Run. Run You Clever Little Boy. And Remember Me. (The Clara Trilogy)

Commissioned by Freezing Inferno

Midway writing the original idea for this post, I realized I was approaching it from the wrong angle. Initially, I was going to do a semi sequel to my Faction Paradox/Clara Echo short story “The Eyes of Her Double” that would be structurally akin to the Utena post I wrote a while back, i.e. focusing on three characters from that story in a way that would mirror what happens in the Clara Trilogy (that being Face the Raven, Heaven Sent, and Hell Bent). Some of the lines were somewhat good (the opening to the Face the Raven one would’ve been “It’s 2019 and there are concentration camps in America). However, as I went on writing it, I kinda hit a wall in the process. This happens from time to time, so I did what I always do when I hit a wall: procrastinate and go for a walk.

While on my walk, it occurred to me that I didn’t like what I was writing. The direction I was going with the Face the Raven one required an amount of trust the audience needs to give me that I don’t think I built up (the Clara echo of that story would’ve been a bus driver to the camp, but revealed at the end to be taking them to a refugee town that ties into the psychogeograpic/liminal space themes of Face the Raven, but I felt I wasn’t pulling it off as well as I could. Maybe some other day). I had no idea what I was doing with the Heaven Sent one, and Hell Bent ultimately rejected the premise of “stories about Clara echos” to be a Seventh Doctor story that’s also a sequel to the Rose book. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t happy with what I was writing.

And so, I returned to the drawing board. Fortunately one such idea has been mulling around in my head for a while, arguably since Series 7 of Doctor Who. But first, I must talk briefly about one of the major criticism levied against the Clara Trilogy: Clara should not have survived at the end of the story. One of the first times I saw the argument was in a video wherein the person arguing it claimed that the reasons she should have died was because she took risks in order to emulate the Doctor, who knows what they are doing.

Putting aside that the argument is essentially “girl does something that man does but fails because man know what he’s doing“ (the video was made prior to Jodie Whittaker being cast as the Doctor), to say the Doctor know what the hell they’re doing is complete and utter rubbish. The Doctor explicitly has no idea what they are doing. Even the incarnation typically seen as having the most idea of what they’re doing (that being the one played by Sylvester McCoy) is, upon closer examination, only slightly aware of what he’s doing. Note how practically every single one of his clever schemes from Paradise Towers to Gabriel Chase to the Master’s furry phase has inevitably ended with “Oh crap, it looks like I’ll have to improvise after all.” The Doctor doesn’t even know how to turn off the TARDIS’ brakes for crying out loud.

But there’s also an undercurrent of a critique of the Moffat era as a whole that the Clara Trilogy works wonderfully as a counter towards. That being why aren’t there consequences? To understand the question, we must understand what people mean when they say “Consequences.” After all, the consequence of, say, the Doctor being sent to a space station where the space suits are trying to kill the employees has the consequence of the space suits being fought against. Or, to use a more critical example, the Doctor visiting the Kerblam factory ends with the Doctor scolding the people fighting against the system that did nothing wrong and the employeesget two months off with two weeks paid leave . (Somebody please commission me to write about Kerblam. I have an angle that will be weird, but enlightening.)

However, this is not what people mean by consequences. Perhaps the best summation comes from Mr TARDIS, a YouTuber who I once followed until he said that the problem with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was that the Death of Gwen Stacy was enough of Peter’s fault. In a recent tweet thread about the problems of Steven Moffat (which mostly showed that the only people good at pointing out the problems of Steven Moffat are people who generally like his work and Jack Graham), he mentioned that his big issue with the Moffat era was the lack of consequences. Upon elaborating, he said “Clara returning in S9 rendered her and the Doctor's arc in S8 pointless and in S9 she didn't even die and got to live forever and before Capaldi regenerated it turns out he remembered her.Yes, S8 and S9 are consequence free.”

