“Mummy” is a tick below that, but still very, very good. In terms of individual episodes, “Flatline” is now on my short list of all-time favorites The Boneless were a great sci-fi/horror idea, brilliantly executed, and the even- smaller-on-the-outside TARDIS was such a hilarious visual I can’t believe no one had yet thought of it. So the big story, Clara’s story, was a success. But that’s OK in the best seasons of the revived series, the companion has been the true protagonist. He could be funny (“Are you my mummy?” … to an actual mummy!), he could be a badass (his monologue to the Boneless in “Flatline”), but he was still pretty much the same pragmatic grump of a Doctor we started out with. Clara becoming like him was the story there wasn’t much movement in the other direction. In contrast to this utterly human, ever-more-ethically-compromised companion, the Doctor, played lean and mean by Peter Capaldi, was a bit static throughout the season. In contrast to his ever-more-compromised companion, the Doctor was a bit static throughout the season. Anyone who’s lost someone can see themselves reflected in Coleman’s luminous, ink-black eyes at that moment. Her reaction to Danny’s death in “Dark Water,” part one of the season finale, is an absolute triumph of writing, direction, and especially acting. Coleman plays this complex web of emotions perfectly. At the end of “Mummy on the Orient Express,” she has enough self-awareness to call her traveling with the Doctor “an addiction”-and then she continues indulging her addiction while lying to both Danny and the Doctor. Her lambasting of the Doctor at the end of “Kill the Moon” was an all-time great “ The Reason You Suck” speech. ![]() ![]() So, progress! Congratulations, Clara, you’re a worse person than a Sopranos character! In terms of giving the Doctor’s companion a story with a beginning, middle, and end, season eight is Moffat’s best effort to date.Īll of this gave Jenna Coleman far more to work with as an actress than she’d had previously, and work with it she did. In season eight, she has had both a personality and an arc: She’s a lying jerk, and under the tutelage of her lying jerk friend the Doctor, becomes an even more accomplished lying jerk.Īs YouTube Doctor Who superfan RitchandSpace declared, “Clara’s kind of an arsehole, and I like it.” Showrunner Steven Moffat himself admitted regrets about Clara being the object of the story in the seventh season, rather than a subject. The biggest problem with Clara in season seven of Doctor Who was that she had neither a personality nor a character arc. And then she commits (or at least thinks she commits) murder-suicide-the victims being herself and her ostensible best friend, the Doctor. Clara Oswald of Doctor Who, on the other hand, responds to the death of her boyfriend Danny Pink in a car accident by committing grand theft, assault, battery, and extortion-all in service of the even greater crime of ripping a hole in the universe.
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