Relationship Spotlight: The Doctor & Bill Potts (Doctor Who)

I won’t use this post to rehash my well-documented issues with Twelve’s relationship with Clara, but suffice to say, when series 10 came along, I was ready for a new companion, one whose relationship with the Doctor was hopefully quite a bit healthier and a lot more fun.Very happily, I got my wish and then some in one Bill Potts (a few Bill-Doctor-related spoilers.)

It’s not uncommon for Doctors, especially in new Who, to initially meet their companions under extreme circumstances – at the onset of an alien invasion, for example, or after falling out of the sky with a fresh regeneration. Things are kicking off, the Doctor and their soon-to-be companion(s) are thrown together, and over the course of the ensuing adventure, the companion(s) catch the Doctor’s eye through their bravery/ingenuity/Excellent Questions/etc. Bill is a little different.

When Bill catches the Doctor’s eye, it’s at an unusual time for him anyway. Stuck at Bristol University guarding the vault, he’s taken up a semi-formal lecturer role, teaching on whatever subjects tickle his fancy as he deals with the prospect of staying put for 1000 years (kudos to Twelve for lasting as long as he does, by the way – Eleven goes stir-crazy after a few hours of sitting around in “Vincent and the Doctor,” and again in “The Power of Three.”) We’re given the impression that alien invasions have been in short supply for him lately and he’s been living as close to a “normal” life as it’s possible for the Doctor to live. He first encounters Bill, not in the middle of blowing up Autons or just before a hospital gets transplanted to the moon, but at his lectures. In amongst a crowded hall of students is a canteen worker who sneaks in to hear him, and he notices the way that she frowns instead of smiles when she comes across something she doesn’t know.

It’s not an instant meet-adventure-TARDIS scenario, either. Again with the “guarding the vault for 1000 years” thing, the Doctor at first engages Bill in a moderately-“ordinary” way, pulling strings to get her admitted to the university and offering to be her personal tutor. While Bill’s debut episode does eventually get around to the alien adventure stuff – sentient engine oil! a chase through time and space! incidental Daleks! – they’ve already known each other for a number of months before Bill ever learns about the TARDIS or time travel.

As such, it occurs to me that it would make sense to Bill to be quite a bit more astounded to learn that her tutor’s an alien (I feel like that reveal would have a bigger impact coming from someone you’ve known for a while, rather than an intriguing stranger,) but Doctor Who doesn’t always do the best job with logical follow-through. However, once Bill does start traveling with the Doctor, vault be damned, their interactions are a positive delight. They maintain something of the mentor/mentee vibe from their university connection, with Bill’s innumerable questions and some of the Doctor’s more instructive moments (like the “history’s a whitewash” scene in “Thin Ice.”) More than anything, though, they’re just friends. The Doctor teases Bill over worrying too much about stepping on butterflies when she first travels to the past, she makes silly bets with him and gives him movie recommendations, and he uses the TARDIS to help her move in with some friends, after which he almost immediately crashes their low-key housewarming (to be fair, there are alien termites in the walls.)

There are parts of their relationship that aggravate me, mostly coming from the Doctor’s side: the way he keeps trying to get her out of the way in “Smile” (I get that it’s a dangerous situation, but accept that, if someone’s your companion, they’re gonna be in dangerous situations – stop trying to manage them,) hiding the whole blindness thing from her after “Oxygen,” and whatever the hell that regeneration fakeout in “The Lie of the Land” is about. I pretty much always dislike it when Doctors are manipulative and/or paternalistic with their companions, and these are a few between the Doctor and Bill that greatly annoy me.

That said, for the most part, they’re just fun, probably the most purely-enjoyable friendship the Doctor has had since Donna. I love watching them run around time and space together, and when Nardole joins in on the action, it just gets better. I wish we had more time with these two than we did (or, barring that, if we could’ve seen Bill meet Thirteen – would’ve loved that.) I love Bill’s ear-to-ear grin as she thanks the Doctor for taking her on her first extended trip to an alien planet. I love that the Doctor patiently waits while Bill enjoys herself at a Victorian Frost Fair, knowing that she’ll eventually recognize something weird’s going on and they can get to work. I love that she tells her friends he’s her granddad, and I love that he reveals the guilty pleasures on her Spotify. The Doctor and Bill Potts, seeing the universe and having a good time.

Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments: Bill Potts (Doctor Who)

As much as I adore Bill, it was tough coming up with her Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments because, looking back at her season on the show, she in fact gets to do so little.  She only really has one unabashedly-big win, and while she’s all about the questions, she rarely gets to be the one following those through to the answers (except in situations where the Doctor has already figured it out and is waiting for her to catch up.)  I don’t say this as a criticism of Bill but of the writers, for not letting this awesome character spend more time doing awesome things (spoilers.)

Releasing Heather (Series 10, Episode 1 – “The Pilot”)

Here, we see Bill’s attention to detail and emotional intelligence saving the day.  The Doctor is able to infer a lot about the sentient engine oil (it must always be said) that takes over Heather, about the alien substance that subsumes her, but through her understanding of the young woman herself, Bill is the one to figure out why Heather is chasing them:  her promise not to leave without Bill.  Understanding this, Bill can let Heather go gently, releasing her from her promise and saying goodbye.

Keeping Her Memories (Series 10, Episode 1 – “The Pilot”)

When Bill meets the Doctor, he’s on a strict no-traveling-in-time-and-space diet, and he can’t afford to have students wandering around who know he’s really an alien, so after their initial adventure, he tries to wipe Bill’s memory of it.  Kudos to Bill, first for realizing what he’s doing (“I know what a mind wipe looks like!”), and then for ardently arguing for her right not to forget what’s happened to her.  It’s a little thing, very personal, responsible for saving no lives or planets, but I love her passion as she stands up to the Doctor here.  “Let me have some good dreams for once!” – beautiful.

Discovering the Memorial (Series 10, Episode 2 – “Smile”)

Any companion worth their salt is both curious and not overly-inclined to stay put when the Doctor tells them to, and in this episode with Bill, it certainly pays off.  The Doctor’s the one who’s able to put it together and figure out why the Vardy turned on the humans, but it’s Bill who finds the deceased woman on the dais, and along with her, the ship’s records of the deaths of the set-up team.  The Doctor’s companions, proving for the umpteenth time that doing what you’re told is overrated!

Stopping the Monks (Series 10, Episode 8 – “The Lie of the Land”)

This is the most typical big-companion-win moment Bill has during her time on the show.  After she was one to give the Monks the in they needed to subdue the human race, she steps up to finish it.  She’s prepared to die, as Missy has told her that’s the only way the Monks can be defeated, but it doesn’t come to that.  Instead, she overwhelms their global psychic propaganda with thoughts of the deceased mother she invented in her head.  It’s somewhat of a cheesy Love Conquers All bit, but I appreciate Bill’s bravery and that it’s her heart that carries the day.

Distracting the Empress (Series 10, Episode 9 – “Empress of Mars”)

While this is a small moment, it’s still brave.  As the Ice Warrior Empress is bearing on the Victorians, Bill remembers the previous, brief affinity they shared as the Empress regarded her with respect as a fellow woman among “noisy men.”  Bill gets her attention and, while she certainly doesn’t talk the Empress around, Bill distracts her and buys the Doctor enough time to get in position and take her down.

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.