Oh, good one.
The Impossible Girl: Who IS Clara Oswin Oswald?!?
- Thread starter Nightowl1701
- Start date
WTF, a live episode?! Unless it's the actors sitting around chatting, it seems pointless to air an episode live and potentially extremely restrictive on what they can do.
Either way, I wouldn't get too excited over it.
Mr Awe
Not necessarily. After all, there have been Doctor Who stage plays. And the early episodes in the '60s were often recorded in a manner similar to a live broadcast, with the actors performing the scenes in sequence and pretty much straight through.
Then there's something like Red Dwarf, some of whose seasons were (and are) shot before a live audience. In a case like that, you could make the FX shots in advance and cut away to them at the appropriate moments in a live performance.
Sure, we generally expect more elaborate visual effects and action from the show today, but there are exceptions. Remember the 4th-season episode "Midnight?" A bottle show taking place almost entirely inside a tour bus, with the threat being an invisible entity whose presence was conveyed entirely through dialogue and performance. That one could've been done live quite easily.
Indeed, given that British actors usually tend to work in stage, screen, and TV interchangeably rather than specializing in just one, I daresay they'd be more experienced at performing live than the cast of an American show would tend to be.
^ Well, I guess I just don't see the point of doing it that way. For a comedy like Red Dwarf, which I totally love, it helps with comedic timing. I just don't see it helping for a drama.
And, there are reasons why they moved away from shooting DW like a live broadcast. I did see a video of a DW stage play and wasn't overly impressed.
I'm just not sure why they'd go that route. I'm thinking maybe it's more likely a discussion about the series by those involved, or something along those lines.
Mr Awe
And, there are reasons why they moved away from shooting DW like a live broadcast. I did see a video of a DW stage play and wasn't overly impressed.
I'm just not sure why they'd go that route. I'm thinking maybe it's more likely a discussion about the series by those involved, or something along those lines.
Mr Awe
Not to toot my own horn, but so far I've been on the same wavelength as Moffat.
There was only one reason for a married couple in the TARDIS. In the UK, this is a children's show. In a children's show, in order to remove any possibility of scandal, it's necessary to marry the characters. Rory and Amy were married to produce River.
Similiarly, there is only one reason to marry the Doctor.
I think Clara's identity follows logically if you wonder why, after almost fifty years, they would marry the Doctor.
Dakota Smith
There was only one reason for a married couple in the TARDIS. In the UK, this is a children's show. In a children's show, in order to remove any possibility of scandal, it's necessary to marry the characters. Rory and Amy were married to produce River.
Similiarly, there is only one reason to marry the Doctor.
I think Clara's identity follows logically if you wonder why, after almost fifty years, they would marry the Doctor.
Dakota Smith
To each his own. I've seen a number of live episodes of various TV shows, as well as the live version of Fail Safe that George Clooney produced and starred in back in 2000, and I quite enjoy it. There's an energy and immediacy to a live performance that you don't get with the carefully constructed and perfected productions we usually get. There are some inevitable glitches and flubs along the way, but that's part of the fun -- it's exciting to watch actors perform without a safety net, to be aware of the risk of a mistake happening, and it makes it more impressive when they carry off the performance mostly without a hitch.
Doctor Who has always been a broad, theatrical show -- sometimes bordering on pantomime in the UK sense. And the British have a grand theatrical tradition. I think it could be a terrific idea.
That was the second Doctor Who at the Proms concert in 2010.
Good grief. You, along with the person who suggested it was Susan, are completely forgetting that they kissed, that Clara has been extremely flirtatious with the Doctor from the get-go. By your own logic, the last thing they would do in a children's show is include incestuous themes! Of course she isn't his daughter or granddaughter or any kind of relative! Ick! Eww!
Fans have been drawing weird connections like that for years. For instance, after the McGann film, a New Zealand fanzine argued that Grace was the Doctor's half-human mother.
If you're implying Oswin will turn out to be his daughter, a Children's show wouldn't have had them kissing like that.
What desired conclusion am I starting with? That there are no rules? Where is your evidence that there are? There's a trend, certainly. And if I missed a quote where it's specifically said to be impossible to take on the same form, my mistake. I am slowly making my way through classic Doctor Who (and some of it's pretty awful to try and sit through), so I may be unaware of any number of statements.
Besides, exceptions are exceptions. So Clara could be another exception anyway. I am not trying to scientifically prove anything.
