Clara Oswald

Template:Infobox Doctor Who character Clara Oswald is a fictional character portrayed by Jenna-Louise Coleman in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Appearing in the show's seventh series, Clara is a companion of the eleventh incarnation of alien time traveller the Doctor, portayed by Matt Smith. Though Coleman first appears as Oswin Oswald in the seventh series premiere, she did not take over duties as the show's female lead from actress Karen Gillan until her second appearance in the mid-series Christmas special, this time playing the Victorian governess and barmaid Clara Oswin Oswald. At the end of this episode, Coleman is seen playing a third version of the character, this one from contemporary London and named just Clara Oswald. From "The Bells of Saint John" this Clara Oswald begins her travels as the Doctor's next full-time companion.

Coleman confirmed that she will be appearing in the eighth series, which will begin filming in September 2013.

Appearances

Television

The character is first introduced as "Oswin Oswald" in the first episode of the seventh series, "Asylum of the Daleks". She is the last survivor of a starship that crashed into the Asylum, a prison planet for Daleks that have gone insane. When the Doctor (Smith) and his companions Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) arrive at the Dalek Asylum to disable the planet's force field, she communicates with them and helps them escape from the Daleks by hacking into the Dalek security systems. She helps the trio escape in return for the Doctor rescuing her, but the Doctor discovers that she had already been captured and fully converted into a Dalek cyborg, as they sought to preserve her intellect. Unable to cope with her conversion, Oswin had retreated into a fantasy of survival as a human still stranded inside the starship. Faced with the truth, Oswin is nearly overcome by her Dalek personality, though she still possesses human emotions and is unable to kill the Doctor. Oswin fulfils her promise of deactivating the force field, and makes a final request that the Doctor remember her as the human she once was. She allows the Doctor, Amy, and Rory escape before the Daleks destroy the planet.

She is reintroduced as "Clara" in the 2012 Christmas special "The Snowmen", her first as the Doctor's companion, a young barmaid and governess in 1892. The Doctor invites her to travel with him after she enters the TARDIS, but Clara tragically falls to her death after being attacked by the former governess, who has been turned to ice. Her tombstone reveals that her full name is "Clara Oswin Oswald" and the Doctor realises she is the same woman as Oswin from the Asylum, even saying the same things Oswin said. Intrigued by a woman who has lived and died twice in different periods of history, he begins searching across time for another Clara. In the following episode, "The Bells of Saint John", the 21st century Clara meets the Doctor after she is given his phone number by a mysterious woman in a shop. Clara has been working as a nanny for friends of her family after their mother died, which forced her to postpone her dream of travelling. After an adventure in London together, the Doctor asks Clara to become his companion. She requests that he visit her again the next day and ask again.

Other media

Clara appears in the online prequel to "The Bells of Saint John" as a little girl who talks to the Doctor at a playground. The Doctor doesn't realise her identity; it is only revealed to the viewers. Clara will appear alongside the Eleventh Doctor in the New Series Adventures novel Shroud of Sorrow, to be published in April 2013.

Casting and development

On 21 March 2012, it was announced that Jenna-Louise Coleman would replace Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill as the next companion. She auditioned for the role in secrecy, pretending it was for something called Men on Waves, an anagram for "Woman Seven". Executive producer and lead writer Steven Moffat chose her for the role because she worked the best alongside Smith and could talk faster than he did. Coleman had never seen Doctor Who before her audition, and watched "The Eleventh Hour" and "completely fell in love with the show". Moffat stated that her character will be different from previous companions, though he attempted to keep the details of her character a secret until she debuted in the Christmas special. In "Asylum of the Daleks", Coleman appears as the character Oswin Oswald, a secret which was kept from the public before transmission. Coleman was originally given the role of a Victorian governess named Jasmine, and then for the second audition she was given both the characters of Oswin and Clara. She originally thought that the producers were looking for the right character, but later realised it was part of Moffat's "soft mystery" plan. Coleman played each version of the character as individuals with "trust that there would be a payoff" to her mystery.

