Since there was a Buster Keaton anniversary yesterday, here's the Sunday Who Review a day late.
Jo is a
little bit deceptive as a character. At
three full seasons, she had a pretty long tenure on the show, and many fondly
remember her time as a fun, sweet companion.
However, there are also many who view her as one of the more useless
classic Who companions, mostly
remembering instances of her going to pieces in a crisis or otherwise failing
to contribute valuably to an adventure.
For me, Jo tends to fall more in the middle – I think there’s more to
her than some would say, but I also think she was poorly served by the show at
times, and that keeps her from joining the upper echelons of my top companions.
Bubbly,
determined, and a bit dizzy, Jo Grant is assigned to be the Third Doctor’s new
“assistant” at UNIT after the offscreen departure of Liz Shaw. Within her first few minutes in the Doctor’s
lab, she makes a clumsy, ill-informed wreck of things, and the Doctor isn’t at
all surprised to learn that she had her muckety-muck uncle pull strings to get
her a job at UNIT in the first place. He
doesn’t see anything she brings to the table and isn’t the least bit pleased to
have her there.
This is
the picture of Jo that sometimes gets painted, and to be fair, it is the picture that the show sometimes
presents. The Jo who blunderingly
disrupts an experiment, the Jo who trips over her own feet while running from
monsters, the Jo who gets captured at the drop of a hat, the Jo who starts
crying, “I can’t!!” when there’s
something super important that has to be done right this second or everyone’s
going to die. If you string all of these
instances together (although, the getting-captured one can’t really be held
against her, since that continues to be one of the companion’s chief
functions,) it’s easy to write her off as a nothing companion from a more
sexist era of television with little to recommend her.
But
understand, that’s only the “sometimes” pictures. For all of her slightly-scattered
girl-next-door personality, Jo actually does have training as a government
agent with skills that we see pop up occasionally. We sometimes see her showing off some quick,
smart moves to disarm a bad guy, and more often, we see her making good use of
her escapology knowledge, working her way out of handcuffs, ropes, or whatever
the villains have used to bind her. It’s
kind of a disjointed characterization, because she has a tendency to go from
really competent and quick-thinking in one serial to hopelessly unhelpful in
the next. It’s hard to tell if the show
tries for a consistent narrative with her that balances these aspects or if
different writers simply have very different ideas of who she is and her place
within the show.
Regardless
of how useful she is or isn’t being, there’s also her personality, which is
mostly earnest and likeable. She reminds
me a little of the “adorable” character on Joss Whedon shows, such as Willow,
Fred, or Kaylee – sweet and kind with a bit of a spark to her. She has a talent for empathizing with those
that she meets on her adventures with the Doctor (particularly those of the
dashing young male variety, although it doesn’t really come across most of the
time as being a contributing factor for her) and a nice dynamic with all the
UNIT folks, especially Sergeant Benton, who sometimes gets the “sad trombone”
treatment from his other coworkers. And
of course, she’s a lot of fun with the Doctor, too. Her lack of scientific curiosity can
infuriate him, but she’s immensely loyal, very understanding, and has a knack
for taking the wind out of his sails in a light, friendly way. She’s not my favorite Third Doctor companion
(Liz Shaw forever!), but I think she might be the one that balances him out the
best.
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