Doctor Who: The Problem With Clara’s Exit

With the exit of Jenna Coleman’s Clara from Doctor Who this past week, it looks a lot like Peter Capaldi’s Doctor will traverse the upcoming season finale alone. It’s an interesting choice – marking the first time since the 2005 revival that the Doctor has tackled a season finale without a companion by his side. In the current era of Doctor Who, however, it’s not at all surprising.

It’s been noted by a few smart people on the internet that while Russell T. Davies (who helmed the show from 2005 to 2010) approached Doctor Who from the perspective of the companion, current showrunner Stephen Moffat does the opposite. Moffat’s show is from the world weary and tragic eyes of the Doctor himself. His companions therefore, are not audience surrogates, but mysteries to be solved.

The spoiler warning you just scrolled past is there because we’re about to talk about the manner of Clara Oswald’s exit. Last chance to turn away guys.

See, Clara dies. This is Doctor Who and Clara has “died” before, but there was a bittersweet finality about Face the Raven. As an episode it was interesting and watchable in the way above average episodes of the last few years have been, and Clara’s tragic death worked in the confines of the self-contained story. As the permanent exit of one of the show’s major characters, however, Clara’s exit is symptomatic of a major problem in the show’s current DNA.

The thing is, the more you think about it, the more Clara needs to not be dead. Her story is unfinished. Nothing about her character is resolved and looking at her journey as a whole, killing her off feels a lot like a lazy way to basically write out the co-lead of the show. It’s possible that Moffat is trolling us here and I sincerely hope he is. Maybe it was a Zygon that died. Maybe it’s timey wimey stuff. Either would be better than essentially pressing the ‘abort’ button on the entire Clara character.

If Clara is really dead, once again under Moffat a major long term companion bows out in tragic circumstances. This in itself is not a bad thing. What truly frustrates is that in the case of both Clara and Amy the tragedy is primarily not used as a culmination of their own character arcs, but an excuse for the Doctor to mope around for a while.

Think about it. After Amy Pond and Rory Williams were separated from the Doctor forever, we were fed an entire Christmas special where the Time Lord moped around Victorian London like a complicated, misunderstood genius. It wasn’t a bad episode but the Ponds’ exit felt like a premature end to a rather rushed story arc. With Clara’s exit though, it’s even worse.

I’ve thought back over season nine’s episodes trying to find a character arc for Clara – some kind of character journey that culminates, perhaps, in the ironic twist of her death. All I can find is a series of fake-out deaths and a growing tendency for the Doctor to feel protective of her. She’s become like a perfect porcelain doll representation of what the Doctor has to save.

It’s sad, because this means her entire arc this season has been about the Doctor’s attachment to her. Perhaps if it was about her attachment to the Doctor we might have had something. In some ways, this attachment to the Doctor was what made Rose Tyler’s initial exit from the show so genuinely heart-wrenching. Both the Doctor and Rose had become attached to each other in a way that felt believable and real. What we have with the Doctor and Clara is the Doctor becoming more protective of her and now presumably getting super upset about it now she’s gone.

The thing is, we’ve seen Moffat tell this story before. At least with Amy and Rory got character closure – the Doctor had been a third wheel pulling at their relationship for years. Separated from him they could now settle down and be a genuinely happy couple. At least that’s how I like to see it.

Moffat is now telling a story he’s already told quite a bit better before. Doctor has friend. Doctor loses friend. Doctor sulks about. In a lot of ways, it makes me feel more sad for Jenna Coleman than Clara the character. She had the charisma, likability and chemistry with Capaldi that could have made her one of the best ever Doctor Who companions. Moffat and his writers are going to have to think long and hard, probably outside their comfort zones, about the next one.

Whoever it ends up being, they need to have their own life and their own world. We need to fully understand why they would be friends with the Doctor or why they want to escape their boring life. At this point the writers probably also need a rough but thought-out sketch of their character arc too. What’s their problem and how would travelling with the Doctor slowly resolve it?

It might sound archaic but it could also be time to revive the old Russell T Davis trick of giving the companion a family too. It gave the companion depth, and real problems that weren’t related to the Doctor. The ninth and tenth Doctors’ companions lived in two worlds – one was the Doctors and one wasn’t that far away from ours. While Moffat tried this from time to time with Amy Pond it never felt like he was fully committing.

At this point, Moffat is probably sticking around as long as Capaldi does. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing even though the internet seems to have turned firmly against the guy. Aside from the stuff with Clara, season nine has probably been the best since Matt Smith’s debut in season five. The next companion Moffat gives us needs to be better. They need to be something new.

In the meantime, please please please let Clara come back. It’s only fair to a companion that’s had the short end of the stick for so much of her run that she be allowed to tie up her story properly. She doesn’t deserve to be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of sloppy storytelling.