I already talked about the theme of eyes, pre-finale. About how the-eyes-are-not-the-windows-to-the-soul-they-are-the-doors, and what that means for Clara's transformation into the Doctor (and vice-versa). About how to-be-seen-is-to-exist, and what that means for the Doctor's conception of his new identity (eye-dentity?). About all of the Doctor's comments on Clara's eyes ('Why are you all eyes?! Get them under control!' 'Don't do that with the eyes.') and all the eye imagery that has surrounded her all season ('Could you trust someone who looked back at you out of your own eyes?'). It's always, always been about the eyes.
Oh, look:
They only put her eyes in the goddamned title sequence.
That was it, that was the ultimate moment of Clara's Doctorhood, but also the ultimate moment of Clara being just Clara.
Let me explain.
Way back when, Ibishtar wrote a great essay on Clara as a metaphor for the show itself, which I always enjoyed, particularly as it dovetails nicely with my feeling that Amy represents fandom. This concept is taken to its natural conclusion with the use of Clara's eyes in place of the Doctor's in the title sequence - it is almost as if the title of the show itself has become 'Clara Who', the main question S7 (and the pre-finale weeks of S8) had us all asking. Audience and Doctor. It is almost indescribably meta! Clara, the companion through whose eyes we the audience are supposed to perceive events (that is the supposed role of the companion, is it not?) - she is now looking out at us. Clara the control-freak has taken over the show's titles, and thus the show itself. Clara, who has become almost addicted to Tardis travel, has become intertwined with the time vortex, seeing all of time and space. It's just a trick, a joke on the part of Steven Moffat, a momentary repeat of Clara's S7 arc - she's built up to be 'impossible' and it turns out she's just an ordinary woman who does an extraordinary thing - and yet the image is striking and works on a number of levels. And somehow feels much more organic to Clara's own story than it would have done for any previous companion.
Because whilst all the Doctor's companions are his best friends for the time they travel with him, and all try to put themselves on an equal footing with him as much as possible, Clara has taken that a step or two further. As many people have noticed and discussed, Clara has become ever more like the Doctor this season, more overtly and deliberately than any companion in New Who before her. But also more carefully. She wasn't 'ordinary companion' one moment and boom! Doctor! the next. Her whole, entire journey has been leading up to this. She has always been 'too perfect' for the Doctor. From every single perspective, her first appearance has foreshadowed this. Oswin, when we the audience first meet her, explicitly mirrors the Doctor:
DOCTOR [on screen]: How can you hack into everything? It should be impossible. You're in a crashed ship!
OSWIN: Long story. Is there a word for total screaming genius that sounds modest and a tiny bit sexy?
DOCTOR [on screen]: Doctor. You call me the Doctor.
OSWIN: See what you did there.
She echoes him in lots of other little ways, not least in the simple fact that she is not what she outwardly appears to be. But that exchange is the most obvious, and is the first little hint that we should expect more of this. (Side note: we also get, in the Nina conversation, an explicit mention of gender expectations, and gender-swapping, which became an important if subtle theme in S8, leading up to the Missy reveal. End side note.) In this episode, Oswin fundamentally changes the Doctor's existence by wiping him from the Daleks' memory banks. At the time, we thought 'who is she, to do this? Such a huge thing?' Little did we know back then that she would stop the Doctor destroying Gallifrey, or that she would save his whole timeline with her life, or that she would persuade the Time Lords to give him more regenerations, or that she would be the one to comfort the Doctor as a scared child. Little did we know the path she would take would lead her to become the Doctor. (Though some of us suspected! I remember writing about my desperate hope that she would follow Ace's intended storyline, and enter the Academy on Gallifrey...) But those first acts - the momentous memory deletion and Oswin's later self-sacrifice - they started a pattern that was noticeable at the time, but only visible in all its glory now we can see the whole tapestry.
The next time we see Clara is in The Snowmen, and this is arguably the first time the Doctor (as opposed to the audience) 'meets' Clara. He sees her face, he interacts with her physically, and it's through her that he discovers the link to Oswin and the mystery of the 'impossible girl'. And oh look what we get here:
DOCTOR: That was stupid.
CLARA: You were stupid, too.
DOCTOR: I'm allowed. I'm good at stupid.
GOVERNESS: That's the way to do it!
CLARA: Why does she keep saying that?
