Clara Who?
Who is Clara Oswin Oswald?
This series of DW is making my head spin, and poor
such_heights has to put up with my flailing. So I thought I would try to clear my head with a List. I do like Lists. Lists are cool. This is a list of the main Clara theories that I have come across so far:
- Clara is a completely ordinary modern girl, who becomes split through time at some point during the finale, thus creating the multiple-Claras as well as her meeting with the Doctor in a Bad Wolf-esque paradox. Emma Grayling seemed convinced she was a normal girl (unless she was lying), and the Doctor has personally stalked her timeline to make sure that she was born to normal parents, and has had a normal life to date. The fact that both Victorian!Clara and Dalek!Oswin seem a bit more mature than Clara, and both have characteristics that can only have come from Clara SINCE she met the Doctor (am thinking in particular of the name ‘Oswin’, and the latent tech-genius) indicates that whatever causes the ‘impossibility’ of Clara has yet to happen. Possibly she is split by accident by some sort of cataclysmic event (Tardis explosion? The Doctor’s name? A paradox? River’s escape from the Library? All of the above?) Or possibly, again in a 'Bad Wolf' style Ascension, she does it to herself, in order to save the world/the Doctor - and ‘Run You Clever Boy And Remember’ are her last words, a sort of ‘Something Old Something New etc’ type verbal cue to get the Doctor to help re-unite her. The time-split Claras being re-united by the Doctor would fit very pleasingly with my post-Asylum speculation that the Doctor needs a companion to DE-weaponise, to make whole again. (Ironically, if this is the case, a lot of Moffat-haters will have to eat their words. I *love* Moffat’s writing (and I loved RTD’s, they are not mutually exclusive) but I know that one criticism often levelled against him is that his companions are too ‘special’ to identify with - people seem to have difficulty connecting to Amy and River and Clara because they are ‘impossible’ rather than ‘ordinary’. These people inevitably go on to compare the ‘specialness’ of Clara unfavourably with the ‘ordinaryness’ of Rose or Martha or Donna….how ironic, therefore, if all Clara’s impossibility comes about later, in exactly the same way as Rose or Donna’s powers did?)
- Clara is a trick, a trap, a puppet. The Doctor is (or was) concerned about this. The coincidence of her repeated meetings with the Doctor, and all the repeated puppet/doll imagery that surrounds her (though, to be fair, this also surrounded the Ponds, so is not unique to Clara) all the times she is deliberately paralleled or mirrored with the monsters, the antipathy the Tardis feels towards her, the similarities with River (who was also created as a trap) and the repeated presence of the manipulative Great Intelligence - is Clara an unknowing pawn in someone’s game? (But whose? There are so many potential players - Omega, Rassilon,The Silence, the Guardians, the GI, the Trickster....? Are they all linked? Are they one and the same?) Is she Eve, designed to lead the Doctor into a great and terrible Knowledge that will have serious consequences and lead to a Fall? (Then again, the Doctor was the one who gave her symbolic fruit to eat - he is playing the Trickster but is he about to be Tricked?) She is a Questioner - was she created to Ask The Question that will cause Silence to Fall? If so - why? ETA (post 'She Said He Said') - has she been created as 'The Perfect Companion' ? I mentioned in my post-xmas meta that she has many qualities in common with all of the previous New Who companions - has she been created in their image, for some reason? (see the prequel for reasoning behind this) Is she somone's bait? Is she luring him into a trap?
- Clara is a Gallifreyan egg/seed/ark/blueprint/key- a get-out clause created long ago by the Time Lords on the edge of destruction, and scattered throughout time and space to one day bring about a New Gallifrey. A time capsule...there were alllllll the references to eggs/light/Christmas in 7a, all symbols of rebirth, and lots of messianic themes associated with Clara. There’s the ‘DNA’ staircase leading up to the Tardis in The Snowmen, and all the talk of ‘blueprints’ for creation in the same episode. Clara’s colour scheme - all that red - and her ‘timey-wimey watch’ all hint at Gallifreyan origins. There have been several characters this season - Skaldak, Hila, ‘Mr Sweet’ (ew) who have survived being preserved over hundreds or thousands of years, before ‘hatching’ into the present day. Is that what Clara is designed for? (She is preserved under a bell jar in The Crimson Horror, much like Gallifrey under its dome) There’s the sense of nostalgia and full-circle-ness that would definitely fit with the creation of a New Gallifrey on - or in time for - the 50th anniversary. I don’t think Old Gallifrey will ever come back (and I REALLY don’t want it to, given how it ended up) but the Doctor has been erasing his Name from the universe, gradually undoing 900 years or so of phonebox travel, and he is going back to how it all began. He needs something to go back TO, and what better way to finally help him get through the Epic Time War Guilt than by helping to create a New Gallifrey? An act of creation to counter all those acts of destruction. Perhaps Clara will bring New Gallifrey into existence with the help of River, or the Tardis, or perhaps she will DREAM it into existence, and bring about the Time Of Angels ('what if we had ideas that could think for themselves? What if one day our dreams no longer needed us?’) Perhaps she is an ‘alarm clock’ for the Doctor (like the vampire alien for ‘Grandfather’ in Akhaten) - she will ring bells for him, cause him to remember something important, to do with the re-creation of Gallifrey. ETA (post 'She Said He Said') Is she a Gallifreyan message bearer, a carrier pigeon?
