8.6 The Caretaker

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might. 

                  Ecclesiastes

Back in 2010, I compared The Lodger with a certain brand of yeasty salty spreadable toast accompaniment. It will, I said, divide Who fans, even as a shepherd divideth the sheep from the goats. On the left will be the people who are in tune with with what the Matt Smith era is about; on the right will be the ones who are simply not.

The Caretaker is a similar pitch to The Lodger. I suspect it will divide fans for similar reasons.

The Lodger took the Doctor out of his TARDIS comfort zone and dumped him in an ordinary environment – as James Cordon’s flat mate. There was an alien, but we could all see that it was a Perfunctory Alien. The actual alien was Matt Smith. If you liked watching Matt Smith being alien — if you think everything that Doctor Matt did lit up the room, even when it wasn't a particularly interesting room — then the Lodger was the Bestest Ever Story about the Bestest Ever Doctor. If you found Matty Smith irritating, or if you were basically still sore that Jon Pertwee quit, then this was the episode that turned you off Doctor Who for good. Everyone knows which side I’m on. 

So: this week the Doctor announces that he is going into deep cover and pretending to be a normal human for a while. (Two weeks ago he was trying to imagine what a critter that could hide perfectly would be like, and spooking himself out over it.) He gets a job as a Caretaker in Wonderful Clara’s school. He pretends to be human, which he is very bad at, and therefore oddly fits in as the Grumpy Caretaker. The Grumpy Caretaker is one of the stock clichés of school stories, along with the sexy English teacher (played here by Wonderful Clara) and the sadistic P.E teacher. Back in Remembrance of the Daleks, Doctor Sylvester pretended to go for a caretaking job at this very school and was told he was overqualified for it. There is a Harold Pinter play called the Caretaker. Harold Pinter almost certainly never played a Yeti. There is a Perfunctory Robot, but like the Lodger, this is mainly a character piece. 

But it isn’t a character piece about us getting to know the Doctor. It isn’t a character piece about what would happen if the Doctor came to your school. (Imagine Doctor Matt as Caretaker! Rewiring the slide projector so that it showed 3D pictures; making champagne spew out of the soft drinks machine without quite intending to...) It’s a character piece about Wonderful Clara and Pink Danny. Clara has been keeping Danny a secret from the Doctor for no very good reason. This is a kind of obligatory episode which tells us how the Doctor finds out about Danny and how Danny finds out about the Doctor. Maybe you see it as a bit of a filler that we need to move the sub-plot forward. Or you may think this kind of rom-com scenario is what the series is really interested in, and it’s stuff like “the Doctor and Clara meet Robin Hood” and “the Doctor and Clara rob a bank for good and adequate reasons” that are the fillers. 

For better or worse, I think that the latter is probably the case. Deep Breath, Listen and Caretaker feel as if they are part of one TV series, telling one story, filmed and acted in a mostly similar style. Robot of Sherwood and Time Heist feel completely different – both to this, and to each other. Yes, I know that Horror of Fang Rock isn’t exactly the same as Talons of Weng Chiang and Talons of Weng Chiang isn’t exactly the same as the Invisible Enemy but my point stands.

There are some good gags and some less good gags. 

I thought it was quite funny that Doctor Peter takes it for granted that Clara is dating the Other English Teacher who looks exactly like Doctor Matt, and is perfectly okay with it. (I shouldn’t think that there is a single English teacher in England who talks or dresses like that and studying the Tempest is about knowing the key points which are likely to come up in an exam, not what Mr Chips feels about the “fascinating enigma of it’s fundamental non-finishedness.”) I quite like the long-suffering headteacher, the disastrous parents evening and the problem child’s awful parents. I actually even quite liked the problem child, although I don’t buy the Doctor giving her a ride in the TARDIS and sincerely hope that’s the last we see of her.

And in fact the mutual revelations about Danny, the Doctor and Clara are pretty well handled. I felt embarrassed for Clara and sad for Danny when it came out that she’d been deceiving him and pleased for both of them that he took it fairly well, and cross with the Doctor for being pointlessly jealous. Particularly him arbitrarily deciding that Danny must be a PE Teacher. Does anybody want to make the case that that was Ever-So-Slightly Racist? Does anyone else want to explain that PE teachers haven’t been like that for years? But the programme has gone off in a pretty weird direction when “I was cross with the Doctor” is a point in its favour. 