DOCTOR: Mirroring. Random mirroring. We need to get on the roof.
CLARA: This way!
DOCTOR: No, I do the hand grabbing. That's my job. That's always me!
'Mirroring. Random mirroring.' FFS, Moffat. Stop that. There's nothing 'random' about it! Clara and the Doctor are constantly mirroring each other, and here we have Clara performing an action that's 'always' the Doctor's role. She also demonstrates an almost uncanny ability to read and manipulate him already - I'm thinking of 'Pond' in the one word game here, and the umbrella-on-the-rooftop scene. Besides which, she is honoured with the Tardis-key-receiving ritual the very first time she steps in the Tardis! The first companion to have that. Also the first companion to try to destroy all the Tardis keys. The moment has been prepared for. Clara has always mirrored the Doctor, always been destined to become him.
We, the audience, see modern day Clara for the first time in the BOSJ prequel, which has young Clara and the Doctor mirroring each other on the swings, and Clara assuming the Doctor's role of giving advice to a lost soul. She got her mojo back, though (just as she Victorian!Clara reignites the grieving Doctor's zest for life, and Clara at Christmas gets him his life back).
In The Rings of Akhaten we see the first time Clara ever meets the Doctor, as a tiny child in the park with two hearts on her jumper. (She hits him in the face with a football <3) And, in TBOSJ, we see Clara meeting the Doctor properly for the first time as an adult. The first time she is really conscious of him. As in her previous two episodes, and as she continues to do for the rest of season 7, she is dressed in red and blue, the two colours most associated with the Doctor, with the Tardis and Gallifrey and the time vortex. Once again, she displays a preternatural ability to do things no 'normal' companion (as if any of them are ever 'normal') should be able to do to the Doctor, such as phone the Tardis without ever having met him. We now know, of course, that Missy gave her that phone number. From pretty early on, Clara sets herself up on an equal footing with him:
(Sitting at a round table, a la King Arthur and his knights, tugging a laptop back and forth)
DOCTOR: If I can't find them, you definitely can't.
CLARA: They uploaded me, remember? I've got computing stuff in my head.
DOCTOR: So do I.
CLARA: I have insane hacking skills.
DOCTOR: I'm from space and the future with two hearts and twenty seven brains.
CLARA: And I can find them in under five minutes plus photographs. Twenty seven?
DOCTOR: Okay, slight exaggeration.
CLARA: Coffee, go get. Five minutes, I promise.
(Who else once promised five minutes?)
Oh, and whilst we're on that particular scene, look at that building behind the Doctor, in Clara's first proper episode, an episode about human souls being trapped in a computer matrix:
There is so much foreshadowing, it blows my mind. (Oh, and to the people who say her 'bossy control freak' personality was not present until the Christmas episode when it became a minor plot point, to you I say 'come back tomorrow. Ask me again. Tomorrow I might say yes. Some time after seven?' But I'm getting side tracked.) There will be more examples from S7 - many more - and if I've missed any glaringly obvious ones please let me know. I haven't watched S7 since this time last year when I was vidding it, and have forgotten a lot. S7 culminates with Clara literally scattering her whole life throughout the Doctor's. She becomes insinuated into every part of his life. Equal and opposite to the forces that seek to destroy him. Clara binds his timeline together. (That we still don't know how she survived, or how she and the Doctor escaped from there is the one thing that still bugs me about S7…) This is, as we've seen, not unprecedented in her story as we the audience have seen it, but chronologically for her this is perhaps the moment her conversion to 'Doctor' takes a step up.
On to The Day Of The Doctor, and we have the first time Clara - whole, unfractured present day Clara - meets other versions of the Doctor. And the first time they properly meet her. She can open the Tardis doors with a snap of her fingers, and she demonstrates, once again, that she can read the Doctor like a book (has read him in a book, actually, in JTTCOTT). 'I always know. Those big sad eyes'.
And then there's this:
WARRIOR: And if I grow to be half the man that you are, Clara Oswald, I shall be happy indeed.
CLARA: That's right. Aim high.
Aim high indeed. This is the moment that Ten and Eleven think the War Doctor is going to talk about *them*, and instead he talks about Clara. As she did in The Snowmen and Asylum, and TBOSJ, she subverts the Doctor/viewer's expectations by assuming the Doctor's qualities. Moffat has been playing a very long game.
