Whouffaldi

Whouffaldi is the non-binary ship between the Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald from the Doctor Who fandom.

Canon
Clara was the companion of the Eleventh Doctor, and was present when he regenerated into the Twelfth Doctor. They had a rocky beginning in which Clara struggled to reconcile the new Doctor -- who was brusque, closed off and older in appearance -- with her previous Doctor, with whom she had shared a flirtatious relationship. But their relationship blossomed over the course of two seasons together into a deep emotional connection and mutual devotion.

Their relationship formed the centre of both of their lives, despite Clara having a long-term boyfriend throughout Season 8 who she was in love with as well. Clara's boyfriend was often a source of friction between her and Doctor in Season 8, with her lying to both men in order to continue travelling with the Doctor.

Clara drew a kinder side out of the Twelfth Doctor, frequently calling him out on his callousness and slowly softening him up into a person who smiled more and even accepted the occasional hug in Season 9. They were equals within the TARDIS, but her increasing recklessness during their adventures caused the Doctor to worry about his impact on her.

Their relationship resulted in arguably the most extreme reaction the Doctor has ever had to losing a companion: he was so unable to accept it that he endured torture for billions of years in order to have the opportunity to save her, and almost caused time itself to unravel. He could only let her go after his memory of her was erased.

Series 7
After Eleven's regeneration, Clara is stuck with an older-looking Doctor that has forgot how to fly the TARDIS.

Series 8
DEEP BREATH

They both arrived in Victorian London after being swallowed by a female tyrannosaurus. After a bit of Twelve mumbling because of his regeneration, he falls on the ground. After noticing Clara's behavior, Vastra decides to call her for a talk. Clara stays with the Doctor for a bit, and hears him saying words in his sleep. Clara thinks those words are about the dinosaur. The moment is interrupted by Strax, who asked Clara to take off her hat, not knowing it's her hair. Madame Vastra, with her veil on, asked her to come so they can talk. She accuses Clara to not care anymore about the Doctor because of his older appearance. Upset, Clara tells her that she is not superficial and would even date a mountain.

Meanwhile, the Doctor writes equations until he hears the tyrannosaurus. He leaves and tries to talk to her, saying that he will bring her back home. But, he doesn't have the time because suddenly, she's on fire. The Doctor goes to see what's happening by stealing a horse. The rest of the team discover that he's gone and go after him. The next day, the two meet in the restaurant, Clara think that the Doctor send her an invitation. They have an argument before noticing that everyone else wasn't breathing. They got captured by androids. After some teamwork based on trust, the two managed to stop the androids.

Back in present day, Clara is still doubting if this is the same Doctor she knew. She then receives a phone call from Eleven. The latter tells Clara to stay by Twelve's side, because of how lonely and scared he really is. After looking at Twelve, Clara finally recognizes the Doctor and gives him a big hug. Twelve awkwardly discovers that he's "not a hugging person anymore".

INTO THE DALEK

In this episode, the Doctor brings Clara coffee, at which point she berates him for being late, as she sent him to get coffee weeks ago, while they were in Glasgow. He asks her to come along on an adventure, and when she says she's busy, he says, "I need you," at which point she drops her plans completely and asks where they're going. He asks her to tell him if he is a "good man", and she, thrown by the question, says she isn't sure.

The Doctor has been roped into providing medical services to a broken Dalek he names "Rusty", who might be a good Dalek because he is against the other Daleks and wants to destroy them. The Doctor brings Clara with him, saying she isn't an assistant but "some other word." She calls herself his "carer", to which the Doctor says "she cares so I don't have to." Throughout the episode, the Doctor is abrasive and thoughtless towards the humans accompanying them inside the Dalek, and seems almost pleased to have discovered that Rusty is no longer 'good' once the radiation poisoning him is fixed. Clara slaps him and then lectures him on how he's acting like a jerk and also missing the right answer. He thanks her and they complete the mission. At the end of the episode, Clara tells him she doesn't know if he's a good man, but she thinks he always tries to be.