I could have done without Danny doing a Matrix-style slow-motion leap over the Perfunctory Robot to save Clara. Not because I don’t think he should have saved Clara. As yet undiscovered tribes in New Guinea could see from the set-up that it was going to finish with Danny saving the day. But we probably don’t need to equate “soldier” quite so clearly with “action figure.” 

So. Which side are you on?

There are going to be people who are going to say that Doctor Who has no right to be doing stories about the relationship between the Companion and the Doctor and the Companion’s Boyfriend because Doctor Who is about monsters and saving the world and relationship-stories are not allowed. On this view, the whole idea of Companions is deeply suspect. When Old Who was still New people openly complained that Rose had no right to exist because the title of the show was Doctor Who as opposed to The Amazing Adventures of Chav Woman. (They really, really did.) A friend of mine recently said that he had attempted to re-frame season 5 - 8 as The Adventures of Amy and Her Time Travelling Friend to see if that made him like it any better. 

This seems to be the same kind of thinking (though not, obviously, to anything like the same degree) as that of J.C Wright and his canine buddies, who see the intrusion of a lady or a black person — any lady or any black person — into any story as evidence that no one is allowed to be white or male any more. It is obviously true that Rose and Clara have more agency than companions did in the olden days. I myself have complained that there is a tendency for New Who to over-sell companions, starting with Rose’s transformation into Dark Phoenix and ending with Clara accidentally creating the entire franchise. But it’s not a zero-sum game. Presenting the companions as people doesn’t mean that the Doctor is now less of a person. 

If you are on this side of the divide, then presumably you hate the whole idea of the Caretaker and are not reading this. 

On the other hand, there are always going to be people who say that Doctor Who always was about the relationship between the Doctor and his lady friends, that fans had sexual hangups that prevented them from seeing this, that memory plays tricks and that the Caretaker is not really that different from tons of stuff in the Old Series. If you are on that side of the divide, then presumably you think that the Caretaker is what Doctor Who was always like and are not quite sure why I am making all this fuss about it. 

I guess my position is this.

It doesn’t matter what Doctor Who “ought” to be. It is unfair to continually compare a new programme with an old programme; and definitely unfair to compare a real programme with an imaginary programme you’ve made up in your head. The true definition of Doctor Who is whatever happened in Doctor Who last week, and always has been.

On the other hand; you have to play to your strengths. A cop show probably should mostly be about a cop solving crimes. The cop is allowed to be cleverer and more observant than any one real policeman could ever be, and “forensics” are probably allowed to produce plot devices that no real forensics team could possibly produce; but if a fairy pops up and tells Frost whodunnit; or if Morse discovers the murder was committed by a ghost, well, that’s cheating. It’s also cheating to sell us a fairy story and then have a cop turn up and fob us off with a perfectly rational explanation on the last page. Unless the whole point is a big twist about what genre we are in mumble mumble Sixth Sense mumble mumble. But you have to do that sort of thing awfully well for the audience not to feel cheated. 

So it is probably not a good idea to sell us a series about explosions and robots — to show us trailers involving explosions and robots — and then reveal that really, it’s not an exploding robot story, it's a kissing story. 

On the other hand, and this being science fiction I am quite entitled to have three hands, by now, everyone knows that Doctor Who is, or partly is, or sometimes is, a romantic comedy about the Doctor, Clara and Danny (or the Doctor, Amy and Rory; or the Doctor, Rose and Mickey, and no, until I started typing this sentence I hadn’t realised that human boyfriends all have names ending in a Y.) 

I don’t really buy the premise. I never have done. I don’t accept that someone would be exploring the universe with the Doctor and at the same time worrying about whether or not she made a date with a colleague who she only met a couple of weeks ago. I don’t think that the kinds of people who worry about keeping appointments become explorers and adventurers. 

There are people who, offered the chance to spend two years living among the aforementioned previously undiscovered tribes in New Guinea would reply “No, I don’t want to do that, I would miss my kids’ birthday party.” And there are ones who would say “Yes: I will sacrifice everything, even family and friendship, for the sake of Adventure. I would walk naked into a live volcano if it meant I could learn something that no other man knew.”  Me, I don’t specially care if I die without seeing the Taj Mahal. I’d like to go to New York some day. But as Sam Gamgee spotted; the people who stay at home don’t get stories written about them. 

But I am happy to accept the premise. The big question is: is Steven Moffat? Is this definitely the story he wants to tell? Are Clara and Danny real grown up people who are in love? Is their relationship going to proceed to a plausible ending, happy or tragic, and are we going to properly deal with the consequences of that ending? If this answer is "yes" then this was an installment of a very good unfolding story. The problem kicks in if next week, they stop being grown up characters and become action figures again.

