It’s the middle, end, and the beginning of Clara Who today. Some of you (my editor) might be thinking that’s the wrong way around. However, it is not because we’ve still got all of Capaldi’s era to go, which is a mess. I can’t remember where I heard it, but I’m sure Steven Moffat is noted as saying there are three stages to a career: The point where it’s new and exciting, the point where it has become steady and you’re in a rhythm, and the point where your ego has ballooned and you’ve stuck your head up your bum. I’d argue this was the crossover point into that third for him.

Don’t get me wrong, for what comes next week, he deserves an ego the size of Bermondsey, but to get there we’ve got to go to Trenzalore. Then, again we return there after his ego should be blown to kingdom come, and he’ll wonderfully wrap up something amazingly beautiful. Only to make the big question of Series 8 (the next one), “am I a good man?” Yes!! That’s the whole point of “The Time of the Doctor,” Moffat you should know, you wrote the thing. However, I feel I am jumping ahead and making this article a bit too much about time travel. I’ve been reading too much of The Day of the Doctor, so let’s talk about the multiple Claras.

The quick answer is, no, I don’t love the episode. This is the first episode where I’ve spent two paragraphs complaining and not even hinting at the fact that we’ve got River throughout the episode. We’ve got a lizard lesbian, Mr. Potatohead, that fleshy boy Jenny, River, and an actor that played an animated Doctor. Yet still, I’m complaining about Moffat’s obsession with Clara Who. “The Name of the Doctor” isn’t a bad episode, it is actually quite good and the usual Moffat conspiracy nonsense.

I know it is a tangent, but Moffat just doesn’t know how to write a companion. I’ll happily make that bold claim right now. He’s always had a problem writing women without making them magical and special (River for example) so when it comes to Clara I’m not surprised. Some would argue that Amy is too fantastical, and I can’t fully deny that, but she at least proved useful while never crossing into a superhuman element and getting in the way. There were people around that grounded her, and it left the Doctor to get on with that magic space wizard business while finding out River is his wife/murderer. We’ll get to Bill Potts one day, but my point is he’s never been the best with writing companions, mostly women.

However, there is a bit at the end where Clara ends up going through the Doctor’s timeline to chase down the Great Intelligence. That nonsense, retroactively puts her in Classic episodes and moments such as the time the Doctor stole the TARDIS in the first place. It does nothing but makes her special for no reason at all, it creates a loop. Ok, this explains why she’s throughout history, but why does she sometimes retain things from here on out and why can she fly the TARDIS? She course corrects him from the 1st to 11th, but does she also go back to the eight Morbius Doctors prior to the 1st? We know she doesn’t with the War Doctor but is she yet to appear again in future Doctor’s timelines since Chibnall screwed that up?

It’s that one line from the 12th Doctor: “She’s my carer, she cares so I don’t have to.” For any other character on any other show, that line would work, but Doctor Who and the lead character of the Doctor saying that? No, that was a man looking at the comments online and trying his damndest to make this one character with no actual personality a mystery wrapped in an enigma, held in a tight skirt that’s two sizes too small. I think what bothers me the most here is the fact it was meant to be the episode that tied a nice bow around her mystery of “the impossible girl,” but it doesn’t. It keeps going with spite and hatred into a Doctor I was mildly excited for.

We’ll do the multi-Doctor thing next week and she’s going to be fine if not a little louder than the background noise among 50-years of wrapping up. The Christmas special, which we’ll actually have in December will be her doing a Rose stuck during “Bad Wolf,” and then we get sweary Scottish grandad shouting at the sexy dinosaur while talking to the lizard lesbian and her potato-Clara friend. From there on, she just has to be the one leading the show, in which we also get the charisma vacuum that is Danny “I’m also an orphan but have no personality” Pink. Ok, enough wanting to hoist Moffat up by his genitals. Let’s talk about the actual episode as a whole and not just that end bit with Clara before we get teased with gravely voiced John Hurt and his silhouette.

I do love the, “I do wish he’d never discovered that place” line about Strax finding Scotland, the only place you can get a friendly fight to the death with a potato. That’s what I think Moffat brings in abundance throughout, character lines where you get little peeks into the world as a whole. The Doctor’s comment about “those little Daleks,” and the way Clara tells him about the kids going to the cinema all bring a sense of experience or groundedness to an episode that’s otherwise a bit timey-wimey and grand. It’s an episode that’s meant to be the one to shake up everything, the one that’s answering the question the whole series has been building to, but it just isn’t and this is what is more satisfying.

The trouble, more or less, is that the answer to the question is that Clara has interacted with every regeneration of the Doctor (that we knew about) to that point. What was the question? Who and what is Clara? The first one is a question mark because she doesn’t know half the time. The second one is that she’s just a boring human caught in a paradox that is not explained. Ultimately, it is a great big reset button, which we’ll return to later on with the Christmas special after Series 13 is reviewed.

Nothing is added, and nothing is taken away. It is a mildly threatening villain defeated at the end by a normal human going through the Doctor’s timeline and coming out unscathed. Then again, with Capaldi’s Doctor, they just bicker because someone (Steven!) doesn’t know when to let go. He then tries to make it seem like the Doctor should care for her death. Everything between 12 and Clara is acrimonious: He hates her, she hates him, he doesn’t know how to be the Doctor 90% of the time, she takes over and we get Clara Who. I’ll say it now, series 8 and 9 are bloody miserable, and I hate that I’m going there.

