Doctor Who: Listen - 7 Failures Which Destroy The Story

5. The All-Important Clara

One thing Doctor Who should never do is allow the companions to start to overshadow the Doctor or hinge too heavily upon their presence. While the Doctor can continue thanks to the trick of regeneration, companions will come and go quite frequently. Even beloved figures such as Sarah Jane-Smith and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart only re-appeared a few times throughout the shows run and remained as a constant presence for a handful of years. While friends of the Doctor and important to his life, the writers never felt the need to buff up their importance by making them utterly, completely integral to the Doctor's entire history. This is a mistake the current series keeps making with its companions, but Clara has been an especially bad offender of late. Along with suddenly having her rescue the Doctor at every single last point in his life ever, and introducing him to the TARDIS, the show now has her influence his core beliefs. By visiting him as a child we're supposed to accept that she not only created his worst fear but also managed to inspire him to be a soldier without a gun. It's ham-fisted at best and jammed into the episode without any build-up or real justification to have her make such a monumental impact upon the Doctor's life, and it's damaging to both characters. On the one hand we run the risk of learning far too much about the Doctor's past, his history and allowing him to become far too human. In the past the Doctor was always an outsider, an enigma even during his most compassionate and social incarnations, yet here the recent show keeps going out of its way to introduce these moments. On the other, we have Clara being made ever more important by writing her into being an ever more crucial part of the Doctor's background. This makes her Clara weak in comparison to others as she can't stand up on her own, and the writers need to justify her importance by shilling her more and more moments where she has influenced the main character in some dramatic way. This sort of approach isn't building characters or developing ideas, it's gradually wrecking this generation of Doctor Who. It's not as if Steven Moffat, or writers for Doctor Who in general, don't have the benefit of prior mistakes to help avoid these failings. Especially given that the entire Cartmel Masterplan was intended to help avoid the show descending into the very grave they're now digging.