A Few Thoughts on “Special” Companions (Doctor Who)

When you get down to it, there have been a number of times in new Who when companions have had that Extra Something – most particularly, a special tie to the season’s arc, the full nature of which isn’t revealed until the finale.  I’ve had different reactions to this device over the years, although, by and large, I’m not a big fan.  Spoilers pretty much across the new Who spectrum.

A lot of genre series have Chosen Ones, but new Who’s “special” companions generally tend a different way.  On Who, it’s not usually about a predestined hero, but rather, something tricky to do with time that connects them to a central mystery on the show.  Sometimes the Doctor starts to twig to it before the reveal, and sometimes it’s brought out at the last moment.  But it always leads to a huge climactic scene that’s probably at least half deus ex machina, and depending on the emotional execution of the scene, I’ll either lap it up anyway (i.e., Rose as the Bad Wolf in series 1) or give it the side-eye (i.e. Clara the “Impossible Girl” in series 7.)

There are four main “special companion” bits I’m looking at today.  In addition to the Rose and Clara moments I already mentioned, we also have Donna becoming the Doctor-Donna in series 4 and Amy’s connection to the Time Crack in series 5 (Amy also gets the Schrödinger’s Pregnancy thing in series 6 – poor Amy! – but I’m mainly gonna focus on the Time Crack.)  I’m not here to rank them according to what I feel are their merits or lack thereof.  Rather, I want to look at two narrative consequences of these storylines that tend to fall back onto the characters they effect.

First, there’s the tendency of a companion to be more of a mystery than a character.  We see this especially with Amy and Clara, and I’ve talked about both before.  Whereas the Doctor has been drawn to other companions by their curiosity, intelligence, bravery, compassion, and whatnot, qualities he admires, Amy and Clara get their initial invitations onto the TARDIS under false pretenses.  Regardless of how the Doctor feels about what they can do, the real reason he brings them aboard is to give him time to figure this out.  What’s with this weird Crack in Amy’s wall?  How does he keep meeting different versions of Clara throughout time and space?  Even though these mysteries don’t get a huge amount of screentime devoted to them throughout their respective seasons, there’s still this sense that the mystery is “enough” for those companions.  Throughout series 5 for Amy and series 7B for Clara, I have little handle on who they are – so few occasions when I can say, “That’s so Amy!”/“That’s Clara all over!”, because I genuinely don’t know.  It’s not until their following seasons, after their mystery has been revealed/solved, that the show starts putting in the work of showing them to us as fuller, more defined people.

Rose and Donna escape this issue, by the way.  Both of them are quite distinct from the start, and the Doctor appreciates them both primarily for who they are, not for the puzzles they represent.  It helps that their respective season mysteries are a) subtler and b) not immediately tied to them specifically.  It’s not until this very end that Rose discovers that she was the Bad Wolf all along, and while the Doctor notices some strange force manipulating the timelines to bring him and Donna together, the series 4 arc has several different threads woven into it, so it’s not such a major focus on What’s This Thing with Donna?

However, none of these companions are immune to the other problem I see cropping up here:  once the mystery is over, it ceases to matter.  Rose looks into the heart of the TARDIS and absorbs the Time Vortex.  She sees all of time and space and, for a short time, has the powers of a god.  But even though the Doctor is forced to regenerate after he pulls that energy from her, there is little lasting impact on Rose herself.  It seems at first that she has no memory of what happened, and she goes back to her regular self in series 2, but the next time she meets the Daleks, she tells them about atomizing the Emperor.  So she does remember?  But has no thoughts about what it was like to be a god?  That’s what we like to call a wasted opportunity.

Donna gets less of this than the others, since she exits the show immediately after the biological metacrisis that mixes her humanity with a Time Lord mind.  Like Rose, her power is taken from her to save her life (against her will,) and she most definitely forgets – the Doctor erases all her memories of him in order to protect her, and she reverts back to the shallow person she was before she met him.  Except, when Donna returns for Ten’s final episodes, that whole “she can never remember, or her mind will burn!” thing turns out to be meaningless.  Not that I want Donna to die – of course not!  But first, I hate that there’s a loophole to keep her safe but not one to let her be who she was, and second, it undermines your solemn declaration when you so easily work around it the first time it becomes an issue.

Amy, for my money, is probably the most adversely affected by this problem.  The years she spent growing up next to the Time Crack (“the universe pouring into her head,” as per the Doctor) are what allows her to remember the Doctor and bring him back when he’s trapped on the other side of Crack, and to be fair, this specialness is brought up again at the end of series 6, when she can remember both versions of the world.  But what happens has zero bearing on her as a person.  Amy grew up with no parents because the Time Crack in her wall ate them, and then time was rewritten and she had parents!  And she was exactly the same.  Nothing different about her – not even any references to her parents after the series 5 finale.  That makes no sense to me, because she’s had two completely different upbringings, she remembers both simultaneously, and none of it matters.  How does that even work?  I’d say it’s the biggest disservice done to a character who the show never treated all that well, and it annoys me on her behalf that there was apparently no point to her backstory.

