Dec 31st.

So, anyone else noticed the similar fashion that Clara and Idris/TARDIS address the Doctor in?

“Run, you clever boy”

“My beautiful idiot. You have what you always had. You have me.”

Also, interestingly enough, the second-to-last episode of the season is written by Neil Gaiman. Just like the one with Idris/TARDIS.

Given that the Doctor is increasingly showing signals of someone we’d actually see as “god”* (kindness, forgiveness, selflessness, laws of time which he “knows” when to break, theoretical omnipresence, principles, a thing for Christmas, loneliness), if the etymologies that circulate for Clara’s names are true (Oswin = friend of god, Oswald = rule/power of god), and that we know the TARDIS is the consciousness (Holy Spirit?) that’s closest bonded with the Doctor, there seems to be quite a connection there. Perhaps the two different versions of the TARDIS appearing in the Snowmen (one being battered and the other being normal) connect to that as well.

Furthermore, it’s evident he can’t resist Clara and it would make no sense that he’d be so easily tempted when contrasted against his behaviour towards Vastra/Jenny/Strax. Another thing that would make no sense, is how there was not a single mention of, you know, River. You’d think that someone like the Doctor would at least make a mention in the scene where Clara was all over him. That’s a bit suspicious, unless there’s either a connection between Clara/River or if there’s a connection between Clara/TARDIS (which would make it completely non-sexual). Oh, and, she’s flirty and puts him in his place. I seem to recall one character that did the same effortlessly. River.

Adding to all the above, the (already mentioned netwide) “coincidence” of Clara’s birthday being 23/11 - just like the show’s first airing.

I’d like to strike out the theory that Clara is Jenny (not Vastra’s wife, but the Doctor’s Daughter), for three main reasons. For one, when Jenny regenerated, she had full memory, just like Timelords. Clara only “remembered” in her deathbed (which also means the Asylum happened, for her, before the Snowmen? Or perhaps there’s an upcoming “first” time she said those things). Reason #1 also gives us reason #2. Having full memory, I really wouldn’t expect her to flirt with her father and make out with him. The last reason is that, since Jenny regenerated identical and Clara was the same both times she lived, there’s no “pulling tricks” like Mels that turned to River. Each time Jenny regenerates, she’d look the same (which is nothing like Clara). As a bonus, that also tells us Clara is not a Timelord, as some claim based on BBC’s page where her home planet is “Earth (apparently!)”… unless… she was “conceived” the same way Jenny was, therefore keeps her appearence. That would leave many loopholes, though, as to how she came out of a buried coffin and an exploded moon mid-space…

Also, I don’t think the “watch me run” pattern is hinting towards the Clara arc, as it’s a running (pun not intended) pattern throughout seasons (for example, upon meeting Rose, Ninth’s words “Nice to meet you, Rose Tyler. Run!” or Tenth’s and Eleventh’s repeated mentions of “Running” from things, or Eleventh’s specific obsession with “we run” - e.g. in The Day of the Moon, when confronting the Silence, in A Good Man Goes To War to the dying girl before River arrived). Maybe it’ll lead to something, maybe not, maybe it’ll get connected to Clara too, maybe not, but I don’t think it’s the major theme for her, it feels like a larger arc that has to do with him, not her. (Added 3/1/13: Another notable mentioning of the “running” theme is at the end of Forest of the Dead, after River’s apparent death. When the Doctor realises why his future self gave her the screwdriver, he runs back to the core to “save” her, saying “Stay with me! You can do it! Stay with me! Come on! You and me, one last run!”)

Back on the previous theorycrafting, again, might be noteworthy how both River and Clara told kids a “bedtime story” about the Doctor, in similar fashion.

River : “When you run with the Doctor, it feels like it will never end. But however hard you try, you can’t run forever. Everybody knows that everybody dies. And nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever, for one moment accepts it. Some days are special. Some days are so so blessed. Some days nobody dies at all. Now and then, every once in a very long while—every day in a million days when the wind stands fair and the Doctor comes to call—everybody lives.” (another “run” thing - normally you’d say “when you travel” or something along the lines, not “when you run”)

Clara : “There’s a man called The Doctor. He lives on a cloud in the sky, and all he does, all day, every day is to stop all the children in the world ever having bad dreams.”

Also, funny how the “uploading” in the Library was a child’s dream (CAL’s). But that might be a “theme” coincidence (just like Amy’s theme about the Doctor in The Beast Below): “What if you were really old and really kind and alone—your whole race dead, no future. What could you do then? If you were that old and that kind, and the very last of your kind, you couldn’t just stand there and watch children cry.”

*And by “see as god”, remember River’s dialogue with the Roman Commander when her Cleopatra cover is blown in The Pandorica Opens.

So many links, so little time. And, I’m afraid, I have to bid farewell to someone today, someone the Doctor can’t bring back, so any further theories will have to wait till another time…