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This is a song. It is one of the nicest songs by one my favorite bands. It is not about politics: it is about football. But it sort of sums up my feelings at the end of a week in which I have joined a political party for the first time in my life; and for the first time in my life do not feel entirely cynical about politics.

Perhaps Jeremy could adopt it as his campaign anthem.

8.5 Time Heist

In 1926, mystery surrounded Agatha Christie, who was discovered staying at a Harrogate hotel eleven days after disappearing from her home. She had become distressed after learning her husband had got a young woman pregnant, although in his defense, he claimed that the policeman did it.

I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue

In this week's episode of Doctor Who, the Doctor and his companions are in terrible danger. Does he have a plan to get them out of it?  "My personal plan is that a thing will probably happen quite soon”. 

Last week, at the crucial moment, Wonderful Clara realized how the TARDIS telepathic circuits worked, she said that she thought the could "do a thing". When asked to explain her plan, she replied "it's not a plan, it's a thing." 

Two weeks before that, when they were trapped inside a Dalek, the Doctor and Clara both separately said that they were going to do "a clever thing".

Four years ago when Doctor Who was good, Matt Smith delivered what, at the time, seemed like a funny line. River Bloody Song had asked him how he was going to save Amy, and he replied “I'll do a thing.” What thing, asks River. “I don't know. It's a thing in progress. Respect the thing.” 

It was a nice hint about the Doctor Matt's emerging persona. Smith’s Doctor admitted that he rarely knew what he was doing -- that he winged it, and then let people think that whatever happened was his plan after all. He himself was on some level pretending to be the Doctor and not quite sure he could pull it off. He said that he wouldn't know what he intended to do until he had finished talking about it or that he was going to do something incredibly clever that he hadn't even thought of yet.

But as soon as the Doctor says anything at all, that thing becomes a catchphrase, a cliche. One of those things which the Doctor says. Any scene in any episode can be given instant gravitas if the Doctor says something a bit like something he once said before. 

I wear a Scottish accent now. Scottish accents are cool. 

*

Having rebooted itself three times already this season, and deconstructed itself to death last week the only thing left for Doctor Who is to play about in the wreckage. If the character we knew as the Doctor basically doesn't exist then why not drop the bit that's left into a "high concept" action movie and see what happens. 

Nothing wrong with this story. Didn't need to be a Doctor Who story; but nothing wrong with it. Didn't see the twists coming. Didn't throw anything at the TV. 

The Doctor, Wonderful Clara, and two nondescript NPCs have been told by an unknown third party to rob a bank for an unknown purpose. They have amnesia, so they don't know why they agreed to it, or how they came to be there there. This is the sort of plot summary Douglas Adams came up with when he had writer's block, which was always. He hoped that if he just started writing, the blank bits would fill themselves in.

In fact, it turns out not to be so much a Hollywood Heist movie as a computer game based on a Hollywood Heist movie. The Doctor actually asks the supporting characters what their special powers are. The person who hired them as left helpful technological artifacts hidden all round the bank he wants them to rob.

It turns out that there is more to the person-who-hired them than meets the eye. The "robbery" is not all that it seems, either. Both twists are quite clever, but they seem to come out of Big Book of Quite Clever Twists. They are not twists which arise organically from the story -- twists which make sense but have been cunningly hidden with red herrings and false trails. They are ha-ha fooled you twists which muck about with the expected structure of the story. Not that there is anything wrong with that, necessarily. I once played a big computer RPG where you are a semi-amnesiac hero hunting down a dark lord who had vanished some years early and about halfway through it turns out, quite unexpectedly... Well, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. You can probably imagine how it turned out. I quite enjoy being quite surprised.

Old Old Who was a perfect TV format. The hero had a Time Machine that didn’t work and some companions who didn’t want to be there, and it would plonk both of them into a random location each week. The Time Travelers would get involved with whatever was happening in their randomly chosen destination. The TARDIS is a big blue answer to the question “what excuse is there for a hero to be in tenth century England one week and a far future super-bank the next week?” 

Once you have changed the set up (and I understand why the set up had to be changed) and allowed the Doctor to chose his destination each week, then you have to come up with more and more contrived pretexts for the Doctor to get involved in a plot. This week, the contrived pretext is a mysterious shadowy figure who turns out to be...oh, come on, surely you can guess? It's quite fun, of course. But each episode feels like a bigger, more horribly overwritten contrivance than the one before.