In TTOTD, when Eleven regenerates - so now we're on Twelve's first 'meeting' with Clara, through his new eyes - the first thing he says directly to her is 'do you know how to fly this thing?!' With no idea who he is, he assumes she must be in charge of the Tardis. Once he's got a little more of a handle on things (but not much) he identifies Clara as 'the not-me one' - he's still not sure who she is, or how to define or distinguish her in any way, except that she (a)is not him, (b)asks questions, and (a) her name is a mystery. Seem familiar? Later on, in the restaurant, we get a wonderful dark reflection of the conversation between the Doctor and Oswin that I quoted earlier:
CLARA: Mmm hmm. Okay, so what sort of person would put a cryptic note in, in a newspaper advert?
DOCTOR: Well, I wouldn't like to say.
CLARA: Oh, go on, do say.
DOCTOR: Well, I would say that that person would be an egomaniac, needy, game-player sort of person.
CLARA: Ah, thank you. Well, at least that hasn't changed.
DOCTOR: And I don't suppose it ever will.
CLARA: No, I don't suppose it will, either.
DOCTOR: Clara, honestly, I don't want you to change. It was no bother, really. I saw your advert, I figured it out. I'm happy to play your game.
CLARA: No. No, no. I didn't place the ad. You placed the ad.
DOCTOR: No, I didn't.
They each mirror the other, and see their own qualities most clearly in the other person. But this time it's the negative qualities. The 'slightly sexy' 'total screaming genius' is now an 'egomaniac needy game-player'. And so begins the second half of Clara's 'becoming the Doctor' arc.
All Doctor Who companions become like the Doctor. All of them get braver, wiser, fiercer, kinder. All of them become more willing to fight for change. Sometimes they start to mirror some of his less desirable qualities too - a certain blasé reaction to danger perhaps - but none of them have becomes like him quite as wholeheartedly as Clara. And as she begins to mirror more and more of his negative qualities, instead of just the positive ones we saw in S7 (signs, along with her increasing abandonment of her 'Wednesdays only' rule, that she is becoming more 'addicted' to him and his lifestyle), this transformation is addressed ever more overtly. I don't need to discuss it much here, as it's treated pretty overtly in the text and has been discussed in detail by many people throughout this season (also I'm tired and there's a lot) but this transformation leads to Flatline, where she to all intents and purposes IS the Doctor in that episode (that is, in fact, the ep's whole purpose) and to ITFOTN where the mystery is, for the first time, more important to her than the lost children. This is a particularly telling moment, I think, as Clara has been fundamentally associated with both children and the need to stop people being 'lost' throughout her arc. It's one of the first things we learn about Victorian and Present Day Clara. And here, that quintessential spark of Clara-ness is briefly extinguished by her growing need to be the Doctor. It is also in this episode that Clara tricks the Doctor into going back to the Tardis, back to safety, just as he did to her in TTOTD.
And then on to the finale. The finale, where not just Clara's expected role as 'companion' but the whole natural order of things is subverted - the graves are 'giving birth', the dead are saving the living, rain brings death and fire saves everyone. Pain is a Gift. It's volcano day, and Clara and the Doctor wrest power back and forth (as they did oh so long ago in their tussle over the laptop at that little round table), both fighting for control of the situation. It turns out that the Doctor is still in ultimate control, but he then uses that control to do exactly as Clara wants him to, so who is really in charge? (I realise am talking about this scene quite coldly. I do not feel at all cold about it. I think it was one of the most moving moments I've ever seen on television, and it made mesob.)
Through two seasons of literal and figurative mirrors, of looking into each other's eyes ('If you want me to travel with you, that's fine. But as me.' / 'Just see me.') they have finally stepped through those doorways and Clara, at least, has the Doctor in her soul. And her eyes in the credits.
'Clara Oswald never existed. I am the Doctor.'
Of course, she isn't. Not literally. It's a clever lie. Just the kind of thing the Doctor would do.
And in the end, after the fighting is over and the Good Man who was also a Soldier saved the day - that victory belonged to Danny, not to the Doctor or to Clara - and after Clara had made her 'promise' in the form of her love for her cyber-soldier-man (just as the Doctor reaffirmed the 'promise' of his name in TNOTD - interesting, the echoes in those lines)…after everything, she and the Doctor independently come to the same decision, to lie to each other, to protect them. This is a kindness. This is such fearful symmetry.
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