Reply to post: Re: Could have had Cyber-Clara

Re: Could have had Cyber-Clara

I was expecting that, actually, but it didn't happen.

Then again, Vastra and Strax (and probably Jenny, between Vastra's Silurian tech and Strax's medical training) should, theoretically, still be around, with two of them probably inhuman enough to be immune to cyberconversion. You'd think that they'd take action, too, what with London being their home as well.

Of course, one could also ask where Martha Jones and Micky Smith are, what with Jones ostensibly still being a member of, or at least affiliated with, UNIT, etc, etc.

In the end, well... Any overt lack of control on Missy's part, or any oddity of these cybermen, can be adequately explained by the fact that they are not normal cybermen. There's no cybercontroller; there's no Cyberman plot. This is all Missy's doing, and it's entirely understandable that Missy wouldn't be as expert a cyber-controller as an actual cybercontroller. That's why a lot of them danced around, dazed and confused; only the ones she'd personally preprogrammed (in the cathedrals) would be ready to go with her plan. Remember, there were only four attacking the plane, it's entirely possible she called those four from a reserve she didn't mention to the Doctor (maybe the ones in the Republic of Ireland,) when she mentioned the number of cybermen in the cathedral in London.

It would also easily explain why certain, especially strong-willed individuals, like the Brigadier, or Danny Pink, with personal, close emotional connections to the situation at hand, and probably some awareness of what was going on, were able to defy her. (The Brig probably followed her safety-briefing instructions voluntarily, to maintain the ruse that he was under her control.)

As regards the mutual, devastating lies...

They were entirely understandable, and entirely boneheaded. The Doctor lied to Clara because he didn't want to admit how hurt he was that Missy had lied to him, how hurt he was that his homeworld wasn't there. He wanted to spare Clara from any guilt she might have felt at realizing that she'd insisted that he either execute, or let her execute, the one person whom they knew WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT, knew the location of Gallifrey, without taking the time to interrogate her or fact-check it.

Clara, in turn, perceived the Doctor as being something she hadn't seen him really be since he wore a bowtie: happy. Joyful. Elevated by mirth and cheer. As far as she knew (though she really should have remembered Rule One: The Doctor Lies,) everything was going aces for him, he was going to be able to go home, see his granddaughter, maybe his parents, for the first time in far longer than anyone should have to go without seeing them. She did, after all, demonstrate knowledge about him - I daresay that not even the Master knows the Doctor as well as Clara Oswald does, perhaps not even the Doctor knows the Doctor as well as the Impossible Girl knows the Doctor. She did, after all, impersonate him /so successfully/ as to prevent herself from being cyberconverted, and only someone who had firsthand knowledge that she was NOT the doctor - IE, Danny Pink - was able to say for sure that she wasn't the Doctor.

In tabletop RPG terms, she rolled a natural 20 to tell an absurdly unbelievable lie, and pulled it off. She told a whopper and got away with it, largely thanks to the massive circumstance bonus of practically being the Doctor's own biographer. So she, of all people, would know just how important going home was to the Doctor; and she'd also know that if she told him that Danny Pink had chosen to send the youth back instead of himself, it would crush him, because she would be crushed, too. It might even delay him from going home, sending him off on another attempt to bring him back from wherever he had gone. So she lied, so that he could believe everything was peaches and roses with her, and he could go home; unfortunately, he'd also lied to her, and he didn't have a peachy, rosy home to go back to.

Entirely understandable, entirely boneheaded, and the kind of thing that could only happen because both of them cared more about the other than about themselves. Am I happy about it? Not in the slightest, I loved the Impossible Girl. Perhaps the Doctor will actually regenerate /into/ her at some point in the future, because Jenna Coleman has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that she has the chops to be The Doctor. Perhaps she'll come back. Hell, perhaps another time-echo of her will show up; she is still the Impossible Girl, the girl who tore herself into a million, billion pieces and scattered herself throughout all of time and space. Or perhaps she'll figure out how to repair the Time Lord bracelet and use it to locate the Master's TARDIS and go off on her own adventures throughout time and space, perhaps picking up the Doctor's Daughter along the way or something. Or maybe she'll pop back to the late 1890s and chill with Vastra, Strax and Jenny.

Either way, I refuse to believe that a mundane goodbye and the life of a schoolteacher forevermore is what awaits Clara Oswald.