In the old days, last Autumn, what would have kept me watching the Doctor and some one-note supporting characters robbing the Biggest Bank In the Universe (a bit like the Biggest Library in the Universe) would have been Matt Smith. In the Old Old Days, it would have been Tom Baker or Sylvester McCoy. These were Doctors who fascinated us, and more importantly, Doctors who it was impossible not to like.

Steven Moffat has cleverly come up with a Doctor who it is impossible to like. Colin Baker was meant to be an un-likable Doctor but after an interestingly deranged debut story he settled for being nice but sarcastic. Peter Capaldi is a Doctor who says things like “She is dead and we are alive. Prioritize if you want it to stay that way.” A Doctor who two weeks ago had “Doesn’t like soldiers” on his character sheet but is now talking like a sergeant major. Or a Dalek. Or, indeed, a P.E Teacher. Doctor Tom could occasionally be harsh, but he had a big grin and a bag of jelly babies and a twinkle in his eye. Doctor Capaldi couldn’t twinkle if he tried. 

Wonderful Clara is, I suppose, meant to be a counterpoint to the Nasty Doctor, just as Ace counterbalanced Sylvester McCoy and Evelyn counterbalanced Colin Baker. But all she actually does is walk around with a big arrow over her head saying "I AM WONDERFUL" and banter with him. 

Capaldi is a fine actor, of course. But he is beginning to look like a series wrecking piece of miscasting. 

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8.4 Listen

Stop your crying now, let daddy dry your tears

There’s no bogeyman to get you, never fear

There’s no ogres, wicked witches

Only greedy sons-of-bitches

Who are waiting to exploit your life away

                Ewan MacColl

Is it ever so slightly incredibly racist for your one black character to be called “Mr Pink”? The black guy in The Mutants was notoriously called Mr Cotton. 

Has the Doctor’s relationship with Wonderful Clara gone beyond “Sherlock says amusingly inappropriate things, bless him” and become actually abusive? The remark about her make-up; the remark about what she looks like from behind: those are not things which an actual woman...an actual person would put up with from another actual person.

Matthew Waterhouse said that 80s scriptwriters cared so little about Adric that he had to assume he was playing a different character in each script. This week the artful dodger; next week, the comedy Bunter who munches his way through the entire buffet; then a geek who betrays the Doctor because it seems the logical thing to do; then a side-kick who hangs out with Uncle Doctor. I wonder if Jenna Coleman approaches Wonderful Clara the same way. Last week, flirting shamelessly with Robin Hood; this week, too shy to make small talk with a colleague over dinner. Two weeks ago the joke was that Danny was painfully shy and Wonderful Clara was bubbly and forward. 

*

Am I perhaps giving the impression here that I’m prepared to talk about everything apart from the actual episode? 

I try to be fair as well as subjective. Different people want different things out of TV shows. The kinds of people who like Doctor Who are no longer the kinds of people Doctor Who wants to be liked by. (S’triangulation, innit?) Other people liked this story. It was up for a Hugo and everything. It deserves a serious critique, not just me informing you whether it made me go “yummy” or “yuck”. 

But I am going to go with my gut instinct. 

   

Yuck. 

I hated it. 

*

I didn’t hate it because it messed around with the Doctor’s background. I didn’t hate it because it was the second story to mess around with Doctor’s background in three weeks. I didn’t even hate it because it broke a long standing taboo and included flashbacks to the Doctor’s lost boyhood on Gallifrey. I hated it because it messed around with the Doctor’s background in an unimaginative and predictable way that didn’t even make sense on its own terms. 

Two weeks ago, we were told that the Doctor became the Doctor when he met the Daleks and realized that being the Doctor was all about not, definitely not, rampaging around the universe destroying all other forms of life. 

This time, we learn that the Doctor is the Doctor because Wonderful Clara visited him when he was a little boy and recited some motivational poster slogans about not being afraid of stuff.

What makes the Doctor the Doctor is not being evil and not being scared. 

Well, yeah. That’s sort of implicit in being the good guy. I am not sure it’s the sort of thing we need origin myths to explain. 

There is a scene in Very Old Who – The One About the Budgie From Atlantis, I think – where Doctor Jon cheers up Jo by telling him a story about his childhood. Turns out he had a mentor on Gallifrey who opened his mind on his darkest day. (He forced him to look, to look properly, at a daisy for the first time. Very Zen.) It was, even then, a little disconcerting to hear the Doctor talking about something which happened when he was “a little boy”. But Barry Letts ensured that there was a back door in his conjurer’s box. Yes, he slightly demystifies the Doctor by revealing that he had a mentor and a childhood. We didn’t even know the name of his planet in those days. But then he drops a tantalizing hint about “the Doctor’s darkest day” and leaves it hanging in the air. The Doctor is made slightly less mysterious and slightly more mysterious at the same time. 