Clara, at the end of series 7, jumps into the Doctor’s timestream and is splintered into innumerable different Claras scattered throughout time and space.  (Of course, she’s also told the she’s very definitely going to die if she does this, and then it’s so easy to save her the show doesn’t even bother to say how it happened, but that’s a whole other thing.)  And after that, there are… maybe two references to the fact that any of this ever happened?  In “The Day of the Doctor,” Eleven points out that she’s met his past selves before, and she’s like, “Oh yeah, right,” suggesting that, like Rose, she sort-of-maybe-but-not-quite(?) remembers.  The Impossible Girl moniker is used once more in Twelve’s first episode, and then none of this is ever mentioned again.  Even if Clara can’t remember the experiences of the other Claras, she still knows that it happened, right?  (Right?  Does she?)  Does she ever think about the other Claras?  Has she ever wanted to meet any of them?  Who knows – ‘cause who cares, right?  :eyeroll:

Those are the biggest takeaways for me.  1)  Don’t let your companion’s mystery get in the way of your companion as a character.  2)  If you want the Big Finale Moment, go for it, but make it matter afterwards.  Seeing what happens to a human after they go through an experience like that has the potential to be even richer and more satisfying than that Big Finale Moment, undeniably cool as it is.  I’d sure like to see that follow-through sometime.

A Few Notes on Clara Variations

It won’t be long until the Christmas special, and hopefully, not much longer after that before series 10 – and with it, our new companion.  In the meantime, I’m looking back at the first “Claras” we saw, before Original Recipe Clara with Eleven and the many (at times aggravating) faces of Clara with Twelve.  Back when we hadn’t met the “girl” yet.  Back when we’d only seen the “impossible” part (a few spoilers for “Asylum of the Daleks” and “The Snowmen.”)

Oswin was our first “Clara,” and while I see how she could grate long-term, she might be my favorite Clara variation the show gave us (including the assorted writing reboots as well as the timesteam versions.)  Had we been with Oswin for an extended period, I’d have liked more context on her “geniusness,” so it would’ve felt like part of her character instead of plot convenience.  (I’d also have liked her to be actually LGBTQ, or barring that, to omit the “going through a phase” remark.)  But I like Oswin.  She’s definitely perky and hyper-competent in ways that don’t always feel organic, and one could call her “too good to be true” (I’m actively avoiding the term “Mary Sue” in this post,) but I can see how those traits could have been more naturally engrained into her character.  That’s because I can see the cracks.  This episode might feature my favorite Who acting from Jenna Coleman – even when the writing leaves her a bit of a cartoon, Coleman makes Oswin a person.  I see the cheery façade falter when Oswin looks at the boarded-up door to her pod.  I hear the wistfulness (regret?) in her voice when she talks about always wanting to see the universe but the Alaska crashing on her “first time out.”  I feel the staggered impact of her expression as she thinks, this is it – I’m really getting out of here.  Enough that I see how the show might have made Oswin a real character if they’d wanted to.

Victorian Clara, on the other hand, doesn’t work for me as well.  Even though she isn’t necessarily more too-good-to-be-true than Oswin, I think she feels that way.  It’s just how the character strikes me.  Maybe it’s the more artificial-sounding dialogue – the snappy replies to absolutely everything feel really unnatural – or the overall “cutesy” feeling that surrounds her, but I get very little sense of how Victorian Clara could have been made into a real character.  I only get a few glimpses at any “real” Clara beneath the fluff, such as her expression as she climbs the invisible staircase and sees the TARDIS on a cloud, or her voice when she says “kindness” in the one-word test, and again, it’s about the strength of Coleman’s acting more than anything else (the best thing about the timestream Claras is that they remind me how good Coleman can be, because the haphazard writing on Clara prime can be pretty trying to watch.)  That said, I still could’ve been open to the hope that Victorian Clara could’ve been written in a more “settled” manner long-term, if only because I was so ready for a companion from the past.

But while the timestream Claras we initially meet have an air of too-muchness about them, they leave Original Recipe Clara paling in comparison.  Oswin crackles through “Asylum of the Daleks” like a lightning bolt, and Victorian Clara and the Doctor feel like they’re grappling for top billing throughout “The Snowmen,” but Clara prime in “The Bells of Saint John” is just sort of… there.  She doesn’t really do much or have a lot to recommend her – as I’ve said before, the Doctor takes her on the TARDIS more for the mystery about her than any merit of her own.  After two highly-specific (albeit artificially-ZOMG-Amazing!!) incarnations of the character, it seems like a poor choice to introduce the actual day-to-day companion as someone who, while pleasant, doesn’t leap off the screen or have any of the uniqueness of her predecessors.