- Clara is a Tardis or part of a Tardis (Girl in the Fireplace style?) or a Tardis pilot -
elisi has covered this in fabulous detail here, so I don’t really need to go into it again. Just… their complex relationship. All the parallels with Clara and the Tardis, all the visual mirroring, all the repeated themes of human/machine combinations, which began in Asylum and have threaded through pretty much every episode right up to the upcoming Cybermen ep - are they all foreshadowing who Clara is? If she IS a Tardis - is she split through time and space as a consequence, or is it a safety measure? A Tardis can’t be poured into a human body safely (see Idris) but perhaps it can if that body is multiplied and split. We know someone has been trying to create a Tardis since The Lodger in Season 5 - is Clara the outcome? Or is she older than that? Is she a Gallifreyan Tardis, (linking to the above theory)? If so, she would be the Tardis’ ‘sister’ - is this sibling rivalry between them?! Alongside machines, the other thing that Clara has often been linked to is ghosts - in The Snowmen (‘I don’t believe in ghosts’), then in Akhaten (‘I’m not competing with a ghost’) then again in Hide (‘we’re all ghosts to you’) - is Clara a Ghost in the Machine? ETA (post 'She Said He Said') She is the 'perfect companion' for the Doctor....and the Tardis can 'reconstruct particles according to your needs' - did the Tardis create Clara for the Doctor (from memories of former companions)? To be his 'perfect' companion, to save him?
- Clara is family - is she the Doctor and River’s daughter? Their granddaughter? Susan? Susan’s daughter? Susan’s mother? Jenny’s daughter? Another long-lost, fobwatched Gallifreyan relative? (Clara does have that impressive multi-face watch...) Almost all Moffat stories end with people claiming each other as family, or drawing on memories of family, and there has been a serious abundance of that in this series - it’s in every episode! And some of the parallels have been made really glaringly obvious - ‘Grandfather’ and the mention of Susan, Hila being a descendent of Emma and Alec, Skaldak’s daughter and Tricky’s brothers and the Doctor and Clara playing at being married in The Crimson Horror, as well as the revelation that it was Ada’s mother who damaged her (a reversal of Clara’s relationship with her human mother - or is Clara’s mother, whoever she may be, responsible for damaging her by splitting her through time?). Obviously we’ve seen that Clara already has a normal, Earthbound family - but are they real? Clara, in all her incarnations, has always been very concerned with whether things are ‘real’ or not. It’s a question she’s asked multiple times. There are so many coincidences surrounding Clara’s parents…perhaps they too have been ‘created’, (Like Donna’s children in the Library) to give the illusion of normality - for good or for evil? We don’t know yet. It depends if she’s a trap or not. Or she could have been adopted by her 'normal' parents - do we see anything that indicates otherwise?) Is she somehow related to CAL? Aside from the physical similarities between the two, there are a lot of symbolic parallels, especially between CAL and Dalek!Oswin - the theme of remembering and forgetting, living in a created reality inside your head, ‘saving’ people, etc. Clara and Lux both mean ‘light’.