The childhood scene in Listen merely makes the Doctor more ordinary: implies that he would always have been ordinary if not for the intervention of Wonderful, Wonderful Clara. Gallifreyan childhoods appear to be indistinguishable from Earthly childhoods: barns, doors with latches, mothers with long aprons. 

I remember the days when new Time Lords were grown in vats.

I get that bedrooms are children’s dens, and beds are where you dream and where Santa comes and where Teddy lives, but the adults-in-children’s-bedrooms thing is starting to feel uncomfortable. Wonderful Clara (a qualfieid teacher) sneaking into a boy’s bedroom in a children’s home? Is she out of her mind? The fact that the Doctor met Clara when she was a little girl and Clara met Danny when he was a little boy and now Clara met the Doctor when he was a little boy is starting to feel slightly creepy as well. 

*

I don’t hate Listen because it was an exact re-run of ideas that Steven Moffat has used, oh, three or four times before. I hate it because they are unimaginative, predictable ideas. 

“What” muses the Doctor to himself “If no one is ever really alone? What if every single living being has a companion, a silent passenger, a shadow? What if the prickle on the back of your neck, is the breath of something close behind you?” 

“What”, we all say in unison, “you mean, exactly like the Silence?”

“Did we come to the end of the Universe because of a nursery rhyme?” asks Wonderful Clara? 

“Not a nursery rhyme”, we all exclaim, “like ‘tick tock goes the clock’ in Season 6 and ‘do you hear the whisperman’ in Season 7?”

I understand that, in folk memory Doctor Who was scary. Kids had nightmares about Doctor Who monsters. 

We remember the One With the Spiders because people don’t like spiders and the idea of a giant telepathic spider that can jump on your back and mind-control you is a terrifying idea. Also a Buddhist allegory, but mostly just a terrifying idea.

We remember the One With the Maggots because maggots are disgusting and squick you out, so giant ones are even more disgusting. 

We remember the Daleks because they were creepy and shouty and wanted to kill ua. They forced you to work in coal mines and exterminated the whole work force if it caught one of them slacking, like a particularly unpleasant P.E teacher I once had.

Same goes for the Autons. Lots of people are creeped out by waxworks and dummies. Even people who aren’t have occasionally had bad dreams about waxworks coming to life. Dummies and toys and house hold appliances coming to life and trying to kill you is a scary idea.

But Moffat seems fixated on the idea that a scary story isn’t a story about the kinds of things people are scared of – spiders and lizards and death and cross country runs. It’s a story about being scared; a story about fear. 

His best creations, the statues that come to life when you aren’t looking at them, play on that idea. So do his worst creations; the invisible telepathic piranhas that live in your shadow. And also his exactly the same creations, the evil monsters you instantly forget about five seconds after you saw them. 

So now we have his once-more-with-feeling creations: the creature that is so good at hiding that no-one knows it exists but everyone is terrified of it anyway. “What” asks this story “if the monsters-under-the-bed were real?”

“You’ve done that one before” we all cry “In The One With Madam Pompadieu. And The One About The Dolls House In the Block Of Flats.”

*

What we are left with is not so much a story as three linked vignettes.

Wonderful Clara goes on a date with Danny. They are both nervous, so it’s a disaster. “First date nerves” are somehow thematically connected to “being terrified of the dark” and “thinking there might be an existential threat at the end of the universe” but there is no narrative connection. We aren’t told that Wonderful Clara messes up the date because the Evil Fear Monster is magnifying her Negative Emotions and Feeding On Them. It would have been better if we had been. 

The Doctor and Wonderful Clara go back in time and visit Danny when he was a little boy. Danny is terrified of the Under The Bed Monster, which Clara assures him does not exist, and then everyone is terrified by a hiding-under-the-bedspread monster. It goes away without revealing whether it existed or not. 

The Doctor and Wonderful Clara go forward in time and meet one of Clara and Danny’s descendents, who is earth’s first time traveler. He has accidentally been sent to the end of time and is planning to set up a restaurant there convinced that there are invisible Under-the-Bed-Monsters banging on the airlock of his moonbase spaceship thingy. Everyone runs away before discovering if they really were or not. 

