The Doctor can’t go home again, but he tries.
What is home to a man who runs away?
Not an ends, but a means to an end.
Credit: BBC WORLDWIDE LIMITED
Nothing that should be permanent is permanent to the Doctor: not home, and not even death.
He had made himself essential to her, and he couldnt do that and then die.
Now, once Clara is already dead, its time for the Doctor to say the same.
It begins with a story.
The Doctor rolls up to a Nevada diner in a pick-up truck and meets Clara behind the counter.
The Gallifreyan High Council would like a word with him, but hes got other plans.
(Whats his plan?
I think hes finishing his soup.)
He never has been one for second chances.
They owe him one.
Everything he claimed to know about the Hybrid was a ruse.
He wasnt just mourning Clara; he was trying to save her.
So far, its working.
The computer uses their consciousness to predict when trouble is coming, ringing Cloister bells to sound the alarm.
Anyway, what do we care about the technicalities?
Clara is more interested in what it means that shes here.
How long has it been for the Doctor?
He even snags one with the First Doctors interior.
The sound of four knocks is exactly what the Doctor needs right now.
(Its always four knocks.)
Ashildr has a theory.
She could be the Hybrid.
When the Doctor and Clara feed off of each other, they both become the Hybrid.
Shes in the TARDIS proving it right now.
Claras having none of that.
This season has done nothing to help the Donna Noble mourning process, has it?
Ive never asked you for that, ever.
These have been the best years of my life, and they are mine.
Tomorrow is promised to no one, Doctor, but I insist upon my past.
I am entitled to that.
And the Doctor, of course, knows shes right.
One last defiant Clara Oswald speech has saved the day.
It doesnt make sense.
He promises that hell remember Claras smile, only to wake up in Nevada and ask, Clara who?
Talk about Clara becoming the Doctor.
The Doctor has always been the one forced to remember and move on, but thats Claras role now.
You said memories become stories when we forget them, she says.
Maybe some of them become songs.
The Doctor doesnt have the specifics, but he hasnt lost his sense of what Clara meant to him.
Ashildr waits in the control room.
They fly off to delay the inevitable.
It couldnt very well be and remember me, now.
The memorial to Clara chips off as the TARDIS disappears.
Shes on the run, with no home but the point of her own death.
Maybe we should retire memory erasing as a plot point; it feels contrary to whatDoctor Whois about.
Or maybe Im just sad.
Background radiation:
UPDATE:Ive figured it out.
Then again, when does the Doctor not delay looming inevitabilities?