Let us put aside the issue regarding Clara’s return in Series 9 negating Series 8 as that would require a focus on the whole of Clara that I AM NOT PREPAIRED TO WRITE. Rather, his comments on Clara’s survival at the end of the Clara Trilogy highlight the nature of consequences in regards to this critique: they are static, bad things that happen to the main characters. Once they happen, they can never be contradicted by the consequences of other things. Nor can they cascade into other consequences that contradict the initial ones.

That is, after all, the central storytelling structure of the Moffat era: the farcical cascade of consequences from something rather small. Let us use the Clara Trilogy as our example as that is what this post is ostensibly about. The story begins with the relatively small event of a neighborhood kid named Rigsy being framed for a crime he didn’t commit involving an alien. The consequence of this is that Rigsy has a tattoo on his neck that’s counting down to zero. To prevent this, Clara decides to buy some time by taking the tattoo on herself, which has the consequence of her death. Equally, the consequence of the Doctor trying to solve the mystery of Rigsy’s death is that he gets sent to a torture chamber where he dies over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until he escapes into Galifrey, which has the natural consequence most times have of the Doctor entering a corrupt system: the Doctor tears it down. Once the powers that be are removed, the Doctor proceeds to cut Clara out of Face the Raven and into Hell Bent. The consequences of this are time and space being rent asunder, the Doctor’s memories being wiped, and Clara getting her own TARDIS and staring in a book series showrun by Caitlin Smith.

The issue people like Mr TARDIS seem to have is that the consequence of Clara taking the tattoo seems to be undone by the consequence of the Doctor deciding to edit out Clara from Face the Raven. There are two ways to deal with this. The first would be that Clara is probably going to go back to that moment. Though she doesn’t have Amy Pond’s attachment to her memories, Clara still has some level of value of them: “These have been the best years of my life, and they are mine. Tomorrow is promised to no one, Doctor, but I insist upon my past. I am entitled to that. It's mine.” As shown by the character of Me, it is possible for an immortal being to forget their own past. As such, once her memories start to fade beyond recognition, Clara will probably return to the Time Lords to be returned to her moment of death. (That, or do something more interesting, but we’ll get to that later.)

The second issue is that the argument is complete bunk. To put it into real life terms, it’s like saying that because you went to the hospital to get your arm fixed, there were no consequences to the arm breaking in the first place. Some might argue that the time travel aspects of the story negate this, but… look, I’m going to be blunt. The argument of Clara not dying is lame. It’s a lame idea that doesn’t go anywhere beyond “And now, Peter Capaldi’s sad because he had to wipe away Clara’s memories like he did Donna.” This fetishization of static consequences ultimately results in the lamest shit that leads to things like Big Finish doing a story where they kill everyone they can because it’s dark and edgy.

Is it not enough that Clara isn’t on the show anymore? Do we really have to add a female character dying to the mix? And especially one as interesting as Clara. Someone who embraces her vices to make other people’s lives better. A thrill seeking junkie who pushes too far and expects too much. Someone who has a drive that pushes her to become impossible and gradually dislodged from the world. A woman who is never cruel nor cowardly. Who will never give up, and never give in. Whose kindness takes the form of looking for crying children being ignored and making the world a place where the cause of tears has been solved. Who looks at a world with terrible stories and opts to tell better ones. The ending to Clara’s story could never be something as simple and mundane as death or retirement. The consequence of creating a character such as Clara Oswald is that she was inevitably going to steal a TARDIS and run away.

(Since someone is going to ask, no, it does not negate the metaphor. Time travel stories are full of stories about people going back and changing things for the better. That’s literally what Quantum Leap is about. And given that time and space were supposedly being rent asunder when she was out, Clara being returned to her time of death is an inevitability. There’s still her body lying on the street after all. Of course, some other writer could come up with a story wherein a clone of her is put in her place and the tattoo is removed through other means. A lot can happen in a split second after all. The point of the article is that thinking Clara being dead is more interesting than Clara being alive and traveling the universe with her ever growing harem of space bisexuals is a lame way of looking at the story. Plus, you know, The Clara Trilogy is more invested in the relationship between Clara and the Doctor than it is in time travel mechanics.)