There is quite a decent prologue of a paranoid Doctor, alone in the TARDIS, convincing himself that he is being followed around by an undetectable alien entity. I quite liked that bit. Capaldi will probably put it in his show-reel. I even almost understood it. The Doctor convincing himself that the universe is full of malevolent entities you can’t see or feel is a bit like a little child convincing himself that there are monsters under his bed.

Then there is the epilogue where Clara visits the Doctor when he was a little boy and tells him that it’s all right, he doesn’t need to be scared of the monsters-under-the-bed, and that anyway, fear can be a good thing. 

Is the idea that the events in the story can be looked at from two points of view — one, in which there really was a monster in Danny’s room, and one, in which everyone was spooked by a kid in a blanket? Is the idea that Wonderful Clara, by going back to see the Doctor when he was a little boy and repeating some of his own platitudes at him, retrospectively changes things so that the Doctor never became scared and paranoid at all? But he did. We’ve just seen the episode. 

I understand that the Doctor has a terrible recurring nightmare in which he wakes up in the night and something under his bed grabs his ankle. (And everyone else has the same nightmare as well, for reasons which are never even hinted at.) And I concede that the moment where Clara hides under the Kid-Doctor’s bed and grabs his ankle to stop a Bad Thing happening, is quite clever. The terrible scary thing the Doctor dreams about is really a Wonderful thing. I read somewhere that that happens in Shamanic initiations — you make friends with the thing in your dream that terrifies you and it becomes your totem animal. But I don’t get what is supposed to have happened in the story. The Doctor has no reason to be scared of the Bed-monster: it was only Clara. But he is scared of it. He’s told us so. And Clara can’t ever tell him what really happened.

Why doesn’t Clara come right out and tell the Doctor how the little boy in the orphanage and the big boy at the end of the universe were related to the guy she was on a date with? The answer “because she’s an idiot” does not seem consistent with what we already know about her. In The Dalek One the Doctor refused to allow the similarly colour coded Journey Blue onto the TARDIS because he “doesn’t like soldiers.” Hello, Sgt Benton. Hello, Captain Yeats. Hello, Ben Jackson. Hello, Ian, probably. Hello “his name was Ross” from the Sontaran One. Was “not liking soldiers” only written in to give wonderful Clara a pretext to keep her relationship with Danny a secret from the Doctor? 

At least, with Nicholas Courtney no longer around, there is no danger of us ever having to deal with the fact that the Doctor’s very best friend in all the universe was, er, a Brigadier.

In the Doctor Who universe, stuff seems to be capable of just spontaneously popping into existence. People can have memories which aren’t memories of anything. The Doctor tells Danny that fear is like a superpower — it makes you cleverer and more alert. Wonderful Clara goes back in time and repeats this to the baby Doctor. So the grown up Doctor is passing on to Danny something that someone once said to him “in a dream”. But Clara was only passing on what the Doctor said to her, which was… Where did the idea originally come from?

It gets more complicated when you try to give innocent little remarks big complicated meanings. In the very first ever story, Doctor Bill told Barbara that “fear makes companions of us all”. He meant was that he was cross about the two teachers barging onto his TARDIS and they were cross about him dragging them back to the stone age, but they were going to have to work together to escape from the cavemen with posh accents. Clara whispers “fear makes companions of us all” at Kid-Doctor — but now it has a complicated philosophical message, or at any rate, a trite philosophical message. “Fear is like a companion. A constant companion, always there. But that's okay, because fear can bring us together. Fear can bring you home. I'm going to leave you something, just so you'll always remember, fear makes companions of us all.” 

Of course, the Doctor didn’t understand what Wonderful Clara meant. Or else, he didn’t properly remember it. She said “Fear, itself is a companion” but the Doctor thought she meant “You have to make friends with people you don’t much like when you are scared.”

Unless...

Does anyone know if probationary teachers at modern comps have to be interviewed by the board of governors? We know from Sarah Jane that friends of the Doctor can sometimes spot each other when they meet. I can imagine the chairman of the Coal Hill School governors being introduced to Wonderful Clara and saying (with a twinkle in his eye) “I expect you are nervous about your first proper teaching job, but don’t worry as a very good friend once said to me ‘fear makes companions of us all.’” 

No. That way fan fiction lies. 

*

In summary, “yuk”. 

A big big thing in the Doctor’s life was when an earth girl snuck into his room and told him to feel the fear and do it anyway.

Give. Me. A. Break.

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