fandom convincing itself of elaborate theories whereby various characters are secretly the Rani/Omega/the Master/the inheritor of the Trouser Press of Rassilon, I'm not fool enough to lay down money that Clara is Romana. But gosh is it fun to speculate that Romana had something go horribly wrong with a Chameleon Arch or died while fobwatched, and wound up stored/copied somewhere still in the guise of her human avatar. And somehow keeps getting written into various time periods unaware that she's anything but Clara-with-ideas-above-her-station.
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