Anonymous asked: SO quick question. If Clara goes through all of the doctor's time line to save him, why did he only remember meeting her twice? We see that he communicates with her more than just those two times (picking out the tardis) so why would he not remember seeing her like tons of times?!
A quick question is something like, “What kind of shoes do you like?” This is not a quick question. There is no obvious answer, but I’ll give you three possibilities:
Simplest
We don’t know how often he actually saw her and interacted, but he always seemed pre-occupied and busy when he ran into her. Yes, she interacted with One, but he was busy trying to steal a TARDIS and run away. Also, One is definitely not the most observant of Doctors. It’s possible he just forgot her.
Similarly, and only slightly more complicated
The Claras the past Doctors encountered were echoes. And, as The Doctor explains to River, echoes fade away. It’s possible that the Clara echoes fade out of The Doctor’s timeline over time, and it would be increasingly more difficult for him to remember the echo he encountered. The reason he encountered more Claras as Eleven, and thus remembered her echoes is because he was moving closer to meeting the original Clara, and the event that creates all the echoes, and one hears the most echoes when nearest the person who yells.
Complicated
The Doctor also doesn’t remember the Great Intelligence going back through his timeline and trying to destroy everything. This is most likely because his regular, post-echo-Clara timeline reasserted itself. But at each moment in The Doctor’s life, The Great Intelligence is both erasing what he did and not erasing what he did. It’s possible there are three possible timelines: one where the G.I. is erasing what The Doctor did, not erasing what the Doctor did, and the one where Clara is fixing it, which means that, at each point, Clara is both existing and not existing in The Doctor’s timeline. Just before the Asylum, Clara has simultaneously “gone back” and “not gone back yet” at the same time. And only once she goes back in The Doctor’s timeline in front of Eleven does the knowledge of the timeline assert itself.
I told you that was complicated.
But go ahead and take your pick. I’m sure there are other explanations, those are just three “quick” ones I came up with just now. I’m kind of partial to number two, if for no other reason than I don’t want to explain the third one again.
