The Name of the Doctor

[morwen]

We open in a repair shop, as well-dressed a set as we get in 2013, with full Murray Gold blazing out of the speakers. "What sort of idiot would steal a faulty TARDIS?", indeed. A CGI camera-pull reveals the full glory of Gallifrey's capitol dome and the Citadel of the Time Lords.

They are watching on television an older gentlemen and a young woman enter a TARDIS. But the image shown there is very different to what we're looking at. Interlaced, and desaturated, if not grey. The set design is something that could have plausibly been seen in 1963. If we had seen the Doctor steal that TARDIS, it would have looked like this. But that of existing in the same place as the CGI and Murray Gold Gallifrey. Clara is noisy too, but her costume is the same as the technicians in the first scene. Later, when the sequence is resumed, we see the unmarked grey cylinder tumbling in the pulsating time vortex. It looks incongruous in a way that the a 1960s police box manages not to.

Clara is then seen in the TARDIS corridors of 2013, with a man wearing a very brightly-coloured coat wandering in the background. Clara is dressed in a manner that's a bit 80s. Next she's been comped into a corridor, wearing something very 70s sci-fi, almost looks like it came out of Blake's Seven. And then she's running down a corridor, approaching a gurning Doctor who has for some reason suspended himself from a walkway with his umbrella. Dressed very 80s again, but differently...

And then, another Clara, who almost manages to attract the attention of a white-haired Doctor (not the same of the first), driving a bright yellow car, before seeing another two Doctors (a chap with improbable hair nd a frock coat, and a funny little clown in a fur coat) run in front of her. She's - as we see in the long shot with the Doctor running from her - in the modern day, but she's not wearing modern day clothes. And then, another one, trapped, wearing some kind of cricketing outfit.

At every stage Clara is wearing era-appropriate clothes for the Doctor she is interacting with. Not those for the era or environment she is in. Clara isn't just becoming part of the Doctor's timeline; she's gone back and become part of Doctor Who.