- Clara is related to Rose - I believe this is a popular theory in some corners of the Internet. There are certainly a LOT of parallels between Clara and Rose, in terms of their life stories before they met the Doctor, and the adventures they have had with him. Obviously there are always parallels between companions and episodes, but the Clara/Rose mirrors are particularly strong. Not to mention all the roses that keep cropping up everywhere - in Oswin’s hair, at the Rose and Crown pub, in a vase in Clara’s room, the box of ‘Mateus Rose’ wine in Hide, on her dress in Nightmare in Silver (I think?)….there may be others but I am not the most observant person. Roses make one think of the famous line ‘A Rose by any other name…’ from Romeo and Juliet (which has been referenced explicitly twice in this series) which is of course about star-crossed lovers, and the importance of names ('what's in a name?'). Combined with all of the ‘bubble universes’ that keep cropping up - both Hide and JTTCOTT feature people being pulled out of bubble or echo worlds - and the fact that we KNOW that Rose and Ten (or Ten.2) are coming back for the 50th, and it is possible there is a connection. Is Clara even of this universe? Is she from Pete’s World? (‘I don’t know where I am’) Was she a by-product of Rose’s Bad Wolf time? (hungry like the wolf) Or is this too far-fetched? (I personally think so, but it’s a popular theory).
- Clara is a former companion of the Doctor but all knowledge of her travels has been wiped from her memory, and the Doctor's. Thanks to
brass_cojones for drawing my attention to this. The main basis for this theory seems to come from cast interviews and (misleading?) spoilers, rather than from the show itself - Jenna's comment that Clara 'hasn't just met the Doctor three times' and the rumours about John Hurt's character in the 50th Anniversary ep. The theme of memory and forgetting, and the idea of wiping memories to have a clean slate are all present in this series (notably in Asylum, when the Doctor first meets Oswin, and also in JTTCOTC and in The Snowmen) - could it be that Clara is such a 'perfect' companion because she has done all this before? She knows how to act and she has such complete trust in him due to some subconscious lingering memory? But if that's the case - why and how and who wiped the memories? Did he? Did she? (I am forceably reminded of Zaphod Beeblebrox in the Hitchiker's Guide here...!) Have the Doctor and Clara been here before?
- Clara is Romana - This theory has been floating around since forever (I'm pretty sure EVERY slightly mysterious character has been linked to Romana at some point!) but Tempus Aeterna over on tumblr has written a dazzling series of essays, collected here, arguing (from many angles) how and why Clara could be - or be connected to - Romana. The parallels and links are often tiny, but there are so very many of them that they do mount up. And some of them are rather substantial....
- ……a combination of several of the above? An ordinary girl who becomes a Tardis? A family member who is also a trap? A forgotten former companion with a message from Gallifrey? Etc…
Let me know if there are other big theories/interesting pieces of conjecture that I have missed!
Of course, the BIG question in all of this is: Where Have All The Soufflés Gone?! Why is Soufflé Girl no longer Soufflé Girl? Perhaps Clara bakes a soufflé in the Tardis oven one day, and it catches fire, causing the Tardis to EXPLODE and everything goes on from there - and all of the Music and Song references that have been with us since Asylum are pointing to the 50th Anniversary ep being a MUSICAL EPISODE! YES!! (Sorry, I have recently watched Once More With Feeling… :-))
Ahem, anyway, crack theories aside,
such_heights I were discussing this, and we speculated that perhaps all the ‘Song saves the day’ stuff means that River is going to pull herself out of the Library, with the help of Clara, and the Doctor. In the course of saving River from the Library (a la Hila, via a Moffat-y combo of Love, Memory, Words and Technology), Clara ascends to a Bad Wolf-like/Tardis-like/CAL-like state, with the power to hold multitudes inside her, and this (or somebody’s reaction to this) causes the Tardis to blow up and splits her through time. The Tardis knows this is coming, which is why she is so weird around Clara. If the Tardis explosion - which happens on the day River is conceived, with an adult River inside it - happens as a result of River’s resurrection from the Library, it would be pleasingly connected to both her death and rebirth, which ties in to lots of themes from this season.
ETA A slight amendment to the above theory, courtesy of the brilliant
lonewytch - the aforementioned human/machine themes we've seen so strongly this season, as well as the people-escaping-from-bubble-universes and all the ghosts, these could point to RIVER becoming part of the Tardis. She lacks a physical body since her death in the Library (not an insurmountable problem, given that this is DW, but certainly an issue) so perhaps she hacks/is hacked out of CAL and becomes integrated into the Tardis matrix? The Tardis would literally become the Doctor's wife...
There is still the issue of The Name Of The Doctor to work in there….(and eeeeeee that title! It is clearly intended to conjure ‘The Name Of The Rose’, with all the connotations of Romeo & Juliet / Roses / LIBRARIES etc that implies)…..in conclusion: help, my brain hurts.
Note: I am posting this before Nightmare in Silver airs, because due to Life I will not be able to watch it (or the mini prequel) until Sunday…..woe. SO this may be updated after I’ve seen that ep, and in fact at any point over the next week, as and when I think of things I have inevitably forgotten…..