ROBOT OF SHERWOOD

Clara requests to visit Robin Hood, her childhood hero, who the Doctor is certain doesn't exist. When they arrive in the right time period, they immediately meet Robin and Clara is thrilled and the Doctor is disbelieving. He and Robin have a rivalry throughout the episode, which Clara finds largely annoying, yelling at both of them to shut up while the three of them are chained up in the dungeons. At the end of the episode, Robin tells the Doctor that Clara had told many stories about him, and says that the Doctor is clearly Clara's hero.

LISTEN

The episode revolves around a disastrous first date with Danny -- the boyfriend who will cause a lot of tension throughout the season due to Clara's inability to define her relationship with the Doctor. After she and Danny accidentally insult each other, Clara storms off and the Doctor appears in her bedroom to ask her help with a problem. She's resistant because she thinks Danny might call her, but goes into the TARDIS anyway. The Doctor is chasing a theory that there is a creature that is perfect at hiding and is the source of the common nightmare where you go to get up from your bed in the middle of the night and something under the bed grabs your ankle. He takes Clara's hands and guides them into the telepathic interface of the TARDIS so she can guide the ship back to her own childhood to find the source of that nightmare. However, her phone rings and distracts her, so they end up in Danny Pink's childhood instead.

Clara asks the Doctor to do her a favour and help her fix her date by taking her back to just after she'd stormed out of the restaurant so she can go back in and resume the date. He does, but she and Danny manage to fight again and she leaves the date a second time after being distracted by a man in a space suit who she believes to be the Doctor. It's actually Orson Pink, a time traveller from the future who looks exactly like Danny and keeps dropping cryptic hints that he is Clara's great-great-great-grandson.

After the Doctor is knocked out in Orson Pink's future space station, the TARDIS accidentally travels back to the Doctor's personal history, to when he was a child sleeping in a barn. Clara hides under the Doctor's bed in order to avoid detection, and when the child version of the Doctor tries to get up because he hears something, she grabs his ankle -- making her the nightmare. She then soothes the Doctor, petting his hair as she tells him it's just a dream and that fear is a strength -- something the Doctor had repeated earlier in the episode to the child Danny.

Clara and Danny reconcile at the end of the episode and begin their relationship.

TIME HEIST

The Doctor arrives at Clara's house and says he has a whole day worked out for them, but Clara is on her way out for a date. The TARDIS phone rings, and when he picks it up, he and Clara suddenly find themselves in a bank with two other people and no memory of the last hour. They are told through a recording of a mysterious person named the Architect that they have agreed to rob a bank, along with Psi, an augmented human akin to a cyborg and Saibra, a mutant human who can transform into any other person.

They carry out the plan despite encountering a terrifying creature that can sense guilt and melt your brains, which seems to be used as a weapon by the bank staff. The creature, called the Teller, is apparently the last of its kind. Psi and Clara bond after he tells her that he had erased his own memory of his friends and family so that the information couldn't be interrogated out of him, saying that he must have loved them very much to have done that.

Psi later seemingly sacrifices himself to draw the Teller's attention away from Clara, but later on in the story, they discover he and Saibra are still alive and their apparent deaths were merely part of the plan. It turns out that the memory loss wasn't just to get them into the bank without too much guilt beaming out a message, but was because the Architect is actually the Doctor, and he arranged this whole bank heist after getting a phone call asking him to save the Teller. Clara balks briefly at the idea of saving the Teller, saying he had killed people, only for the Doctor to respond that she might do the same to protect everything she loved. It is revealed that the Teller is not the last of his kind -- the bank was holding his partner captive to induce him to do their bidding, so the Doctor rescues the two creatures and rehomes them.

At the end of the episode, Clara tells the Doctor not to rob any banks without her before she leaves to go on her date finally. After she's gone, he comments to himself that robbing a bank can't be beaten as a date.

