*wild clapping* *pets and soothes* How's your head doing?
It's magnificent. I'm sorry I've been so absent. But I suppose better late than never.
Mind you, considering how this whole season has been Clara's, and how the whole finale turns around her, she doesn't need anything else. She makes a mighty fine Doctor... From the beginning of her arc it's felt like Clara was going to somehow be 'the return of the Time Lords,' and the question was, how would she be that. Obviously she saved Gallifrey, but that didn't seem sufficient as just popping Gallifrey back would undermine a whole lot of development in the modern show and throw out this question of what it means to be a Time Lord with Gallifrey gone. I generally frame it to myself that the Doctor is not the last of the Time Lords, but the first of the post-Time Lords. The question is, what is a post-Time Lord? Can we say that Clara is not a Gallifreyan, but a Time Lord? I remember some comment discussion from earlier in the season about who is Clara that she gets to make decisions that have traditionally been the Doctor's because, supposedly, he was the only one with the time head to understand them properly. And I thought, ok, this can be going one of two ways: either we find out that Clara is a time head, in which case the return of the Time Lords is about the rise of a Time Lord/human hybrid line. Or we find out that we've entered a universe where the Laws of Time are everyone's: the Wild West of the universe. The great frontier. This second possibility seemed much more radical . . . but that also makes it more exciting. Part of the story of Kill the Moon was about Clara's actions inspiring humanity to spread out to the stars. There's an implication in Listen that Clara's life as a time traveller inspired Orson Pink. Listen also highlighted for us the difference between a Gallifreyan and a Time Lord ('he'll never make Time Lord now' <---- which also suggests that we might look outside of those we see as 'suitable' to find Time Lords). I'm even reminded of our surprise when Tasha Lem brought the TARDIS to pick up Clara (because driving the TARDIS was one of those things meant to indicate to us that River was more than just human). But what Tasha says is that driving the TARDIS was always easy, it's driving the Doctor that's hard. Well, apparently Clara has mastered the greater skill.
Now the fascinating thing about this, is that both women are acting out of love, hoping to retrieve someone lost. (And notice how Missy’s ambitions mirror Clara’s almost exactly.) Interesting bit of this parallel that you didn't quite get to is the threat of being killed by the one they want back. The Doctor is so concerned that if Clara turns on the inhibitor that Danny will kill her instantly. And yet it's the Doctor who ends up killing Missy (or as good as kills her, anyway). An interesting connection between Danny's programming as a Cyberman and the Doctor's speech about his 'basic programming,' Also throws an interesting light on the Doctor's speech to Danny about the importance of pain. While personally I am cheering all the way for Twelve shooting Missy, I like the shadows this throws on it, together with the paralleling of Twelve and the half-faced man (who is a cyborg, like the Cybermen: you've been repaired an put back together so many times, there's none of you left. You probably don't even remember where you got that face!), and the question of whether the Doctor came back 'wrong.'
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It's magnificent. I'm sorry I've been so absent. But I suppose better late than never.
Mind you, considering how this whole season has been Clara's, and how the whole finale turns around her, she doesn't need anything else. She makes a mighty fine Doctor...
From the beginning of her arc it's felt like Clara was going to somehow be 'the return of the Time Lords,' and the question was, how would she be that. Obviously she saved Gallifrey, but that didn't seem sufficient as just popping Gallifrey back would undermine a whole lot of development in the modern show and throw out this question of what it means to be a Time Lord with Gallifrey gone. I generally frame it to myself that the Doctor is not the last of the Time Lords, but the first of the post-Time Lords. The question is, what is a post-Time Lord? Can we say that Clara is not a Gallifreyan, but a Time Lord? I remember some comment discussion from earlier in the season about who is Clara that she gets to make decisions that have traditionally been the Doctor's because, supposedly, he was the only one with the time head to understand them properly. And I thought, ok, this can be going one of two ways: either we find out that Clara is a time head, in which case the return of the Time Lords is about the rise of a Time Lord/human hybrid line. Or we find out that we've entered a universe where the Laws of Time are everyone's: the Wild West of the universe. The great frontier. This second possibility seemed much more radical . . . but that also makes it more exciting. Part of the story of Kill the Moon was about Clara's actions inspiring humanity to spread out to the stars. There's an implication in Listen that Clara's life as a time traveller inspired Orson Pink. Listen also highlighted for us the difference between a Gallifreyan and a Time Lord ('he'll never make Time Lord now' <---- which also suggests that we might look outside of those we see as 'suitable' to find Time Lords). I'm even reminded of our surprise when Tasha Lem brought the TARDIS to pick up Clara (because driving the TARDIS was one of those things meant to indicate to us that River was more than just human). But what Tasha says is that driving the TARDIS was always easy, it's driving the Doctor that's hard. Well, apparently Clara has mastered the greater skill.
Now the fascinating thing about this, is that both women are acting out of love, hoping to retrieve someone lost. (And notice how Missy’s ambitions mirror Clara’s almost exactly.)
Interesting bit of this parallel that you didn't quite get to is the threat of being killed by the one they want back. The Doctor is so concerned that if Clara turns on the inhibitor that Danny will kill her instantly. And yet it's the Doctor who ends up killing Missy (or as good as kills her, anyway). An interesting connection between Danny's programming as a Cyberman and the Doctor's speech about his 'basic programming,' Also throws an interesting light on the Doctor's speech to Danny about the importance of pain. While personally I am cheering all the way for Twelve shooting Missy, I like the shadows this throws on it, together with the paralleling of Twelve and the half-faced man (who is a cyborg, like the Cybermen: you've been repaired an put back together so many times, there's none of you left. You probably don't even remember where you got that face!), and the question of whether the Doctor came back 'wrong.'