Character Highlight: Steven Taylor (Doctor Who)

I feel like classic Who took a bit of a misstep with Steven.  He wasn’t a bad companion or anything, and he worked well enough with everyone they put him with, from Vicki to Dodo, but I dunno.  I get the sense that the show couldn’t quite decide who it wanted him to be, and his character suffered as a result.

First off, two-thirds of Steven’s stories are all or mostly made up of lost episodes, and it’s always a little tougher to connect with a companion whose adventures are mainly audio-only.  Even though I can get by pretty well between the audio track and the picture recons, it still can’t hold my attention quite as well, and you don’t get as much of a sense of what the character is really like.  I’m so grateful for the lost episodes that have been recovered in recent years, as well as the serials that have been put out with animated reconstructions to fill in the gaps.  Without these releases, I wouldn’t have as good of a sense of Ben and Polly or Victoria.  Unfortunately, much of Steven’s tenure on the show is still unavailable in its full version.

I remember being really intrigued by Steven’s introduction at the end of “The Chase.”  A space pilot from the future, stranded on a hostile planet – shades of Vicki, true enough, but it’s not quite the same situation.  When we meet Steven, he’s manic from his long period of isolation, on the whole a little unbalanced and outright giddy at seeing humans again.  And really, if the show was going to do a “future human who crash-lands on an alien world” companion origin for the second time in a row, it’d be logical enough to address how an experience like that would mess you up.  The show doesn’t really go down that road with Vicki, so it would’ve been nice to look more at the effects of Steven’s time on Mechanus, but as with Vicki, all that is dropped pretty quickly.

What we’re left with is a rather ill-defined-feeling companion.  Smart enough, although after a Gallifreyan teenager, two teachers, and Vicki, Steven is probably the least intellectual companion to date when he comes onto the scene (being from the future, he probably knows quite a bit more than Ian and Barbara, but we don’t see that many instances of him solving problems with his knowledge.)  Brave, and a decent fighter, although he seems to spend more than his fair share of time getting capture and/or bested in combat (I feel like history teacher Ian is more of a badass than space pilot Steven.)  Fairly good leadership skills that crop up now and again, often in terms of wrangling one-shot characters to help out in dicey situations.  Compassionate – for a while, his time on the TARDIS is pretty rough in terms of what happens to his friends, and he feels it sharply when things go badly.

I think my main issue with Steven is that very little about him feels specific to who he is.  After his initial introduction, his background hardly comes up at all; it doesn’t inform who he is.  (In fact, the only major reference that comes to mind is when the Doctor wants him and Sara to stay in the TARDIS when they land in England in the middle of “The Daleks’ Master Plan,” saying that humans from the future wouldn’t be able to cope with mid-20^th-century air pollution.)  It feels like he does things more as the story needs him to rather than because “that’s such a Steven thing to do.”  It’s too bad, because I think there was potential in the character, but it was never fully realized.