This series of DW is making my head spin, and poor
such_heights has to put up with my flailing. So I thought I would try to clear my head with a List. I do like Lists. Lists are cool. This is a list of the main Clara theories that I have come across so far:
- Clara is a completely ordinary modern girl, who becomes split through time at some point during the finale, thus creating the multiple-Claras as well as her meeting with the Doctor in a Bad Wolf-esque paradox. Emma Grayling seemed convinced she was a normal girl (unless she was lying), and the Doctor has personally stalked her timeline to make sure that she was born to normal parents, and has had a normal life to date. The fact that both Victorian!Clara and Dalek!Oswin seem a bit more mature than Clara, and both have characteristics that can only have come from Clara SINCE she met the Doctor (am thinking in particular of the name ‘Oswin’, and the latent tech-genius) indicates that whatever causes the ‘impossibility’ of Clara has yet to happen. Possibly she is split by accident by some sort of cataclysmic event (Tardis explosion? The Doctor’s name? A paradox? River’s escape from the Library? All of the above?) Or possibly, again in a 'Bad Wolf' style Ascension, she does it to herself, in order to save the world/the Doctor - and ‘Run You Clever Boy And Remember’ are her last words, a sort of ‘Something Old Something New etc’ type verbal cue to get the Doctor to help re-unite her. The time-split Claras being re-united by the Doctor would fit very pleasingly with my post-Asylum speculation that the Doctor needs a companion to DE-weaponise, to make whole again. (Ironically, if this is the case, a lot of Moffat-haters will have to eat their words. I *love* Moffat’s writing (and I loved RTD’s, they are not mutually exclusive) but I know that one criticism often levelled against him is that his companions are too ‘special’ to identify with - people seem to have difficulty connecting to Amy and River and Clara because they are ‘impossible’ rather than ‘ordinary’. These people inevitably go on to compare the ‘specialness’ of Clara unfavourably with the ‘ordinaryness’ of Rose or Martha or Donna….how ironic, therefore, if all Clara’s impossibility comes about later, in exactly the same way as Rose or Donna’s powers did?)
- Clara is a trick, a trap, a puppet. The Doctor is (or was) concerned about this. The coincidence of her repeated meetings with the Doctor, and all the repeated puppet/doll imagery that surrounds her (though, to be fair, this also surrounded the Ponds, so is not unique to Clara) all the times she is deliberately paralleled or mirrored with the monsters, the antipathy the Tardis feels towards her, the similarities with River (who was also created as a trap) and the repeated presence of the manipulative Great Intelligence - is Clara an unknowing pawn in someone’s game? (But whose? There are so many potential players - Omega, Rassilon,The Silence, the Guardians, the GI, the Trickster....? Are they all linked? Are they one and the same?) Is she Eve, designed to lead the Doctor into a great and terrible Knowledge that will have serious consequences and lead to a Fall? (Then again, the Doctor was the one who gave her symbolic fruit to eat - he is playing the Trickster but is he about to be Tricked?) She is a Questioner - was she created to Ask The Question that will cause Silence to Fall? If so - why? ETA (post 'She Said He Said') - has she been created as 'The Perfect Companion' ? I mentioned in my post-xmas meta that she has many qualities in common with all of the previous New Who companions - has she been created in their image, for some reason? (see the prequel for reasoning behind this) Is she somone's bait? Is she luring him into a trap?
- Clara is a Gallifreyan egg/seed/ark/blueprint/key- a get-out clause created long ago by the Time Lords on the edge of destruction, and scattered throughout time and space to one day bring about a New Gallifrey. A time capsule...there were alllllll the references to eggs/light/Christmas in 7a, all symbols of rebirth, and lots of messianic themes associated with Clara. There’s the ‘DNA’ staircase leading up to the Tardis in The Snowmen, and all the talk of ‘blueprints’ for creation in the same episode. Clara’s colour scheme - all that red - and her ‘timey-wimey watch’ all hint at Gallifreyan origins. There have been several characters this season - Skaldak, Hila, ‘Mr Sweet’ (ew) who have survived being preserved over hundreds or thousands of years, before ‘hatching’ into the present day. Is that what Clara is designed for? (She is preserved under a bell jar in The Crimson Horror, much like Gallifrey under its dome) There’s the sense of nostalgia and full-circle-ness that would definitely fit with the creation of a New Gallifrey on - or in time for - the 50th anniversary. I don’t think Old Gallifrey will ever come back (and I REALLY don’t want it to, given how it ended up) but the Doctor has been erasing his Name from the universe, gradually undoing 900 years or so of phonebox travel, and he is going back to how it all began. He needs something to go back TO, and what better way to finally help him get through the Epic Time War Guilt than by helping to create a New Gallifrey? An act of creation to counter all those acts of destruction. Perhaps Clara will bring New Gallifrey into existence with the help of River, or the Tardis, or perhaps she will DREAM it into existence, and bring about the Time Of Angels ('what if we had ideas that could think for themselves? What if one day our dreams no longer needed us?’) Perhaps she is an ‘alarm clock’ for the Doctor (like the vampire alien for ‘Grandfather’ in Akhaten) - she will ring bells for him, cause him to remember something important, to do with the re-creation of Gallifrey. ETA (post 'She Said He Said') Is she a Gallifreyan message bearer, a carrier pigeon?
