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.