Moffat felt that the introduction of a new companion made "the show feel different" and brought the story to "a new beginning" with a different person meeting the Doctor. Executive producer Caroline Skinner remarked that her introduction allowed the series return to a more "classic Doctor Who format". Smith said that Clara was different from her predecessor Amy Pond (Gillan), which allowed the audience to see a different side of the Doctor. Moffat said that Coleman brings "a speed and wit and an unimpressed quality that makes the Doctor dance a bit harder" Coleman stated that her character "holds her own" and was competitive with the Doctor, providing "a nice double act". With her place in the series' narrative, Clara was intended to reawaken the Doctor's "curiosity in the universe and gives him his mojo back". Concerning Clara's relationship to the Doctor, Coleman said, "It's been interesting how it's changed Matt's Doctor. There is a natural bounce between them, and a flirtation, and attraction. But, again, they've always got this friction because they're a bit magnetic and drawn to each other, but she can't quite figure him out. He's got loads of secrets and he's always looking at her, trying to figure her out." The dynamic between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy was an influence on Coleman and Smith.

Reception

Nick Setchfield of SFX praised the effective surprise debut of Coleman as Oswin in "Asylum of the Daleks". He wrote, "Coleman brings sauce and sparkiness, and while she initially seems a familiar Moffat archetype, all snarky cracks about the Doctor’s chin and throwaway lines about sexual experimentation ... there's a deeper vulnerability there too, which makes her eventual fate in this episode genuinely heart-skewering." Michael Hogan, writing for The Daily Telegraph, also found her debut promising and described her as "enchanting in an elfin way – rather like a brunette, curvier, less annoying Fearne Cotton".

The character's reintroduction as Clara in "The Snowmen" received generally positive reviews from critics. The Guardian's Dan Martin wrote, "The masterstroke behind Jenna-Louise Coleman's surprise introduction is that it made us want to see more of her before Karen Gillan had even gone. The cheeky, self-assured Clara won a place in our hearts from the off." Setchfield called her "less of a motormouthed quip-merchant than [Oswin], but Coleman makes her equally winning – plucky, smart and riffing on a very promising chemistry with Matt Smith". IGN's Matt Risley felt that the Clara "trumped her already-bombastic debut with a character both fully formed and utterly unpredictable". He praised the mystery surrounding her and and her independence, commenting that she seemed to be the "antithesis" of Amy Pond as she was "a girl who will wait for no-one". Radio Times reviewer Patrick Mulkern admitted that he had "found Oswin’s perkiness a tad wearing", but he was "completely won over" by Coleman's Clara in "The Snowmen". Neela Debanth of The Independent felt that Clara's demise in "The Snowmen" made the episode "a bit of a tease" and set up the question of what the travelling Clara would be like. Unlike Mulkern, she favoured the Oswin version, describing her as "much more fun and flirtatious".

Following "The Bells of Saint John", Digital Spy's Morgan Jeffery said that the new Clara was "more grounded and so far easier for the viewer to latch on to" than her two predecessors, both of which could have been harder to sustain as companions. Mulkern said that he did not bother with the character's mystery and found it pleasing that Coleman played her as "a straightforward modern companion with no baggage". Setchfield described Clara as "equally sparky and winning but altogether younger and possibly just a tad more vulnerable than her previous incarnations" with a " helplessly watchable chemistry" with Smith. Debnath described her as a "softer version" of Oswin, still hoping that "the character will be taken up a notch, challenging the Doctor more and bouncing off him like Oswin did. However, the Daily Mirror's Jon Cooper expressed concern that Clara, despite Coleman's success, was too similar to Amy. Mike Higgins of The Independent felt that Coleman was "an improvement" upon Gillan, but wrote that "the pairing of an intellectually bright but emotionally dim male with a techno-illiterate but wised up female is a tired old trope of much drama and comedy".

External links

• Clara Oswald at the BBC One Doctor Who website
• Clara at BBC America's Doctor Who website