Timelord Thoughts Extra - The Season 9 Theory

So in the post about "The Girl Who Died", I hinted that I had a grand theory of where this season is going and what we may be seeing happen. It's time to put my neck on the line and reveal all. Now I'm not going to pretend that I am the only one who can come up with this idea. There are millions of fans out there all with their own theories and someone is bound to have hit on the same one (though it's entirely possible that we are all wrong). I'm sure that I may have been subconsciously influenced by something that I may have seen or heard (although I have tried to stay away from reading or listening to too many reviews this year - and I've certainly not been on any forums). This is just a bit of fun based on the five episodes we have seen so far. Anyway, let's look at the evidence:

• A Doctor who is more than normally concerned about Clara being hurt or killed.
• The Cloister Bell ringing in every episode.
• Conversations about the rules of time travel, ripples and tidal waves
• Clara thinking she is the Doctor's equal and acting more and more like him
• The sonic sunglasses instead of the screwdriver.
• "A good death is the best anyone can hope for...."
• The Doctor saying he is sick of losing people.
• The rise of the 'Timelord Victorious' aspect of the Doctor's personality.
• "I can do anything".
• "She might meet someone she can't bear to lose. That happens...I believe".
• References to travelling back in time as "seeing ghosts"
• The prophecy of a "hybrid"
• The Minister of War
• "You can't cheat time".
• Missy's daughter
• The Doctor's Confession Dial
• Why did the Doctor really leave Gallifrey?
• Suicide moons
• The "Cloister Wars"
• "Ever since he was a little girl"

There's a lot of stuff there and some of it is probably throwaway. I don't think that suicide moons, the Cloister Wars, Missy's daughter or the fact that she says the Doctor used to be a little girl are key elements so let's leave them aside for now. No to my mind, the major themes are Clara's fate, the "hybrid" and breaking the laws of time. So to bring this all into focus, let's consider Charles Dickens - and the first line of "A Christmas Carol"...

"Marley was dead: to begin with."

You see it's not a question of if Clara is going to be killed, or when - she is already dead. She has been since before the first episode. Everything we have seen since the beginning of "The Magician's Apprentice" is set in the past of Clara's personal timeline, before whatever catastrophe caused her to die.The Doctor talks about "ghosts" because that is what Clara is to him. He has seen her die. He was there. He may even have been the one who inadvertently made it happen.

This is why the Doctor is overly protective of Clara at the moment. *This* Clara is not meant to be there. Perhaps originally in the normal flow of time Clara stayed at Coal Hill School, mourned for Danny and didn't travel with the Doctor for a while - but now after seeing her die, he has gone back and interrupted that. That has to be one of the rules of time that should not be broken - after all the Fifth Doctor said that he couldn't go back and save Adric. The longer this "past" Clara and the Doctor travel together, the more chance there is of her getting hurt and the Doctor is terrified of that. Taking someone out of their own timeline and getting them killed before they are "meant " to won't just create ripples in time - it has the possibility of shattering the Web of Time completely.

Also remember that picture the BBC released of the Doctor, some Daleks and Clara recreating the Beatles "Abbey Road" cover? The fan theory relating to the original was that the hidden meaning revealed Paul McCartney had been killed and replaced with a lookalike. So what if Clara has been killed and replaced with a lookalike - her earlier self...?

 

The TARDIS knows that things are wrong too. That's why the Cloister Bell keeps ringing. Every time this version of Clara is in danger, it can feel the timelines shudder. Remember that the TARDIS already doesn't like Clara that much because of all the temporal energy around her when she was the "Impossible Girl". The problem is, the Doctor is obsessed with saving Clara. He can't bear to lose her. To see her die that way (whatever horrible death it must have been). Every time he flaunts the rules and rescues the "past " Clara from danger he is getting bolder - daring to think that he can do anything, cheat time, perhaps even death itself. The Doctor is planning and thinking and trying to figure a way to stop Clara dying. Whatever plan he needs to come up with will have to be cleverer than using robot duplicates or holograms or Tessalecta's. Clara's death must be too big - beyond even a fixed point in time. It needs something more...drastic. More dangerous. Something illegal perhaps.

