meta: The Memory of Snow: The Snowmen.
For me this was just a totally fantastic Christmas special. I don't have an awful lot to say about the actual plot involving the Great Intelligence, but there's a whole heap of stuff going on around the concepts of mirroring, memory, above/below, who Clara is and there's some links into the Pond era.
( Run you clever boy...and remember. )
( Run you clever boy...and remember. )
Ideas above her station. The junior entertainment manager turned genius hacker. The Dalek dreaming of being human. The barmaid turned governess. Both are true, but the one she really believes in is the one that gets things done, and what Clara believes herself to be is always more than what her outward situation would suggest. She's smaller on the outside. And the dreams within have a funny knack of coming true by sheer force of belief.
One of the companion's jobs is almost always to stay true to herself. To provide an anchor for the Doctor with his thousand (okay, dozen) faces. Amy did that by remembering, cutting through all the alterations to memory and reality to grab onto what she knew she'd experienced. Perhaps it's Clara's job to do that by forgetting whatever her present inglorious circumstances have limited her to being, and imposing her dreams on reality.
What is Clara? Almost certainly an ordinary human girl, and almost certainly something more. Quite possibly she is a dead human girl whose dream of Something More lives on.
Very probably she will be the one to disentangle the Doctor from all the circumstances and history that have grown up around him, and force him to confront who he really thinks he is, because that's the important thing, not all the burdens of guilt and reputation weighing him down. (Cf. A Town Called Mercy, where the kind of person you think you ought to be dictates what moral choices you should make far more than what you've already done.) Hell, she's already started doing it: she made the Daleks forget him. Forget him.
Oof, this is turning into an essay. I should really stick it in its own post. But you've set the gears in my head turning like mad.
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Yeah, it's another great theory about her being a sort of dream come to life. There's the stuff about the nutcracker and the link to the name Clara, plus absolutely everything you said. It's a good point that in each case she dreams a life "better" than the one she has in reality - and she's so powerful that she manages to create that life for herself. Moff's been interested in this for a while...see the quote from The Time of Angels..."What if we had ideas that could think for themselves? What if one day our dreams no longer needed us? When these things occur and are held to be true, the time will be upon us"
The question for me though, like you, is - what is she that she can create such dreams? Take the Nutcracker - while I don't think Moffat is modelling Clara's story on it, mythically its themes are similar. Clara is an ordinary little girl, but she dreams a magical world where - after various challenges - she is ultimately crowned as its ruler along with the Prince. She wakes from the dream but evidence of it is still there (her crown) and she chooses to go back to sleep. in the book the Nutcracker is based on, the girl (Marie) wakes from her dream to find that reality reflects it in some ways - and she ultimately returns to the magical land at the very end. So in both cases there's this idea of dreaming a world alive, waking up from it into reality, but then returning again to the dream forever. I wonder if we'll see that same arc playing out here. It's Clara's "awakening" to herself that will surely provide the series finale.
Very probably she will be the one to disentangle the Doctor from all the circumstances and history that have grown up around him
Good point...and see what she does in her very first episode. She effectively wipes away the legacy of the Time War by making the Daleks forget. There's that baggage gone.
Adding you, hope that's okay :)
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