3. How Many Incarnations Does Clara Have? What Does It Mean To Be Alive?
The Doctor Who universe is constantly in flux. Timelines are continuously rewritten. How often did Rory die only to find his way back to physical reality? River Song dies but does she? The essence of who she is lives within the data core of the library. Older Amy dies but her sacrifice allows younger Amy to exist in The Girl Who Waited (series 6). Similarly Clara dies at two different points of time but another version of her always seems to exist somewhere. In fact, Clara actually dies for a third time in Bells of Saint John but is rebooted when she is downloaded back into her body. This would suggest that Clara may herself be a kind of cloud the Doctor encounters different parts of her but is perhaps still searching for the whole. Similarly the Doctor himself is a kind of cloud a unified entity encompassing many different personalities. At the end of The Snowmen, modern Clara explicitly states she does not believe in ghosts. The minds uploaded to the wifi in The Bells of Saint John are essentially ghosts data ghosts. This is, in essence, what is left of a being after physical form is removed. River Songs data ghost was uploaded to the Library data core. On Gallifrey, the Time Lords had something called the Matrix, a computer network that contained the personalities and memories of dead Time Lords and past incarnations of living Time Lords.