For all my complaining and angry bites at Clara as a character or Moffat for writing her into these endlessly miserable pockets of hatred, there are good bits to the episode beyond a few good lines. Smith appears on his final run, third from the last time we’ll see him, and he shows it. It’s that moment he’s told about Trenzalore, it takes it back to that line Moffat said about him: He’s a young man, as crafted by an old man from memory. The hundreds, and by the end of it all, thousands of years are something he beautifully wears at the drop of a hat, or quite literally, the drip of a tear on his 70s geography teacher’s jacket. He plays every bit of the Doctor’s pain, knowing this is the end, showing his feeling of “I don’t want to go,” with a simple look.

Anyway, let’s discuss killing the gays in this episode. I’m torn here. It is one of the biggest issues of Chibnall’s Who, he’ll set up something as a problem and answer the question or solve it minutes later. Yes, that works to move us along, but it doesn’t make good narrative sense to solve something that quickly. So Jenny gets killed, and within 20-minutes, only a few minutes of screentime for her or Vastra, she’s alive again, no problem. It does avoid the bury your gays trope a little, but nonetheless, it is messy at best. It is to make Vastra cry over her wife before the space field nurse, Strax, does the most basic thing of restarting the human heart. Again, nothing changes and no one grows.

If we’re going through the whole episode, we might as well praise Richard E Grant for his performance, which is something I don’t often do. “Scream of the Shalka” was never the best of Doctor Who spin-offs, and Grant wasn’t that into the idea, as apparent by his early line reads. Some of this may just be part of typecasting, he is the bloke you cast as the grim evil-looking villain, never smiling and always with a slow, patient, low voice. As this long-time villain, someone who’s wanted the Doctor dead for years and years, he beautifully captures that hatred. The bubbling seething resentment of someone finally getting that reward he’s been looking for. There is just one trouble with it all.

The point of his desire to go into the Doctor’s timeline is to re-write it and reverse every battle fought, every victory won, and every person saved. In doing so, this being of great power, the being that is the sci-fi McGuffin of sci-fi McGuffins, established he’s going to die doing all of this, it will kill him. Then when Clara says she has to go through his timeline to revert all of that, River explains that Clara will be ripped into a million-billion little bits, spread throughout time. Much like reincarnation, but always the same grumpy and always dying cow. So, how does she get back to the land of the living? “Spoilers,” as said by the ultimate impossible woman.

Do we get an explanation of how the Doctor gets back out of his own timeline? I’m remembering a very specific line that goes something like, “except for cheap tricks.” If The Great Intelligence almost instantly dies going through the Doctor’s timeline, why is Clara still alive long enough to save the Doctor while 11 snogs his wife’s ghost and explains the emergency return protocols? Maybe I’m saying this because it makes sense, or maybe because I hate her from Christmas/Trenzalore onward, she could have just died. As she says in voice-over in the penultimate scene, “I’m the Impossible Girl, and my story is done.“

If her story ended there, great! Clara is rounded off, we get the explanation of things in Big Finish, the comics, and in the books and we don’t have to go through the next two years of misery. I don’t want great big 20-minute exposition offs about how he can walk in and out of his timeline, just a simple line or a scene to establish it. That’s what bothered me about the most recent series: So much of it, including that suicidal Yaz bit (which Andrew Ellard wonderfully points out), could just use a small line to fix it or stop me thinking something else is happening.

The next time we see Clara outside the DVD extras that are mini-episodes is at Coal Hill Secondary. That’s another thing I’d love to see about Clara, just a comic strip or short story of her just missing the Doctor by a day or so and living that life taking over for Ian and/or Barbara, which ties into her getting the job in this timeline where Ian is now the chairman of the board of governors. This is the thing with Doctor Who: You can tie up little bits like this with easter eggs, simple lines, or whole stories, but at least do something. Really it just feels like a massive gap is missing between Trenzalore and Coal Hill; A gap to be used to show Clara becoming a teacher or learning to fly the TARDIS, which sets up for her superhuman child murder spree later.

It would remiss of me to not talk about the Whisper Men, or as I call them “the victorian KKK pallbearers.” As a concept and a bit of horrific pressure on the characters, they work very well being mostly faceless while also holding that humanoid form. However, they are more unsettling than actually threatening, if you ask me. They do nothing all episode, and I know others have said The Great Intelligence was never that threatening either, but that’s my point of the episode. If Clara was the one going through time correcting him all along and we know she’s in the next episode (or anniversary film), there are no stakes. If she died, yes, but again she didn’t and we still don’t know what she is other than some snippy human that I can’t stand.

Ultimately, as an episode it is good, but as the finale to a series, it is lacking in several departments. Once you understand what is going on, the stakes disappear and the question is answered before it can deflate like every soufflé metaphor in this series. The trouble is that if you can’t get that by 25-minutes in, you couldn’t see a bus advert if it stopped right in front of you. The episode is front-loaded with great TV, snappy dialogue, and is full of momentum, but that last 20-minutes is throwing the word exposition down the stairs. In fact, it becomes a bigger problem with every step it hits on the way down. This is somewhat exacerbated by the next episode needing an old not-Doctor newly introduced before “The Night of the Doctor” can put Paul McGann where he belongs, in the role of the Doctor on non-Americanized TV.

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Doctor Who "The Name of the Doctor"

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Matt Smith is nothing but a delight.
• The Whisper Men design.
• A fun and snappy first 20-minutes.

Cons

• Every soufflé metaphor.
• Magic Clara, away!
• Graves for gays, kinda.
• Any threat lost 25-minutes in.