- Clara is a Tardis or part of a Tardis (Girl in the Fireplace style?) or a Tardis pilot -
elisi has covered this in fabulous detail here, so I don’t really need to go into it again. Just… their complex relationship. All the parallels with Clara and the Tardis, all the visual mirroring, all the repeated themes of human/machine combinations, which began in Asylum and have threaded through pretty much every episode right up to the upcoming Cybermen ep - are they all foreshadowing who Clara is? If she IS a Tardis - is she split through time and space as a consequence, or is it a safety measure? A Tardis can’t be poured into a human body safely (see Idris) but perhaps it can if that body is multiplied and split. We know someone has been trying to create a Tardis since The Lodger in Season 5 - is Clara the outcome? Or is she older than that? Is she a Gallifreyan Tardis, (linking to the above theory)? If so, she would be the Tardis’ ‘sister’ - is this sibling rivalry between them?! Alongside machines, the other thing that Clara has often been linked to is ghosts - in The Snowmen (‘I don’t believe in ghosts’), then in Akhaten (‘I’m not competing with a ghost’) then again in Hide (‘we’re all ghosts to you’) - is Clara a Ghost in the Machine? ETA (post 'She Said He Said') She is the 'perfect companion' for the Doctor....and the Tardis can 'reconstruct particles according to your needs' - did the Tardis create Clara for the Doctor (from memories of former companions)? To be his 'perfect' companion, to save him?
- Clara is family - is she the Doctor and River’s daughter? Their granddaughter? Susan? Susan’s daughter? Susan’s mother? Jenny’s daughter? Another long-lost, fobwatched Gallifreyan relative? (Clara does have that impressive multi-face watch...) Almost all Moffat stories end with people claiming each other as family, or drawing on memories of family, and there has been a serious abundance of that in this series - it’s in every episode! And some of the parallels have been made really glaringly obvious - ‘Grandfather’ and the mention of Susan, Hila being a descendent of Emma and Alec, Skaldak’s daughter and Tricky’s brothers and the Doctor and Clara playing at being married in The Crimson Horror, as well as the revelation that it was Ada’s mother who damaged her (a reversal of Clara’s relationship with her human mother - or is Clara’s mother, whoever she may be, responsible for damaging her by splitting her through time?). Obviously we’ve seen that Clara already has a normal, Earthbound family - but are they real? Clara, in all her incarnations, has always been very concerned with whether things are ‘real’ or not. It’s a question she’s asked multiple times. There are so many coincidences surrounding Clara’s parents…perhaps they too have been ‘created’, (Like Donna’s children in the Library) to give the illusion of normality - for good or for evil? We don’t know yet. It depends if she’s a trap or not. Or she could have been adopted by her 'normal' parents - do we see anything that indicates otherwise?) Is she somehow related to CAL? Aside from the physical similarities between the two, there are a lot of symbolic parallels, especially between CAL and Dalek!Oswin - the theme of remembering and forgetting, living in a created reality inside your head, ‘saving’ people, etc. Clara and Lux both mean ‘light’.