Thoughts on New Who Companion Introduction Episodes

I’ve already looked at how new Who has said both hello and goodbye to Doctors, so why not companions, too?  Intros today; we’ll save the extreme angst for another time.  Also, rather than look at the quality of the episodes as a whole, like I’ve done for the Doctors, I’m really just looking at the companions themselves and how they’re presented.  Because I have to make the cut-off somewhere, I’m only including Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy, Rory, and Clara – sorry, Mickey, Jack, River, and other short-term or recurring companions!  Spoilers for “Rose,” “Smith and Jones,” “Partners in Crime,” “The Eleventh Hour,” and “The Bells of Saint John.”

“Rose,” obviously, kicks things off with a whirlwind look into the life of Rose Tyler.  It starts a trend for new Who, increased emphasis on the companion’s home life.  RTD tends to focus more on family while Moffat seems to prefer romantic partners, but it’s the same general idea.  The important part, though, is what Rose does when she comes in contact with the Doctor.  I’d say she proves herself companion-material in a reasonable way.  Although she doesn’t do anything too jaw-dropping (she does do a bit of gymnastics to free the Doctor from some Autons, but that moment is more about her determination to help than her amazing moves,) she still demonstrates why the Doctor is interested in her beyond the Living Plastic in the department store where she works.  She gets in some Excellent Questions and makes good observations.  She takes the initiative to try and figure out who the Doctor is, researching online and then meeting with Clive.  And while she’s clearly overwhelmed to step inside the TARDIS for the first time, she handles the revolution that it and the Doctor are both alien very well.  I’m a fan of this intro; it shows off Rose’s brand of ordinary-person awesomeness potential.

For my money, Martha is the biggest boss of the group.  She’s terrific throughout “Smith and Jones.”  Her medical training to keep calm in a crisis serves her well, which allows her intuition (realizing there must be an air bubble around the hospital,) bravery (standing up to the Judoon,) and resourcefulness (thinking to grab the manual when she absolutely needs to able to operate the X-ray machine in a mad hurry) to shine through.  I also like that she doesn’t spend any time denying that what’s happening is alien, as well as the fact that she takes a moment to go outside with the Doctor and just enjoy standing on the moon.  Oh, and did I mention she saves the Doctor’s life, remembering to factor in his alien biology as she resuscitates him, all while dealing with extreme oxygen deprivation?  Martha Jones can get things done!

I realize that Donna’s real introduction comes in “The Runaway Bride,” but since she basically has two of these episodes, I’m gonna go with “Partners in Crime,” because how could I not?  It’s a different kind of companion intro, since she comes into it already knowing who the Doctor is and what he does (Moffat will do another take on that idea with Amy,) and that gives her something of an edge.  I don’t mind, though – she’s just too great here.  I like, beyond just investigating strange goings-on in the hopes of running into the Doctor, Donna does actual investigating into the strange goings-on themselves.  She’s quite the hustler, working at Health & Safety just long enough to get the badge she needs to infiltrate Adipose, snagging a customer list from a phone salesman, and pounding enough pavement to meet an Adipose client.  The parallels showing how her investigation aligns with the Doctor’s are pretty cool.  And once they do finally connect, it’s a lot of the awesome sci-fi hijinks I was hoping for – running around, making faces, and dangling outside windows – but Donna also proves how she can help.  I love that moment in the climax when the Doctor is freaking out about how he can’t stop the machine, and Donna gets through to him with that calm-but-stern, “Doctor, tell me what you need.”  The fact that she’s able to pull out that second capsule, critical to overriding the machine, is just gravy.

“The Eleventh Hour” is a bit unfortunate in that I feel like Amy comes off as better companion material as a kid than an adult.  Young Amelia takes the Doctor’s weirdness and alienness in stride and, with him beside her, takes on her fear of the Time Crack in her wall.  Adult Amy, meanwhile, doesn’t get a lot to do.  Probably her best move is passing herself off as a police officer when she finds the Doctor in her house, although that’s marred by no longer having the key to the handcuffs she uses and the camera’s sexualization of her in her cop costume.  When she pulls the trick again later, to get into the hospital, it’s only because the Doctor reminds her what she’s wearing.  Other than that, she holds up the Doctor to do an “explain now!!!!” when he’s insanely busy and on a massive time crunch, and she gets taken over by Prisoner Zero – though it’s not her fault, it’s an unfortunate position to put her in for her first episode.  I get that she’s not in her best state of mind, since being left by the Doctor as a kid really did a number on her and she can’t quite believe he’s actually back, but I wish we could see her doing more companion stuff.  As it is, if it weren’t for the Doctor’s memory of young Amelia, guilt at having come back so late, and suspicions about the Crack, I’m not sure if he would have invited Amy to come with him simply for her.

