Favorite Characters: Bill Potts (Doctor Who)

By the time Bill came along, it had been a good several years since I’d unabashedly loved a companion  My frustations with Clara are well recorded and don’t need going over again.  While I like Amy and River, I don’t always like what the show does with them, which colors my enjoyment of them somewhat.  And Rory is great, but it takes quite a while for him to feel like a companion in his own right rather than Amy’s tag-along, and even though I do like his relationship with the Doctor, it’s never really highlighted the way the Doctor’s relationships with other (read:  female) companions are.

Enter Bill, wonderfully refreshing and long-awaited.  Still a little bit of a part-time companion, since we see a decent amount of her living, dating, and going to school, but she never brushes off time-and-space travel as something she can’t be bothered with, and the only time she complains about it is when the Pope interrupts her date by bursting out of her bedroom (where the TARDIS has just materialized.)  No – this is a young woman who recognizes full well the opportunity that’s been handed to her, and she doesn’t intend to waste a moment of it.  I love to watch her infectious relish at arriving on different planets, in different times, and among different people.  In her earliest adventures, she repeatedly thanks the Doctor for bringing her, and she frequently dives in with both hands, wanting to take in absolutely everything around her.

Bill also marks a return to form with a companion that’s an ordinary person shown how life can be extraordinary.  She’s first introduced to TARDIS living through a crazy sci-fi occurrence that seeps into her life, as virtually all companions do, but the Doctor doesn’t invite her along to solve the mystery of her.  Instead, he’s initially intrigued by her, not as a companion, and not even in a sci-fi capacity, but just as a clever young person with potential that hasn’t been helped along, and when he does ask her to travel with him, it’s after she’s fought for the right not to have her one astounding day of adventure swept under the rug.

One of the biggest things anyone notices about Bill is, of course, her propensity for questions, both of the Excellent and mundane variety.  I know some fans find it annoying, but I love it.  It’s a quality that seems to suit her very well, that brimming energy and the mind that never stops racing, often two or more steps ahead of the rest of her.  What’s more, it goes back to what first makes her catch the Doctor’s eye:  that, when she doesn’t know something, she smiles rather than frowns.  More than anything, Bill just wants to know, anything and everything, and she’ll never run out of things she hasn’t learned yet.

I also like that Bill is our first full-time queer companion (sorry, Jack – love you, but you’re definitely recurring,) and on that front, I think the show overall does a decent job with her.  Certainly, there’s less of the male-gazeness and teasing than we get with Vastra and Jenny, and her flirtation with Heather at the start of the season is both sweet and cute.  If I have a complaint, it’s that the show most often brings it up in the context of her being not-straight rather than her being gay, explaining to guys why she’s not into them.  In this way, I don’t think it’s quite equitable with her straight new Who predecessors (especially not Moffat’s previous companions, who all have a lot of relationship stuff in their plots,) but it’s a lot closer than I worried it might have wound up being.