(Revamped) Doctor Who's seventh season (or series, if you're British, which I think they do just to confuse people - the same way they spell color "colour,"as if it's meant to sound like "allure") is an odd beast, considering how really, it was two short seasons.
Oh, naturally, Spoiler Alert, etc.
The first half of course was a kind of epilogue to the previous two (in many ways, Moffat's takeover as showrunner was itself a reboot of a reboot, as we got both Matt Smith's Doctor, Karen Gillan's Amy as probably my favorite companion of the series and a whole new visual style,) serving basically to find a way to pry the Ponds away from the Doctor in a way that felt final enough. Personally, I think it could have been done in a less dire way, but even though it was constantly reinforced through season six that Amy would always choose Rory over the Doctor, the writers felt that there needed to be an ultimate moment for that conflict, which we got in the season 7 mid-season finale.
But that was a year ago. Honestly, I think we ought to refer to that half-season as season 7 and this one that's been going the last few weeks as season 8 (they did a similar thing with Battlestar Galactica's season 4, and I was just as frustrated by it.)
Anyway, this run of episodes, there has been a dangling question: What the hell is Clara? We were introduced to Clara first in Asylum of the Daleks, which I had forgotten was the premiere of season 7, though she was called Oswin back then. Also, she died (and had actually been turned into a Dalek before that, so... fun.) We next saw her after the departure of the Ponds in Victorian England, and once again, she wound up dead in the end.
So the mystery that's been hanging along throughout this seaso... string of episodes is what the hell she is, and how she can have been in all those places and times and died and yet shown up later - each time she seems unaware of her other incarnations. Well, we finally find out how this all happened, though it's some seriously Doctor Who-level nutbags craziness.
The Name of the Doctor brings our favorite Time Lord to a planet called Trenzalore. In previous episodes, we've generally avoided one of the biggest potential story lines in a time travel story: the time traveler meeting him or herself. The Doctor is something like 1100 years old at this point, and has spent a huge portion of that time traveling through time (was that sentence awkward?) Anyway, he can't go back and visit himself before he was born, because as we've established way back at the beginning of the revamp's first season, Gallifrey is time-locked - no one gets in or out. It's bubbled out of the space-time continuum. But the Doctor is mortal, even if he can usually just regenerate, and probabilistically, if there's any way for a person to die, they eventually will. So it stands to reason that yes - the Doctor's grave is out there, somewhere. Oh and guess what? It's at Trenzalore.
I'm getting to my point!
We discover that what is left when a Time Lord dies is not a body (one would think that if a body were intact enough to still look like a body that it would probably just regenerate,) but a strange kind of scar within the fabric of reality. It's part map, part actual break in reality, but it details every single change that the Doctor has made to the fabric of time.
The season's big bad, the Great Intelligence (an old villain - I have no idea if the GI was a credible threat in the old series or just something to do with Yetis) wants access to this in order to ruin the Doctor - all very menacing villain stuff. He succeeds, stepping in and reversing everything the Doctor's done, like saving existence, that sort of thing. However, Clara, having discovered her past incarnations, sacrifices herself by jumping in after the GI and protecting the Doctor. Hence Soufflé Girl (saved him from the planet's destruction,) hence Clara the Governess (saved him from the Great Intelligence) and even hence Clara the Time Lady, who talked the First Doctor into stealing the Tardis we've come to know and love back when it was a grey cylinder like all the others (is this the first time we've seen the Tardis without its malfunctioning camouflage on? - also, of all the "inserting a modern actor into old footage" moments, this was the one that worked best for me, doubly impressive because of the need to colorize it. Sorry, colourize it.)
Clara's given up her life in order to take on thousands of other lives, saving the Doctor at every turn. But we can't have that sort of ending, especially since we were only just getting to know Clara (something many reviewers have complained about, as she's been a bit of a blank slate until now.) So the Doctor goes into his own time stream - essentially climbing into his own corpse, which is pretty freaking strange when you think about it - and we of course get a slight Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich moment, ultimately involving some kind of strange dystopian vista that also looks a lot like the graveyard outside on Trenzalore. It seems that the Doctor can rescue Clara (though actually, it's never made super clear how they're going to get out. There's stuff about the leaf that caused her parents to meet... does she cause her own birth, or something? Is there actually an original Clara or is she some kind of time-loop? Is that it or is Clara Prime going to come out and continue her adventures? Casting news seems to point to yes.)
But then there's the big twist, and it's portrayed in simultaneously the most awesome and utterly goofy way possible. In Malkovich land, we've been seeing different versions of the Doctor running by - 4, 9, 10, but there's one figure who's just standing still, facing away. The Doctor explains that the significance of the name of the Doctor is not just a question of "what did his parents call him when he was born," but more a question of a set of values to execute. He's been helping people and saving the universe in the name of the Doctor - an ideal he has set up for himself. But there's a figure who did not live up to that ideal, who tossed it away - the series' protagonist, either in the distant past or the future, during a different regeneration.
And it's John Hurt, which is kind of awesome. The fact that we get an introductory credit on screen as he's revealed? Kind of goofy. But still.
So Clara's mystery is pretty much solved (assuming there's no more timey-wimey stuff to deal with, like her intervention to make sure that her parents met,) and hopefully we can let her develop a little more as a person in her own right (though I wouldn't be too hasty to toss away the sci-fi stuff surrounding her. What if she ran into one of her other selves on her journeys?) The big question, then, is what is going to happen with John Hurt?
Really, all we've actually seen was just an echo - the same way that we saw 9 and 10 running around, it's not like John Hurt (and that's how I'll refer to him until we get a number or his alternate, non-Doctor name... which actually made that whole credit thing even goofier. The whole point was that he wasn't The Doctor, even if he was the same person) was actively plotting against us. He was basically just there.
Yet it's clear that we're going to get some more out of him.
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