Strangely enough, it’s Rory who looks more like a pre-companion in that episode.  (I know, he doesn’t join the TARDIS crew till later, but “The Vampires of Venice” is his first trip, which doesn’t fit my pattern here – “The Eleventh Hour” is better.)  He’s the one who’s noticed something strange, Prisoner Zero disguised as the hospital’s coma patients, and he tries to tell his boss about it even though he knows how crazy it sounds.  But he’s come prepared for that, having taken pictures of Zero on his phone as proof.  Curious, determined, and smart; companion all over.  And yet, when he’s initially invited onto the TARDIS, it’s for Amy’s sake, not his.  It’s only after the events of “The Vampires of Venice” that both Amy and the Doctor suggest he stay on with them.  Tsk, tsk – the Doctor should’ve paid attention more.

For Clara, I’m going with “The Bells of Saint John,” since that’s when we actually meet Clara 1.0.  This is another one that comes in with some foreknowledge, but it’s on the Doctor’s side, not Clara’s.  He’s already met the “Impossible Girl” twice at this point and is totally weird and elated when he comes face to face with her.  Sadly, this is also one where the companion doesn’t come off great.  She’s taken out twice by the Spoonheads, and her only real contribution to the adventure – figuring out where the Great Intelligence’s base is located – is accomplished due to the temporary tech skills that the Great Intelligence gave her the first time it took her over.  It’s not knowledge she’s actually gained, and it’s not something she keeps going forward.  While she is brave and rolls with the shock of her first crazy journey in the TARDIS, she doesn’t get to do a lot that feels companionish.  Again, if it weren’t for the Impossible Girl mystery, I’m not sure if the Doctor would’ve asked her to come with him.

Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments: Clara Oswald (Doctor Who)

It might have been better to hold off on this post until I rewatched all of series 9, but whatever.  As it is, my choicest Clara moments are pretty frontloaded.  I feel like a lot of her big-ticket stuff from the Twelve era either 1) feels manufactured as a Big Moment rather than a natural action born from her character, or 2) comes at the expense of the Doctor’s competence, which just annoys me from a writing standpoint.  So, here’s what we have instead (spoilers.)

Comforting Merry (Series 7, Episode 8 – “The Rings of Akhaten”)

Not flashy, not world-saving, but wonderful.  On her first adventure to an alien planet, overwhelmed and temporarily on her own (the Doctor is off doing something else,) Clara sees a young girl in distress and helps her, just because she can.  Clara does more than just help Merry evade the shady-looking guys who are searching for her; she sits down, talks with Merry, learns what’s upsetting her, and shares a warm personal story to help reassure her.  Lovely.

Telling the Old God a Story (Series 7, Episode 8 – “The Rings of Akhaten”)

Here’s how much I love Clara in “The Rings of Akhaten” – two-and-a-half seasons on the show, and two of my favorite moments of hers come from this one episode.  True, Clara is probably just looking for more cherished memories to “feed” the Old God when she presents the leaf, hoping to turn its hunger away from the Doctor, but because she is offering it the potential futures lost when her mother died young, she’s able to glut it and make it destroy itself.  I love her strength in sacrificing something so precious to her, especially because her mom is not longer with her.

Jumping into the Doctor’s Time Stream (Series 7, Episode 14 – “The Name of the Doctor”)

An obvious one, and the story does feel pretty heavily steered to get her to this point, but I buy it.  Seeing the Doctor suffer, Clara can’t stand by and do nothing, and she knows the universe will be better with the Doctor in it.  So, she leaps.  If they had laid off the unpleasant “I was born to save the Doctor” stuff, it could have been a really compelling end for her character.

Interrogating with the Half Man (Series 8, Episode 1 – “Deep Breath”)

I like Clara’s smarts here, doing some quick thinking under a lot of pressure to turn the tables on the Half Man and make him answer some of her questions.  I especially like how visibly afraid she is throughout the whole thing, digging deep to push through her fear instead of being unrealistically untouched by it.

Recovering the TARDIS (Series 8, Episode 9 – “Flatline”)

Clara does a nice job “playing the Doctor” in this episode, and when she and the others are cut off from the Doctor, she really comes through.  In a pretty despairing moment, she figures out how to use the available resources to exploit the aliens’ power and restore the TARDIS to its full size, allowing the Doctor to come out and finish them off.