THE CARETAKER

A montage beginning the episode shows how Clara is trying to manage dating Danny and having her adventures with the Doctor, including being pulled away to planets full of fish people right before she's supposed to go on a date and being too tan when she sees Danny one evening because she and the Doctor almost died while tied up in the sun surrounded by sand piranhas.

Then the Doctor shows up at the school where she teaches, undercover as the caretaker to investigate the trace of an alien called a Skovox Blitzer. Clara is nervous about introducing Danny to him, as Danny used to be a soldier and the Doctor has made his dislike of soldiers known. However, the Doctor -- after dismissing Danny numerous times as a P.E. teacher because he can't imagine a soldier would be a maths teacher -- assumes that Clara's boyfriend is actually another teacher named Adrian. Adrian wear a bowtie and has a square jaw, showing a clear resemblance to the Doctor's previous incarnation, the Eleventh Doctor, causing the Doctor to assume that of course, Clara must be dating this man. He approves of the idea, smiling at the two of them in the hallway together and later telling Clara that of course he likes her new boyfriend when she -- unaware that the Doctor believes it to be a different person -- ask him what he thinks.

Later, Danny susses out the Doctor is doing something suspicious at the school and tries to confront him, accidentally foiling a trap that the Doctor had set for the Skovox Blitzer. The Doctor is furious. Clara tries to lie about what Danny saw and he is having none of it. He assumes the Doctor is her father and the Doctor protests, saying they look "the exact same age". When the Doctor suggests wiping Danny's memory, Clara steps in the way, saying he's her boyfriend, which the Doctor responds to poorly, asking why she would date a soldier. She says she loves Danny, throwing the Doctor off even more. He asks her why she would say that, and asks about the "handsome one, the one with the bowtie", to which she says Adrian isn't her "type". The Doctor pulls an extremely incredulous facial expression at this statement.

Danny asks Clara who the Doctor is, and the Doctor waits to hear what Clara will say, prompting her to "go on," when she falters and can't seem to find the words. Danny asks why she's never mentioned the Doctor, and she says simply that it's because he's an alien. The Doctor is clearly exasperated by the brevity of this answer and walks away from them.

Clara explains to Danny that she and the Doctor travel together, and they show Danny the TARDIS. As Danny looks inside for the first time, Clara and the Doctor stand on the outside, looking at each other. As Clara herds Danny away to let the Doctor get back to his work, the Doctor tells Clara that she still needs to explain Danny to him.

Clara secrets Danny onto the TARDIS with an invisibility watch so that he can see her and the Doctor interact and see that side of her. However, the Doctor quickly realizes that Clara has brought Danny on board and goads Danny into revealing himself by pretending he and Clara are going to fly off on an adventure right now. When Clara says they shouldn't fly off right now, he points out that she's "never said no before, not even in the middle of dinner," clearly trying to let Danny know that Clara has always picked him first. Danny reveals himself, saying it's obvious the Doctor already knows he's there.

The two argue, with Danny stating that the Doctor is arrogant and reminds him of officers he'd dealt with as a soldier. He salutes the Doctor, even though the Doctor tells him not to, and keeps calling him "sir," until the Doctor yells at him and throws him out of the TARDIS, over Clara's complaints. After Clara follows Danny, the Doctor comments to himself, "Humans. I never learn."

The three of them eventually work together to defeat the Skovox Blitzer, although Danny criticizes the Doctor for exposing Clara to danger even though Clara willingly and eagerly ran into danger to help with the mission. At the end of the episode, Danny tells Clara he just wants to be kept in the loop if she's travelling with the Doctor, and that she should tell him if the Doctor pushes her too hard during their adventures.