Just to be clear, I am not saying Clara is regenerating, and I seriously doubt that's the situation. I just don't think you can rule it out. Though I mostly just object to passive-aggressive statements starting with "I don't know why." What is your goal in making this statement? To make everyone give up their wild suppositions? To make people feel foolish for making such unscientifically-based arguments? Is the fact that I didn't use the scientific method in my grand (admittedly weak) argument that Clara could be regenerating offensive? And, if we are to reserve judgment, then why don't you take your own advice, and let people make their own foolish observations? If you want to argue that it's unlikely, or that evidence contradicts it, then fine. But why bring up your inability to comprehend others' ideas? It takes it from being about Doctor Who and makes it about the fans themselves.
The regeneration from being a Dalek seems unlikely, true, but what are the limits of regeneration? Has any Time Lord been turned into a Dalek before? I think it more likely that the utter obliteration of her physical form when the planet blew up probably makes it more of non-starter.
Forgive me, but didn't the Time Lord in yellowface from "Planet of the Spiders" regenerate and teleport?
Wild hypothesis: Clara's "regeneration" takes 150 years or so, so she burst out of the ground 26 years before the present day scene in "The Snowmen." In between stuff happens, has amnesia, final death in "Asylum of the Daleks."
I hate that hypothesis.
That she's a Time Lady, obviously. It's a blatantly unlikely premise on the face of it, because what's happening with Clara is blatantly unlike Gallifreyan regeneration, but you're ignoring the way it works most of the time and cherrypicking the very few exceptions in order to support a very unlikely suggestion.
But one can assess probabilities. It continually bewilders me how many people don't seem to understand the concept of probability. Just because multiple possibilities exist doesn't mean they're equally likely or equally worth taking seriously. Assessing the probabilities of different ideas lets you determine which ones are more likely to be true and which ones are more likely to be false. Yes, sometimes an unlikely premise turns out to be true, but you don't favor it without evidence. And you sure as hell don't make up whatever ad hoc rationalizations you need in order to justify it. The more convoluted excuses you have to pile on in order to argue that something could be true, the less credibility it has.
Besides, as I've said, it's just so damned unimaginative. We've had Time Lords in the show. We've had plenty of them, including secret part-Gallifreyans like River. What we've seen of Clara so far suggests she's something different and new. Different and new is interesting. It's exciting. I don't understand the desire of so many people to reject the possibility of something different and new and want it to be just more of the same old stuff we've already seen.
For what it's worth her name, Oswin, means God's friend and Oswald, God's power. What of Vastra's comment that perhaps the universe does make bargains?
http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/1/Oswin
http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/1/Oswald
http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/1/Oswin
http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/1/Oswald
You are wrong. I have no desire to see Clara as a Time Lady. I want to see a return of Susan and Romana. I wouldn't mind more Time Lords either, 1) because I hate whole races being wiped out, because it's so trite (Superman, ALF, etc.), and 2) I also think Time Lords somehow all being inaccessible is stupid, given the premise of the time-traveler known as the Doctor. If the Doctor visited Earth right after the events of "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" would Susan somehow be dead? It's stupid. But Clara herself? I can make rhetorical points (badly argued or not) without believing them to be the case. You inferred something. I didn't imply it.
I do understand probabilities, and as you quoted, I said I have serious doubts. I think it's almost certain she isn't a Time Lady.
While I appreciate the fact that you don't hedge your statements with "I think," unimaginative is a relative term. Frankly, I think another young pretty white girl as the companion is unimaginative. I think human companions are unimaginative (though she might be something else, I suppose). So more Time Lords is unimaginative? Because there have been TWO of them as companions in 50 years?
Companions:
Time Lords: Susan, Romana
Humans: Ian, Barbara, Vicki, Steven, Dodo, Ben, Polly, Jamie, Victoria, Zoe, Liz, Jo, Sarah Jane, Harry, Leela, Tegan, Peri, Mel, Ace, Rose, Adam, Jack, Mickey, Martha, Donna, Amy, Rory
Alzarians: Adric
Trakenites: Nyssa
Trions: Turlough
robot dogs: K-9
(I left out the UNIT guys, and the one-shotters, and River because of their narrative ambiguity as Companions.)
If anything, making the new companion a Time Lady would bring some much needed diversity to the list. When I first saw "Asylum of the Daleks" and was surprised by Jenna-Louise Coleman's appearance, I actually thought how cool it would be to have a Dalek companion! She died at the end, so that idea was quashed. Ah, well.