Now some of this may seem slightly familiar to a section of Doctor Who fans - specifically those who have followed the Big Finish audio adventures of the Eighth Doctor. In those early stories the Doctor rescues Charley Pollard from the crash of the Airship R101 where she was supposed to die. This creates a temporal paradox and the Web of Time begins to break down, allowing particles of "anti-time" to use her as the focus and seep into our universe. The Timelords take notice and capture the pair. Unwilling to sacrifice Charley, the Doctor infects himself with the "anti-time" with terrible consequences... Now I am not suggesting that Moffat is ripping the idea wholesale from Big Finish but there enough thematic similarities aren't there?

So how does Clara die? Well everything is pointing to her thinking of herself more and more as the Doctor's equal. She can do anything he can. What if her hubris goes too far? What if she puts herself in a situation she can't talk her way out of and she's not clever enough - not 'Doctor' enough - to get herself out of it? There are two ways this could go: a) Clara gets herself accidently killed or b) what if she becomes a danger to the universe through her actions and the Doctor has to stop her?  The Doctor already thinks that he has changed Clara (and not necessarily for the better). How terrible would he feel if the result of their travels together is her unavoidable death? He says he is sick of losing people so what would he do to save the one who has done the most for him?

There is another element in this tragedy, and that's where the "hybrid" comes in - but the more I think about it the more I flit between  a couple of ideas where this could go - so I am going to have my cake and eat it and outline them both just in case one is right. Davros said that it was a prophecy of a fusion between a Dalek and a Timelord. The Doctor described the now immortal Ashildr as a hybrid, but I think that might be a deliberate red herring (the next episode of course could of course make this paragraph totally redundant!). No I think the hybrid is one of two people - it's either Clara, or, more likely, the Doctor himself.

How can it be Clara? Well, if she is too arrogant in her opinion of herself and her "skills" as a pseudo-Doctor she could get into a situation so extreme that there is no way out - and gets transformed in the process. She dies as it happens or is killed because she becomes a threat. How can it be the Doctor? Think back to what I was saying about the Eighth Doctor and Charley. What if in order to save Clara, the Doctor has to take on whatever originally affected her into himself - and it's something masterminded by the Daleks / Davros. He becomes the Dalek / Timelord hybrid in order to save her. And maybe there is only one race that can stop him... Yes the Timelords are going to come back aren't they?

--- Just a quick aside here. A good friend of mine has a theory that the Doctor is the hybrid - tying into the "half human on my mother's side" line from the TV movie. Only last night I was telling him that my theory didn't consider the Doctor to be the answer - and it didn't. Then. The thing is the more I thought about it today, and the more I folded in the Big Finish Charley Pollard idea to my wild imaginings, the more logical the Doctor seems. So sorry Al if I mislead you at all! ---

So we then come to my idea of what is inside the Doctor's Confession Dial (to fit in with the rest of my theory - and yes, I am aware I'm probably hugely guilty of confirmation bias in all of this). It has to be his confession that he has allowed Clara to die / had to kill her, and is going to do whatever it takes to change time and save her. He doesn't expect to die because he goes to visit Davros (although it's certainly a risky situation), he expects to die because he is going to transgress every law of time and change history and bring someone back from the dead. But he's going to have some last adventures with his former companion first. Why did he give the dial to Missy? Well he could hardly give something to Clara that says "sorry I got you killed" could he?

The only thing I can't really reconcile is why the prophecy of the hybrid would be the cause of the Doctor leaving Gallifrey. Why would something happening now affect his decisions over a thousand years ago? Unless the First Doctor saw his own future and was trying to avoid it by running away, but I don't really believe that. Of course it's entirely possible that the hybrid and the Doctor leaving are two separate unrelated things. Moffat likes to "lie". I need more thinking time...

There we go then, that's my theory. Clara is dead already. "Current" Clara is from her own past. The Doctor is going to break all the laws of time and risk everything to save her, and in the process maybe have to become the hybrid. And whatever happens will necessitate the return of the Timelords. What their solution / punishment may be I'm not sure (although I've heard a couple of unsubstantiated rumours about the finale that sound very...interesting)

What do you think?


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Hang on, hang on what about the Minister of War? Plus have I forgotten about the sonic sunglasses (much as I wish I could)?

Ah...okay. So the Minister of War was mentioned by someone who was from Earth and worked for UNIT. So that's probably going to come up in the Zygon two-parter, or not at all this year. And the reason for the Doctor having the sonic sunglasses is so he can hide behind them. Hide what Clara might see. Hide from his own reflection. What he is going to do is very wrong, and who could face themselves after that?...