KILL THE MOON

During the episode "Kill The Moon", the Doctor abandons Clara to make an enormous decision: whether or not to destroy the Moon (which is actually an alien egg) in order to protect Earth. This decision leads to a catastrophic fight between the two, with Clara feeling betrayed that he would leave her in such a position instead of helping out. He claims to have been allowing the human race to make its own decisions, but she tells him it was patronizing. The episode ends with her storming out after telling him to "clear off". She is comforted by Danny, who tells her she likely isn't done with the Doctor if she's still mad.

MUMMY ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

In the following episode, "Mummy On the Orient Express", the two have reunited for one more adventure as a last hurrah. Dressed to the nines on a recreation of the Orient Express which travels through space, the two of them dance around what it means that this is the end of their time travelling together.

While snuggling into his side as they lean on a table near the train window, Clara tells the Doctor that she thought she hated him after their trip to the Moon. He tries to change the subject, but she clarifies that she could never truly hate him, she just doesn't think she can travel like this anymore. Later in the cramped hallway, she asks him if he'd ever come round for dinner, trying to ask if they'll see each other again, and he says he thought she didn't want that. They cheers to their last hurrah.

Both are curious about unexplained deaths on the train, but are hesitant to talk to the other about it, with both getting up in the middle of the night and standing uncertainly outside the bedroom door of the other in indecision before walking away to investigate independently. Clara ends up in one part of the train with a young woman named Maisie, who asks her about the Doctor: "he's your what, exactly?" Clara says he's not her "anything", to which Maisie responds that Clara must mean they're "just friends". When Clara tries to change the subject, saying they should be able to talk about something other than "some man,", Maisie smiles and parrots back "some man?", clearly trying to tease Clara and imply that Clara and the Doctor might not be just friends. Clara goes to correct her again, but stops herself and explains that they used to travel and now aren't anymore. She tells Maisie about their fight, and Maisie totally agrees with her, but is shocked Clara would still get on a train with the Doctor after that. She tells Clara people walk away on a slammed door all the time, unless they are unable to.

"Life would be so much simpler if we liked the right people," Maisie says. "People we were supposed to like. But then I guess, there'd be no fairytales." Clara says nothing in response.

The Doctor ends up asking Clara to lie to Maisie in order to bring her to the lab to help with his quest to figure out how to stop the mummy killing everyone. Clara does as he asks, but isn't happy about it.

After the Doctor defeats the mummy, everyone passes out due to the air being vented from the train. Clara wakes up on a beach, wrapped in a blanket, with the Doctor drawing in the sand near her. He explains how he saved the day and took everyone home before the train blew up. He adds that he left her asleep because she seemed happy. She asks him if he merely pretended to be heartless when risking Maisie's life, and he asks her if it would make it easier for Clara to think that about him.

At the end of the episode, inside the TARDIS, Clara asks the Doctor if travelling and saving the day is like an addiction, and he tells her that she should let him know since she's the one trying to give it up. She receives a call from Danny, who believes she went on this trip to tell the Doctor it was over. She lies to him that she did, then loudly tells him, "I love you," which the Doctor, standing in clear earshot, overhears. Clara then lies to the Doctor that Danny is okay with her continuing to travel with him, and, delighted, the Doctor accepts her decision to continue as his companion.

FLATLINE

A shrinking TARDIS means that the Doctor is stuck inside while Clara is outside, speaking to him through earbuds and navigating the case as if she is the Doctor. She jokingly calls herself the Doctor and the Doctor is displeased with this. When the TARDIS is in danger, the Doctor turns it into siege mode, which protects it from outside damage but also means that life support is slowly shutting down because it's been sapped of power. As he is running out of air, the Doctor tells Clara, unsure if she can still hear him, that she had made a good Doctor.