Last edited:
Going a little further, Clara can mean bright. Of interesting note, the Benu or Bennu Bird's name in Egyptian mythology means bright or shining. The Benu Bird resurects itself after death, like the phoenix and our Clara seemingly. Also, in the Book of the dead the Benu Bird describes itself thus, “I am the Bennu bird, the Heart-Soul of Ra, the Guide of the Gods to the Tuat.” The Heart-Soul of Ra might be a fanciful way to look at Clara's other names described earlier, Oswin Oswald.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benu
http://www.egyptianmyths.net/phoenix.htm
So, could Clara's story be some kind of Phoenix, or inspired by the legends of such?
Heck, I did the name-etymology thing back in post #3 of this thread. The meaning of "Oswald" I found was "divine ruler," and I put forth the admittedly unlikely notion that "Clara Oswald," "bright divine ruler," could tie into "White Guardian" somehow.
The motivation is irrelevant; the methodology is the problem. You just don't start with a conclusion and fudge the reasoning and evidence to fit it. That's not a way to assess realistic likelihoods, just a way to rationalize whatever notion you're trying to rationalize. It doesn't make it any less unlikely that Clara is some kind of Gallifreyan, or that the very, very un-regeneration-like thing she's doing is merely a variant on regeneration.
Not entirely, because it's been established that the Time War altered history extensively -- that the two sides kept going back in time and altering events to turn defeats into victories and so on, waging the same battles over and over. And though RTD left it ambiguous, Moffat established right off the bat that the history of the Doctor Who universe is mutable, and that major events from the RTD era like the Cyber King's rampage and the Dalek theft of Earth could be completely wiped from the timeline.
So since it was a Time War, it's entirely possible (under the very flexible temporal physics and logic of the Who-verse) that it was waged throughout history, that the Time Lords weren't just killed at a certain point in their timeline, but were effectively erased from ever having existed at all.
And I can state what terrible ideas I think they are.
Then why argue with me when I said she probably wasn't?! Why waste so many posts on it? Just to be annoying?
It's not about companions specifically. Nor is it about Time Lords specifically. Such a narrow definition excludes River Song and Jenny, two of the main characters that have been implausibly proposed as Clara's true identity.
And it's not about who's a companion and who isn't, it's about how to interpret the mystery of what Clara is and what she's doing. Seeing a character lead multiple lives in separate eras and jumping to the conclusion that she's a regenerating Gallifreyan, ignoring all the ways that doesn't fit the evidence, is what's unimaginative. It's retreating into the trite and familiar rather than opening one's mind to novelty.
Maybe, I'd like that better than she's a Time Lord, though I would rather something other than Guardian's, too. I'd wondered, with Egyptian Goddess's in Oblisks, and Nefertiti, if Moffat might have gotten some inspiration from Egyptian Myth rather than recycle a past character or concept?
You can't just say it's irrelevant when I was responding to your declaration that I had a "desired" conclusion. I was refuting the "desired" part.
A good point, but also terribly annoying. I guess Doctor Who is a show whose fans apparently demand less internal consistency than say, Star Trek, but as a fan I find the "throw out what's inconvenient" thing to be pretty lazy. And yes, I am well aware of all the contradictions in Trek. It may be impossible to keep a consistent universe, but at least there is (apparently) an effort. If the events of past episodes are now null, there should be due consideration for how these things played out, and even why this change would have taken place. If Earth was never stolen, does that mean Mickey and Martha never met? What change did the Eleventh Doctor make so that these things didn't come to pass? That's just the way I like my speculative fiction, I guess.
The Time Lords being wiped from existence doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. Many, many aliens have claimed to have heard of them in the modern Who. Jo specifically references them in "Death of the Doctor." And if the Doctor's race is gone, is the Doctor somebody who just came into existence at some point, sans history, and at what point? We know that various people still had memories of him (Sarah Jane, Jo), others' lives were affected (as mentioned by Sarah Jane in regards to Ian, Barbara, Ben, Polly, Tegan, Ace), and there are records of him, like with UNIT, strongly implying the First through Eighth's adventures did take place.
Initially I was responding to your passive-aggressive statement, which I found annoying. Then I was arguing against your premise that I was supposed to have some pure rhetorical reasoning. Finally, you made other points, and I was discussing them (like the nature of something being unimaginative).
Where do you get the idea that the Timelords have been permanently erased from time? It has been clearly in End of Time that on the last day of the Time War, Daleks launched an all out attack on Galifrey. The Doctor used something called The Moment to create a Time Lock around Galifrey, trapping all Daleks and Timelords within. They're just trapped inside the Time Lock. A few Daleks have escaped from the Time Lock, so has The Master. Rassilon almost succeeded in releasing all the Timelords. Who knows, maybe a few other Timelords have also escaped.
To say Timelords have been "erased from ever having existed at all" is just wrong.
