chicafrom3: photo of the Eleventh Doctor and Clara Oswald (tv: dw: 11/clara)
[personal profile] chicafrom3
I am kind of obsessed with The Name Of The Doctor tonight, so under the cut find pictures, speculation, and headcanon spitballing.

Super-spoilery, if you haven't seen the episode yet.

It starts with

the original Clara Oswald. ("Just Clara Oswald. What was that middle one?") The real one -- the definitive article, you might say. ("The souffle is the recipe.") Daughter of Ellie and Dave. ("There are millions and millions of unlived days but every day we live an infinity.") She gains L33T hacking skills after being uploaded by the Great Intelligence, and she's the nanny for the children of a friend who died, and she's the Doctor's traveling companion, who makes him come back to ask her again, who keeps him on a schedule, who doesn't know whether to trust him or not.

And then there are the echoes.


Presumably the earliest echo, the Gallifreyan version of Clara; her name is probably 35 letters long, but it's got 'oswald' buried in that jumble of consonants somewhere. (Or part of it translates to "God's friend", I like that idea too.) Maybe she works at the repair facility where the TARDIS is in storage, or maybe she's snuck in. She's as bored with Time Lord society as the Doctor is, but since she can't run away (because ... reasons), she offers him advice on which TARDIS to take. That old Type 40 is kind of temperamental, and the navigation controls are completely trashed, but she just knows he and his grandaughter are going to have grand adventures with it.
Later, she acheives a position with the Chancellery Guard, serving the Castellan. When the Doctor turns back up, now claiming his right to the Presidency, she can't help remembering the old man and his granddaughter she helped run away ... and she knows that he found all the adventure she'd hoped he would. So when the Castellan sets her and the rest of the guard after the new President, when she spots him running away, she lets him go.
(I expect this echo died on Gallifrey as part of the Time War, and in her last moments she remembered, and realized why it was so important for that man to steal that Type 40 -- why he had to run.)


In the 1890s, there's Clara Oswin Oswald, governess to the children of Captain Latimer. She claims to have been born behind the face of Big Ben, accounting for her acute sense of time; she fakes an accent to get work, but is willing to go back to her roots and help out as a barmaid at her uncle's pub when there's need. She meets the Doctor during the crisis of the Ice Governess, and together they save the Latimer family; Clara dies, pulled to her death by the Ice Governess, but the Doctor defeats the Great Intelligence and returns to her side to hear her dying words.


Here we have a Clara in the sixties or seventies. I expect she went by Oswald, and was big into women's lib; she was probably casual friends with Sarah Jane Smith, though they never mentioned the Doctor to each other. She seems to be the echo that sees the most incarnations Doctors as well -- she chases after Three and Bessie, Eight and Two run past her, and the part that interests me, she appears to be on the TARDIS when she encounters Six. Did she stowaway? Was she taken onboard by one of his companions, and then ousted? Was she a companion of Six's who was somehow forgotten, a la Charley Pollard?


This Clara appears to be a resident of Iceworld. (She might also be my favorite Clara. Look at those fab 80s earrings and the studded jacket. And the hair!) Maybe she waited tables with Ace; maybe they hung out after their shifts and blew shit up together...
And then somehow she got to Gallifrey (still in her super awesome 80s togs) to try to save the Doctor from dispersal? I don't know how. I also remember next to nothing about Arc Of Infinity and can't fanwank an explanation. Anyone?


And then there's Oswin Oswald, the girl who can -- the genius who left home to see the stars and wound up stranded on a crashed ship in the middle of the Dalek Asylum -- the woman who, through sheer force of will, resisted being converted into a Dalek, invented a whole world for herself, and then erased all memory of the Doctor from the Daleks ...
And as she died, she remembered why it all happened.

Run, you clever boy, and remember me.

Obviously there were also a lot of echoes we didn't see, for time/budget reasons, but the glimpses we got of these five echoes? SO MUCH POTENTIAL THERE.

Literally, you guys, I want all the fic. (Particularly any dealing with Iceworld!Clara. Or any Clara-echo interacting with any Companion.)

(Also, aside from lost-in-the-Doctor's-timestream bit, we don't see her dealing with Nine or Ten. SO MUCH FIC POTENTIAL.)
Date: 2013-05-19 04:25 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] tallyen.livejournal.com
That scene with 4 running away down the corridor. Who was originally standing there?
Date: 2013-05-19 04:25 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] tallyen.livejournal.com
Opps, hit reply too early. I've got a theory, which is why I ask.
Date: 2013-05-20 02:53 am (UTC)

From: [identity profile] chicafrom3.livejournal.com
Arrgh, I can't go look up the clip ATM -- as far as I recall, there's nobody there in the original clip, but I'll try to check to see for sure tomorrow. What's your theory?
Date: 2013-05-20 12:07 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] tallyen.livejournal.com
The echo!Clara's aren't dressed like the companions, she IS some of the companions.
Date: 2013-05-21 01:30 am (UTC)

From: [identity profile] chicafrom3.livejournal.com
Ooh, that's entirely possible. Going back through the episode it looks like they took a shot of Four with Leela in the background and replaced Leela with Clara. She's even dressed kinda similar, though it's hard to tell.
Date: 2013-05-21 11:34 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] tallyen.livejournal.com
I cannot form a sentence. I can't really fathom what it would mean if many of the Doctor's companions have been some sort of echo of Clara. O_O
Date: 2013-05-19 11:16 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] spikeandtara.livejournal.com
Okay, I really love that you took the time to bring all this together and that you already have headcanon about the Clara echoes. I cannot wait for the fic to start coming out. You are right. There is just so much potential here.
Date: 2013-05-20 02:58 am (UTC)

From: [identity profile] chicafrom3.livejournal.com
I am a TINY BIT obsessed. There's so many possibilities, and this just opens up a whole new world for ficwriting, and if fandom doesn't jump on it I will be disappointed forever (probably).
Date: 2013-05-20 03:25 am (UTC)

From: [identity profile] donna-c-punk.livejournal.com
I think that Six shot might've been from "Vengeance on Varos". I remember quite a few corridors in that one.
Date: 2013-05-20 03:38 am (UTC)

From: [identity profile] chicafrom3.livejournal.com
Oh, that's possible! It still invites the question of how circa-seventies Clara wound up on Varos, but that's far easier to invent explanations for than how she got on Six's TARDIS without his remembering her later.
Date: 2013-05-23 07:52 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] tallyen.livejournal.com
To be fair if Clara met Six during "The Twin Dilema", she could probably of broken his nose and he still wouldn't have noticed her.

"PERPUGILLIAM, MY FACE IS BROKEN! LETS GO LIVE A CAVE!"

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