-

When Danny is killed in a car accident, Clara goes to extreme lengths to bring him back by blackmailing the Doctor. She orders him to save Danny while throwing the TARDIS keys into a volcano. When the Doctor refuses, she breaks down in despair and he reveals that she hasn't destroyed all the TARDIS keys as she thought -- the entire encounter had unfolded in a dream state the Doctor placed the two of them in. He then berates her for betraying him, but shocks her by agreeing to help her all the same, stating that her betrayal changes nothing. After resolving the situation, the Doctor and Clara agree to part ways, with Clara falsely claiming that Danny had returned from the afterlife and the Doctor saying he'd located his home planet, Gallifrey. Their "final meeting" ends with the Doctor accepting a warm hug from her and the two agreeing they each made each other feel special.

The Doctor and Clara are reunited during Christmas when both find themselves trapped in a dream state where they interact with, of all people, Santa Claus. They quickly reveal they had lied to each other so as to make the other feel OK about parting ways. During one of their dreams, they encounter Danny Pink, who effectively gives the still-grieving Clara permission to find someone else. Still trapped in the dream world, Clara imagines herself growing immensely old; when talking to the Doctor, she says she never married because there was only one man other than Danny she would have married, "but he was impossible." Upon escaping the dream state, the Doctor invites Clara to travel with him once more. She accepts by kissing him on the cheek.

Series 9
The Doctor and Clara grow increasingly close over the events of this season. A key moment occurs in "Before the Flood" when the Doctor is resigned to likely dying, resulting in Clara admonishing him with "If you love me in any way, you'll come back!" Which he does. By this point in time, the Doctor willingly accepts hugs from Clara, most notably in "The Woman Who Lived" when Clara wraps her arms around him for no apparent reason. He also initiates hugs on at least two occasions when he thinks he's lost her. In "The Zygon Inversion", he successfully talks down an alien who has taken Clara's appearance, afterwards explaining, "I let Clara Oswald get inside my head. Trust me. She doesn't leave."

When Clara is killed in "Face the Raven", the grieving Doctor spends 4.5 billion years dying over and over again to break through a wall stronger than diamond and escape the Confession Dial he has been trapped in by the Time Lords -- all to gain the opportunity to step back in time and rescue Clara from the moment of her death.

However, Clara's death is a fixed point in time, and they realize she will need to return to it in order to stop all of time from unravelling. With both Clara and the Doctor shaken by what his devotion to her has pushed him to do, they agree that one of them must lose their memories so that they can let the other go. They choose to leave it to chance, and the Doctor ends up being the one who loses his memory. Before this occurs, Clara tells him something very important that she refuses to divulge to anyone else. After the memory-erasure, the Doctor is left with vague memories of travelling with someone named Clara, and that she was someone special to him, but otherwise any memory of her appearance and his feelings for her are left a blank. Before saying goodbye to him, now having been rendered functionally immortal by the Doctor's efforts, Clara suggests a romantic melody the Doctor had been playing on his guitar during their final meeting might well be a remnant of what it was she had told in him private.

Series 10
In "The Pilot", the Doctor has been working as a professor on Earth, guarding a vault containing Missy. When he has an adventure with Bill, a college-aged young woman who he has begun to tutor after noticing she was attending his lectures despite not being a student, he decides that he should erase her memory of it to protect her. She accepts this, but asks him how he would feel if someone erased his memories of them. The Doctor hesitates, and Clara's Theme plays in the background. He decides not to erase Bill's memory. (N.B. A deleted scene from this episode has the Doctor playing a version of the theme on his guitar; by this time he has given the song a title: "I Forget".)

At the end of his life, directly before regeneration ("Twice Upon a Time"), the alien entity Testimony, in the guise of Bill, gives him a "gift" -- returning his memories of Clara and allowing him to meet her one last time. Just before transforming into Clara, "Bill" kisses the Doctor on the cheek.

Quotes
"I have a duty of care"

- The Doctor at Clara, during several points in Series 9 -"Robbing a bank. Robbing a whole bank. Beat that for a date."

- Doctor, 8x05: Time Heist -"I already have a hobby. It's you, by the way"

- Clara to the Doctor, 9x05 "The Girl Who Died" --"Clara Oswald, you will never look any different to me"

- The Doctor in S9 Last Christmas -"Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?"

