Taking a moment to appreciate how lucky we were that Clara was in series 9

gwendolynnby:

Because otherwise her story would have felt very incomplete.  Let’s take a vague look at how that developed through the series

• Series 7: The Doctor meets the same woman in different time periods, something that is completely unprecedented and therefore makes no sense to him.  He asks the third Clara he meets (that he knows of) to travel with him until he can solve this mystery.  The conclusion is, of course, that this version of Clara is the original and that she entered his timestream and ripped herself into an unknown number of echoes that have existed and protected him throughout his life this entire time.
• Series 8: Over the course of this series we learn that their timestreams are intertwined and not simply because of the echoes.  Their link is strong enough that Clara accidentally pilots the Tardis to his childhood where she has a profound influence on him and the forming of “The Doctor” persona that he wishes to embody.  As they grow closer, different aspects of their personalities began to show themselves, especially their shared affinity for dangerous situations, their ease at lying, and being the ones to make the tough call (the morality crisis of series 8 does not belong solely to the Doctor).  By the finale they both express a strong devotion to each other which ends in them both willingly sacrificing their happiness for what they think is the other’s.

If Clara had left after Death in Heaven, it would have felt premature.  Why was Clara’s personality being compared with the Doctor’s if it never comes to anything?  Was there a point to the echoes or were they just a one-off story that didn’t really matter?  Why show that their timestreams are intertwined if nothing was going to come of it?  This is why we’re so lucky that Jenna decided to stay on for series 9, because it completes the story.

• Series 9: The prophecy of the Hybrid and why the Doctor really left Gallifrey follows them through the story line.  Their devotion to one another has reached the point where they are unwilling to let each other die, no matter the consequences.  Ashildr’s theory – the last one presented and therefore given the most weight by the narrative – is that the two of them are the two halves of the Hybrid.  With this Hybrid theory in mind, we can now say that Clara has been a part of the Doctor’s life from his childhood, to the reason he left Gallifrey, to all the times her echoes watched over him.  He and Clara have to part ways for the safety of the universe, and his parting advice to her are the rules for being the Doctor which 1) tells us he already knew that she would choose to keep the second Tardis and travel because that’s how much alike they are and how much he understands her, 2) fulfills the parallels between the two of them, and 3) brings the scene in Listen full circle as Clara was the first to tell him to never be cruel or cowardly, a standard he’s tried to live up to all his life since, and now he’s telling her the same thing, having her make the same promise he does.
• Clara’s story began as a mystery and concluded by revealing that she and the Doctor were so intertwined and so much alike that they are not only a part of each other (and two halves of a prophesied whole), they are essentially both the Doctor.  They both travel the universe in stolen Tardises with broken chameleon circuits and companions, and you cannot tell the whole story of one without talking about the other.
• And more than anything, Clara’s story on Doctor Who is really more of an origin story in the end.