Why Clara Should Live
Guest contributor Kevin Burnard explains why there are better ways for a companion to depart.
I’m Born. I live. I…die?
As we near the ninth series of revived Doctor Who, the question on everyone’s minds (unless you’re too busy asking about Osgood or Maisie Williams, or any of those other pressing questions) is “is Jenna Coleman staying?” And, as with last year, heavy speculation is that she isn’t. As a result, the question of how Clara will exit the show is at the forefront of current fandom debate. A popular suggestion is that she’ll die, one that I vehemently oppose.
This suggestion comes primarily due to two lines of reasoning. The first is the theory that characters must die permanently to “create a sense of consequences”, and that as new Who has not done much of this, it is overdue. The second is that, as Clara has left the Doctor so many times and come back to him, there is no other way for her to permanently leave. Both, in my eyes, are fundamentally flawed.
Let’s start with the cry for more death in general, because that’s been a very heated topic of discussion on this site. Proponents claim that deaths are necessary for this fictional world to be believable. At heart this is a matter of stylistic preference, but I very much do not care for the idea that a show about travelling the universe in a 1960s police box is one that needs gritty realism. The show is not in any way realistic. It would be jarring both with the wistful tone Moffat favors and the generally impossible material of the show.
It comes as no surprise to me that Doctor Who Who has not had a particularly successful track record with character deaths. Let’s check the list. Sara Kingdom and Katarina were first. The former was killed as an easy solution to getting rid of her, as she was only ever around for one serial. The latter, in a similar move, was just killed because the character didn’t work. Both deaths have cemented The Daleks’ Master Plan as an iconic break for the norm from Doctor Who. However, neither death is dwelled on particularly long because neither is a particularly established character. In fact, neither Sara nor Katarina are mentioned in the following serial, the tragedies they suffered totally forgotten. After that came Adric, another case of killing the weakest link for shock value. An iconic moment, but not one particularly befitting the character. Then came Peri, whose death was quickly retconned and replaced with an inexplicable marriage to Brian Blessed. River, Amy, Rory, and Danny came next, and that’s where the debate becomes even more contentious.
For some, these deaths don’t “count”. Because Amy and Rory lived full lives, and River was saved to a computer hard drive. The argument is that their deaths don’t accomplish what they should. It’s fundamentally ridiculous for a number of reasons. For one thing, Adric and Katarina make similar posthumous appearances in the expanded universe. Adric makes his return in “The Boy that Time Forgot”, living a very long life before dying again, and Katarina makes a brief return in a short story,
Katarina in the Underworld. Like Amy and Rory, Adric lives before dying. Like Danny and River, Katarina exists in some form of afterlife. So by the argument that the deaths of new Who companions don’t count, one must then be claiming that the deaths of Katarina and Adric, don’t count either. All of which is just pedantry in the extreme. The notion of some deaths “counting” and others not is fundamentally ridiculous.
Furthermore, death as a means of creating a sense of consequences is, in my mind, a very lazy writing technique that limits possibilities rather than creating them. As I stated earlier, the deaths of Katarina, Sara, and Adric all were acts of convenience, a quick way to get rid of a character in a shocking manner. It’s disrespectful to their characters to kill them off to shock viewers, eliminating their own character progression to startle viewers. To create a genuine sense of emotional consequence, characters must be pushed out of their comfort zones, not necessarily killed (though death can be used to punctuate such character exploration). That’s why something like Dalek succeeds as a character piece, while Earthshock does not. Furthermore, none of these are dwelled on for long, given Doctor Who’s general focus on constantly providing something new. This need for newness does not particularly suit character deaths, which ideally take time to process and respond to.
And so I must move on to disputing the other point, the claim that it’s the only way for Clara to permanently leave at this point. It’s really not. It’s merely the laziest possible way to accomplish that end. Clara is a complex and dynamic character. Just look at how much she’s shown since The Bells of St. John, how many layers have been peeled away. There is plenty that can be done to develop her in a new direction and find a new reason for her to leave. A successful Clara departure need not be built upon her death, but rather upon her being pushed in a new direction, perhaps to breaking point that would cause her to leave.
So here, I shall make a new proposal of just one of many possible ways Clara can leave in a way that befits her character and doesn’t need to kill her off for shock value. The death of Danny Pink was clearly a very painful experience for her, one which almost pushed her away from the Doctor for good. Even after that, there still remains one person even closer to her who hasn’t been hurt. The Doctor. What if, by Clara’s own actions, she were to hurt the Doctor on a very deep level? If she were to do something, or inadvertently cause something, that drove her to leave for his own good? I think that would show far more depth and far more emotion on her part than killing her ever would achieve.
Whether Clara is truly leaving still remains to be seen, and her actual fate is something we will not learn until another day. But ’till then, I beg you to remember in your fan debates that, contrary to a certain minisode, death is not the only answer.