- The Doctor to Clara in 8x11 "Dark Water" -

"The TARDIS is outside. [...] So all of time and all of space is sitting out there in a big blue box. Please! Don't even argue."

- The Doctor to Clara, before offering his hand to her, S9: Last Christmas

--"If you love me in any way, you’ll come back."

- Clara to the Doctor, 9x04 "Before The Flood" -"Look at you, with your eyes and your never-giving-up, and your anger, and your kindness. One day, the memory of that will hurt so much that I won't be able to breathe, and I'll do what I always do, I'll get in my box and I'll run, and I'll run. In case all the pain ever catches up, and every place I go, it will be there."

- Doctor to Clara, 9x05, "The Girl Who Died" --"Four and a half billion years? [...] No, why would you even do that? I was dead! I was dead and gone, why, why would you even do that to yourself?"

- Clara to the Doctor, 9x12 "Hell Bent" -"People like me and you. We should say things to one another. And I'm going to say them now."

- Clara to the Doctor, 9x12: Hell Bent -"Look how far I went for fear of losing you."

- Doctor to Clara, 9x12: Hell Bent -"I don't think I could ever forget you."

- Clara to the Doctor, 9x12: Hell Bent

Fanon
After watching Series 8, some fans started to ship the Twelfth Doctor with Clara Oswald. Episodes such as Mummy on the Orient-Express are seen by those who ship Whouffaldi as containing clear sexual tension. Just like Whoufflé, the actors playing the characters have a great chemistry both on screen and off screen. Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman themselves ship them. Their separation brought the fans to tears, but in Twice Upon A Time, they cried again but with tears of joy as they finally got one last interaction (a more substantial reunion had been planned for the episode, but Coleman was unavailable due to filming her series, Victoria, for anything other than a cameo that was filmed separately from the main episode).

While the fandom generally agrees they are soulmates, some believe they are platonic soulmates and that the Doctor ceased treating Clara romantically when he regenerated into an older body. Capaldi's casting marked a change from the younger actors who had portrayed the Doctor prior to him, and created the largest visible age gap between the Doctor and his companion in the Nu-Who era, something which changed how some fans viewed the dynamic between Clara and the Doctor. Those who ship the pair romantically argue that the Doctor has always been too old for his human companions, which wasn't a barrier to shipping until his face reflected it; that Twelve is constantly making hugely romantic statements; that Twelve and Clara have a much deeper connection than Eleven and Clara, largely due to Clara's character development; and point to the whole "4.5 billion years of suffering to break the laws of time to save her because he was destroyed by her death in a frankly psychotically codependent way" as a sign that the Doctor was clearly still in love with her.

Fandom
FAN FICTION

TUMBLR

Trivia

 * Part of the name of this ship is derived from Peter Capaldi.
 * According to the script of The Magician's Apprentice, the Doctor was playing Pretty Woman to Clara specifically.
 * In a letter, published in the spin-off work The Companion's Companion, it is revealed that Twelve called Clara "[his] Impossible Girl", just like Eleven did.
 * In Dark Water, there is a travelling shot on Clara's book shelves. One of the books is The Time Traveler's Wife. This is a reference to a book that inspired a Tenth Doctor-era story written by Steven Moffat and also inspired the character of River Song, but aspects of the novel are also reflected in Clara and the Doctor's relationship.
 * According to show-runner and writer Steven Moffat, when the Doctor tells Clara "Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?", the Doctor is saying "I love you." - "He’s surprised he has to say it. That’s the truth about him, he says lots of horrible things all the time, that’s because he assumes all the other stuff is taken for granted and it’s only in that moment Clara realises just how much he’s assuming is taken for granted, absolute monomaniacal devotion to her. He absolutely loves her."
 * Both Capaldi and Coleman confirmed that the relationship between the Doctor and Clara is romantic in nature, with the characters being too reluctant to tell each other about their feelings.