- Clara is related to Rose - I believe this is a popular theory in some corners of the Internet. There are certainly a LOT of parallels between Clara and Rose, in terms of their life stories before they met the Doctor, and the adventures they have had with him. Obviously there are always parallels between companions and episodes, but the Clara/Rose mirrors are particularly strong. Not to mention all the roses that keep cropping up everywhere - in Oswin’s hair, at the Rose and Crown pub, in a vase in Clara’s room, the box of ‘Mateus Rose’ wine in Hide, on her dress in Nightmare in Silver (I think?)….there may be others but I am not the most observant person. Roses make one think of the famous line ‘A Rose by any other name…’ from Romeo and Juliet (which has been referenced explicitly twice in this series) which is of course about star-crossed lovers, and the importance of names ('what's in a name?'). Combined with all of the ‘bubble universes’ that keep cropping up - both Hide and JTTCOTT feature people being pulled out of bubble or echo worlds - and the fact that we KNOW that Rose and Ten (or Ten.2) are coming back for the 50th, and it is possible there is a connection. Is Clara even of this universe? Is she from Pete’s World? (‘I don’t know where I am’) Was she a by-product of Rose’s Bad Wolf time? (hungry like the wolf) Or is this too far-fetched? (I personally think so, but it’s a popular theory).
- Clara is a former companion of the Doctor but all knowledge of her travels has been wiped from her memory, and the Doctor's. Thanks to
brass_cojones for drawing my attention to this. The main basis for this theory seems to come from cast interviews and (misleading?) spoilers, rather than from the show itself - Jenna's comment that Clara 'hasn't just met the Doctor three times' and the rumours about John Hurt's character in the 50th Anniversary ep. The theme of memory and forgetting, and the idea of wiping memories to have a clean slate are all present in this series (notably in Asylum, when the Doctor first meets Oswin, and also in JTTCOTC and in The Snowmen) - could it be that Clara is such a 'perfect' companion because she has done all this before? She knows how to act and she has such complete trust in him due to some subconscious lingering memory? But if that's the case - why and how and who wiped the memories? Did he? Did she? (I am forceably reminded of Zaphod Beeblebrox in the Hitchiker's Guide here...!) Have the Doctor and Clara been here before?
- Clara is Romana - This theory has been floating around since forever (I'm pretty sure EVERY slightly mysterious character has been linked to Romana at some point!) but Tempus Aeterna over on tumblr has written a dazzling series of essays, collected here, arguing (from many angles) how and why Clara could be - or be connected to - Romana. The parallels and links are often tiny, but there are so very many of them that they do mount up. And some of them are rather substantial....
- ……a combination of several of the above? An ordinary girl who becomes a Tardis? A family member who is also a trap? A forgotten former companion with a message from Gallifrey? Etc…
Let me know if there are other big theories/interesting pieces of conjecture that I have missed!
Of course, the BIG question in all of this is: Where Have All The Soufflés Gone?! Why is Soufflé Girl no longer Soufflé Girl? Perhaps Clara bakes a soufflé in the Tardis oven one day, and it catches fire, causing the Tardis to EXPLODE and everything goes on from there - and all of the Music and Song references that have been with us since Asylum are pointing to the 50th Anniversary ep being a MUSICAL EPISODE! YES!! (Sorry, I have recently watched Once More With Feeling… :-))
Ahem, anyway, crack theories aside,
such_heights I were discussing this, and we speculated that perhaps all the ‘Song saves the day’ stuff means that River is going to pull herself out of the Library, with the help of Clara, and the Doctor. In the course of saving River from the Library (a la Hila, via a Moffat-y combo of Love, Memory, Words and Technology), Clara ascends to a Bad Wolf-like/Tardis-like/CAL-like state, with the power to hold multitudes inside her, and this (or somebody’s reaction to this) causes the Tardis to blow up and splits her through time. The Tardis knows this is coming, which is why she is so weird around Clara. If the Tardis explosion - which happens on the day River is conceived, with an adult River inside it - happens as a result of River’s resurrection from the Library, it would be pleasingly connected to both her death and rebirth, which ties in to lots of themes from this season.
ETA A slight amendment to the above theory, courtesy of the brilliant
lonewytch - the aforementioned human/machine themes we've seen so strongly this season, as well as the people-escaping-from-bubble-universes and all the ghosts, these could point to RIVER becoming part of the Tardis. She lacks a physical body since her death in the Library (not an insurmountable problem, given that this is DW, but certainly an issue) so perhaps she hacks/is hacked out of CAL and becomes integrated into the Tardis matrix? The Tardis would literally become the Doctor's wife...
There is still the issue of The Name Of The Doctor to work in there….(and eeeeeee that title! It is clearly intended to conjure ‘The Name Of The Rose’, with all the connotations of Romeo & Juliet / Roses / LIBRARIES etc that implies)…..in conclusion: help, my brain hurts.
Note: I am posting this before Nightmare in Silver airs, because due to Life I will not be able to watch it (or the mini prequel) until Sunday…..woe. SO this may be updated after I’ve seen that ep, and in fact at any point over the next week, as and when I think of things I have inevitably forgotten…..